EMBODIED QUESTION ANSWERING: A GOAL-DRIVEN APPROACH TO AUTONOMOUS AGENTS
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has developed a collection of virtual environments for training and testing autonomous agents, as well as novel AI agents that learn to intelligently explore those environments. To test this goal-driven approach, FAIR are collaborating Georgia Tech on a multistep AI task called Embodied Question Answering, or EmbodiedQA. Source: facebook.com
ONNX EXPANSION SPEEDS AI DEVELOPMENT
Facebook helped develop the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format to allow AI engineers to more easily move models between frameworks without having to do resource-intensive custom engineering. Today, we’re sharing that ONNX is adding support for additional AI tools, including Apple Core ML converter technology, Baidu’s PaddlePaddle platform, and Qualcomm SNPE. Source: facebook.com
GOOGLE RELEASES OPEN SOURCE FRAMEWORK FOR BUILDING “ENCLAVED” APPS FOR CLOUD
Today, Google is releasing an open source framework for the development of “confidential computing” cloud applications—a software development kit that will allow developers to build secure applications that run across multiple cloud architectures even in shared (and not necessarily trusted) environments. The framework, called Asylo, is currently experimental but could eventually make it possible for developers to address some of the most basic concerns about running applications in any multi-tenant environment.
Read moreRESEARCHERS FIND A GENE THAT LETS BACTERIA KILL ALL MALE FLIES
A number of bacteria that infect insects have a simple and brutal way of increasing their transmission: they kill off all the male progeny of the females that they infect. There’s actually some evolutionary logic to this. The bacteria can get transmitted to the eggs of the females they infect but can’t get carried along on the sperm. That makes the male offspring a problem: they can’t spread the bacteria further, and they’ll compete with the females for food. Better to kill them off, then, just to ensure that never becomes a problem.
Read moreMASSIVE E. COLI OUTBREAK LINKED TO ROMAINE LETTUCE TURNS DEADLY
The California Department of Public Health confirmed to Ars that a resident had died from an illness linked to contaminated romaine lettuce grown in the Yuma region. “Due to patient privacy laws, we cannot provide further details,” the department said in a statement. But it added that the death was among 24 cases of illnesses in the state linked to the salad staple.
Read moreLINUX SYSTEM MONITORING WITH EBPF
The Linux kernel is an abundant component of modern IT systems. It provides the critical services of hardware abstraction and time-sharing to applications. The classical metrics for monitoring Linux are among the most well known metrics in monitoring: CPU utilization, memory usage, disk utilization, and network throughput. For a while now, Circonus installations have organized, the key system metrics in the form of a USE Dashboard, as a high level overview of the system resources.
Read moreALTAIR: DECLARATIVE VISUALIZATION IN PYTHON
With Altair, you can spend more time understanding your data and its meaning. Altair’s API is simple, friendly and consistent and built on top of the powerful Vega-Lite visualization grammar. This elegant simplicity produces beautiful and effective visualizations with a minimal amount of code. Source: github.io
AIRBNB IS SCREWING OVER NEW YORK’S VULNERABLE NEIGHBORHOODS
Here in New York, where the city cracked down on short term rentals more than a hundred years ago, renting out your home for less than 30 days is illegal as of October 2016. But many landlords continue to rent out entire homes to tourists and visitors—today, 12,200 units are available on Airbnb in New York City in total—allowing them to reap in an income that’s higher than what they could make from renting those same units long term. That causes gaps in the housing market.
Read moreBBC – HIGH SPEED NETWORKING: OPEN SOURCING OUR KERNEL BYPASS WORK
Whilst Netmap helps us to reduce the number of copy operations required, we can further enhance performance by interacting directly with the network interface card (NIC) hardware, allowing multiple packets to be passed to the NIC at one time. This could be achieved by interacting directly with any vendor’s NIC driver from our applications, but given a desire to prototype with a range of network cards we didn’t want to have to write code to interact with each vendor’s driver directly. Thankfully, Netmap provides an abstraction layer to enable this.
Read moreWE NEED BUG BOUNTIES FOR BAD ALGORITHMS
Algorithmic auditors are a growing discipline of researchers specializing in computer science and human-computer interaction. They employ a variety of methods to tinker with and uncover how algorithms work, and their research has already sparked public discussions and regulatory investigations into the most dominant and powerful algorithms of the Information Age. From Uber and Booking.com to Google and Facebook, to name a few, these friendly auditors already uncovered bias and deception in the algorithms that control our lives.
Read more