Featured Articles

Programmer's Guide To Theory - Kolmogorov Complexity
Mike James

Randomness and regularity are two sides of the same coin but what connects them? Kolmogorov complexity, related to both, is one of the strangest ideas of all. This is what this extract from the recently published book by Mike James, which introduces and explains the key ideas of computer science, is all about.

Without the microchip it is unlikely that computers would have become commonplace.  Its invention was a key stage in the development of computing and is credited to two individuals - Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.

News

Devs Finally Angry At Apple's App Store
24 Jun | Mike James

Fear And Loathing In The App Store 26 - If you are a dog on a leash you don't notice it unless you try to go your own way. So if you want to be a happy App Store developer don't pull on the leash like Basecamp did.

Google has announced the ten winners of the Helpful Innovation Android Develop Challenge in which developers were asked to incorporate Machine Learning, specifically TensorFlow Lite and ML Kit, into their apps.

DeepCode, a SAST tool bug finder based on machine learning, can now be used seamlessly from within IntelliJ, PyCharm, and WebStorm.

Microsoft and Udacity have formed a new partnership to offer a new microcredential that will equip learners with valuable skills to pursue a career in Artificial Intelligence or Data Science. There are 300 Scholarship places available to students who excel at a free introductory course on Azure Machine Learning. 

Spark 3 has been released with major improvements in Python and SQL support, along with changes to make it easier to explore data. It is also faster.

Introducing XS:CODE, a subscription based service looking to get OSS developers paid for their work.

NASA wants help to add a new on-board capability to its Mars Rover - that of visually distinguishing between different types of terrain. AI4Mars is a Zooniverse project to label images captured by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity that can then be used to train an artificial intelligence algorithm to automatically read the landscape. 

A contest recently launched on Kaggle has the goal of using machine learning to identify bird calls within natural soundscapes. The challenge in this situation is to detect bird vocalizations against the background of ambient noise - wind, trees rustling, traffic, human voices and so on.

The VS Code extension for Go is officially joining the Go project. The extension is now used by 41 percent of Go developers, according to the Go developer survey.

The first two courses of a four-course Specialization in Natural Language Processing from deeplearning.ai are now ready and waiting on the Coursera platform. This an opportunity to learn from experts in this sought-after area of AI.

IBM has released a fully homomorphic encryption toolkit for MacOS and iOS, with plans to add versions for Linux and Android. FHE provides a way to carry out computations on encrypted data without it needing to be decrypted.