Spring Season Essay: Crude Facts in a Tech World
Spring is officially off, so we’ve synthesized and stored up technology world updates from various sources on AI, ML and deep learning topics, to make it a useful resource for our readers. Come check what this spring was famous for.
The previous selection ended up with the latest JS update, remember? Namely with a new progressive JS framework, Vue. To be consistent, we want to start off with the spring updates for JavaScript.
So check more on What is React Fiber? And how can you try it out today? To cut the long story short, it is intended to increase suitability for animation, layout, and gesture areas. Therefore, its main feature is incremental rendering: the ability to split rendering work into chunks and spread it out over multiple frames. Is Fiber ready yet?
As we’ve predicted, spring has a card up her sleeve and not even one but quite a bunch of cards. Compared with a heavy-footed winter, spring has finally brought some life to the IT community with two remarkable events.
Facebook Annual F8 developers conference is the first in a row with its loud updates for AR/VR. Still, this event has disclosed some things in our tech focus too:
- A new deep learning open source framework Caffe2, aimed to support industrial-strength applications with mobile in focus.
- The other one is a Facebook’s world changing (if real some day) perspective — “silent speech interface”. Working on ways to link the human brain with technology Facebook developers has gone far but not yet enough to push human capabilities through technology. We, at CHI Software, also believe that Typing With Your Brain is a tomorrow’s reality.
Google I/O 2017 comes next. As always, there was a bunch of things in focus: main figures of users’ activity, the future of payments, security for IoT on Android Things, new DevTools, and etc. CEO Sundar Pichai opened the keynote and has outlined the company’s further steps in the AI policy for the next year.
- ‘Mobile first to AI first’ approach
Deep data and machine learning are what Google team is focused on over the past few years. Such approach allowed to rethink and reimagine every product they are working on, be it identity, payments, multi touch, locations etc.
- ‘Tensorflow + everyone’
Tensorflow seizes its growing moment. It’s already the most popular ML repository on Github. The library, being open sourced, creates a huge amount of opportunities to anyone. Everyone all around the globe can give a try to their ideas, that can change the world.
- From now on the company launches Google.ai platform, that brings together all its efforts and tools in the artificial intelligence field.
One more surprise for the devs was Kotlin as an official Android language announcement. It’s simple, it’s powerful, it’s interoperable and plays well alongside with Java and C++. Besides the outstanding characteristics, Kotlin matches perfectly the spirit of Android. Due to that, the language plug-in has been bundled directly in Android Studio 3.0, which allows to use autocomplete, lint checker, refactoring, debugging, and more tools with your Kotlin code.
It’s easy to start using it. Just keep your existing code and incrementally add Kotlin files to your project, effortlessly convert Java language code to Kotlin on demand. If you’re not a Kotlin user yet, here are useful resources for beginners.
Explore and experiment with AI in hands-on ways
And finally, despite all that buzz environment around Artificial Intelligence, there are still a lot of enthusiasts truly eager to experiment with Machine Learning.
That’s why Google has launched A.I. Experiments platform to let anyone to play with the technology through pictures, language, drawings, music, code and more. Some inventive ones have already open-sourced their projects to entertain, but, furthermore, inspire other developers to create approachable experiments powered by AI.
The platform also offers some tools to start exploring ML: Cloud ML, TensorFlow, DeepMind Lab, Keras.js, Convnet.js, Wekinator, OpenFrameworks.
To be updated next season. Even if summer stands for ‘vacation’, it does not have to be boring for IT.
