Algorithmia’s AI smart contract, Microsoft’s ML server 9.3, PostgreSQL 10 supported in Amazon RDS, Bitcoin Core 0.16.0, and more in today’s top stories around machine learning, blockchain, and data science news.
1. Algorithmia has developed an AI smart contract with a neural network running on the Ethereum blockchain
Algorithmia Inc, the AI and ML algorithm marketplace provider, has created the first ever AI smart contract with a neural network running on the Ethereum blockchain. The contract basically offers a bounty for developers to create an AI model that can determine voter preferences based on their latitude and longitude. The smart contract will use the blockchain to automatically validate the solution. Here’s how the model works:
- The buyer creates a new contract.
- The contract is published to the Ethereum blockchain.
- Machine Learning engineers download the data and train an AI/ML model.
- The model is submitted and run on the ethereum blockchain using the data set from the contract.
- If the model fulfils the criteria of the contract, the model is sent to the buyer and payment sent to the ML engineer.
2. Microsoft Machine Learning Server 9.3 releases
Microsoft Machine Learning Server 9.3 has been released. Key areas of change in the 9.3 release include:
- Set-up and configuration of Operationalization.
- Platform upgrades, better-together with Azure ML.
- Support for local Spark.
- Improved revoscalepy library.
- Linux R-Client support for SQL Server compute context.
- More partnerships and solution templates.
Microsoft Machine Learning Server 9.3 can be downloaded from Visual Studio Dev Essentials, or via ML Server VMs in Azure. It comes packed with the power of the open source R and Python engines, making both R and Python ready for enterprise-class ML and advanced analytics.
3. PostgreSQL 10 is now supported in Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports PostgreSQL major version 10. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. To use the new versions, users can create an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or upgrade an existing instance using point-and-click upgrades. PostgreSQL 10 includes various new features including native table partitioning, support for improved parallelism in query execution, ICU collation support, column group statistics, enhanced postgres_fdw extension, and many more.
4. Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 is now released
Bitcoin Core version 0.16.0 is now available. This is a new major version release, including new features, various bug fixes, performance improvements, as well as updated translations.
- Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 introduces full support for segwit in the wallet and user interfaces.
- Version 0.16.0 will only create hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets.
- It now has more flexibility in where the wallets directory can be located.
- The minimum version of the GCC compiler required to compile Bitcoin Core is now 4.8.
- Pruned nodes can now signal BIP159’s NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED using service bits, in preparation for full BIP159 support in later versions.
- A new RPC ‘rescanblockchain’ has been added to manually invoke a blockchain rescan.
- Safe mode is now disabled by default and must be manually enabled.
- The `validateaddress` RPC output has been extended with a few new fields, and support for segwit addresses.
The detailed report is available in the change log.
5. Introducing Draw.io JupyterLab extension, a Diagram Editor for JupyterLab
The Draw.io JupyterLab extension is a LaTeX editor for JupyterLab which is an easy way to live-compile text documents, diagrams, flow charts and draw figures. The Draw.io JupyterLab extension takes advantage of the JupyterLab architecture: i.e. registering a new mime type (.dio) with the file explorer to open files, and adding a launcher button and menu items. It also provides multiple synchronized views of the same diagrams, displayed at the same time. It allows a user to visualize the same content with different zoom levels, or with a bare text editor. The entire code is available on GitHub.