NASA’s breakthrough using Google’s machine learning, Kubeflow machine learning toolkits on Kubernetes, Lexalytics ‘words-first’ AI for natural language processing, and more in today’s top stories in AI, machine learning and data science news.
Artificial Intelligence for Space Exploration..
Google’s machine learning may drive NASA’s next breakthrough announcement
NASA could announce a major breakthrough discovery from its alien-hunting Kepler telescope, driven by Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence software. The press conference will take place Thursday, December 14, at 1 pm EST, and will be live-streamed on NASA’s website. Experts from NASA and Google will be present to explain the latest breakthrough, and the attendees include Paul Hertz, the director of NASA’s astrophysics division, and Christopher Shallue, senior research software engineer at Google Brain—the tech giant’s machine intelligence research team. NASA’s Kepler space telescope has been searching for habitable planets since 2009.
Has the futures contract legitimized Bitcoin?
Bitcoin price steadies, albeit a little, as first futures contracts begin trading on Cboe exchange
Following the launch of the Cboe XBT tradable bitcoin futures contracts on the Cboe Global Markets exchange, the price of bitcoin steadied in trading to some extent. The price fluctuated a bit for a while, but upon XBT’s debut, the price rose to around $15,800 on the influence of futures contracts (at last close the price was 16765.99 US Dollar). A futures contract is a tradable legal agreement that entitles its holder to buy or sell a particular commodity or financial instrument at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future. In terms of bitcoin, that gives a contract holder the ability to buy or sell bitcoin at a set price in the future. That means that in theory, it takes away some of the speculation surrounding bitcoin by locking in projected future prices. Still some industry experts are warning that bitcoin could just be in the middle of a ‘bubble.’ They say that not only will the bitcoin bubble burst in 2018, its crash will also impact the global economy.
Microsoft cruising through quantum computing
Microsoft releases quantum computing development kit preview
Microsoft has released a preview of its quantum computing development kit. The kit includes all of the pieces a developer needs to get started including a Q# language and compiler, a Q# library, a local quantum computing simulator, a quantum trace simulator and a Visual Studio extension. The preview is aimed at early adopters who want to understand what it takes to develop programs for quantum computers. Earlier Microsoft had said in September that it plans to offer a “comprehensive full-stack solution” for controlling the quantum computer and writing applications for it. The race for quantum computing has heated up after IBM announced a 50 qubit prototype.
Kubeflow: Bringing together Kubernetes and machine learning
Introducing Kubeflow to bring composable, easier to use stacks with more control and portability for Kubernetes deployments for all ML, not just TensorFlow.
A new project, Kubeflow, has been announced to make machine learning on Kubernetes easy, portable, and scalable. Kubeflow lets the system take care of the details and support the kind of tooling ML practitioners want and need. Kuberflow helps users in having an easy to use ML stack anywhere Kubernetes is already running. Plus, it should self-configure based on the cluster it deploys into. While Kubeflow contains support for creating JupyterHub, Kubeflow users can also create a TensorFlow Training Controller for configuring CPUs or GPUs. It also helps adjust the size of a cluster with a single setting. How is it better than a plain Docker image over Kubernetes? Well, first of all, Kubeflow is great for anyone already using Kubernetes. And then it also brings scalability to people with existing on premise or cloud-based servers. In general, if you’re wiring together 5 or more services and systems to create a ML stack, then Kubeflow should simplify your workload. Read more about Kubeflow here on GitHub.
Lexalytics pioneers ‘words-first’ AI
Lexalytics launches new pipeline for building machine learning-based, artificial intelligence applications for natural language processing
Lexalytics has launched a new machine learning platform, Lexalytics AI Assembler, to facilitate seamless insights from the huge amount of natural language data surrounding the enterprise. With AI Assembler, Lexalytics is now providing enterprise customers with the same tools to accomplish tasks like raising the accuracy of Named Entity Recognition by 25 percent in a fraction of the time it would take with standard industry technologies. Lexalytics is also launching a limited-availability beta release of Semantria Storage & Visualization, a content storage, aggregation, search and reporting framework that provides business analysts and marketers a single access point to interact with their data. “With today’s announcement, Lexalytics is pioneering the field of ‘words-first’ AI, offering our customers the same machine learning tools we use internally to power our text and sentiment analysis platforms, along with easy-to-use data storage and visualization tools to make the most of their data,” said Jeff Catlin, CEO of Lexalytics. For more details on AI Assembler, visit https://www.lexalytics.com/assembler.