News

$1.19 Million Study of Impact of Pre-College Computing   Wednesday 05 October

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $1.19 Million for research into the long-term effects of initiatives, such as the Hour of Code and summer coding camps, designed to introduce computing to K-12 students.

//No Comment - Quantized Neural Networks,Generating Faces & cleverhans v0.1   Wednesday 05 October

• Quantized Neural Networks

• Generating Faces with Deconvolution Networks

• cleverhans v0.1

Flash Problems for Firefox To be Solved With Mortar   Wednesday 05 October

Mozilla has a problem with Firefox plugins and Flash. It is now considering supporting the Chrome solution to Flash and its Pepper API with Project Mortar. 

//No Comment - Rust 1.12, Nim 0.15 & VC++ For Linux 1.0,5   Tuesday 04 October

• Rust 1.12

• Nim Version 0.15.0 released

• Visual C++ for Linux 1.0.5 Updates

Microsoft Bug Bounty Extends Scope   Tuesday 04 October

Microsoft recently added  NET Core and ASP.NET Core to its suite of ongoing bounty programs. It has also expanded its Remote Code Execution Bounty for Microsoft Edge.

NetBeans 8.2 - With Lots Of Carets   Monday 03 October

No misprint - it really does say caret and not carrot - but it doesn't help explain what a multi-caret is, although multi-carrot would be even stranger. Yes, NetBeans 8.2 is here with some new features.

New Microsoft AI and Research Group   Monday 03 October

The newly formed group brings together Microsoft Research, its AI-focused product groups, the Information Platform Group, Bing and Cortana product groups, and the Ambient Computing and Robotics teams. 

Arduino Back To Being One Company   Sunday 02 October

After a long and heated dispute between the two original parts of the Arduino world, that resulted in the Arduino and Genuino brands being confusingly used in different parts of the world, everything is back to normal or even better than before.

Turing's Computer Music   Saturday 01 October

An often overlooked facet of the Alan Turing story is that he was the first to generate musical notes using a computer. This was as early as 1948 on the Manchester Mark I. A recording of the first computer music, made in 1951, by the BBC has been restored by Jack Copeland and Jason Long and we can now hear it.

Formation of Partnership On AI   Friday 30 September

Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have announced the founding of a non-profit organization that to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence technologies and formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities AI presents.

Alexa Prize For Conversational AI   Friday 30 September

With $2.5 million dollars on the table Amazon's new Alexa Prize, an annual competition for University students, could be the stimulus to making significant breakthroughs in conversational AI.

The Weekly Top 10: More JavaScript Development Resources   Thursday 29 September

In this week's selection of other people's blog posts you'll find JavaScript libraries, frameworks and developers. We've also included two posts on debugging and one from John Resig on JavaScript Inheritance.

//No Comment - Earth on AWS & The 280-Year-Old Algorithm Inside Google Trips   Thursday 29 September

• Earth on AWS Opens Access to Large Geospatial Datasets

• The 280-Year-Old Algorithm Inside Google Trips

dbForge Studio For SQL Server Adds Documenter   Thursday 29 September

There's a new version of dbForge Studio for SQL Server with a database documenter feature. 

Google-backed Virtual Reality Nanodegree   Thursday 29 September

In conjunction with Google VR, HTC, Upload and Unity, Udacity has announced a new nanodegree for developers aspiring to a career in virtual reality.

The Core

jQuery 3 - Modifying DOM Objects   Monday 03 October

Finding a DOM object using selectors and filters is usually just the first step. Once you have found what you are looking for, you generally want to modify it. In this chapter we look at the tools that jQuery gives you to change the DOM objects that you retrieve. 

Android Adventures - Building The UI 2.2   Friday 30 September

If you've been reading Android Adventures, at this point you understand how the Activity and the View fit together to create a simple application, but the Android UI is more complicated than most because of its need to cope with a range of very different screen sizes and orientations. In this chapter, now updated to Android Studio Version 2.2, we look at the problem of layout and working with the UI framework. On the way we build a calculator app.