InfoQ Homepage Algorithms Content on InfoQ
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Amazon Switched Compression from Gzip to Zstd for Own Service Data
A tweet from Adrian Cockcroft, former VP at Amazon, recently highlighted the benefits of switching from gzip to Zstandard compression at Amazon and triggered discussions in the community about the compression algorithm. Other large corporations, including Twitter and Honeycomb, shared interesting gains using zstd.
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Microsoft's New Simulation Framework FLUTE Accelerates Federated Learning Algorithm Development
Microsoft Research has recently released Federated Learning Utilities and Tools for Experimentation (FLUTE), a new simulation framework to accelerate federated learning ML algorithm development. The main goal of federated learning is to train complex machine-learning models over massive amounts of data without the need to share that data in a centralized location.
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Every Question Has an Answer: an Impossible Thing for Developers
We tend to assume that every question has an answer, which for instance isn’t true when we want to find out what the current time is. Developers should increase awareness of unexpected failure modes, advertise the possibility of failure, and use time-outs to recover from waiting for an answer that will never come.
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Infinite Representations: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Developers can face impossible things in their daily work. It’s impossible to directly represent infinity or to hold infinite precision on a discrete physical computer. Storage and representations are bounded. Ignoring or being unaware of this impossibility can lead to bugs or systems behaving differently than expected. Kevlin Henney gave the keynote Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022.
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ImageSharp 2.0.0: the Feature-Packed Release
ImageSharp, one of the most popular .NET image-processing libraries, released version 2 of their library. The release includes major features such as supporting WebP, TIFF and PBM as well adding XMP support with various performance improvements and enhancements for JPEG and PNG formats. This release drops support for .NET Standard 1.3. The update replaces version 1.0.4.
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Amazon S3 Supports New Checksum Algorithms for Integrity Checking
Amazon S3 recently introduced support of four checksum algorithms for data integrity checking on upload and download requests. Amazon claims that the enhancements to the AWS SDK and S3 API accelerates integrity checking of the S3 requests by up to 90%.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."