News
Bank of America - Blockchain Data Storage Patent Released
On April 12, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released a patent filing from the Bank of America outlining their plans for a permissioned blockchain implementation that enables personal and business data sharing. A user will authorize service providers to securely access their data, but only for the specific records they have access to.
Baidu Release Huge Dataset "ApolloScape" for Autonomous Vehicle Research
Baidu, the Chinese internet giant, has released ApolloScape, a massive data-set for autonomous vehicle simulation and research. ApolloScape is an order of magnitude more complex than similar open data-sets. It is part of Apollo, Baidu's vehicle simulation and hardware platform. With this release, Baidu strengthens its position in the automated driving sector.
Chile’s Energy Regulator to Adopt Blockchain
PV magazine, a publication focused on reporting photovoltaics (solar power generation), has announced the Chile Energy Regulator is set to adopt blockchain in March 2018. The regulator plans to use blockchain technology to transparently record market prices, marginal costs, fuel prices and compliance documentation.
Data-Driven Thinking for Continuous Improvement
Organizations need an objective way to measure performance and tie actions back to business outcomes to improve continuously. Avvo uses a data-driven decision framework with an autonomous team model and a practice of retrospectives to help people make better decisions and proposals for continuous improvement.
LinkedIn Ordered to Allow Scraping of Public Profile Data
A United States federal judge has ruled that Microsoft’s LinkedIn cannot block third party web scrapers from scraping data from publicly available profiles.
Netflix Introduces Hollow, a Java Library for Processing In-Memory Datasets
Netflix recently introduced Hollow, a Java library and toolset for processing in-memory datasets that aren’t characterized as “big data.” A single producer provides datasets from which many consumers have read-only access. The communication mechanism between producer and consumer includes real-time dataset changes.
Facebook Builds an Efficient Neural Network Model over a Billion Words
Using Neural Networks for sequence prediction is a well-known Computer Science problem with a vast array of applications in speech recognition, machine translation, language modeling and other fields. FB AI Research scientists designed adaptive softmax, an approximation algorithm tailored for GPUs which can be used to efficiently train neural networks over vocabularies of a billion words & beyond.
Cloudera Announces Partnership with the Broad Institute
Cloudera announced their partnership with MIT & Harvard's Broad Institute and detailed some of their experience with the Genome Analytics Toolkit pipeline.
Yahoo! Benchmarks Apache Flink, Spark and Storm
Yahoo! has benchmarked three of the main stream processing frameworks: Apache Flink, Spark and Storm.
UI Design: Go Out and Get Data
Chris Atherton did the closing keynote of the GOTO Berlin 2015 conference in which she talked about designing software. She suggests that, in stead of relying on professional opinions on how software should look or work, it can be better to go out and get data from real users. InfoQ interviewed her about designing and testing user interfaces.
Samsung SAMI – a D3 Platform for the IoT
Samsung SAMI is a Data-driven Development (D3) platform for receiving, storing and sending data to/from IoT devices. Any device can send data in various formats which is then normalized into a JSON format and stored in the cloud. Data can then be requested by other devices.
Data Quality at Prezi
For an organization to be data-driven, it's not enough to just dump mountains of data. That data needs to be accurate and meaningful. Julianna Göbölös-Szabó, data engineer at Prezi shared how they improved the quality of its log data. Their solution involved moving from unstructured to structured data with a lightweight, contract-based approach to nudge all teams in the right direction.
Agile View of Big Data
An agile view of Big Data, wherein data is viewed as a real time stream, offers a new look at how data is managed. Using an agile data infrastructure, organizations can conquer Big Data challenges with a level of ease, flexibility and performance. White paper by codeFutures describes the Agile view of Big Data.
Prismatic Adds Data Type Coercion to Schema 0.2
Prismatic have added data coercion in the 0.2 release of their Clojure data description library, Schema. The addition of coercion means that the library doesn’t just reject data that has the wrong types, but it can be configured to modify instances to fit the schema. InfoQ talked to Prismatic's Jason Wolfe about Schema.
