Tomorrow is Good: #Freethemodels: we need open source energy models

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is arguably the biggest operation in human history. But it’s increasingly based on secret models with a bad track record. That has to change!

For me, this journey started in 2007 (Dutch link). I was doing some research in my spare time and it struck me that solar, wind and electric vehicles were on course to become cheaper than fossil alternatives. What struck me even more, was that the predictions of ‘authoritative’ institutions like the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Administration seemed to ignore this development. At first, it seemed unrelated to my work in computers, the Internet and mobile phones. Then I realized the similarity: I had been ‘fighting’ with ‘trusted experts’ in Telecom for the past 15 years. They had been denying the future of PCs, the Internet and mobile phones all through my career. The lesson I take from this: experts of the old cannot fathom the new.

Google open-sources PlaNet, an AI agent that learns about the world from images

Reinforcement learning — a machine learning training technique that uses rewards to drive AI agents toward certain goals — is a reliable means of improving said agents’ decision-making, given plenty of compute, data, and time. But it’s not always practical; model-free approaches, which aim to get agents to directly predict actions from observations about their world, can take weeks of training.

Model-based reinforcement learning is a viable alternative — it has agents come up with a general model of their environment they can use to plan ahead. But in order to accurately forecast actions in unfamiliar surroundings, those agents have to formulate rules from experience. Toward that end, Google in collaboration with DeepMind today introduced the Deep Planning Network (PlaNet) agent, which learns a world model from image inputs and leverages it for planning. It’s able to solve a variety of image-based tasks with up to 5,000 percent the data efficiency, Google says, while maintaining competitiveness with advanced model-free agents.

eLife invests in Texture to provide open-source content production tools for publishers

Originally created by Substance Software GmbH (Substance) as a JavaScript library of tools for web-based content editing, Texture has been supported by a community of organisations collectively known as the Substance Consortium and including Érudit, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and SciELO. eLife has now invested in Texture's development to support its own open-source publishing platform, but - as with the organisation's other open-source projects - any new features will be added to the tool in such a way that they can be repurposed by other publishers.

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Principled GraphQL

GraphQL is quickly becoming the preferred approach for working with APIs. It is a query language for APIs, and is designed to give users more insight and understanding into the data inside their APIs.

According to GraphQL platform provider Apollo, it’s also so much more than a query language. “It’s a comprehensive solution to the problem of connecting modern apps to services in the cloud. As such, it forms the basis for a new and important layer in the modern application development stack: the data graph. This new layer brings all of a company’s app data and services together in one place, with one consistent, secure, and easy-to-use interface, so that anyone can draw upon it with minimal friction,” the company wrote.

Open source your automation testing for the mobile web with OpenTest

Testing is a crucial part of the development cycle. How else will we find out if that cool new idea actually works in practice? Entering a crowded field, OpenTest offers developers a new tool for standardizing functional tests across a wide variety of platforms and teams.

OpenTest is an open source functional test automation tool for web applications, mobile apps and APIs. With a wide variety of features and a focus on mainstream testing practices, OpenTest gives developers a spectacular foundation to evaluate their applications for the mobile web. What’s more, it is an easy to use tool for beginners as well as experts.

Facebook Open-Sources PyText NLP Modeling Framework

Facebook AI Research is open-sourcing PyText, a natural-language-processing (NLP) modeling framework that is used in the Portal video-calling device and M Suggestions in Facebook Messenger.

NLP is a technology for parsing and handling human languages and is a key component of chatbot or smart-assistant applications. Engineers developing NLP algorithms often turn to deep-learning systems to build their solutions, such as Facebook's PyTorch platform. PyText builds on top of PyTorch by providing a set of interfaces and models specifically tuned for NLP. Internally, Facebook is using PyText to power NLP in their Portal video-calling device and in their Messenger app's M Suggestion feature.

Fasttoken Is Making Its Codes Open Source

One of the most common problems facing the Ethereum blockchain is scaling. While Ethereum has seen its fair share of proposed scaling solutions, state channels appear to be the best solution so far. State channels are a form of block communication that occurs outside of the blockchain and can be used to support greater scalability. And that’s not in the distant future – state channels are already available.

Novel Software May Help Detect Heart Diseases: Study

Researchers have developed a new software that could spot potentially lethal heart diseases and may lead to improvements in prevention and treatment, says a new study.

The software - ElectroMap - which measures electrical activity in the organ, is a new open-source software for processing, analysis and mapping complex cardiac data.

This new software reads cardiac data, can predict risk of heart disease

The ElectroMap software is an open-source software for processing, analysis and mapping complex cardiac data, said experts at the University of Birmingham Dubai. 

The heart's pumping ability is controlled by electrical activity that triggers the heart muscle cells to contract and relax. 

In certain heart diseases such as arrhythmia, the organ's electrical activity is affected. 

Cardiac researchers can already record and analyse the heart's electrical behaviour using optical and electrode mapping, but widespread use of these technologies is limited by a lack of appropriate software, according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Gadgetbridge is an open-source replacement for the Android app of Pebble, Mi Band, Amazfit, and other smart bands

Purchasing a Smart Band or a smart wrist-based fitness tracker means that you not only purchase a product, but you also purchase yourself into an ecosystem of services controlled by the manufacturer. The functionality that is present on your smart band flows to you through the manufacturer, meaning that your data always goes through one extra pair of hands than is required. For most smart bands, you have to create an account with the manufacturer and continue tracking your activity and data through the manufacturer’s app — something that may not appeal to everyone in this privacy-conscious world. Enter Gadgetbridge, an open-source app that focuses on removing the manufacturer out of the equation.

The Pros and Cons of Open Source Cloud Computing

Open source software is becoming increasingly more common in the technology world. True to its name, the underlying base of open source software is available for its users to study and tinker with. As such, dedicated userbases for open source technology have propped up to provide resources, updates, and technical help for open source programs.

You Can Now Use Open-Source Machine Learning Tools In Your Ableton Sessions

Despite having become buzzwords in music technology over the last few years, it has often felt like “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” were experiments taking place in secluded computer labs or only with established musicians. The tools that promised to revolutionize the way we make music never seemed to trickle down to the “we” of your regular bedroom producer.

Magenta Studio might be set to change all that. Developed by the Google AI team and first showed at Ableton Loop in Los Angeles last year, Magenta is now available standalone and on Ableton (both Mac and Windows), giving you the chance to experiment with the powerful data analysis that machine learning provides.

5 Open-source ML Tools You Can Use Without Coding

As the demand for machine learning and artificial intelligence goes up, leading tech giants realised the need to give developers access to tools to build and deploy models. From the industrial perspective, there aren’t enough skilled programmers and data scientists within the industry to develop these systems. Tech giants are now open sourcing their platforms and developer tools to lower the barrier for entry in AI/ML.

In this article, we list down 5 such tools that are making ML and AI accessible:

Lobe:Lobe is an easy-to-use visual mechanism that lets users to build custom deep learning models, promptly train them, and ship them immediately in a user desired app without writing any code. Users can begin by dragging in a folder of training examples from there desktop. Lobe automatically builds its users a custom deep learning model and starts training. User can export the trained model and ship it directly in their app.

Healthcare Design Studio Publishes Open Source Health Finance Visualization

“The Healthscape visualization serves two purposes. The first is to provide the public and professionals interested in the healthcare space a way to increase understanding and explore how all the pieces fit together. The second is to give providers, patient advocacy groups, health policymakers, and health economists a visual communication tool to discuss issues at the higher health systems level,” said Juhan Sonin, director of GoInvo.

HUAWEI's open source WATCH GT smartwatch is coming to America

The company is hoping American consumers will also be interested in its wearables, as today, it reveals the previously announced HUAWEI WATCH GT is finally coming to America. While not the company's first smartwatch to hit the USA, it is definitely the most intriguing. It runs an open source operating system called LiteOS, and battery life can apparently reach two weeks. No, that is not a typo -- two weeks! It focuses heavily on health -- it can monitor fitness and sleep. Best of all, it is compatible with both iOS and Android, so it won't lock you into either platform.

Argonne’s Innovative Community Software Is on Weather Scientists’ Radar

In 2015, the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) made its open-source debut. After 4 years, and with contributions from 34 individual editors, it is now a staple in radar science. The toolkit helps scientists analyze radar data to improve models of the Earth’s systems; its growth illustrates the power of community software.

Py-ART is an architecture for working with radar data in the Python programming language. It ingests data from a wide variety of atmospheric radars to produce visualizations that enable users to draw meaningful conclusions. Institutions across the world — including the National Weather Service, MeteoSwiss, IBM and the University of Illinois — use Py-ART to organize and analyze radar data.

[...]

Inspired by Py-ART’s success, scientists have launched the OpenRadar Partnership, an informal collaboration across Europe, Canada and the United States on open-source radar software education and inter-compatibility.

Furnace turns up heat on data streaming apps

Furnace – New, Serverless, Open Source Platform -- Lets Developers Create Advanced, Data-Intensive Apps In Hours, Not Months

Why Use Open Source to Gain More Visibility into Network Monitoring

8 Free & Best Open source bare metal hypervisors (Foss)

Open Robotics turns its focus to ROS 2.0

Open Robotics, previously known as the Open Source Robotics Foundation, is pouring its development efforts into rewriting the core of the Robot Operating System (ROS) 1.0 this year. ROS has been around since 2007, and while version 1.0 is already being used in a number of different applications and solutions, the robotics industry is changing and Open Robotics is determined to see that the technology changes with it.

Despite its name, ROS is not exactly an operating system. It is a collection of software libraries and tools used to develop robot applications. According to Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics, when the organization first started working on ROS, many of the robotics solutions already available were in the form of traditional robot arms used in factories or in such things as floor-cleaning robots for consumers.

“Since that time we’ve seen an explosion of products in other domains, especially mobile robots that do everything from transport goods, to provide facility security, to entertain. And of course we’ve seen the impossible to ignore trend of investment and advancement in autonomous vehicles,” he said.

The ongoing evolution of the robotics industry, and the need for more advanced solutions, is what led Open Robotics to rethink the core system.

MITRE Announces Compass™, a New Open-Source Application to Collect Common Oncology Data

New geometric model improves predictions of fluid flow in rock

"Relationships once thought to be inherently history-dependent can now be reconsidered based on rigorous geometric theory," McClure said.

The team used the open source Lattice Boltzmann for Porous Media (LBPM) code, developed by McClure and named for the statistics-driven lattice Boltzmann method that calculates fluid flow across a range of scales more rapidly than calculations using finite methods, which are most accurate at small scales. The LBPM code, which uses Titan's GPUs to speed fluid flow simulations, is released through the Open Porous Media Initiative, which maintains open-source codes for the research community.

Over 16,000 bugs later, Google’s fuzz tester is now open source

Here comes another tool open sourced by Google! This time, security and testing take the center stage. ClusterFuzz helps find bugs in your software so you can exterminate them with its scalable fuzzing infrastructure. Open sourced on February 7, 2019, this service focuses on stability and security.

ClusterFuzz already has some impressive numbers to brag about. So far, it found over 16,000 bugs in Chrome, as well as over 11,000 bugs in open source projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz. If you use Chrome as your browser of choice, then you owe some of your experience to ClusterFuzz. Now you too can harness that power for good and keep your own projects secure and bug-free.

As always, it is a great plus to all developers when a useful tool gets open sourced. Contributing to open source is becoming the new normal, with even large organizations getting on board. Hopefully FOSS will continue to grow and help break down silos.

Continuous Fuzzing for all? Google open sources ClusterFuzz bug hunter

Google has open sourced ClusterFuzz, a scalable fuzzing infrastructure project that has already helped to get rid of more than 16,000 Chrome bugs.

It is also the tool used for Google’s Oss-Fuzz initiative, which aims at helping maintainers of open source projects get their project as ready to deal with anything users throw at it as possible – an offer over 160 projects have accepted in the last two years. Fuzzing is a sort of testing approach which confronts a system with random inputs to help developers to find security flaws and unexpected behaviour. 

ClusterFuzz has been written to offer fuzzing at scale and in a continuous manner, which is why Google claims to have it running on over 25,000 cores for Chrome. There it is integrated into the development workflow and provides users with a web interface for managing and viewing crashes caused during testing. To ensure no issue goes unnoticed, it also includes automatic bug filing and closing for the Monorail issue tracker.

Rubrik Launches Open Source Community Called Build

Rubrik announced an open source community, Rubrik Build, which aims to simplify improvement of existing projects and ease creation of applications, automation tooling, and integrations. It’s based on a set of APIs providing pre-built use cases, quick-start guides, and integrations with popular tooling.

A goal is inclusion. “Many people in the tech community do not come from a traditional software engineering background, and this can make contributing to open source seem daunting,” Rubrik Principal Technologist Rebecca Fitzhugh told SDxCentral. “The goal of Rubrik Build is to break down these barriers so anyone can contribute to a project.”

Rubrik just launched an open source community

Rubrik just announced Rubrik Build, a new 100 percent public, 100 percent Open Source community built around use cases and integrations that consume Rubrik APIs. As part of Rubrik Build, contributors can leverage existing software development kits, tools, and use cases or contribute their own ideas, code, documentation, and feedback.

The goal of Rubrik Build to establish a community around consuming Rubrik's world-class APIs to quickly get started with pre-built use cases, quick start guides, and integrations with popular tooling. The Build program was designed with customers in mind, easing their transition to consuming APIs.

A former Marine explains how her service helped prepare her to lead a new open source initiative for $3.3 billion startup Rubrik

 

The idea, says Fitzhugh, is to encourage an open source ecosystem to flourish around Rubrik, though the company's main offering is not offered as open source.  

The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable?

 

In a recent interview with New Left Review, Stallman described how MIT’s AI lab fostered a culture of collaboration and radical openness to the point where the lab’s giant computer wasn’t protected with passwords and the doors to the lab were always unlocked. To be sure, Stallman acknowledged that some of this culture of openness was a product of circumstance: Minsky, for instance, was always losing his door keys and the researchers in the lab couldn’t help but share the room-sized computer because it was the only one. Nevertheless, the spirit of the lab made an impression on Stallman.
 

In 1983, he posted a message to a Usenet group—basically a proto-forum—in which he declared his intention to create an operating system and “give it away free to everyone who can use it.” Stallman called the operating system GNU, a recursive acronym for “Gnus Not Unix,” a challenge to the dominant proprietary OS of the time—Unix, which was used internally at Bell Labs—embedded in its very name.
 

GNU was the opening salvo in the free software movement, whose principles Stallman summarized in the 1985 GNU Manifesto: “I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.”  

Open-Source Biology and Biohacking Hack Chat

Justin Atkin‘s name might not ring a bell, but you’ve probably seen his popular YouTube channel The Thought Emporium, devoted to regular doses of open source science. Justin’s interests span a wide range, literally from the heavens above to the microscopic world.

His current interest is to genetically modify yeast to produce spider silk, and to perhaps even use the yeast for brewing beer. He and the Thought Emporium team have been busy building out a complete DIY biology lab to support the effort, and have been conducting a variety of test experiments along the way.