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Qubole’s Spark on Lambda, Blockchain 3D Explorer, Twitter’s Bookmarks feature, and Baidu’s driverless cars in today’s trending stories in data science news.

Integrating serverless and elastic Apache Spark on AWS Lambda

Big-data company Qubole brings Apache Spark to AWS Lambda

Qubole, the big data-as-a-service company, has announced a technology preview of ‘Spark on Lambda’ thus enabling Apache Spark applications to run on AWS Lambda for highly elastic workloads. “Qubole customers run some of the largest Spark clusters in the world. We wanted to show that a complex technology like Spark can be implemented on a serverless compute infrastructure like Lambda and scale efficiently..” said Qubole CEO Ashish Thusoo. “Spark on Lambda can eliminate most of the operational complexities of running Spark clusters, handle bursty workloads more effectively and be more cost efficient.” Technical information on this implementation can be found at http://www.qubole.com/blog/spark-on-aws-lambda/. The code is available on Github at https://github.com/qubole/spark-on-lambda. Qubole will be demonstrating Spark on Lambda at AWS Re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas at Sands Expo booth 834 and Aria booth 201.

Now visualize Bitcoin Blockchain in 3D and Virtual Reality

Announcing Blockchain 3D Explorer

Kevin Small has created a blockchain explorer that enables anyone to view the bitcoin blockchain in 3D or VR. The British developer is planning to take his creation to London’s Blockchain Summit on November 28. Although the explorer is still being perfected, a working model is already up and running. It allows data detectives to zero in on a specific address and trace the flow of bitcoins as they move along the blockchain.The free software can be downloaded for Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux and is easy to operate.

Soon you could privately flag Tweets for later

Twitter is testing Bookmarks, its ‘save for later’ feature

Twitter is testing a new feature ’Bookmarks’ that allows its over 300 million active users to privately save tweets for reading them later. “News from the #SaveForLater team! We’ve decided to call our feature Bookmarks because that’s a commonly used term for saving content and it fits nicely alongside the names of the other features in the navigation,” Staff product designer Tina Koyama announced the development in a series of tweets. Save for later has been one of the most sought-after features by the users of the social media giant. At this stage, Twitter declined to comment beyond the Tweets. “We’ll be sure to let you know if/when we have more details to share in terms of a formal announcement!” the spokesperson added.

Baidu rolls out driverless cars plan

China’s Baidu to begin production of autonomous self-driving bus in 2018

Baidu will start small-scale production of self-driving minibuses in July 2018. If the pilot projects are successful, it will launch its driverless cars in 2019 and the mass production will take place from 2020. The Chinese search engine giant is partnering with JAC Motors, BAIC Motor, and Cherry Automobile on the ambitious project. Baidu recently invested $1.5 billion in its self-driving Apollo project which has attracted more than 6000 developers.

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