InfoQ Homepage AI, ML & Data Engineering Content on InfoQ
-
Alexa Soon to Offer "Newscaster" Voice: Applying Generative Neural Networks for Text-to-Speech
Amazon recently announced the development of a customized Alexa voice, suitable for reading the news. In earlier implementations, text to speech functionality was achieved by concatenating small snippets of audio to produce the full sentence outcome. In the article we will discuss how Alexa can achieve a newscaster voice and how it can be expanded to several other types of voices in the future..
-
Amazon Announces DynamoDB Support for Transactions
Amazon announced that its DynamoDB database service now supports Transactions, offering full atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) guarantee for developing highly scalable apps. With this capability, developers can build transaction guarantees for multi-item updates, making it easier to avoid conflicts and errors when developing highly scalable business-critical applications.
-
Recap of AWS re:Invent 2018 Announcements
If you thought Amazon Web Services (AWS) might run out of services to launch, this year's re:Invent put that fear to rest. At the recently concluded event, AWS shared a flurry of announcements across a range of categories. re:Invent rarely has a "theme" for its announcements. But there was heavy attention on machine learning, databases, hybrid cloud, and account management.
-
Sony Trains ResNet-50 on ImageNet in 224 Seconds
Researchers from Sony announced that they trained a ResNet 50 architecture on ImageNet in only 224 seconds. The resulting network has a top-1 accuracy of 75% on the validation set of ImageNet. They achieved this record by using 2.100 Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs from NVIDIA. Besides this record, they also got a 90% GPU scaling efficiency using 1.088 Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs.
-
Microsoft Announces Container Support for Azure Cognitive Services
Microsoft has announced container support for Cognitive Services, which allows taking advantage of machine learning capabilities anywhere, whether it is in the cloud, on the edge or on-premises. With Azure Cognitive Services, organizations can start using various cognitive features, like vision, speech and text processing, without the need for a dedicated data scientist.
-
Google Introduces AI Hub and Kubeflow Pipelines for Easier ML Deployment
Google is launching two new tools, one proprietary and one open source: AI Hub and Kubeflow pipelines. Both are designed to assist data scientists design, launch and keep track of their machine learning algorithms.
-
Google Open-Sources Speaker Diarization AI Technology, Claims 92% Accuracy
In a recent blog post, Google announced they have open-sourced their speaker diarization technology, which is able to differentiate people’s voices at a high accuracy rate. Google is able to do this by partitioning an audio stream that includes multiple participants into homogeneous segments per participant.
-
U.S. Commerce Dept Proposes Rulemaking for Export Control of Emerging Technologies Including AI
In the Federal Register, the official journal of the federal government of the United States, an article titled “Review of Controls for Certain Emerging Technologies” outlines proposed rulemaking for export control of “emerging technologies”, which includes a wide range of categories including biotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics.
-
Google Open-Sources BERT: A Natural Language Processing Training Technique
In a recent blog post, Google announced they have open-sourced BERT, their state-of-the-art training technique for Natural Language Processing (NLP) . Google has decided to do this, in part, due to a lack of public data sets that are available to developers. In addition, optimizations have been made to Cloud TPUs to reduce the amount of time required for training NLP.
-
Building Human Interfaces with Artificial Intelligence
AI helps us to build human interfaces based on speaking and writing, instead of using a keyboard or mouse; it allows humans to stay human. The biggest challenges are finding ways to tell systems what answers are unsatisfactory to help them learn, be transparent in what data is recorded and retained, and ensure that diversity and inclusion is part of our training data to prevent bias in AI systems.
-
Facebook Releases PyTorch 1.0 Preview, with Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure Integrations
At a recent PyTorch developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook released a developer preview version of PyTorch 1.0. PyTorch is an open source, deep learning framework used to reduce friction in taking research projects to production. In this release, many investments have been made by public cloud and hardware companies to better support the PyTorch ecosystem.
-
Face-api.js: JavaScript Face Recognition Leveraging TensorFlow.js
Face-api.js is a JavaScript API for face detection and face recognition in the browser implemented on top of the tensorflow.js core API, which implements a series of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), optimized for the web and for mobile devices.
-
The Evolution of Uber’s 100+ Petabyte Big Data Platform
Uber’s engineering team wrote about how their big data platform evolved from traditional ETL jobs with relational databases to one based on Hadoop and Spark. A scalable ingestion model, standard transfer format and a custom library for incremental updates are the key components of the platform.
-
Data Lakes and Modern Data Architecture in Clinical Research and Healthcare
Dr. Prakriteswar Santikary, chief data officer at ERT, spoke at Data Architecture Summit 2018 Conference last month about data lake architecture his team developed at their clinical research organization. He discussed the data platform deployed in the cloud to streamline data collection, aggregation and clinical reporting and analytics, using concepts like serverless computing and data services.
-
JetBrains Introduces Datalore 1.0, an Intelligent Web Application for Data Analysis
JetBrains recently introduced Datalore 1.0, an intelligent web application for data analysis and visualization in Python. Datalore 1.0 brings an improved smart code editor, user-controlled code execution, professional subscription, and more.