Feeds are the cornerstones on which modern music recommenders, news aggregators, and social media platforms are built. If you’re like most people, you spend minutes to hours each day scrolling through songs, clips, articles, questions, public service announcements, and advertisements informed by your interests and preferences. But wouldn’t it be great if the algorithms underpinning […]
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We’re fast approaching a point where every company is effectively a software company, a notion proffered by some of tech’s top people such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. This is partly why we’ve seen a slew of major investments into tools that help developers operate — last year, for example, Microsoft went all-in and snapped […]
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Educating developers about cloud communications isn’t an easy task, and that’s why Twilio turned to a video game to do the job. TwilioQuest 3 is launching today with a mission of training developers to create cloud communications solutions. It may sound like “gamification” rearing its ugly head again. But Kevin Whinnery, lead developer of the […]
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I lead the hiring process at a quickly growing development agency, so I have reviewed hundreds of resumes and interviewed dozens of candidates from all types of educational backgrounds. Many of those whom we consider come from traditional four-year computer science programs, but an increasing percentage are recent graduates of coding bootcamps. Through my interviewing […]
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Not to be outdone by Google’s WaveNet, which mimics things like stress and intonation in speech by identifying tonal patterns, Amazon today announced the general availability of Neural Text-To-Speech and newscaster style in Amazon Polly, its cloud service that converts text into speech. As Amazon Web Services tech evangelist Julien Simon noted in a blog […]
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Chinese tech giant Baidu today introduced ERNIE 2.0, a conversational AI framework and model that works in Chinese and English. ERNIE 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art results better than Google’s BERT and XLNet in a range of language understanding benchmarks and state-of-the-art results in 9 Chinese natural language tasks. ERNIE stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, […]
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Back in 2017, Intel launched RL Coach, an open source framework for training and evaluating reinforcement learning agents. Since then, the library of multi-threaded models, games, and robotics environments has picked up features like benchmarks and native support for reinforcement learning subtypes, in addition to better scalability. Today, the Santa Clara company announced the launch […]
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Video game developers have longed used artificial intelligence to help create believable worlds. So it’s not too surprising that researchers can now use some of those same game-making tools to train AI. During a talk at VentureBeat’s Transform 2019 conference last week, Unity Technologies VP of AI and machine learning Danny Lange argued that game […]
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Facebook is continuing its open source spree with the launch of a new JavaScript engine designed to improve the performance of big apps on Android devices, the company announced today at the Chain React conference in Portland, Oregon. Mobile apps getting increasingly larger, which can pose problems — particularly for devices with limited storage or […]
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As Apple increasingly relies on services revenue to grow its profits, its easiest route to sharing 30% of recurring App Store revenues is to help third-party developers win more subscribers for their apps. To that end, Apple has announced that its first app development accelerator has opened in Shanghai, China, offering developers the opportunity to […]
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Back in May during Google’s I/O 2019 developer conference, the tech giant took the wraps off of the Local Home software development kit (SDK), which lets developers run smart code locally on Google Home Speakers and Nest Displays and tap integrated Wi-Fi radios to communicate with smart devices. Today, as promised, Google launched the Local […]
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Google wants to turn the decades-old Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) into an official internet standard — and it’s making its own robots.txt parser open source as part of the push. The REP, which was proposed as a standard by Dutch software engineer Martijn Koster back in 1994, has pretty much become the standard used by websites […]
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Countless online courses promise to inculcate budding programmers in the ways of AI, but a team of MIT researchers hopes to flatten the learning curve further. In a paper (“Gen: A General-Purpose Probabilistic Programming System with Programmable Inference“) presented this week at the Programming Language Design and Implementation Conference, they propose Gen, a novel probabilistic […]
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Ctrl-labs, a New York-based startup developing a wristband that translates musculoneural signals into machine-interpretable commands, today announced that it’s acquired patents associated with Myo, a similar wearable created by North (formerly Thalmic Labs) that enables control of robotics and PCs via gestures and motion. According to Ctrl-labs chief strategy officer Josh Duyan, the patents in […]
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“My boss doesn’t understand what I do.” We’ve all said that at some point, and it’s usually just regular workplace griping. But software developers are in a tough spot because when your boss doesn’t know anything about software development, it can make your job way more difficult. Bosses might think they know what they’re doing […]
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In an effort to tamp down data collection by third-party ad-blocking Chrome browser extensions, Google today announced that it intends to replace parts of Chrome’s Web Request API, a set of events and functions that enable developers to monitor, analyze, and block web traffic, with the Declarative Net Request API, which doesn’t require access to […]
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Automated software testing platform Testim has raised $10 million in a series B round of funding led by SignalFire, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meron Capital, NHN Ventures, and Spider Capital. Founded in 2014, Testim is one of a number of startups offering companies artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to continuously test their software. Indeed, quality […]
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RapidAPI, a developer-focused marketplace for discovering and connecting with application programming interfaces (APIs), has raised $25 million in a series B round of funding led by Microsoft’s venture capital arm M12, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Green Bay Capital, and DNS Capital. Founded in 2015, San Francisco-based RapidAPI connects developers with thousands of public APIs, […]
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“Reference resolution” is a considerable challenge in natural language processing — in the context of AI assistants like Alexa, it entails correctly associating a word like “their” in the utterance like “play their latest album” with a given musician. Scientists at Amazon have previously addressed it by tapping AI that maps correspondences between variables used […]
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Global interest in technology jobs in the United States is holding steady, despite the volatile political situation related to immigration, according to an analysis by job site Indeed. But interest has declined in India, which has historically been the largest source of foreign clicks on U.S. tech job listings. That’s the latest interesting data that […]
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