Data science news bulletin – Monday 23 April

2 min read

Welcome to the new week. Here is the data science bulletin with the latest data science news and software releases. The new TensorFlow is here (not long after the last version…), there’s news of Apple open sourcing FoundationDB, and another Blockchain product from one of tech’s biggest organizations.

Data science news from the Packt Hub

JupyterLab v0.32.0 releases.

Data science news from across the web

Apple has open sourced FoundationDB. Apple purchased the database company in 2015. But with strategic goal of making FoundationDB “the foundation of the next generation of distributed databases.” The team went on to explain that “The vision of FoundationDB is to start with a simple, powerful core and extend it through the addition of “layers”. The key-value store, which is open sourced today, is the core, focused on incorporating only features that aren’t possible to write in layers. Layers extend that core by adding features to model specific types of data and handle their access patterns.” You can now access the FoundationDB source code on GitHub.
AWS has announced new Blockchain product. Blockchain Templates makes setting up cryptocurrency networks easier for app developers working on AWS. The announcement is an important move for Amazon, as it seeks to compete with the likes of Oracle and IBM who have also recently made plays within the Blockchain space.

New software releases and updates

SciPy 1.1.0rc1 has been released.
TensorFlow 1.8.0-rc1 has been released. We reported last week that a new release was going to drop last week and here it is. Clearly the TensorFlow community has been busy…
OpenAI releases evolved policy gradients. Evolved policy gradients are a metalearning algorithm that “evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks.”
MySQL 8.0 now out on general availability. The new version of MySQL contains a range of interesting updates that are going to help consolidate its position in the database world.