InfoQ Homepage Algorithms Content on InfoQ
-
Facebook Compression Algorithm Zstandard 1.5 Improves Performance
Facebook open sourced Zstandard almost six years ago with the aim of outperforming Zlib in both speed and efficiency. Zstandard 1.5 improves compression speed at intermediate compression levels, compression ratio at higher levels, and brings faster decompression speed.
-
Content-Aware Image Resizing in Go and JavaScript
Oleksii Trekhleb, software engineer at Uber, recently explored the use of dynamic programming to speed up a CPU-intensive content-aware image resizing algorithm. Developers may use content-aware resizing to fit images into a variety of enclosing contexts (e.g., screen form factors, responsive layout container) while preserving the image’s key features.
-
Swift Collections Brings New Data Structures to Swift
Swift Collections is a new open-source package that aims to extend the choice of data structures available to Swift programmers beyond those provided in the standard library. In its initial version, it offers deques, ordered sets, and ordered dictionaries.
-
In Memory of John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway, pioneering Mathematician and creator of the Game of Life, was sadly lost to covid-19 in April. Hackday recently wrote about his influence on generations of programmers. The Communications of the ACM, the Scientific American and Siobhan Roberts, his biographer, have all written about his long list of celebrated accomplishments and contributions.
-
AlphaFold Algorithm Predicts COVID-19 Protein Structures
DeepMind uses AlphaFold to predict 3D protein structures straight from amino acid sequences for novel coronavirus 2019 (NCOVID-2019).
-
MIT CSAIL TextFooler Framework Tricks Leading NLP Systems
A team of researchers at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) recently released a framework called TextFooler which successfully tricked state-of-the-art NLP models (such as BERT) into making incorrect predictions.
-
Microsoft Open-Sources Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithm Powering Bing
Microsoft's latest contribution to open source, Space Partition Tree And Graph (SPTAG), is an implementation of the approximate nearest neighbor search (NNS) algorithm that is used in Microsoft Bing search engine.
-
Making Machine Learning Adoptable for Clinicians
Dr. Alexander Scarlat explains the core tenants of machine learning in his 12-part series "Machine Learning Primer for Clinicians." Scarlat covers defining aspects of machine learning, followed by examples that communicate aspects of measuring the performance of machine learning models. The series uses animated charts in place of the math to help readers understand the machine learning concepts.
-
Grady Booch on the Future of AI
According to Grady Booch, most current AI systems are about pattern matching of signals at the edge and inductive reasoning, not true Artificial Intelligence. During his second day keynote at the 2018 QCon San Francisco, "Building the Enchanted Land", he explained his view that AI today is a "system engineering problem with AI components."
-
Facebook Publishes New Neural Machine Translation Algorithm
Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research team published research results using a new approach for neural machine translation (NMT). Their algorithm scores higher than any other system on three established machine translation tasks.
-
News in Graphics: Xamarin Kimono, Google Guetzli and Draco
Xamarin has open sourced a tool for editing SkiaSharp objects, while Google has reduced the size taken by 2D JPEG and 3D graphics.
-
Wolfram Wants to Deliver “Computation Everywhere” with New Private Cloud
Wolfram, the software company behind computation-centric products like Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, shipped a new private cloud appliance targeting companies that want to centralize their computational efforts.
-
Apple Open-Sources its New Compression Algorithm LZFSE
Apple has open-sourced its new lossless compression algorithm, LZFSE, introduced last year with iOS 9 and OS X 10.10. According to Apple, LZFE provides the same compression gain as ZLib level 5 while being 2x–3x faster and with higher energy efficiency.
-
Yahoo Open-Sources DataSketches for Faster Operations Over Streams
Yahoo has open-sourced DataSketches, a library written in Java for stochastic streaming algorithms. DataSketches is able to perform traditionally expensive operations, like counting distinct occurrences of a variable within a stream, using a fraction of time and memory and with a predictable error margin.
-
Google publishes FarmHash, a new family of hash functions for strings
Google has just announced FarmHash, a new family of hash functions for strings. FarmHash is a successor to CityHash, from which it inherits many tricks and techniques. FarmHash has multiple goals and claims to improve CityHash on several accounts.