Tech News

Yesterday, Airtable, a cloud collaboration service, has raised $100 million in funding. The company has raised the funds to expand its business with more talent and offices outside the US. The company has also catapulted to a $1.1 billion valuation. According to PitchBook, the company was only valued at $152 million, eight months ago in its last round. Airtable, the maker of a coding platform for non-techies was founded by Howie Liu, Emmett Nicholas and Andrew Ofstad. It uses a simple interface as a frontend to produce apps and other web-based experiences. This interface is built on spreadsheets and other tools familiar to knowledge workers. Airtable just had 30,000 customers, eight months back. But Airtable’s tools are now used by approximately, 80,000 businesses. One of the major advantages of Airtable is its Slack-like approach to the task of buildings things. Airtable make it easy for non-developers to code There are many tools for building apps and other products but usually, they are very technical and complicated. It becomes difficult for those who aren’t well versed with programming. Also, it’s equally difficult and expensive to build apps that solve this problem. Airtable identified this problem and has built powerful macros under the hood of standard-looking database interfaces. It has made things easy for people who aren’t good at coding. With Airtable, one can customize their own database as per their requirements without relying on someone’s DB model The competition and the market scenario Airtable is not the only organization working on this issue. Companies like DashDash and Microsoft and partners are also working in the same direction. Microsoft’s Excel is known to all, Microsoft and partners are now working towards enhancing the functionalities of the spreadsheets. It seems the competition is going to be tough in near future! Airtable also has a platform called Blocks. Blocks help its users to bring in data from a number of sources. It also lets users select different kinds of outputs. Users can decide how and where the data is to be used, whether it be a marketing campaign across text messaging, an AI-based bot, or a VR experience. Read more about this news on TechCrunch. Python, Tensorflow, Excel and more – Data professionals reveal their top tools Is Microsoft planning to make Python an official Scripting Language for its Excel package? Manage Security in Excel

On Wednesday, New York Times published a report on Facebook that raised questions on the company's way of dealing with the controversies surrounding it, disinformation, the way it treats competitors and critics. The report scathingly pointed out how Facebook denied and deflected the blame it faced, time and again- listing a series of issues faced by the company which affected its users right from 2015. In response to this report, Facebook released a statement on Thursday pointing out inaccuracies in the report by the New York Times. Further on a press call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg planned, to discuss how the social network manages problematic posts and its community standards. He also released a “community standards” transparency report, on the very same day, listing the actions proactively taken to take down illicit accounts and the struggles that the company still faces. However, the almost 90 minute call mainly ended up focusing on discussions around the New York Times story and what Facebook intends to do in its aftermath. Mark Zuckerberg’s call with the reporters “The reality of running a company of more than 10,000 people is that you’re not going to know everything that’s going on” -Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and chairman On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg held a conference call with reporters of top media firms like USA today, Bloomberg, ABC news, Wired and many others to discuss Facebook's latest transparency report, which lists how the company caters to its community standards that govern content on its platform. While addressing questions on how he and Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg,  dealt with the issues listed in the New York Times report, Mr. Zuckerberg defended the social network, Ms. Sandberg and his own record. In response to the Russian interference, he acknowledged that the company was slow to act, but did not hinder investigation at any point. He stated: "I've said many times we were too slow to spot Russian interference, to suggest we weren't interested in knowing the truth or wanted to hide what we knew or wanted to prevent investigations is simply untrue." This was aligned to Facebook’s board statement on Thursday where the board acknowledged that the two executives responded slowly to Russian interference on Facebook and that directors had pushed them to act faster, but “to suggest they knew about Russian interference and either tried to ignore it or prevent investigations into what had happened was grossly unfair.” As for hiring a PR firm- Definers- who reportedly diverted attention from Facebook’s problems to its rival companies issues, Zuckerberg repeatedly said that he had only learned of Facebook's work with Definers from the NYT report and Sandberg was also previously unaware of the relationship. When asked who was aware, Zuckerberg simply said  "someone on our comms team must have hired them." "As soon as I read it, I looked into whether this is the type of firm we want to be working with, and we stopped working with them," he added. "We certainly never asked them to spread anything that wasn't true." However, as COO, Facebook's corporate communications team is under the purview of Sandberg. In a statement on Facebook late Thursday, Ms. Sandberg  wrote: “I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing, but I should have.” During the call, Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook will soon create an independent oversight body to adjudicate appeals on content moderation issues. This analogous to a Supreme court, will be created sometime next year and attempt to bring a balance between the right to free speech while keeping people safe around the world. A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement On Thursday, Facebook released its second transparency report listing its advances in proactively identifying hate speech, and the first numbers for bullying, harassment, and child sexual exploitation takedowns .The report emphasizes the company's efforts to remove bad content before users ever see it, while fielding an ever-growing number of requests from governments. In line to establishing an independent body to govern content moderation issues, he wrote “I believe independence is important for a few reasons. First, it will prevent the concentration of too much decision-making within our teams. Second, it will create accountability and oversight. Third, it will provide assurance that these decisions are made in the best interests of our community and not for commercial reasons.” Some interesting statistics to note from this report are: From July to September of 2018, Facebook took down far more pieces of unacceptable content. It removed 2.1 million and 8.7 million pieces of content from the category of bullying and harassment and child sexual exploitation and nudity, respectively. It removed 1.23 billion pieces of spam and closed 754 million fake accounts in the past quarter. Facebook says these are mostly spam, although it’s periodically removed accounts linked to political propaganda campaigns. Facebook removed 15.4 million pieces of violent content between June and September of 2018. Facebook has also become better at removing this content before users report it, claiming to proactively find more than 96 percent of the material, compared to around 71 percent last year. Facebook is still fielding government requests for user data, which has increased around 26 percent between the last half of 2017 and the first half of 2018. Facebook has made progress at deploying thousands of newly hired reviewers and artificial-intelligence tools, to enforce its community standards more aggressively. They have managed to catch 95 percent of nudity, fake accounts and graphic violence before users report it to Facebook. Public’s Reaction The New York Times reported that, in Washington, Republicans and Democrats threatened to restrain Facebook through competition laws. They also plan to open investigations into possible campaign finance violations. Shareholders ramped up calls to oust Mr. Zuckerberg as Facebook’s chairman while activists filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about the social network’s privacy policies and condemned Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, for overseeing a campaign to secretly attack opponents. Mr. Zuckerberg said on the conference call that he was not willing to step down as chairman. Jessica Guynn, a reporter for USA Today, started an interesting thread on twitter where she stresses on the point that Mark Zuckerberg is denying allegations in the Times story and instead is stressing on solutions to divert people’s attention from the problems. https://twitter.com/jguynn/status/1063148779212169216 Jessica also proded Mark on the topic of being the right person to lead Facebook. To which he replied “ We are doing the right things to fix the issues. I am fully committed to getting this right.” You can head over to the New York Times for a complete coverage of this news. What is Facebook hiding? New York Times reveals Facebook’s insidious crisis management strategy Facebook shares update on last week’s takedowns of accounts involved in “inauthentic behavior” Emmanuel Macron teams up with Facebook in a bid to fight hate speech on social media

Dart 2.1, an increment over Dart 2 is released with changes for performance and usability. New features in Dart 2.1 include smaller code size, faster type checks, better usability for type errors, and new language features to improve productivity. Support for int-to-double conversion in Dart 2.1 Developers new to Flutter often face obstacles in the form of analysis errors when specifying padding, setting font sizes, etc. These errors make sense from a system point of view. For example, the API expects a type say, a double, and the developer specifies the value in a different type say, an int. From a usability point of view, it seems foolish as there is a trivial conversion from int to double. So, Dart 2.1 now infers the line where applicable and silently evaluates an int as a double. Language support for mixins in Dart 2.1 Dart 2.1 comes with a new syntax for mixins. It features a new mixin keyword that can be used to define classes which can exclusively be used as mixins. Support is also added so that mixins can extend other classes and invoke methods in their superclass. Previously, mixins could only extend Object. An example of extending non-Object classes is from Flutter’s animation APIs. The SingleTickerProviderStateMixin which is a framework class that provides a ticker for advancing an animation by a single frame declares a mixin that implements the general TickerProvider interface. The animations are applicable only to stateful widgets since the position in the animation is considered state. The new mixin support in Dart 2.1 allows expressing this by declaring that only classes that extend the Flutter State class can use the mixin. Compile-time type checks The type system in Dart 2 protects users during development, indicating violations of the contract specified by the types. Such checks at edit time were added in Dart 2 powered by the Dart Analyzer. There is another place where developers might expect type checks. Like compile time, when performing a Flutter release build. Such checks were incomplete in Dart 2, which potentially leading to usability issues where bad source code could compile without errors. In Dart 2.1, these checks are complete. Now, the Analyzer and Dart compiler both contain the same checks. Performance improvements for Flutter developers In a few cases, though, the comprehensive checks in Dart 2 caused undesirable overheads of 20–40%. Dart 2.1 has greatly reduced cost of type checks. This is applicable to both, AOT-compiled code and code run in the VM with JIT compilation. The developer tools which run using the VM, benefit from this. Performing code analysis of one large benchmark app used to take about 41 seconds, it now takes only around 25 seconds. Performance improvements for web developers The code size and compile time is also improved for Dart code running on the web. The output size of dart2js were in focus. This yielded good results, such as a 17% reduction in minified output size and a 15% improvement in compilation time in one of the tested samples. Other changes There are also some changes made outside the core Dart SDK. One is protocol buffers (protobuf) which are a platform-neutral mechanism for serializing structured data. Dart is now an officially protobuf supported language. They have created a small sample for knative—a platform based on Kubernetes for building, deploying, and managing serverless workloads. For more details, visit the Dart Blog post. Google’s Dart hits version 2.0 with major changes for developers C# 8.0 to have async streams, recursive patterns and more Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary

Soundation, online music production software, released their new music studio built on WebAssembly Threads, after working closely with Google. It is the first music production software to run on WebAssembly Threads, which contributes to considerably improved speed, performance, and stability when producing music in a browser. Its online music studio is used by over 80,000 creatives who produce music directly in their web browsers. For Soundation’s users, the WebAssembly technology provides an improved performance on multicore machines, between 100-300 percent*, according to measurements. Soundation has been collaborating with Google’s WASM and Chrome Audio teams for over a year, working to optimize the implementation of Soundation Studio based on WebAssembly, with support of multithreading and shared memory. Adam Hasslert, CEO, Soundation, said, “Implementing WebAssembly Threads is a key part of our mission to build the next-generation music production service online. This technology will have a significant impact on how web apps are made in the future, and it’s essential for us to lead this development and offer our users the most powerful alternative.” Thomas Nattestad at CDS, Product Manager, WebAssembly, said, “Soundation is one of the first adopters of WebAssembly Threads. They use these Threads to achieve fast, parallelized processing to seamlessly mix songs. Adding just a single Thread doubled their performance, and by the time they added five threads, they more than tripled their performance.” How did Soundation conduct the tests? Soundation made tests of complex Soundation Studio project (consisting of 10 audio tracks, 12 synthesizers, 270 audio regions with audio samples and notes with 84 filter effects applied) to generate the audio file. The test was later run on Ubuntu 16.04, Chrome 72.0.3584.0 (64-bit) on board they had Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ. They then compared systems based on WebAssembly, PNaCL, native application using different processing buffer sizes in ring buffer. WebAssembly version has been tested using different number of threads. Here’s a video by Thomas Nattestad, the Product Manager for WebAsssembly, introducing Soundation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgOGZgAPUjQ&feature=youtu.be&t=474 Cloudflare’s Workers enable containerless cloud computing powered by V8 Isolates and WebAssembly Google Chrome 70 now supports WebAssembly threads to build multi-threaded web applications Mozilla shares plans to bring desktop applications, games to WebAssembly and make deeper inroads for the future web

The Elastic team released version 6.5.0 of their open source distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine, Elasticsearch, earlier this week. Elasticsearch 6.5.0 explores features such as cross-cluster replication, new source-only snapshots, SQL/ODBC changes, and security features, among others. Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene library that provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface as well as schema-free JSON documents. Let’s now discuss these features in Elasticsearch 6.5.0. Cross-cluster replication Elasticsearch 6.5.0 comes with cross-cluster replication which is a Platinum-level feature for Elasticsearch. Cross-cluster replication allows you to create an index in a local cluster to follow an index in a remote cluster or automatically-follow indices in a remote cluster matching a pattern. New source-only snapshots Elasticsearch 6.5 comes with a new source-only snapshot that allows you to store a minimal amount of information (namely, the _source and index metadata). This enables the indices to be rebuilt through a reindex operation when necessary. What’s great about this is that it creates up to 50% reduction in disk space of the snapshots. However, they can take a longer time to restore (in full) as you’ll need to do a reindex to make them searchable. SQL/ODBC changes An initial (alpha status) ODBC driver has been added for Elasticsearch 6.5.0. Since ODBC is supported by many BI tools, it makes it easy to connect Elasticsearch to a lot of your favourite 3rd party tools giving you the speed, flexibility, and power of full-text search and relevance. Other than that, few new functions and capabilities have also been added to Elasticsearch’s SQL capabilities. These include ROUND, TRUNCATE, IN, MONTHNAME, DAYNAME, QUARTER, CONVERT, as well as a number of string manipulation functions such as CONCAT, LEFT, RIGHT, REPEAT, POSITION, LOCATE, REPLACE, SUBSTRING, and INSERT. You can now also query across indices, with different mappings, given that the mapping types are compatible. New scriptable token filters Elasticsearch 6.5 introduces new scriptable token filters namely, predicate and conditional. The predicate token filter allows you to remove tokens that don’t match a script.  The conditional token filter builds on the idea of scriptable token filters but lets you apply other token filters matching a script. These let you manipulate the data you’re indexing without requiring to write a Java plugin. Moreover, Elasticsearch 6.5 also comes with a new text type, called annotated_text. This new annotated_text type allows you to use markdown-like syntax to then link to different entities in applications using natural language processing. JDK 11 and G1GC Elasticsearch 6.5 offers support for JDK 11. Other than that, Elasticsearch 6.5 also supports the G1 garbage collector on JDK 10+. Security and Audit Logging Elasticsearch 6.5 comes with two new security features, namely, authorization realms and audit logging. Authorization realms enable an authenticating realm to delegate the task of pulling the user information (with the username, the user’s roles, etc) to one or more other realms. Audit logging is a new, completely structured format, where all attributes are named, meaning each log entry is a one-line JSON document and each one of these are printed on a separate line. These attributes are ordered like in any other normal log entry. Multi-bucket analysis A multi-metric machine learning job analyzes multiple time series together. Elasticsearch 6.5 introduces multi-bucket analysis for machine learning jobs. Here, features from multiple contiguous buckets are used for anomaly detection. The final anomaly score includes a combination of values from both the “standard” single-bucket analysis and the new multi-bucket analysis. Additionally, Elasticsearch 6.5, comes with an experimental find file structure API which aims to help discover the structure of a text file. It attempts to read the file and on succeeding returns statistics about the common values of the detected fields and mappings that can be used for ingesting the file into Elasticsearch. For more information, check out the official Elasticsearch 6.5 blog. Dejavu 2.0, the open source browser by ElasticSearch, now lets you build search UIs visually Search company Elastic goes public and doubles its value on day 1 How does Elasticsearch work? [Tutorial]

The Magic Leap Independent Creator Program is a development fund to help individual developers and teams to kick-start their Magic Leap One projects. They are offering grants between $20,000 and $500,000 per project along with the developer, hardware, and marketing support. The company highlights that the program is a grant and not an exclusivity deal. “You own your IP and publishing is not exclusive to Magic Leap, You’ll be expected to publish on Magic Leap World, but participation in our program does not exclude you from supporting other platforms. Go forth, and share what you make however you wish.” the company writes. Applications are evaluated on originality, use case, and the team’s technical capability and diversity, project scope and feasibility, and to what extent their concept encourages user engagement. How will the process work? Developers are invited to apply and showcase their projects by December 15th, 2018. Applications will be reviewed by the Magic Leap team and funding will be offered on a rolling basis through February 15, 2019. If developers receive a grant, they will be paired with Magic Leap’s Developer Relations team for guidance and support. Once, teams have built, submitted, and launched their projects, the best experiences will be showcased at L.E.A.P. Conference in 2019. Teams will receive dedicated marketing support, including planning, promotion, and social media amplification. The Developer Relations team consisting of Magic Leap's subject matter experts and QA testers will give developers one on one guidance. You can start applying from Magic Leap’s website. Magic Leap unveils Mica, a human-like AI in augmented reality. Magic Leap teams with Andy Serkis’ Imaginarium Studios to enhance Augmented Reality. Magic Leap One, the first mixed reality headsets by Magic Leap, is now available at $2295.

Yesterday, Raspberry launched the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ board which is a smaller and cheaper version of the Raspberry Pi 3B+. In 2014, the first gen Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ was followed by a lighter Model A+ with half the RAM and removed ports. This was able to fit into their Hardware Attached on Top (HAT). Until now there were no such small form factor boards for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. Size is cut down but not the features (most of) The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ retains most of the features and enhancements as the bigger board of this series. This includes a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM, and dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2/BLE. The enhancements retained are improved USB mass-storage booting and improved thermal management. The entire Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ board is an FCC certified radio module. This will significantly reduce the cost in conformance testing Raspberry Pi–based products. What is shrunk is the price which is now down to $25 and the board size of 65x56mm, the size of a HAT. Source: Raspberry website Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ will likely be the last product for now In March this year, Raspberry said that the 3+ platform is the final iteration of the “classic” Raspberry Pi boards. The next steps/released products will be out of necessity and not an evolution. This is because for an evolution to happen Raspberry will need a new core silicon, on a new process node, with new memory technology. So this new board, the 3A+ is about closing things; meaning we won’t see any more products in this line, in the foreseeable future. This board does answer one of their most frequent customer requests for ‘missing products’. And clears their pipeline to focus on building the next generation of Raspberry Pi boards. For more details visit the Raspberry Pi website. Introducing Raspberry Pi TV HAT, a new addon that lets you stream live TV Tensorflow 1.9 now officially supports Raspberry Pi bringing machine learning to DIY enthusiasts Should you go with Arduino Uno or Raspberry Pi 3 for your next IoT project?

Earlier this month, Red Hat released RHEL 7.6. Now, Red Hata Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 beta version is available with more container friendliness than ever. This RHEL release is based on the Red Hat community Linux May 2018 Fedora 28 release. It uses the upstream Linux kernel 4.18 for its foundation. RHEL 8 beta introduces the concept of Application Streams. With this, userspace components can now update more quickly than core operating system packages and without having to wait for the next major version of the operating system. With Application Streams, you can also keep multiple versions of the same package around. RHEL 8 beta features RHEL 8 beta introduces a single and consistent user control panel through the RHEL Web Console. Systems admins of all experience levels can easily manage RHEL servers locally and remotely, including virtual machines. RHEL 8 beta uses IPVLAN to support efficient Linux networking in containers through connecting containers nested in virtual machines (VMs) to networking hosts. RHEL 8 beta also has a new TCP/IP stack with Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) congestion control. This increases performance and minimizes latency for services like streaming video or hosted storage. RHEL 8 is made secure with OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 support and system-wide Cryptographic Policies. Red Hat’s lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit comes with Buildah (container building), Podman (running containers) and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers). RPM's YUM package manager has also been updated. Yum 4 delivers faster performance, fewer installed dependencies and more choices of package versions to meet specific workload requirements. File Systems in RHEL 8 beta RedHat has deprecated the Btrfs filesystem. This has really confused developers who are surprised why RedHat would opt out of it especially considering that it is also used for ChromeOS's Crostini Linux application container. From hacker news: “I'm still incredibly sad about that, especially as Btrfs has become a really solid filesystem over the last year or so in the upstream kernel.” “Indeed, Btrfs is uniquely capable and important. It has lightweight snapshots of directory trees, and fully supports NFS exports and kernel namespaces, so it can easily solve technical problems that currently can't be easily solved using ZFS or other filesystems.” Stratis is the new volume-managing file system in RHEL 8 beta. Stratis abstracts away the complexities inherent to data management via an API. Also, File System Snapshots provide for a faster way of conducting file-level tasks, like cloning virtual machines, while saving space by consuming new storage only when data changes. Existing customers and subscribers can test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta. You can also view the README file for instructions on how to download and install the software. RedHat shares what to expect from next week’s first-ever DNSSEC root key rollover. Soon, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) won’t support KDE. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 (RHEL 7.5) now generally available.

On Wednesday, Microsoft shared that it has signed an agreement to acquire XOXCO, an Austin-based software developer with a focus on bot design. In another announcement, it shared a set of guidelines formulated to help developers build responsible bots or conversational AI. Microsoft acquires conversational AI startup, XOXCO Microsoft has shared its intent to acquire XOXCO. The software product design and development company has been working on conversation AI since 2013. They have developed products like Botkit which provide development tools and the Howdy bot for Slack that enables users to schedule meetings. With this acquisition, Microsoft aims to democratize AI development. “The Microsoft Bot Framework, available as a service in Azure and on GitHub, supports over 360,000 developers today. With this acquisition, we are continuing to realize our approach of democratizing AI development, conversation, and dialog, and integrating conversational experiences where people communicate,” reads the post. Throughout this year, the tech giant acquired many companies which have contributed to AI development. For example, Semantic Machines in May, Bonsai in July, and Lobe in September. XOXCO is another company added to this list enabling Microsoft to get more closer to its goal of “making AI accessible and valuable to every individual and organization, amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology.” Read more about the acquisition on Microsoft’s official website. Building responsible bots with Microsoft’s guidelines Nowadays, conversational AI is being used to automate communication, query solving, and create personalized customer experiences at scale. With this increasing adoption, it is important to build conversational AI that is responsible and trustworthy. The team at ICS.ai are a Microsoft Inner Circle partner that provide transformational AI solutions for the public sector in the United Kingdom. Their Smart Chat AI Assistant offers that achieves human parity performance, with over 90% of queries answered correctly. The 10 guidelines formulated by Microsoft aims to help developers do exactly that: [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""] Articulate the purpose of your bot and take special care if your bot will support consequential use cases. Be transparent about the fact that you use bots as part of your product or service. Ensure a seamless hand-off to a human where the human-bot exchange leads to interactions that exceed the bot’s competence. Design your bot so that it respects relevant cultural norms and guards against misuse. Ensure your bot is reliable. Ensure your bot treats people fairly. Ensure your bot respects user privacy. Ensure your bot handles data securely. Ensure your bot is accessible. Accept responsibility.[/box] Some of them are described below: “Articulate the purpose of your bot and take special care if your bot will support consequential use cases.” Before starting any design work, carefully analyze the benefits your bot will provide to the users or the entity deploying the bot. Ensuring that your bot’s design is ethical is very important, especially when it is likely to affect the well-being of the user such as in consequential use cases. These use cases include access to services such as healthcare, education, employment, and financing. “Be transparent about the fact that you use bots as part of your product or service.” Users should be aware that they are interacting with a bot. Nowadays, designers can equip their bots with “personality” and natural language capabilities. This is why it is important to convey to the users that they are not interacting with another person and some aspects of their interaction are being performed by a bot. Also, users should be able to easily find information about the limitations of the bot, including the possibility of errors and the consequences of these errors. “Ensure a seamless hand-off to a human where the human-bot exchange leads to interactions that exceed the bot’s competence.” In cases where a human judgment is required, provide a means or ready access to a human moderator, particularly if your bot deals with consequential matters. Bots should have the ability to transfer a conversation to a human moderator as soon as the user asks. Users will quickly lose trust in the technology and in the company that has deployed it if they feel trapped or alienated by a bot. “Design your bot so that it respects relevant cultural norms and guards against misuse.” Bots should have built-in safeguards and protocols to handle misuse and abuse. Since bots can now have a human-like persona, it is crucial that they interact respectfully and safely with users. Developers can use machine learning techniques and keyword filtering mechanisms to enable the bot to detect and respond appropriately to sensitive or offensive input from users. “Ensure your bot is reliable.” Bots need to be reliable for the function it aims to perform. As a developer, you should take into account that since AI systems are probabilistic they will not always give the correct answer. That is why establish reliability metrics and review them periodically. The performance of AI-based systems may vary over time as the bot is rolled out to new users and in new contexts, developers must continually monitor its reliability. Read the full document: Responsible bots: 10 guidelines for developers of conversational AI Microsoft announces container support for Azure Cognitive Services to build intelligent applications that span the cloud and the edge Satya Nadella reflects on Microsoft’s progress in areas of data, AI, business applications, trust, privacy and more. Microsoft Azure reportedly chooses Xilinx chips over Intel Altera for AI co-processors, says Bloomberg report

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced the preview of Azure Cognitive Services containers, which will make it possible to build intelligent applications that span the cloud and the edge. Azure Cognitive Services allows developers to easily add cognitive features such as object detection, vision recognition, and language understanding into their applications. With containerization, developers are able to build large AI systems that are scalable, reliable, and consistent in a way that supports better data governance. It is a way of software distribution in which an application or service is packaged so that it can be deployed in a container host with little or no modification. Following are the advantages of container support for Azure Cognitive Services: Build portable and scalable intelligent apps Containerisation will allow customers to use Azure Cognitive Services capabilities wherever the data resides. The applications will be able to perform functionalities like facial recognition, OCR, or text analytics without sending data to the cloud. Irrespective of where the apps are running (edge or in Azure), they will be portable and scalable with great consistency. Flexibility to deploy AI capabilities Everyday, huge volumes of data are generated across organizations, which demands a flexible way to deploy AI capabilities in a variety of environments. Deploying Cognitive Services in containers allows customers to analyze information close to the physical world where the data resides. This helps in delivering real-time insights and immersive experiences that are highly responsive and contextually aware. Build one app architecture optimized for both cloud and edge Container support for Cognitive Services allows customers to build one application architecture that is optimized to take advantage of both robust cloud capabilities and edge locality. Customers can now choose when to upgrade the AI models deployed in their solutions. They can also test new model version before deploying them in production in a consistent way, whether running on the edge or in Azure. Many companies are already leveraging these advanced capabilities. One such company is www.ics.ai, based in the UK. Their Microsoft based AI solutions are built specifically for local governments, higher education institutions and regional county councils. Andy Vargas, Intel VP of Software and Services said: “Azure Cognitive Services containers give you more options on how you grow and deploy AI solutions, either on or off premises, with consistent performance. You can scale up as workload intensity increases or scale out to the edge.” Read more about container support for Azure Cognitive Services on Microsoft's website. Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS): How Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and AWS are democratizing Artificial Intelligence How Microsoft 365 is now using artificial intelligence to smartly enrich your content in OneDrive and SharePoint Microsoft announces ‘Decentralized Identity’ in partnership with DIF and W3C Credentials Community Group

Yesterday, at Uber Open Summit 2018, the company announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member with a promise to support the open source community via the Linux Foundation. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said, “Uber has been influential in the open source community for years, and we’re very excited to welcome them as a Gold member at the Linux Foundation. Uber truly understands the power of open source and community collaboration, and I am honored to witness that first hand as a part of Uber Open Summit 2018.” By being a member, Uber will support the Linux Foundation’s mission and help the community in building ecosystems that accelerate open source technology development. Uber will also work towards solving complex technical problems and further promote open source adoption globally. Zemlin said, “Their expertise will be instrumental for our projects as we continue to advance open solutions for cloud-native technologies, deep learning, data visualization and other technologies that are critical to businesses today.” Thuan Pham, Uber CTO, said, “The Linux Foundation not only provides homes to many significant open source projects but also creates an open environment for companies like Uber to work together on developing these technologies. We are honored to join the Linux Foundation to foster greater collaboration with the open source community.” To know more about this membership in detail, head over to Uber Engineering. Michelangelo PyML: Introducing Uber’s platform for rapid machine learning development Uber posted a billion dollar loss this quarter. Can Uber Eats revitalize the Uber growth story? Uber announces the 2019 Uber AI Residency

ZTE Corporation, a Chinese multinational telecommunications company, is assisting Venezuela to create a system that can monitor citizen behavior through a new identification card named ‘Fatherland Card’. A few years ago, in 2008, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez sent some officials to China, to learn the workings of China’s national identity card program. According to Reuters, “Chávez, wanted help to provide ID credentials to the millions of Venezuelans who still lacked basic documentation needed for tasks like voting or opening a bank account.” 10 years after the trip to China, Venezuela has rolled out a brand new smart-card ID known as the ‘carnet de la patria’ or ‘fatherland card’. This smart ID transmits data about cardholders to computer servers. The card is linked by the government to subsidize food, health and other social programs for the daily needs of the Venezuelans. According to Reuters, “Venezuela last year hired ZTE to build a fatherland database and create a mobile payment system for use with the card, according to contracts reviewed by Reuters. A team of ZTE employees is now embedded in a special unit within Cantv, the Venezuelan state telecommunications company that manages the database.” Problems with the Fatherland card Some Venezuelan citizens and human-rights groups believe that Fatherland card is a tool for Chávez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro for monitoring the population and allocate scarce resources to his loyalists. Héctor Navarro, one of the founders of the ruling Socialist Party and a former minister under Chávez said, “Venezuelans with the cards now have more rights than those without.” Per Reuters, “In a phone interview, Su Qingfeng, the head of ZTE’s Venezuela unit, confirmed ZTE sold Caracas servers for the database and is developing the mobile payment application. The company, he said, violated no Chinese or local laws and has no role in how Venezuela collects or uses cardholder data. We don’t support the government. We are just developing our market.” To encourage the adoption of the Fatherland card, the government has granted cash prizes to cardholders for performing civic duties, like rallying voters. It has also given one-time payouts, such as awarding moms enrolled in the card a Mother’s Day bonus of about $2. Fatherland card's hack and the handover to Cantv Maduro introduced the cards in December 2016. In May 2017, hackers broke into the fatherland database. The hack was carried out by anonymous anti-Maduro activists known as TeamHDP. The group’s leader with the Twitter handle @YoSoyJustincito, said, “the hack was extremely simple and motivated by TeamHDP’s mission to expose Maduro secrets." During the hack, TeamHDP took screenshots of user data and deleted the accounts of government officials, including Maduro. The president later appeared on television scanning his card and receiving an error message: “This person doesn’t exist.” According to Reuters, “Screenshots of the information embedded in various card accounts, shared by TeamHDP, included phone numbers, emails, home addresses, participation at Socialist Party events and even whether a person owns a pet. People familiar with the database said the screenshots appear authentic." “Soon after the hack, Maduro signed a $70 million contract with Cantv and a state bank for ‘national security’ projects. These included the development of a “centralized fatherland database” and a mobile app to process payments, such as the discounted cost of a subsidized food box, associated with the card”, according to Reuters. Héctor Navarro, a Socialist Party founder, and former government minister said, “It’s blackmail. Venezuelans with the cards now have more rights than those without. In July 2017, the ownership of the Fatherland card was transferred to Cantv from Soltein, the project documents show. A team of a dozen ZTE developers began bolstering the database’s capacity and security, current and former Cantv employees said. Among other measures, ZTE installed data storage units built by U.S.-based Dell Technologies Inc. Dell spokeswoman Lauren Lee said, “ ZTE is a client in China but that Dell doesn’t sell equipment to ZTE in Venezuela. Dell reviewed its transactions in Venezuela and wasn’t aware of any sale to Cantv, either." “Dell is committed to compliance with all applicable laws where we do business,” Lee said in an email. “We expect our customers, partners, and suppliers to follow these same laws.” “In May, Venezuela held elections that were widely discredited by foreign governments after Maduro banned several opposition parties. Ahead of the vote, ruling party officials urged voters to be grateful for government largesse dispensed via the fatherland cards. They set up ‘red point’ kiosks near voting booths, where voters could scan their cards and register, Maduro himself promised, for a ‘fatherland prize’, said the Reuters report. An internal Cantv presentation from last year said the system can feed information from the database to ministries to help generate statistics and take decisions. After the vote, government offices including Banco Bicentenario del Pueblo, a state bank, sent Cantv lists with employees’ names to determine whether they had voted, according to the manager who helped set up the servers. Mariela Magallanes, an opposition lawmaker who headed a commission that last year investigated how the fatherland card was being linked to the subsidized food program, said, “With personal data now so available, some citizens fear they can lose more than just their jobs. The government, the commission said in a report, is depriving some citizens of the food boxes because they don’t possess the card. The government knows exactly who is most vulnerable to pressure." To know more about this news in detail, head over to the complete coverage on Reuters. Read Next Security Vulnerabilities identified in Washington, Georgia, and North Carolina’s voting systems A Twitter video shows how voting machines used in 18 states can be hacked in 2 mins “Instead of data scientists working on their models and advancing AI, they are spending their time doing DeepOps work”, MissingLink CEO, Yosi Taguri [Interview]

Uber’s sales are slowing down as the company is spending more in its food delivery business. The quarterly loss surged to $1.1B. The revenue in the third quarter growth of Uber rose 38 percent from the previous year. But it is almost half of what the growth rate was six months back, though there is a 5% increase from the previous quarter. Uber has withdrawn from the foreign markets where it faced heavy losses. It has already withdrawn it services from Austin, Denmark, Budapest, and Bulgaria. Expensive ventures like the self-driving trucks also were responsible for the losses and Uber has shuttered them too. Uber has been investing a lot towards becoming a major player in autonomous cars. It has also agreed to buy vehicles from Volvo to start off self-driving taxis. The series of missteps and scandals over executive misconduct could also possibly be one of the reasons behind the sales getting affected. At the Code Conference, Dara Khosrowshahi said, “We have to compete against the economy for drivers.” He further added, “We have three million driver partners around the world, and there are some that are disgruntled. All of them, I think, wanna make more money, but fundamentally, they get to be their own bosses, and they get to work on their own terms. In general, I think driver earnings are going up, and we have an increased time and distance in certain places.” Uber Eats’ healthy appetite Despite this quarter’s massive losses, the company seems to be quite excited about its food delivery business, Uber Eats. Uber Eats is turning out to be the fastest-growing meal delivery service in the U.S. According to data from Second Measure, in nine out of the 22 most populous U.S. cities, people are now spending more on Uber Eats than on any other food delivery services. CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi said onstage at Code Conference at Rancho Palos Verdes, California, “Eats is an exploding business in a good way. It’s now at a $6 billion bookings run rate, growing over 200 percent. Eats is only in 250 cities on a global basis and it’s got 350 cities to go, to catch up to our rides business.” Uber Eats was launched in several cities last year. It is now profitable in 27 of 108 cities worldwide. Uber Eats dominated in three Texas cities, six months ago, namely, Houston, Austin, and Dallas. It has beaten out DoorDash in Fort Worth, GrubHub in El Paso, and Postmates in Phoenix. It has also beaten out Amazon Restaurants in Amazon’s home city of Seattle! The food delivery companies usually fall under one of the two categories. The first one is aggregators, which collect restaurant options and menus through an online portal for customers. They usually require restaurants to handle delivery themselves. An example of this category is GrubHub. The second one is full delivery services, which take orders through an online portal and also, deliver the food for restaurants. The restaurants have to fork out a fixed percentage of an order as a fee, while also, customers pay a fee to the delivery service. Postmates and UberEats are examples of this category. Uber Eats have an advantage over GrubHub as it’s just not an aggregator. It also has the benefit of existing driver networks around the country from its parent company Uber, unlike Postmates. There is some uncertainty about the profitability of Uber’s core ride-hailing business as food is boosting Uber’s gross revenue but it’s shrinking the company’s margins. Only time will tell if Uber Eats can really make a difference to the company’s economy! Read more about this news on the official website of Bloomberg. Michelangelo PyML: Introducing Uber’s platform for rapid machine learning development Uber’s Head of corporate development, Cameron Poetzscher, resigns following a report on a 2017 investigation into sexual misconduct Why did Uber created Hudi, an open source incremental processing framework on Apache Hadoop?

At the Chrome Web Summit 2018, Dan Dascalescu, Partner Developer Advocate at Google provided a high-level overview of ChromeOS and discussed Chrome’s core and new features available to web developers. Topics included best practices for web development, including Progressive Web Apps, and optimizing input and touch for tablets while having desktop users in mind. He specified that Chromebooks are convergence machines that run Linux, Android, and Google Play natively without emulation. He explained why ChromeOS can be a good choice for web developers. It not only powers devices from sticks to tablets to desktops, but it can also run web, Android, and now Linux applications. ChromeOS brings together your own development workflow with a variety of form factors from mobiles, tablets, desktop, and browsers on Android and Linux. Run Linux apps on ChromeOS with Crostini Stephen Barber, an engineer on ChromeOS described Chrome’s container architecture which is based on Chrome’s principle of safety, security, and reliability.  By using lightweight containers and hardware virtualization support, Android and Linux code run natively in ChromeOS. Developers can run Linux apps on ChromeOS through Project Crostini. Crostini is based on Debian stable and uses both virtualization and containers to provide security in depth. For now, they are starting out targeting web developers by providing integration features like port forwarding to localhost as a secure origin. They also provide a penguin.linux.test DNS alias, to treat a container like a separate system. For supporting more developer workflows than just web, they are soon providing USB, GPU, audio, FUSE, and file sharing support in upcoming releases. Dan also shared how Crostini is actually used for developing web apps. He demonstrated how you can easily install Linux on your Chromebook. Although Crostini is still in development, most things work as expected. Developers can run IDEs, databases like MongoDB, or MySQL. Anything can be installed with an -apt. It also has a terminal. Dan also mentioned Carlo, which is a Google project that is essentially a helpful node app framework. It provides applications with Chrome rendering capabilities. It uses a locally detected instance of chrome and it connects to your process pipe and then exposes the high-level API to render in Chrome from your NodeScript. If you don’t need low-level features, you can make your app as a PWA which works without a LaunchBar once installed in ChromeOS. Windows Chrome desktop PWA support will be available from Chrome 70+ and Mac from Chrome 72+. Dan also conducted a demo on how to run a PWA. These were the steps: Set up Crostini Install the development environment (node, npm, VSCode) Checkout a PWA (Squoosh) from GitHub Open in VSCode Run the web server Open PWA from Linux and Android browsers He also provided guidance on optimizing forms, handling touch interactions, pointer events, and how to set up remote debugging. What does the future look like for ChromeOS? Chrome team is on improving the desktop PWA support. This includes support for keyboard shortcuts, badging for the launch icon, and link capturing. They are also working on low-latency canvas contexts which are introduced in Chrome 71 Beta. This context uses OpenGLES for rastering, writes directly to the Front Buffer, which bypasses several steps of the rendering process but risks tearing. It is used mainly for high-level interactive apps. View the full talk on YouTube. Day 1 of Chrome Dev Summit 2018: new announcements and Google’s initiative to close the gap between web and native. Meet Carlo, a web rendering surface for Node applications by the Google Chrome team. Google Chrome 70 now supports WebAssembly threads to build multi-threaded web applications.

Yesterday, Pixel camera app launched a new feature, Night Sight to help in clicking sharp, clean photographs in very low light. It works on both, the main and selfie cameras of all three generations of Pixel phones. Also, it does not require an additional tripod or flash. How HDR+ helps Night Sight [caption id="attachment_24169" align="aligncenter" width="696"]  Image source: Google AI Blog[/caption] Night Sight features works because of HDR+. HDR+ uses computational photography for producing clearer photographs. When the shutter button is pressed, HDR+ captures a rapid burst of pictures, then quickly combines them into one. It improves results in both high dynamic range and low-light situations. It reduces the impact of read noise and shot noise thereby improving SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) in dim lighting. To keep the photographs sharp even if the hand shakes or the subject moves, Pixel camera app uses short exposures. The pieces of frames which aren’t well aligned, get rejected. This lets HDR+ to produce sharp images even while there is excessive light. The Pixel camera app works well in both the situations, dim light or excessive light exposure. The default picture-taking mode on Pixel phones uses a zero-shutter-lag (ZSL) protocol, which limits exposure time. As soon as one opens the camera app, it starts capturing image frames and stores them in a circular buffer. This circular buffer constantly erases old frames to make room for new ones. When the shutter button is pressed, the camera sends the most recent 9 or 15 frames to the HDR+ or Super Res Zoom software. The image is captured exactly at the right moment. That’s why it is called zero-shutter-lag. No matter how dim the scene is, HDR+ limits exposures to at most 66ms, allowing the display rate of at least 15 frames per second. Night Sight uses positive-shutter-lag (PSL), for dimmer scenes where longer exposures are needed. The app uses motion metering to measure recent scene motions and chooses an exposure time to minimize the blur effect. How to use Night Sight? The Night Sight feature can't operate in complete darkness, there should be at least some light. Night Sight works better in uniform lighting than harsh lighting. Users can tap on various objects, then move the exposure slider, to increase exposure. If it’s very dark and the camera can’t focus, tap on the edge of a light source or on a high-contrast edge. Keep very bright light sources out of the field of view to avoid lens flare artifacts. The Night Sight feature has already created some buzz around. But the major drawback is that it can’t work in complete darkness. Also, since the learning-based white balancer is trained for Pixel 3, it will be less accurate on older phones. This app works better with the newer phone than the older ones. Read more about this news on Google AI Blog. The DEA and ICE reportedly plan to turn streetlights to covert surveillance cameras, says Quartz report Facebook is at it again. This time with Candidate Info where politicians can pitch on camera ‘Peekaboo’ Zero-Day Vulnerability allows hackers to access CCTV cameras, says Tenable Research