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Honda has come up with a program called Curious Minded Machine (CMM) to expand cognitive robotics research. This is a program to create artificial intelligence that enables ‘learning’ with a human-like sense of curiosity. What is the Curious Minded Machine program? The idea is to build a model based on how children ‘learn to learn’. By observing human interactions and how they perform tasks, CMM can learn better ways to achieve goals. This initiative explores Cooperative Intelligence (CI), AI embedded in a social context enabling people to confidence and trust with AI systems. Soshi Iba, a principal scientist at Honda Research Institute USA, Inc says: “Our ultimate goal is to create new types of machines that can acquire an interest in learning and knowledge, and the ability to interact with the world and others. We want to develop Curious Minded Machines that use curiosity to serve the common good by understanding people's needs, empowering human capability, and ultimately addressing complex societal issues.” Who is in the program by Honda? This three-year program will include efforts from the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. The areas tackled by the research teams participating with Honda are: MIT CSAIL: They are addressing a key limitation in robotic action planning. The focus is on establishing a causal theory of sensor percepts, which will help in predicting future percepts and the effect of future actions. Penn Engineering: This team from Pennsylvania is focusing on challenges in machine perception by learning from biological systems. Then applying an embodied, active and efficient approach towards acquiring representations of the surrounding world and actions. University of Washington: They are addressing the challenges to enable robots working effectively in human environments. Similar to a human child learning through exploration and curiosity, they aim to build a mathematical model of curiosity. After three years, the participating universities will have to show demonstrations of working systems that will be the foundation of CMM. To know more about the initiative, visit the Curious mind machine website. SingularityNET and Mindfire unite talents to explore artificial intelligence MIT plans to invest $1 billion in a new College of computing that will serve as an interdisciplinary hub for computer science, AI, data science “Deep meta reinforcement learning will be the future of AI where we will be so close to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)”, Sudharsan Ravichandiran

SQLite adopted Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines as its new Code of Conduct on Saturday. After being nagged by clients and businesses to implement a code of conduct, SQLite founder, D. Richard Hipp, had come out with a code of conduct based on "instruments of good works" from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict, last Monday. But, it faced major criticism as the majority of developers, across the world, did not approve of it. SQLite then adopted the Mozilla guidelines. “The original document we put here was more of a Code of Ethics of the Project Founder. While we stand by those principles, they are not in line with the modern technical meaning of a Code of Conduct and have hence been renamed”, reads the SQLite Code of conduct page. SQLite is one of the most used database engines across the world. It is a self-contained, high-reliability, embedded, full-featured, and a public-domain, SQL database engine. Earlier Hipp stated that the former CoC “was created (in a slightly different format) for the purpose of filling in a box on "supplier registration" forms submitted to the SQLite developers by various minor clients. But it is not a Code of Conduct in the same sense that many communities mean a Code of Conduct. Rather, the foundational ethical principles upon which SQLite is based...a succinct description of the SQLite Founder's idea of what it means to be virtuous”. The former code of conduct comprised an overview, instruments of Good works, the scope of application, and “The Rule”. It has received a lot of criticism from developers. In fact, many of them were confused about whether the new CoC is a sarcastic reply to the clients asking SQLite to set up CoC, or if SQLite is serious about it. Here’s the former Code of conduct by SQLite. When asked by users if the CoC was legit, D. Richard Hipp, replied on the SQLite forum with, “Yes. Clients were encouraging me to have a code of conduct. (Having a CoC seems to be a trendy thing nowadays.)  So I looked around and came up with what you found, submitted the idea to the whole staff, and everybody approved”. Public reaction regarding the former CoC varied. Some believed that the CoC was impractical and excludes people based on religion, while others loved it. https://twitter.com/DarrenPMeyer/status/1054364170232258562 https://twitter.com/panzertime/status/1054407789257330688 https://twitter.com/geek/status/1054423437249253376 https://twitter.com/brionv/status/1054371935629373440 https://twitter.com/aaronbieber/status/1054403524686200838 https://twitter.com/_sagesharp_/status/1054404033518043137 The CoC also comprised of 72 rules such as  “Do not murder”, “Do not commit adultery”, “Do not steal”, “Do not covet”,”Do not bear false witness”, “Chastise the body”, “Do not become attached to pleasures”, “Love fasting”, “Clothe the naked”, and so forth. “No one is required to follow The Rule, to know The Rule, or even to think that The Rule is a good idea… anyone who follows The Rule will live a happier and more productive life, but individuals are free to dispute or ignore that advice if they wish”, reads the former CoC. SQLite’s new code of conduct based on Mozilla’s community participation guideline preaches rules such as being respectful, being direct but professional, being inclusive, understanding different perspectives, appreciating differences, leading by example, and so forth. This change, however, is not the result of public criticism received as the SQLite team states, “While we are not doing so in reaction to any current or ongoing issues, we believe that this will be a helpful part of maintaining the long-term sustainability of the project”. Here’s what people feel about SQLite’s decision to adopt Mozilla’s community participation guidelines. Some approve of it while others liked the former CoC better. https://twitter.com/ZanBaldwin/status/1055994596369547264 https://twitter.com/ann_arcana/status/1055399132230246400 https://twitter.com/TheQuQu/status/1055170161425240064 SQLite 3.25.0 is out with better query optimizer and support for windows functions How to use SQLite with Ionic to store data? Introduction to SQL and SQLite

Last week, researchers from UC Berkeley and UW Madison published a research paper highlighting a system for linear algebra built on a serverless framework. numpywren is a scientific computing framework built on top of the serverless execution framework pywren. Pywren is a stateless computation framework that leverages AWS Lambda to execute python functions remotely in parallel. What is numpywren? Basically Numpywren, is a distributed system for executing large-scale dense linear algebra programs via stateless function executions. numpywren runs computations as stateless functions while storing intermediate state in a distributed object store. Instead of dealing with individual machines, hostnames, and processor grids numpywren works on the abstraction of "cores" and "memory". Numpywren currently uses Amazon EC2 and Lambda services for computation and uses Amazon S3 as a distributed memory abstraction. Numpywren can scale to run Cholesky decomposition (a linear algebra algorithm) on a 1Mx1M matrix within 36% of the completion time of ScaLAPACK running on dedicated instances and can be tuned to use 33% fewer CPU-hours. They’ve also introduced LAmbdaPACK, a domain-specific language designed to implement highly parallel linear algebra algorithms in a serverless setting. Why serverless for Numpywren? Per their research, serverless computing model can be used for computationally intensive programs while providing ease-of-use and seamless fault tolerance. The elasticity provided by serverless computing also allows the numpywren system to dynamically adapt to the inherent parallelism of common linear algebra algorithms. What’s next for Numpywren? One of the main drawbacks of the serverless model is the high communication needed due to the lack of locality and efficient broadcast primitives. The researchers want to incorporate coarser serverless executions (e.g., 8 cores instead of 1) that process larger portions of the input data. They also want to develop services that provide efficient collective communication primitives like broadcast to help address this problem. The researchers want modern convex optimization solvers such as CVXOPT to use Numpywren to scale much larger problems. They are also working on automatically translating numpy code directly into LAmbdaPACK instructions that can be executed in parallel. As data centers continue their push towards disaggregation, the researchers point out that platforms like numpywren open up a fruitful area of research. For further explanation, go through the research paper. Platform9 announces a new release of Fission.io, the open source, Kubernetes-native Serverless framework Azure Functions 2.0 launches with better workload support for serverless How Serverless computing is making AI development easier

“The harvesting and sharing of data by mobile phone apps is out of control” -Researchers at Oxford University A paper published on 18th October by researchers at Oxford University revealed that 90% of Google play store apps are harvesting user data and subsequently sharing it with companies like Alphabet, Twitter, Facebook, and many others. The study points out the presence of third-party trackers on nearly one million (959,000) apps from the US and UK Google Play stores. The statistics are unsettling. Around 88% of this data is handed over to ‘Alphabet’- Google’s parent company. Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and others follow suite. Here is how they fair: The most prevalent root parent tracking companies and their subsidiaries These third-party trackers were mostly prevalent in news apps and apps aimed at children and young adults. By tracking users data- which includes information like age, location, gender, buying habits, and other miscellaneous information- companies can form a profile of users. This can then be used to send target specific ads, influence a user’s buying habits or even send political campaign messages. Considering that these trackers were hugely present in apps related to children, the paper states that allowing profiling of children without attempting to obtain parental consent, is downright unlawful. Even though there are tracker blocking software available for mobile and web, these primarily cannot control the tracking software embedded on an app’s OS. The privacy settings for an app are focussed on more specific app permissions like contact sharing, location sharing etc. In response to this research,  a Google spokesman said in a statement to Business Insider “Across Google and in Google Play, we have clear policies and guidelines for how developers and third-party apps can handle data and we require developers to be transparent and ask for user permission.” Further, they added, “If an app violates our policies, we take action.” Google also added that the researchers had “mischaracterized” some of the app’s basic functions to reach their conclusion. Head over to the research paper to obtain more information about this study. Alternatively, you can visit the dailmail.co.uk for more insights to this news. Google is missing out $50 million because of Fortnite’s decision to bypass Play Store A multimillion-dollar ad fraud scheme that secretly tracked user affected millions of Android phones. This is how Google is tackling it. All new Android apps on Google Play must target API Level 26 (Android Oreo) or higher, to publish

Last week, the Mozilla Gfx team announced that WebRender is now in beta. It is not yet released because of some blocking bugs. WebRender is an experimental renderer for Servo that draws web content like a modern game engine. It consists of a collection of shaders that very closely matched CSS properties. Though WebRender is known for being extremely fast, its main focus is on making rendering smoother. It basically changes the way the rendering engine works to make it more like a 3D game engine. What are the WebRender and Gecko changes? In order to save GPU memory, the sizing logic to render targets is now more efficient. It comes with improved tooling to synchronize between the WebRender and Gecko repositories. Many incremental changes towards picture caching including batch caching based on z id rather than prim index, removing PrimitiveMetadata struct, and many more. A proper support for using tiled images as clip masks. A texture corruption issue after resuming from sleep on Linux with proprietary Nvidia drivers is fixed. A flickering issue at startup on Windows is fixed. The backface-visibility bugs are fixed. The z-fighting glitch with 3D transforms is fixed. A font leak on Windows is fixed. In the future, we will see more improvements in memory usage, the interaction between blob images and scrolling, and support for WebRender in Firefox for Android. You can enable WebRender in FireFox Nightly by following these steps: In about:config set “gfx.webrender.all” to true. After configuring restart Firefox. Read the official announcement on the Mozilla Gfx team blog. Mozilla updates Firefox Focus for mobile with new features, revamped design, and Geckoview for Android Developers of Firefox Focus set to replace Android’s WebView with GeckoView Mozilla optimizes calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly in Firefox, making it almost as fast as JS to JS calls

Soundtracking feature for Facebook stories has finally been rolled out! Facebook rolled out its soundtracking feature for Stories, on Wednesday. This feature helps you to choose from a catalog of songs, the section of the track you want, and overlaying it on a Story. It also allows you to share these clips to your News Feed. It’s now available on iOS and Android in Czech Republic, Australia,Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Belgium, France,  Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. Facebook is experimenting with a video music app called Lasso As reported by TechCrunch, FB is working towards building a new app called Lasso which is a video music app. It is a standalone product where users can record and share videos of themselves while lip syncing or dancing to popular songs. This app could possibly be a strong competition to Musically, which was a hit amongst teens and pre-teens even before it was acquired by Chinese tech giant ByteDance for around $1 billion and rolled into the company’s TikTok app in November, 2017. Since 2016, Facebook has been investigating on the teen music app space. Earlier this year, Facebook secured licensing deals with all the major music record labels. The brains behind this product are Facebook’s video team and Watch team under the leadership of principal lead product designer, Brady Voss. FB’s experiments with a Lip Sync Live feature for live streaming Karaoke The company has also began experimenting with a Lip Sync Live feature for live streaming karaoke and finally yesterday, Facebook opened it for Pages and began showing some lyrics for few songs on screen. It also plans to allow its users to pin their favorite songs to their profile. so the one visiting the profile can listen to the them. Nick Clegg, ex-deputy PM of the UK, is joining FB as its Head of Global Affairs Following Instagram founders, Brendan Iribe, Oculus co-founder, leaves FB Facebook says only 29 million and not 50 million users were affected by last month’s security breach

On Wednesday,  Facebook launched Candidate Info, where politicians can pitch on camera. It features thousands of direct-to-camera vertical videos where federal, local and state candidates introduce themselves and explain their top policy priority, qualifications and biggest goal if they win office. Scott Walker (R – WI Governor), Elizabeth Warren (D – MA Senate) and Beto O’Rourke (D – TX Senate) have already posted, while Facebook expects more candidates to participate, shortly. The Facebook mobile app’s navigation drawer will soon show these videos as part of an Election 2018 bookmark. The video clips will begin appearing to the potential constituents in the News Feed, next week. Facebook believes these videos will make it easier for people to learn about and compare different candidates. This feature is an addition to the Town Hall feature which Facebook had launched in 2017, which offers a personalized directory of candidates the users could vote for. In a similar fashion, Candidate Info only shows video clips from politicians running elections relevant to a given user, so in case, you are in California you won’t see videos from the Texas Senate race between O’Rourke and Ted Cruz. Though, you can still find their videos on their Facebook Pages. Considering, the midterms are just around the corner, Facebook is trying its best to protect elections from interference by  domestic and foreign attackers, connect users to candidates, offer transparency about who bought campaign ads, and encourage people to register and vote. With fake news that spread through the social network thought to have influenced the 2016 election, and ill-gotten Facebook user data from Cambridge Analytica applied to Donald Trump’s campaign ad targeting, the social media platform is hoping to avoid similar problematic narratives this time around. We aren’t sure Candidate Info is going to help here though. If anything, it might make things worse for the elections. It looks a lot like a shiny new filter bubble. What happens, for example, if one candidate in a constituency uses this tool to reach their constituents and the other doesn’t? Worse, still what if they don’t own a Facebook profile? This could give one of the parties an undue advantage as they will be on the top of the mind on Election day. And even if both the parties have their accounts and opt for this tool, what’s the guarantee that there won’t be any algorithmic manipulations? One of the campaigns from either of the parties might get an advantage purely based on what’s trending. Thirdly, the logic behind Facebook deciding which candidate’s pitches are relevant to the user based on where they are located is blickered, at best and dangerously comprising the viewer’s worldview, at its worse. Friends and family, though distributed across states, do influence who one votes for by virtue of their shared values. Denying users a chance to understand candidates from other constituencies simply tells an incomplete story. This could prevent healthy national level discussions and directly impact who becomes the next president. The bottomline is users should be ones deciding who to listen to, not the algorithm. Did you know Facebook shares the data you share with them for ‘security’ reasons with advertisers? Coinbase looking to replicate Facebook’s platform strategy with support for more digital assets WhatsApp co-founder reveals why he left Facebook; is called ‘low class’ by a Facebook senior executive

Yesterday, a shocking report by The New York Times shared its investigation on sexual misconduct at Google. It alleged that Google had protected at least four senior executives over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. They obtained corporate and court documents and spoke to more than three dozen current and former Google executives and employees about these episodes. Here is a summary of the three incidents that the New York Times article reported on.. The controversy with Andy Rubin, Creator of Android Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, often exhibited unprofessional behavior towards his co-workers. He was involved in a consensual relationship with a woman employee from 2011, who reported to one of his direct reports on the Android team. Google’s human resources department was not informed about this relationship despite a policy in place to do so. In 2013 when she wanted to cool things off, she agreed to meet Rubin at a hotel, where she was pressured to perform a non-consensual sexual activity. The woman filed a complaint to Google’s human resources department in 2014 and informed officials about the relationship. Amidst Google’s investigation, in September 2014, Mr. Rubin was awarded a stock grant worth $150 million approved by Google board’s leadership development and compensation committee. Google’s inquiry found the claims to be credible and the relationship inappropriate.   Mr. Page, the then CEO of Google, decided Mr. Rubin should leave and Google paid him $90 million as an exit package with an agreement to not work with Google’s rival companies. The company then proceeded to give Mr. Rubin’s a high profile well-respected farewell in October 2014. A civil suit filed later this month by Mr. Rubin’s ex-wife, Rie Rubin, includes a screenshot on an email (dated August 2015) that Mr. Rubin sent to a woman which said: “You will be happy being taken care of, Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.” Mr. Rubin released a statement calling the allegations “false” and “part of a smear campaign by my ex-wife to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle.” The controversy with Richard DeVaul, Director at Google X In 2013, Richard DeVaul, director at Google X, interviewed Star Simpson, a hardware engineer. After the job interview, he invited her to an annual festival in the Nevada desert, the following week. On getting back to his encampment, he asked her to remove her shirt and offered a back rub. When she refused, he insisted and she relented to a neck rub. Why you ask? “I didn’t have enough spine or backbone to shut that down as a 24-year-old” -Ms. Simpson Later she was informed by Google that she did not land the job, without any explanation. After finally reporting the episode to Google after 2 years, human resources told her that her account was “more likely than not” true and that “appropriate action” was taken. She was asked to stay quiet about the whole incident. Chelsea Bailey, the head of human resources at X, declined Simpson's allegations in a statement, adding that officials investigated and “took appropriate corrective action.” declining to say what the action was, owing to employee confidentiality. The controversy with Amit Singhal, former SVP of Search In 2005, an employee alleged that Amit Singhal, a senior vice president who headed search, groped her at an off-site event attended by dozens of colleagues. Google investigated and found that Mr. Singhal was inebriated and there were no witnesses to corroborate the incident. Google did not fire Mr. Singhal. They accepted his resignation and negotiated an exit package that paid him millions and prevented him from working for a competitor. The controversy with Drummond, Chief Legal Officer, Alphabet, and Chairman, CapitalG “Google felt like I was the liability.” - Jennifer Blakely, ex- senior contract manager David C. Drummond, joined as general counsel in 2002, started dating Jennifer Blakely (senior contract manager) in 2004. They had a son in 2007, after which Mr. Drummond disclosed their relationship to the company. Soon after, Google took action and Ms. Blakely had to leave the legal department as only one of them could work there and transferred to sales in 2007. She eventually left Google in 2008. While resigning, she was asked to sign paperwork saying she had departed voluntarily. Drummond left her in late 2008. Since the affair, Mr. Drummond’s has moved up the rungs within Alphabet. As Alphabet’s chief legal officer and chairman of CapitalG, he has reaped about $190 million from stock options and awards since 2011. Google’s response to the New York Times story Following the report by the New York Times, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an email to all Google employees on Thursday clarifying that the company has fired 48 people over the last two years for sexual harassment 13 of them were "senior managers and above". None of them received any exit packages. The email opened “We are dead serious about making sure we provide a safe and inclusive workplace. We want to assure you that we review every single complaint about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct, we investigate and we take action.” It also stated that there are “confidential channels” available for employees to report incidents of sexual harassment. He further informed they have updated their policies to demand all VPs and SVPs to disclose any relationship with a co-worker irrespective of whether they work on the same projects or not.  You can head over to CNBC to read the entire email. Our take on this story The email seems to have deliberately excluded the timelines during which the incidents reported in the New York Times article took place. Also, it neither denies nor confirms those incidents which hints at them being true, in most likelihood. While Mr. Pichai assures his people that Google is doing everything to ensure it is a safe place to work, he does not address any of the red flags satisfactorily the NYT article raised such as: All the above incidents point to weak policy implementation by HR and Google leadership. Just amending policies is clearly not enough. The ‘hard line on inappropriate conduct by people in positions of authority’ that Pichai references in his response seem to vary based on how valuable the perpetrator is to Google or its board. What measures are they taking to ensure an impartial assessment happens? The incidents also highlight that executives brazenly misbehave with their victims. There is no mention of how that aspect of Google is being tackled. Specifically, for example, would Mr. Page take a different decision today if had a chance to go back in time or if Mr. Pichai, as Google CEO personally taken a public stance on specific incidents of sexual misconduct without hiding behind aggregate numbers and figures. The report throws light on the pervasive sexist culture in male-dominated Silicon Valley and the growing chorus denouncing it.  It is traumatic enough to experience such harassment, imagine the pressure that one has to deal with when such incidents go public. It is also sad that the tech giant that everyone looks up to- Google- decided to sweep matters under the carpet to save itself from public attention. These recurring stories seem to have led to the release of Brotopia: Breaking Up The Boys Club of Silicon Valley, a book by Emily Chang, Bloomberg reporter, that dives into the stories of women who say they have been sexually harassed at tech companies and venture capital firms. You can head over to The New York Times for the entire news coverage as well as similar incidents documented. NIPS Foundation decides against name change as poll finds it an unpopular superficial move; instead increases ‘focus on diversity and inclusivity initiatives’ Python founder resigns – Guido van Rossum goes ‘on a permanent vacation from being BDFL’ Ex-googler who quit Google on moral grounds writes to Senate about company’s “Unethical” China censorship plan

Yesterday, further details surrounding the firing of Netflix's Chief Communications Officer Jonathan Friedland emerged. A report by The Wall Street Journal highlighted a number of cultural issues within the company. Mr. Friedland was fired in June for saying the “N-word” in full form in a meeting. The WSJ report highlights that Netflix’s culture focuses on “freedom and responsibility”, allowing every employee to access sensitive information, from how many subscribers sign up to the viewership of shows to contractual terms for Netflix’s production deals. Netflix’s policy of internal transparency and candor Keeping transparency in an organization is important, but Netflix takes this to the next level. Executives at the director level and above are permitted to see the salaries of every employee. This can upset team dynamics, according to a number of current and former executives. But others, including Bob Heldt, a former director of engineering, threw their support behind the initiative after it helped people who were underpaid make a case for raises. Employees are given the freedom to offer harsh feedback to their colleagues. They have introduced something called a “keeper test”, which lets managers take the decision of firing a team member based on just a question. They explain this on their culture page: “We focus on managers’ judgment through the “keeper test” for each of their people: if one of the members of the team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would the manager try hard to keep them from leaving? Those who do not pass the keeper test (i.e. their manager would not fight to keep them) are promptly and respectfully given a generous severance package so we can find someone for that position that makes us an even better dream team.” Netflix, in a written statement, likened working at the organization to being in an Olympic team: “Being part of Netflix is like being part of an Olympic team. Getting cut, when it happens, is very disappointing but there is no shame at all. Our former employees get a generous severance and they generally get snapped up by another company.” Netflix is a rapidly growing company with its subscribers nearly quadrupling since 2013. But with this level of openness and transparency, for many Netflixers, its culture can be ruthless, demoralizing and transparent to the point of dysfunctional. Read the full report at WSJ's official website. How everyone at Netflix uses Jupyter notebooks from data scientists, machine learning engineers, to data analysts How Netflix uses AVA, an Image Discovery tool to find the perfect title image for each of its shows Netflix bring in Verna Myers as new VP of Inclusion strategy to boost cultural diversity

The Google Brain team with DeepMind and ETH Zurich have introduced an episodic memory-based curiosity model which allows Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to explore environments in an intelligent way. This model was the result of a study called Episodic Curiosity through Reachability, the findings of which Google AI shared yesterday. Why this episodic curiosity model is introduced? In real-world scenarios, the rewards required in reinforcement learning are sparse and most of the current reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. Wouldn’t it be better if the agent is capable of creating its own rewards? That’s what this model does. This makes the rewards denser and more suitable for learning. Many researchers have worked on some curiosity-driven learning approaches before, one of them is Intrinsic Curiosity Module (ICM). This method is explored in the recent paper Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction published by Ph.D. students at the University of California, Berkeley. ICM builds a predictive model of the dynamics of the world. The agent is rewarded when the model fails to make good predictions. Exploring unvisited locations is not directly a part of the ICM curiosity formulation. In the ICM method, visiting them is only a way to obtain more “surprise” and thus maximize overall rewards. As a result, in some environments there could be other ways to cause self-surprise, leading to unforeseen results. The authors of the ICM method along with researchers at OpenAI, in their research Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning, show a hidden danger of surprise maximization. Instead of doing something useful for the task at hand, agents can learn to indulge procrastination-like behavior. The episodic memory-based curiosity model overcomes this “procrastination” issues. What is episodic memory-based curiosity model? This model uses a deep neural network trained to measure how similar two experiences are. For training the model, the researchers made it guess whether two observations were experienced close together in time, or far apart in time. Temporal proximity is a good proxy for whether two experiences should be judged to be part of the same experience. This training gives a general concept of novelty via reachability, which is shown a follows: Source: Google AI How this model works Inspired by curious behavior in animals, this model rewards the agent with a bonus when it observes something novel. This bonus is summed up with the real task reward making it possible for the RL algorithm to learn from the combined reward. To calculate the bonus of the agent, the current observation is compared with the observation in memory. This comparison is done based on how many environment steps it takes to reach the current observation from those in memory. Source: Google AI This method follows these steps: The agent's observations of the environment are stored in an episodic memory. The agents are also rewarded for reaching observations that are not yet represented in memory. In this method, being “not in memory” is the definition of novelty in our method. Such a behavior of seeking the unfamiliar will lead the artificial agent to new locations, thus keeping it from wandering in circles and ultimately help it stumble on the goal. Experiment and results Different approaches to curiosity were tested in two visually rich 3D environments: ViZDoom and DMLab. The agent was given various tasks such as searching for a goal in a maze or collecting good objects and avoiding bad objects. The standard setting in previous formulations, such as ICM, on DMLab, was to provide the agent a laser-like science fiction gadget. If the agent does not need a gadget for a particular task, it was free not to use it. In this test, the surprise-based ICM method used this gadget a lot even when it is useless for the task at hand. The newly introduced method instead learns reasonable exploration behavior under the same conditions. This is because it does not try to predict the result of its actions, but rather seeks observations which are “harder” to achieve from those already in the episodic memory. In short, the agent implicitly pursues goals which require more effort to reach from memory than just a single tagging action. This approach penalizes an agent running in circles because after completing the first circle the agent does not encounter new observations other than those in memory, and thus receives no rewards. In the experimental environment, the model was able to achieve: In ViZDoom, the agent learned to successfully navigate to a distant goal at least two times faster than the state-of-the-art curiosity method ICM. In DMLab, the agent generalized well to new procedurally generated levels of the game. It was able to reach the goal at least two times more frequently than ICM on test mazes with very sparse reward. To know more in detail about the episodic memory-based curiosity model, check out Google AI’s post and also the paper: Episodic Curiosity Through Reachability. DeepMind open sources TRFL, a new library of reinforcement learning building blocks Google open sources Active Question Answering (ActiveQA), a Reinforcement Learning based Q&A system Understanding Deep Reinforcement Learning by understanding the Markov Decision Process [Tutorial]

On Wednesday, Facebook posted that during the last quarter, its content moderators had removed 8.7 million user images of child nudity from their platform with the help of a software that automatically flags such photos. This software was previously undisclosed. In 2016, Joaquin Candela, the company’s director of applied machine learning, told Reuters that Facebook was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material. It is “an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to our policies,” he added. The machine learning tool rolled out last year identifies images that contain both nudity and a child, allowing the increased enforcement of Facebook’s ban on photos that show minors in a sexualized context.The software which was disclosed yesterday, is similar to the one released last year. However, this time it catches the users engaged in “grooming,” or befriending minors for sexual exploitation. Facebook’s Global Head of Safety, Antigone Davis told Reuters in an interview that the “machine helps us prioritize” and “more efficiently queue” problematic content for the company’s trained team of reviewers. Due to pressure from regulators and lawmakers, Facebook has promised to speed up the process of removing extremist and illicit material. Machine learning programs that sift through billions of pieces of content that its users post each day play a crucial role in this plan. Though Facebook has not disclosed data on child nudity removals before. This year, news agencies and advertisers have been among those that complained about Facebook’s automated systems wrongly blocking their posts. Facebook’s rules have banned even family photos of lightly clothed children uploaded with “good intentions”, considering how others might abuse such images. Davis said, “the child safety systems would make mistakes but users could appeal. We’d rather err on the side of caution with children.” Previously, Facebook relied on users or its adult nudity filters to report abusive posts. Facebook said that the program, which learned from its collection of nude adult photos and clothed children photos, has led to more removals. It makes exceptions for art and history, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked girl fleeing a Vietnam War napalm attack. Davis said, “The child grooming system evaluates factors such as how many people have blocked a particular user and whether that user quickly attempts to contact many children.” Michelle DeLaune, Chief Operating Officer at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), said, “the organization expects to receive about 16 million child porn tips worldwide this year from Facebook and other tech companies, up from 10 million last year.” Michelle acknowledged that a crucial blind spot is encrypted chat apps and secretive “dark web” sites where much of new child pornography originates. For example, message encryption on Facebook-owned WhatsApp, prevents machine learning from analyzing them. “Facebook is the new Cigarettes”, says Marc Benioff, Salesforce Co-CEO Facebook releases Skiplang, a general purpose programming language Facebook’s largest security breach in its history leaves 50M user accounts compromised

Software engineer Gaël Duval who is working to create an ‘ethical operating system’ called /e/ wrote an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook today in response to Cook’s talk about privacy at ICDPPC on Oct 24. Duval argued that Cook’s pro-privacy comments and actions are brilliant PR moves that work in favor of Apple. His open letter to Tim Cook reads, “your strategists know that Google, that owns 80% of the smartphone market worldwide, is in a difficult position on this topic because their business model essentially relies on collecting personal data and profiting from it through advertizing. That’s a great opportunity for Apple to communicate, because Apple’s business model is selling devices, not advertising.” Why Duval finds Apple’s privacy claims disingenuous Duval further dived into why he is skeptical of Apple’s concern for user privacy on its products. Apple’s privacy claims can’t be verified as it a closed ecosystem iOS and macOS are mostly proprietary, closed operating systems. Users can only ‘trust Apple’s claims’ of the OS being secure. As there is no source code in the open, there is no guarantee that the security measurements put in place are enough to protect users against all privacy threats. He pointed out that if the source code was open source, the community and experts could verify the security and privacy measures themselves. Personal information for profit According to Apple’s privacy policy: “Personal information will only be shared by Apple to provide or improve our products, services and advertising; it will not be shared with third parties for their marketing purposes.” Duval says that Apple explicitly accepted using personal information for their own profit. Apple allows Google to collect user data on iPhone for the right price The price was $9B for this year! It was $1B in 2014, speculated to be $3B in 2017 and to be $13B in 2019! This hefty fee allows Google to collect a lot of data from iOS users. Apple hasn’t been in the news for privacy issues mostly because they don’t collect that much personal data, or so Apple users should hope. Will Apple open-source their OSes? I don’t think so. Apple OSes are also less susceptible to less attacks because of it being a closed system. Apple, /e/, and privacy What about Apple user data collected by Google being the default search engine? Now you may argue that it is just the default engine and can be changed. Yes, but how many regular consumers do you picture doing that? Most people would just pull out their phone go to the browser and start typing on the search bar. While all of the above points are valid and call out Apple on its practices, the open letter ends up doing what Duval accused Cook of doing in the first place - cease the opportunity to promote his product. This letter does serve as a promotional medium for Duval’s new mobile OS project /e/ that follows a privacy by design ethos. We aren’t complaining though, more competition and diverse business models in the mobile OS space can only be a good thing in the age of data harvesting and security breaches . To read the letter, visit Duval’s Medium post. Tim Cook talks about privacy, supports GDPR for USA at ICDPPC, ex-FB security chief calls him out ‘Ethical mobile operating system’ /e/, an alternative for Android and iOS, is in beta Apple now allows U.S. users to download their personal data via its online privacy data portal

Yesterday, the founder of QubesOS and Invisible Things, Joanna Rutkowska announced her resignation from the organization. She shared on the QubesOS’ blog, that she has joined Golem Project as a Chief Strategy Officer, also doubling as the Chief Security Officer. Joanna Rutkowska has been working on several fields of computer security engineering over the past 10 years. Her projects include desktop systems security, Qubes OS, virtualization security, and other hardware-enforced security mechanisms, such as Intel vPro technologies, their vulnerabilities, as well as how they could be used to build more secure systems. Prior to these, her primary focus was on kernel-mode rootkits and stealth malware (e.g. Blue Pill), including both offensive as well as defensive research. In her post on QubesOS, she said, “Earlier this year, I decided to take a sabbatical. I wanted to reflect on my infosec work and decide what I would like to focus on in the coming years. As you probably know, I’ve spent the last nine years mostly fighting the battle to secure the endpoint, more specifically creating, developing, architecting, and promoting Qubes OS, as well as the more general concept of ‘Security through Distrusting’.” QubesOS: A security-oriented FOSS Qubes is a free and open-source software (FOSS), which means that everyone is free to use, copy, and change the software in any way. It also means that the source code is openly available so others can contribute to and audit it. Joanna says, “Over these past nine years, Qubes OS has grown from a research-inspired proof-of-concept into a reasonably mature, large open-source project with dozens of contributors and tens of thousands of users, including some high-profile security experts.” She highlighted two challenges for Qubes, firstly, improving hardware compatibility and UX and secondly, the trustworthiness of the x86 platform. From QubesOS to the Golem Project Despite the challenges in QubesOS, Joanna decided to switch to Golem as she believes endpoint device security has reasonably matured and the QubesOS project is in good hands. She sees cloud security as the next big challenge on this decade. She wrote, “While I still believe that the security of our digital lives starts and ends with the trustworthiness of the client devices we use”. “I recognize that the state of endpoint device security has significantly improved over the past decade. At the same time, most of our data and activities have migrated from local devices to the cloud.”, she added. She highlighted some fundamental problems with cloud trustworthiness, which include: The service providers who own our data (e.g. the vendor of your fitness tracking app), The hosting infrastructure owners, who can both access our data as well as deny us use of the service at their discretion (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP), and The networking infrastructure operators, who can also selectively cut us off from the services (e.g. to implement some form of censorship). She added, “These are very important problems, in my opinion, and I’d like to work now on making the cloud more trustworthy, specifically by limiting the amount of trust we have to place in it.” Following this, she mentioned that Golem is a very unique project for her. Golem has been on a mission to build a ‘decentralized computer’ out of a heterogeneous network of third-party provided computers. Golem was founded two years ago through a successful crowdfunding campaign that allowed it to build a strong development team. Golem’s funding model has eliminated two common obstacles--lack of money to hire enough people and the need to implement investors’ agenda-- faced by most of the budding tech startups. She said, “Most importantly, we (ITL), have already been working with Golem over the past year. During that time I’ve had enough time to get to know some of the key people in the project, understand their personal agendas, and conclude they might be very much inline with my own.” Talking about QubesOS’ future, Joanna said that not much will change. Also that Marek Marczykowski-Górecki, QubesOS’ Lead engineer has been effectively leading most of the day-to-day efforts with Qubes OS development since recent years. “Marek will continue to lead Qubes now, so I’m reassured about the future of the project. I will also remain as an advisor to the Qubes OS Project, as well as… its user, though I’ve recently also been embracing other systems, including – of course – the cloud”, she added. To know more about this news in detail, head over to Joanna Rutkowska’s post ‘The Next Chapter’ on QubesOS. Sir Tim Berners-Lee on digital ethics and socio-technical systems at ICDPPC 2018 Mozilla shares plans to bring desktop applications, games to WebAssembly and make deeper inroads for the future web Why does the C programming language refuse to die?

Today, The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office proposed new rules which will become effective from 28 October 2018. The new rules give consumers and independent repair experts the permission to legally hack embedded software on consumer electronics like smartphones, tractors, cars, smart home appliances, and many other devices in order to repair or maintain them. This is an upgrade to the previous exemption in 2015 that allowed consumers to hack into embedded systems of tractors and farm equipment for repair/ maintenance purpose. The ruling makes it clear that the federal government believes consumers should be legally allowed to fix the things they own. The rule states that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of “lawfully acquired” devices for the “maintenance” and “repair” of that device. The new clause specifically targets breaking the digital rights management (DRM) and embedded software locks for “the maintenance/ repair of a device or system …. in order to make it work in accordance with its original specifications.” DRM is a term for any technology used to control access and restrict usage of proprietary hardware and software and copyrighted work. It prevents the owner of a product from modifying, repairing, improving, distributing, and otherwise using the product in a way not authorized by the copyright holder. Until now, many countries prohibited circumventing DRM illegally. It is also illegal to create and distribute tools to bypass DRM. By applying restrictions on what the owner can and cannot do with their product, copyright holders can prevent intellectual property theft, copyright infringement, maintain artistic control, and ensure continued revenue streams. A good analog of DRM put to use is a printer’s inkjet cartridges. Printer companies make a lot more money when you buy your ink directly from them. They come up with multiple techniques to prevent users from refilling their cartridges and putting them in their printer. This move is considered as a big win for the ‘right to repair’ movement that aims to “protect consumers from unfair and deceptive policies that make it difficult, expensive, or impossible for you to repair the things you own.” Most of the devices used today have software locks, which can now be legally circumvented. The catch here is as DRM becomes legal to crack, companies will make it much harder to bypass. To top it up, the federal government has not made any rules for manufacturers to make it easy to break in the DRM. As such, the right to repair movement is pursuing state-level legislation to force manufacturers to allow DRM to be circumvented for the purposes of repair. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""] With this ruling, some major freedoms for consumers include the following, as listed by iFixit: You can now jailbreak Alexa-powered hardware, and other similar gadgets—they call these ‘Voice assistant devices.’ You can unlock new phones, not just used ones. This is important for recyclers that get unopened consumer returns. We got a general exemption for repair of smartphones, home appliances, or home systems. This means that it’s finally legal to root and fix the Revolv smart home hubs that Google bricked when they shut down the servers. Or pretty much any other home device. Repair of motorized land vehicles (including tractors) by modifying the software is now legal. Importantly, this includes access to telematic diagnostic data—which was a major point of contention. It’s now legal for third-parties to perform repair on behalf of the owner. This is hugely important for the American economy, where repair jobs represent 3% of overall employment. [/box] Nathan Proctor, head of consumer rights group US PIRG’s right to repair states that "Companies use the anti-piracy rules in copyright laws to cover things that are nowhere near copying music or video games. We just want to fix our stuff. We're pleased with the progress being made, and ultimately we want to settle this by establishing Right to Repair." Kyle Wiens,  co-founder and CEO of iFixit wrote, “This ruling doesn’t make that [self-made] tooling available to the public—we’re going to need actual Right to Repair legislation for that. But it does make it legal to make your own tools. And that’s a huge step in the right direction. This is a sweeping victory. It’s the result of years of careful, painstakingly detailed work by the community.” While this discussion can be considered as a blow to manufacturers that use digital rights management  protections, consumers will now be able to take charge of their own devices and maintain them the way they want to. Head over to Motherboard.vice.com for more insights on this news. Day Against DRM is back. And its timing couldn’t be better. Git-bug: A new distributed bug tracker embedded in git Facebook and Arm join Yocto Project as platinum members for embedded Linux development

Bokeh has released their first stable version. Bokeh is an interactive visualization library that targets modern web browsers for presentation. Bokeh 1.0 marks the progress of making Bokeh a truly independent project in the context of a wider OSS community. Bokeh 1.0 comes with new features and other fixes and improvements. These include fixing patches with holes, a new scatter, JSON export and embed etc. Patches With Holes Patches with holes are often useful for working with GIS data or maps, and support all the usual and expected hover and hit-testing interactions. They are also helpful in filling contour plots. The Patches with holes approach adds a new glyph type MultiPolygons, inspired by GeoJSON format of sub-polygons. The GeoJSON specifies an "exterior ring" followed by optional "holes" inside the exterior ring. Source: Bokeh Github A New Scatter Scatter marker type is now parameterizable in the Bokeh 1.0 release. The scatter glyph method creates a new Scatter object, that can specify the marker type of each data point individually. This approach with a parameterized scatter is useful to keep all the data inside a single ColumnDataSource. This capability is especially useful together with a new factor_marker transform that can map categorical values to marker types. A new function to bokeh.embed Bokeh 1.0 adds a new function to bokeh.embed. This function can be called on any Bokeh object, e.g plots or layouts, and the output of the call is a block of JSON that represents a Bokeh Document for obj. This JSON output can be used in any HTML document by calling a single function from JavaScript: Bokeh.embed.embed_item(item, "myplot") The first parameter is the JSON output and the second parameter is the id of the div to embed the content into. Testing improvements Bokeh unit tests can now run continuously on Windows. Their Selenium integration testing machinery has also been rebuilt and expanded. Almost 200 Selenium tests can run continuously to explicitly exercise various Bokeh features and behaviors. These are just a select few updates. For full details, see the CHANGELOG and Release Notes. If you are using Anaconda, Bokeh can easily be installed by executing the command conda install -c bokeh bokeh. Otherwise, use pip install bokeh. How to create a web designer resume that lands you a Job. Is your web design responsive? “Be objective, fight for the user, and test with real users on the go!” – Interview with design purist, Will Grant