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Austrian DPA Ruling against Google Analytics Paves the Way to EU-based Cloud Services
In a recent ruling, the Austrian data regulator declared the use of Google Analytics unlawful based on EU GDPR regulation. While the ruling is very specifically argued and worded, its implications go well beyond this particular case.
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Meta and AWS to Collaborate on PyTorch Adoption
Meta and AWS will work together to improve the performance for customers of applications running PyTorch on AWS and accelerate how developers build, train, deploy, and operate artificial intelligence and machine-learning models.
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Facebook Open-Sources Two Billion Parameter Multilingual Speech Recognition Model XLS-R
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open-sourced XLS-R, a cross-lingual speech recognition (SR) AI model. XSLR is trained on 436K hours of speech audio from 128 languages, an order of magnitude more than the largest previous models, and outperforms the current state-of-the-art on several downstream SR and translation tasks.
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Improve Android App Startup Times Like Facebook and Google Do
In a recent article, engineers from Google and Facebook provided their hints at what matters the most when reducing the time it takes for an Android app to become responsive on launch and ensuring an optimal user experience.
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Facebook Open-Sources GHN-2 AI for Fast Initialization of Deep-Learning Models
A team from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and the University of Guelph have open-sourced an improved Graph HyperNetworks (GHN-2) meta-model that predicts initial parameters for deep-learning neural networks. GHN-2 executes in less than a second on a CPU and predicts values for computer vision (CV) networks that achieve up to 77% top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 with no additional training.
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Building Large-Scale iOS Apps at Airbnb
The Airbnb iOS team addressed the challenge of its growing mobile app codebase and complexity by adopting new tools and processes, including a modern build systems, module types, and dev apps.
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Facebook CSS-in-JS Solution Stylex Introduced at React Finland 2021
Naman Goel, software engineer at Facebook, recently presented Stylex at React Finland 2021. Stylex is Facebook’s custom CSS-in-JS solution used for the new facebook.com website. StyleX alleviates key pain points of CSS-in-JS for large React applications (unused styles, large CSS files, CSS-in-JS library size). Goel anticipates that Stylex will be open-sourced by the end of 2021.
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Flow Type Checker No Longer Just JavaScript with Types, Centers of Facebook Needs
Vladan Djeric, engineering manager supporting the Flow team at Facebook, announced that the Flow type checker will go beyond being just JavaScript with types and introduce new features based on Facebook’s internal user needs. In particular, Flow strives to deliver fast type-checking on large, complicated codebases. Flow’s vision is in contrast with TypeScript’s — JavaScript with syntax for types.
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Facebook Open-Sources Computer Vision Model Multiscale Vision Transformers
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) recently open-sourced Multiscale Vision Transformers (MViT), a deep-learning model for computer vision based on the Transformer architecture. MViT contains several internal resolution-reduction stages and outperforms other Transformer vision models while requiring less compute power, achieving new state-of-the-art accuracy on several benchmarks.
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Facebook Superpack Leverages Code Analysis for Android App Compression
In a recent article, Facebook described its novel technique for Android app compression, Superpack, which combines compiler analysis with data compression. While not yet available for everyone, Facebook is hoping to open source it.
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ZippyDB: the Architecture of Facebook’s Strongly Consistent Key-Value Store
Facebook Engineering recently published how it built its general-purpose key-value store, known as ZippyDB. ZippyDB is Facebook's biggest key-value store, which has been in production for more than six years. It offers flexibility to applications in terms of tunable durability, consistency, availability, and latency guarantees.
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PyTorch 1.9 Release Includes Mobile, Scientific Computing, and Distributed Training Updates
PyTorch, Facebook's open-source deep-learning framework, announced the release of version 1.9 which includes improvements for scientific computing, mobile support, and distributed training. Overall, the new release contains more than 3,400 commits since the 1.8 release.
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Facebook Open-Sources BlenderBot 2.0 Chatbot
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open-sourced BlenderBot 2.0, an AI chatbot that has long-term memory and can use internet searches for supplemental conversational context. The new model outperforms version 1.0, the previous state-of-the-art chatbot, achieving 55% improvement in use of previous conversations, according to human evaluators.
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WhatsApp Adopts the Signal Protocol for Secure Multi-Device Communication
WhatsApp is testing its new architecture aimed to enable true multi-device message synchronization while preserving end-to-end cryptographic security. To this aim, WhatsApp is adopting the Signal protocol.
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Facebook Open-Sources Expire-Span Method for Scaling Transformer AI
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open-sourced Expire-Span, a deep-learning technique that learns which items in an input sequence should be remembered, reducing the memory and computation requirements for AI. FAIR showed that Transformer models that incorporate Expire-Span can scale to sequences of tens of thousands of items with improved performance compared to previous models.