No matter how beautiful your backend code is, how optimized your architecture is, if you don’t get this part right, you can’t get a user onboard. Also, this is accurate if you view it from the lens of a product developer working in a startup of not more than 15 engineers. Some projects do not make any impact on product in anyway, instead, they help other developers to work efficiently and enable them to deploy code seamlessly to production in a matter of minutes, thus increasing engineering productivity.

The Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering of core-kernel developers; it is one of the most intensive and technical events on the annual calendar. Our coverage is a work in progress; the articles that are available at this point are:

There were a few sessions of general interest attended by all developers at the event. The filesystem developers discussed the following topics in their track:

Some sessions were shared discussions involving both storage and filesystem developers:

The memory-management developers sequestered themselves to dive into a number of detailed topics:

Thanks to the LSFMM 2019 program committee for inviting LWN to the event, and to the Linux Foundation, LWN’s travel sponsor, for supporting our travel to Puerto Rico.

Android developers can now force app a year ago, at the Android Dev Summit, Google announced a new way for developers to force their users to update their apps when they launch new features or important bug fixes. It’s only now, at Google I/O, though, that the company is actually making this feature available to developers. This new feature, called Inline Updates, gives developers access to a new API that they can then use to force users to update.

RealTalk: This Speech Synthesis Model Our Engineers Built Recreates a Human Voice Perfectly 15

…and it’s the voice of Joe Rogan. This includes the breathes, ‘um’s and ‘ah’s, and all other noises.The replica of Rogan’s voice the team created was produced using a text-to-speech deep learning system they developed called RealTalk, which generates life-like speech using only text inputs. But in the next few years (or even sooner), we’ll see the technology advance to the point where only a few seconds of audio are needed to create a life-like replica of anyone’s voice on the planet.

The approach we took was to first perform a task on the driver node in a Spark cluster using a sample of data, and then scale up to the full data set using Pandas UDFs to handle billions of records of data. To demonstrate how Pandas UDFs can be used to scale up Python code, we’ll walk through an example where a batch process is used to create a likelihood to purchase model, first using a single machine and then a cluster to scale to potentially billions or records. Instead of pulling the full dataset into memory on the driver node, we can use Pandas UDFs to distribute the dataset across a Spark cluster, and use pyarrow to translate between the spark and Pandas data frame representations.

Bing can return a natural language result telling the user the Eiffel Tower is 1,063 feet, even though the word “Eiffel” never appeared in the search query and the word “tall” never appears in the result. Microsoft uses vector search for its own Bing search engine, and the technology is helping Bing better understand the intent behind billions of web searches and find the most relevant result among billions of web pages. “Bing processes billions of documents every day, and the idea now is that we can represent these entries as vectors and search through this giant index of 100 billion-plus vectors to find the most related results in 5 milliseconds,” said Jeffrey Zhu, program manager on Microsoft’s Bing team.

Silkie Carlo, the director of civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, was at the scene holding a placard saying ‘stop facial recognition’ – before she asked an officer about the man they had taken aside: ‘What’s your suspicion?’ The Metropolitan Police hopes live facial recognition technology will help reduce crime, especially violent incidents, and could be used as a tactic to deter people from offending. Last December, a suspect was arrested by the Metropolitan Police during a trial of the facial recognition technology among Christmas shoppers at Leicester Square in London’s West End.

A paper by University of Maryland researchers just published in the journal Science Robotics introduces a new way of combining perception and motor commands using the so-called hyperdimensional computing theory, which could fundamentally alter and improve the basic artificial intelligence (AI) task of sensorimotor representation—how agents like robots translate what they sense into what they do. “Learning Sensorimotor Control with Neuromorphic Sensors: Toward Hyperdimensional Active Perception” was written by Computer Science Ph.D. students Anton Mitrokhin and Peter Sutor, Jr.; Cornelia Fermüller, an associate research scientist with the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies; and Computer Science Professor Yiannis Aloimonos. In the authors’ new computing theory, a robot’s operating system would be based on hyperdimensional binary vectors (HBVs), which exist in a sparse and extremely high-dimensional space.

On Wednesday, the White House launched a new tool for people to use if they feel they’ve been wrongly censored, banned, or suspended on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The user is also asked to choose between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube or “other” as the platform where the offense took place. The tool also collects significant personal information from the user, and near the end invites users to opt into email newsletters from President Trump, “so we can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

In April, protests from tech employees against excessive overtime surfaced online, sparking an equal pushback from industry magnates such as billionaire Jack Ma of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The protest prompted a public debate about work hours in China’s tech industry, and spurred reactions from at least 10 Chinese tech moguls, including Ma, who initially defended the practice. People in the industry say the protests were in part spurred by a slowdown in the tech sector, which has seen venture capitalists grow cautious, Chinese tech IPOs underperform, and companies layoff workers.