Sponsor: Bonsai

Listen to the latest ARCHITECHT Show podcasts

architechtshow.com

In this episode of the ARCHITECHT Show, Elastic founder and CEO Shay Banon talks about the evolution of Elasticsearch — from an open source side project (the first iteration was a recipe-search app for his wife) to popular big data tool to the core of a company worth nearly a billion dollars. He also shares his thoughts and strategies on the growth of Elastic, which, somewhat under the radar, has expanded to include multiple products and employ hundreds of people around the world.

architechtshow.com

In this episode of the ARCHITECHT AI Show, Derrick Harris speaks with Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas of Fast.ai, where they teach popular online courses aimed to get students up and running with deep learning. Among other things, Howard and Thomas discuss the promise of deep learning and early student successes (including Hot Dog, Not Hot Dog app from Silicon Valley), as well as the threat of job losses from AI and how seriously we should take Elon Musk’s AI warnings.

Artificial intelligence

techcrunch.com

AIMatter is based in Belarus and built an app, called Fabby, that lets users add effects to their selfies. One has to wonder if Google is holding onto its dreams of launching a successful social platform, or if it has other plans for the technology. Or perhaps it’s just playing games with Snap …

research.googleblog.com

Speaking of Google and digital photos … This is kind of interesting work, but Google devised a pretty sophisticated method for getting around them. Seems like there should be another use for this technology.

news.wsu.edu

Yes, an artificial neural network that’s as good as humans at mapping neural networks in brains. If AI helps us better understand neuroscience, which helps us develop better AI, that will really be something.

www.fast.ai

This is a good thing to look into if you meet the criteria (i.e., not white, straight and male) and live in San Francisco. Some people get up in arms about the push for diversity, but the truth is that it is a big problem — and will only get bigger — as we rely on algorithms more important things.

arxiv.org

I linked to the blog post about this earlier in the week, and here’s the paper. When someone ultimately does crack StarCraft II, it will probably be a smaller deal from a PR perspective than chess, Go, Jeopardy, etc., but a bigger technological accomplishment.

www.oreilly.com

Here’s an O’Reilly podcast featuring two folks working on the Ray project at UC-Berkeley’s RISELab. Ray, as you might have heard in the recent podcast with RISELab director Ion Stoica, is focused on building a general-purpose execution platform for reinforcement learning, etc.

Sponsor: DigitalOcean

Cloud and infrastructure

techcrunch.com

I’m all for DigitalOcean, Cloudflare and whoever else booting Nazi websites from their services, but where’s the line on publicly shaming them for hosting them in the first place? When people can sign up with a credit card, you’re going to get some bad apples and might not even know it.

www.theregister.co.uk

It was in Amazon S3, not that that part really matters. This is just another brick in the wall of data left exposed because something wasn’t configured correctly.

coreos.com

CoreOS was funded by Google Ventures and there were rumors Google was going to acquire it, but here it is announcing stable support for Microsoft Azure. That’s really a necessity today if you’re claiming to be multi-cloud, and multi-cloud will be a big selling point for Kubernetes.

thenewstack.io

Yet another reminder that microservices environments can be as complex as containers are simple. For more on service meshes, check out the recent podcast interview with William Morgan of Buoyant, which manages the Linkerd project.

arxiv.org

A group of researchers is working on a method to help GPUs better handle memory requirements from multiple applications. They say improvements are necessary as general-purpose GPU usage ramps up, especially in multi-tenant cloud environments.

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All things data

www.reuters.com

The basic pitch around ThoughtSpot is that it’s a simpler way to get information by using a Google-like interface. It’s now being marketed as AI, but that’s probably a stretch.

www.technologyreview.com

This is a nice overview of an increasingly complex market — especially, I would expect, as companies start relying on gig workers rather than just UPS and FedEx. My gut tells me it’s largely data-based right now, but I could imagine advances in AI (maybe even quantum computing) having an impact via a learning-based approach.