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Showing posts from April, 2019

Python & Webassembly Plus Science Equals Pyodide

Based on Iodide, we now have Pyodide which allows a Python interpreter to run inside the browser and create living documents there, thus bringing data science to the browser. As we've seen in " Run VSCode in the browser ", portability is the new trend sought after. And with that we mean the ease of running everything inside the ubiquitous browser, be it an IDE, a game or an interpreter.  Pyodide is the Python offspring of Iodide, the attempt to bring Javascript and science to the browser. Iodide was already a success, but since Javascript had no well-defined scientific stack whereas Python does, the idea of replacing JavaScript with Python was suggested. And thus, Pyodide. full article on i-programmer

How Do Open Source Deep Learning Frameworks Stack Up?

As the popularity of deep learning increases, finding application in all sorts of cases, so does the popularity of the various DL frameworks and libraries, making it difficult to choose between them. To provide an informed choice academic researchers devised and ran benchmarks.  The results are published a a pre-print on arxiv.org with the title "A Detailed Comparative Study Of Open Source Deep Learning Frameworks". full article on i-programmer

Run VSCode in the Browser

Coder.com has open sourced its cloud-server component which allows VSCode to run on a remote server fully accessible through the browser.  What is the advantage of that? Code on your Chromebook, tablet, and laptop with a consistent dev environment. Take advantage of large cloud servers to speed up tests, compilations, downloads, and more. Preserve battery life when you're on the go as all intensive computation runs on your server, plus you're no longer running excess instances of Chrome. Code-server is available as a single binary or Docker image and can be self hosted  locally , which of course beats the purpose of portability, or on remote servers such as a VPSs' on  Digital Ocean full article on i-programmer

An annotated analysis of the EU Ethics Guidelines For Trustworthy AI

Having seen the potential of AI, the European Commission has released a set of ongoing guidelines on how to build AIs that can be trusted by society. We present an annotated analysis. It is refreshing to see that the EU Commission follows the trend in the technological advancements, setting up pilot groups to understand how these advancements can be used for its own prosperity. Examples of that are the EU Blockchain Observatory which we've looked into in the article  "EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum Blockchain AMA"  or the EU bug bounty initiative which we've looked into in  "EU Bug Bounty - Software Security as a Civil Right" . The Commission's instrument in this case is the High-Level Expert Group on AI (AI HLEG), an independent expert group set up in June 2018. The aim of the HLEG is to draft two deliverables:  AI Ethics Guidelines  and  Policy and Investment Recommendations . It's the former that we'll be focusing on here. The aim

A MIT Crash Course On Hacker Tools

MIT has provided an online version of crash course on navigating the command line, using a text editor and version control, automating mundane tasks, managing packages and software and configuring your environment.  Being at least familiar with the command line and knowing how to set up a programming environment is an essential aspect of today's college classes, even not those directly associated with Computer Science.This MIT class, originally presented on-campus during the winter break, aims to fill that gap by familiarizing students to those handy computing practices. We've felt the importance of that in the article  "How To Successfully Teach Computing Disciplines To The Uninitiated"  where we saw how you can turn a student with little background in computation into a competent programming computer user, witnessing how SciNet, the supercomputer department of the University of Toronto, teaches computing disciplines to graduate students in emerging fields such