Azure DNS Private Zones

Azure DNS Private Zones now available in public preview | Blog | Microsoft Azure
"Private Zones obviates the need to setup and manage custom DNS servers. You can bring DNS zones to your virtual network as you lift-and-shift applications to the Azure cloud, or if you are building Cloud-Native applications. You also have the flexibility to use custom domain names, such as your company’s domain name."

Link from Azure Podcast: Episode 222 - Azure Portal Update

AWS has a similar feature:

Working with Private Hosted Zones - Amazon Route 53

"A private hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic for a domain and its subdomains within one or more Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs)."

Another AWS standard feature that was recently added to Azure:

Azure’s availability zones are now generally available | TechCrunch

Azure has more granular control of placement of VMs with "Availability Sets" (essentially server racks) so it now provides more reliability features. 

Availability sets tutorial for Windows VMs in Azure | Microsoft Docs

cloud: Microsoft Azure Service Fabric: Open Sourced

Many crucial services of Microsoft Azure are built and running on Service Fabric.
That platform is now being open sourced, first on Linux with Windows version to follow.

Service Fabric is going open source – Azure Service Fabric Team Blog

"Service Fabric is going open source under the MIT license and over the coming months will be transitioning to a completely open development process on GitHub."

Microsoft/service-fabric: Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform for packaging, deploying, and managing stateless and stateful distributed applications and containers at large scale. @ GitHub

"Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform for packaging, deploying, and managing stateless and stateful distributed applications and containers at large scale. Service Fabric runs on Windows and Linux, on any cloud, any datacenter, across geographic regions, or on your laptop."

Azure Service Fabric Documentation - Tutorials, API Reference | Microsoft Docs

Introduction to microservices on Azure | Microsoft Docs

Architecture of Azure Service Fabric | Microsoft Docs

Web Geolocation API's

Geolocation - Wikipedia

From Web Browser:

User Location  |  Web Fundamentals  |  Google Developers

(Web browser) Geolocation (JavaScript) API lets you discover, with the user's consent, the user's location.
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(geoSuccess, geoError);

As of Chrome 50, the Geolocation API only works on secure contexts (HTTPS). If your site is hosted on a non-secure origin (such as HTTP), any requests for the user's location no longer function.

From Web Server:

Overview  |  Google Maps Geolocation API  |  Google Developers

"The Google Maps Geolocation (REST web service) API returns a location and accuracy radius based on information about cell towers and WiFi nodes that the mobile client can detect. 

You must specify a key in your request, included as the value of a key parameter. A key is your application's API key. This key identifies your application for purposes of quota management. Learn how to get a key."

freegeoip.net

"a public HTTP API for software developers to search the geolocation of IP addresses. It uses a database of IP addresses that are associated to cities along with other relevant information like time zone, latitude and longitude. You're allowed up to 10,000 queries per hour by default."
open source @ GitHub (GoLang)
fiorix/freegeoip: IP geolocation web server

Oracle Cloud ML SQL Notebooks (Apache Zeppelin based)

Introducing Oracle Machine Learning SQL Notebooks for the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud! | Oracle Data Mining (ODM) Blog

"Apache Zeppelin based Machine Learning SQL Notebook for Data Scientists to Collaborate in the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud"

Oracle Data Mining Techniques and Algorithms
Oracle Advanced Analytics' Machine Learning Algorithms SQL Functions
Database Cloud Service | Oracle Cloud

Data Cloud | Customer Experience | Oracle Cloud (DaaS: Data as a Service)

Try for Free | Oracle Cloud

Apache Zeppelin

"Web-based notebook that enables data-driven,
interactive data analytics and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala and more.

Zeppelin lets you connect any JDBC data sources seamlessly. Postgresql, Mysql, MariaDB, Redshift, Apache Hive and so on."

Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud

World's First Self-Driving Database | Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud

Self-Driving Database | Autonomous Database Cloud Oracle 18c

"...autonomous database cloud integrates applied machine learning to deliver self-driving, self-tuning, self-recovering, self-scaling, and self-securing administration—without human intervention—resulting in streamlined operations, more efficient consumption of resources, and higher security and reliability. With built-in automation at all levels to perform maintenance tasks..."

Self-Driving | Self-Securing |  Self-Repairing

Oracle, Ellison Seek ‘Path’ Around AWS
"strategy versus Amazon,...“autonomous data warehouse cloud.” The overarching goal is reducing costs, speeding application development and boosting database security via automated services. ... beyond the AWS infrastructure-as-a-service model to deliver “a complete suite of platform services that are at a higher level than low-level infrastructure stuff.”

Larry Ellison demonstrates how AWS is 5x to 13x more expensive (17:25)

5 Ways to Choose the Best Database Cloud

Oracle SVP Juan Loaiza introduces Oracle Autonomous Database (2:44)

cloud.oracle.com

Oracle Cloud: Tour My Services Console - YouTube

Some self-optimizing features are recently added to Microsoft SQL Server / Azure SQL Database also: Automatic tuning | Microsoft Docs

SQL Server 2017 Adaptive Query Processing Query Plan Enhancements with Interleaved Execution

IoT new homes: Lennar + Amazon Alexa

Lennar Corporation - Lennar Launches World's First Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ Smart Home Designs with Amazon Alexa
"Features include:

• The world's first Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Home Design – no more dead spots;
• Voice control by Amazon Alexa;
• Whole-home automation by Samsung SmartThings;
• iOS and Android compatibility;
• Smart home products from the most trusted manufacturers – including Ring, Honeywell, Baldwin, Kwikset, Lutron, Ruckus and Sonos;
• White-glove activation and service. (by Amazon)"

Amazon.com: Lennar Homeowners: Welcome to your smart home: Home & Business Services



It is WiFi, not wired.

info from:
Episode 156: Lennar’s smart home and why it dumped Apple HomeKit – IoT Podcast – Internet of Things

School of AI @ Udacity

School of AI | Udacity

"Want to master AI programming with Python, or become a Natural Language Processing expert?
Start learning and get building with Udacity's world-class programs and expert instructors.

• Tools:  Python, NumPy, TensorFlow
• Concepts:  Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning
• Applications: Computer Vision, NLP, Speech Recognition"

5 Skills You Need to Become a Machine Learning Engineer | Udacity

GoLang Concurrency Interactive WebGL Animation

Visualizing Concurrency in Go · divan's blog @ GitHub

using three.js - Javascript 3D library



Go Concurrency (interactive)

source: divan.github.io/demos/workers/main.js

GopherCon 2016: Ivan Danyliuk - Visualizing Concurrency in Go - YouTube


mentioned by Vitor De Mario in
Go Concurrency in the Real World @ InfoQ

IoT: IDoT: Identity of Things, Samsung ARTIC

Top Three IoT Security Trends to Watch in 2018 | Samsung ARTIK IoT Platform
"Traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems were developed to identify humans, not machines. To cope with the new connected IoT world, IAM leaders must extend identity management to encompass all entities—humans, devices, applications, and services—in IoT ecosystems. This extension of IAM is known as the Identity of Things (IDoT), and it works by assigning unique credentials, keys and identifiers (UID) to all entities in an IoT implementation. Unique identities enable secure communications between a device and a human, a device and another device, a device and an application or service, and between a human and an application or service. Additionally, device manufacturers and enterprises may want to inject credentials—PKI is generally the best choice—for operational control and secure updates."

this is explained more in interesting interview with Samsung representative in this:
Episode 156: Lennar’s smart home and why it dumped Apple HomeKit – IoT Podcast – Internet of Things

Smart Home - SmartThings | Samsung US

James Clarks (of SGI & Netscape) claims the same: using embedded PKI for device authentication is the best way, completely avoiding passwords (and WiFi, more sercure!)

DraganSr: IoT startup by founder of Netscape: CommandScape | Home

Using PKI in HW is not a new concept, most of current PC's and Windows support it,
but so far was not typically embedded in small peripheral devices.

Trusted Platform Module Technology Overview (Windows 10) | Microsoft Docs

What is Trusted Platform Module (TPM)? - Definition from WhatIs.com

Trusted Platform Module - Wikipedia

"Computer programs can use a TPM to authenticate hardware devices, since each TPM chip has a unique and secret RSA key burned in as it is produced. Pushing the security down to the hardware level provides more protection than a software-only solution."...
The endorsement key is a 2048-bit RSA public and private key pair that is created randomly on the chip at manufacture time and cannot be changed. The private key never leaves the chip, while the public key is used for attestation and for encryption of sensitive data sent to the chip"
TPM could become common in many devices by creating dedicated affordable HW modules, like this:

Energy-efficient encryption for the internet of things | MIT News
"MIT researchers have built a new chip, hardwired to perform public-key encryption, that consumes only 1/400 as much power as software execution of the same protocols would. It also uses about 1/10 as much memory and executes 500 times faster."

(free) ebook: Essential TypeScript

Essential TypeScript by Jess Chadwick [Leanpub PDF/iPad/Kindle]

slides: jchadwick/TypeScriptIntro @ GitHub

TypeScript.pptx - Microsoft PowerPoint Online


Introduction to TypeScript - YouTube

ECMAScript 6 compatibility table


TypeScript - JavaScript that scales (.org)

web c#: WebAssembly + Mono + Razor = Blazor

After "magic" PoC demo by Steve Sanderson @ NDC
to run trans-complied C# in web browser (via WebAsssembly),
Microsoft is now committed to "real" product development of this interesting tool.

Web Apps can’t really do *that*, can they? - Steve Sanderson - YouTube

Get started building .NET web apps that run in the browser with Blazor | ASP.NET Blog

"first public preview of Blazor, a new experimental .NET web framework using C#/Razor and HTML that runs in the browser with WebAssembly. Blazor enables full stack web development with the stability, consistency, and productivity of .NET."

Blazor: a technical introduction by Steven Sanderson

aspnet/Blazor: Blazor is an experimental .NET web framework using C#/Razor and HTML that runs in the browser with WebAssembly @ GitHub

Blazor (.NET in WebAssembly) with Dan Roth & Steve Sanderson @ MSDevShow podcast

Some other languages could also run with WebAssembly in modern web browsers. 

appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs: 😎 A curated list of languages that compile directly to or have their VMs in WebAssembly

Cloud: "Bare Metal" Kubernetes containers

IBM Delivers the First Bare Metal Kubernetes in the Public Cloud @ InfoQ
"IBM offers the industries first bare metal Kubernetes as a managed service. This service will enable developers and data science teams to push containers to a managed service directly on bare metal cloud infrastructure... Not sharing the infrastructure means an extra layer of isolation, security and better performance with a choice of machines."

IBM is not the first to offer "Bare Metal" Kubernetes, though: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is providing many services on "Bare Metal" (dedicated OS without VMs), including containers:

Get a highly available Kubernetes Cluster on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in minutes | Oracle Developers Blog

"you can specify Bare Metal shapes (no hypervisor!), in addition to VM shapes, to leverage the full power and performance of OCI infrastructure for your Kubernetes clusters"

• Container Service - Overview | IBM Cloud
• Containers | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• AWS Elastic Container service for Kubernetes (EKS)
• Microsoft’s Azure container service for Kubernetes (AKS)
• Google Kubernetes Engine  |  Google Cloud

Java 10, Jakarta EE, $8.8 billion?

Java 10 Released @ InfoQ

"The release of Java 10 immediately obsoletes Java 9 and no further free support releases of Java 9 will be made available. As of March 20th, the only versions of Java with free support from Oracle are Java 8 and Java 10. The next release with long-term support available is Java 11, which will be released in September 2018."

Java EE Becomes Jakarta EE

"After Oracle expressed its desire that Java EE be rebranded as part of the project’s transfer to Eclipse, the community has voted, and the new name for Java EE going forward will be Jakarta EE."

but... Java is not "free", while it was open source for a while.

Google-Oracle lawsuit revived -- billions on the line
"The closely watched case, dating back to 2010, now goes back to a U.S. judge in San Francisco for a trial to determine how much compensation Google owes Oracle. Oracle had previously sought $9 billion in damages."

Azure Data Architecture Guide

Azure Data Architecture Guide | Microsoft Docs
"structured approach for designing data-centric solutions on Microsoft Azure. It is based on proven practices derived from customer engagements"

Download PDF




link from:
.NET Rocks! vNext

AWS CI/CD Tools

Microsoft has 500+ people developing TFS and related dev tools.
AWS is also investing heavily in automation of cloud dev. tools

AWS CodePipeline | Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery



Introduction to AWS CodePipeline - Continuous Delivery on Amazon Web Services - YouTube

Jenkins CI Server vs AWS CodePipeline - Sumo Logic

Jenkins Pipeline
"Jenkins Pipeline (or simply "Pipeline" with a capital "P") is a suite of plugins which supports implementing and integrating continuous delivery pipelines into Jenkins."
Setting Up Jenkins Continuous Integration - YouTube


Other AWS Developer Tools:

• CodeStar
• CodeCommit
• CodeBuild
• CodeDeploy
• CodePipeline
• Cloud9
• X-Ray

Microsoft Azure integrated CI/CD solution:

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery | Visual Studio Team Services

AI University Schools & Colleges

AI is the new electricity!
claims prominent AI researcher and entrepreneur Andrew Ng:

Andrew Ng on Twitter: ""AI is the new electricity!"
Electricity transformed countless industries;
AI will now do the same.… "

Futurist Kevin Kelly, author of book The Inevitable suggests:

Kevin Kelly on Twitter:
"The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast:
Take X and add AI"




In that context, it is reasonable to expect a huge demand for people educated to be able to use AI.
And this is a new field of competition, in particular between USA and China.
In China now there are dedicated colleges and university schools for AI.

Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science
=> "AI Engineering & Science"

Data Science Vs Artificial Intelligence: Is Data Science Dependent on AI?

Original AI was one of the oldest applications of computer science,
but only in last about 10 years thanks to Moore's Law, cloud, and new improved techniques,
there is a significant progress in "Machine Learning" and "Deep Learning" sub-domains of AI.
There are already "AI optimized" computer chips, and this will expand quickly.
"AI models" may soon provide viable alternative for human-crafted computer programs.

This is a "brave new world", and education will need to keep up with this.
"Department of AI" may soon be on many Universities as well as in many Enterprises.

The Top 15 Employers Hiring Artificial Intelligence Talent @ Forbes

"...there’s a staggering talent shortage — fewer than 10,000 people in the world have the skill set to conduct important AI research... The shortage has driven salaries sky-high: AI specialists reportedly fetch compensation of $300,000 to $500,000.

"One year later, Microsoft AI and Research grows to 8k people in massive bet on artificial intelligence – GeekWire


Top 20 Artificial Intelligence Engineering Schools in the U.S. 2016 – Computer Science Degree Hub

25 Best Artificial Intelligence Colleges | Successful Student

Best Artificial Intelligence Programs & Top Computer Science Schools - US News Rankings


China and the US are battling to become the world’s first AI superpower - The Verge


China enters the battle for AI talent @ nature

China’s AI dreams

China wants to bring artificial intelligence to its classrooms to boost its education system | South China Morning Post @ sciencemag


A quote by a great hockey player, explaining how he was so succesful:
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" - Wayne Gretzky

AI: Windows ML with ONNX & UWP

How Three Lines of Code and Windows Machine Learning Empower .NET Developers to Run AI Locally on Windows 10 Devices | Machine Learning Blog

Intelligent Edge - How 3 lines of code & Windows ML empower devs to run AI locally on Win 10 devices | AI Show | Channel 9

Windows-Machine-Learning/Samples/UWP/WinMLExplorer at master · Microsoft/Windows-Machine-Learning @ GitHub

"Windows Machine Learning Explorer is a data driven and generic sample application that serves as a launch pad to bootstrap ML models to be evaluated by Windows ML. It currently includes a scenario of circuit board defect detection model that can detect defects on pictures and a real-time camera feed of a printed circuit board."

onnx/onnx: Open Neural Network Exchange

"ONNX provides an open source format for AI models. It defines an extensible computation graph model, as well as definitions of built-in operators and standard data types."

Windows ML - Microsoft's Grand Plan To Bring AI Closer To Windows Developers @ Forbes


Microsoft Embeds Artificial Intelligence Platform in Windows 10 Update @ InfoQ

cloud serverless: AWS Step Functions

Using AWS Step Functions State Machines to Handle Workflow-Driven AWS CodePipeline Actions | AWS DevOps Blog



AWS Step Functions – Coordinate Microservices using Visual Workflows

AWS Step Functions Getting Started – Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AI/ML HW: Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick

Getting started with the Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick - PyImageSearch

"10x performance on this USB stick compared to your CPU, $77"

Amazon.com: Intel NCSM2450.DK1 Movidius Neural Compute Stick: Computers & Accessories

Google Machine Learning Crash Course

free:

Machine Learning Crash Course  |  Google Developers

"A self-study guide for aspiring machine learning practitioners
Machine Learning Crash Course features a series of lessons with video lectures, real-world case studies, and hands-on practice exercises."


Artificial intelligence development course offered for free by Google - Science & Tech - The Jakarta Post

tool: PWA Builder, App Image Generator

Interesting tools:

Take a URL of running web site, download pages, and package as PWA that can run disconnected!

PWABuilder
"PWA.tools takes data from your site and uses that to generate cross-platform Progressive Web Apps"

PWABuilder Docs | Documentation for PWABuilder.com

Benefits of PWA on Windows 10s | PWABuilder Docs

Take a single image, and create set of required logo images and thumbnails for 

Windows 10, Android, iOS etc... Very useful!

App Image Generator

"Quickly and easily create app icons for various platforms in the right size and format"

link from .NET Rocks! vNext

.NET Core 2.1 features & road map

.NET Core 2.1 Roadmap | .NET Blog
many improvements, performance (IIS integration), build speed etc.



.NET Foundation @ GitHub

The .NET Core 2 Road Map with Scott Hunter @.NET Rocks! vNext

 PWA Builder .NET Downloads TechEmpower Benchmarks .NET Standard Orchard CMS EntityFramework Core Span of T Kestrel Windows Compatibility Pack Polly SignalR GDPR Precompilation of Razor WebHooks CosmosDB .NET SDK

Markdown Editor for Visual Studio

Markdown Editor - Visual Studio Marketplace
by Mads Kristensen

or as a par of:
Web Essentials 2017 - Visual Studio Marketplace

for previous versions of Visual Studio
Web Essentials for Visual Studio

Markdown editing with Visual Studio Code
"VS Code supports Markdown files out of the box. You just start writing Markdown text, save the file with the .md extension and then you can toggle the visualization of the editor between the code and the preview of the Markdown file; obviously, you can also open an existing Markdown file and start working with it. To switch between views, press Ctrl+Shift+V in the editor. You can view the preview side-by-side (Ctrl+K V) with the file you are editing and see changes reflected in real-time as you edit."

Syntax usage for Markdown files, widgets, wikis, and pull requests - VSTS & TFS | Microsoft Docs

Markdown Reference

Markdown Cheatsheet · adam-p/markdown-here Wiki @ GitHub

Graphs for Machine Learning

Graphs as the front end for machine learning - O'Reilly Media
The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Leo Meyerovich on building large-scale, interactive applications that enable visual investigations.

Graphistry

IoT: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ on sale now at $35 - Raspberry Pi

"Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is now on sale for $35 (the same price as the existing Raspberry Pi 3 Model B), featuring:

• A 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
• Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2
• Faster Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0)
• Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE HAT)
• Improved PXE network and USB mass-storage booting
• Improved thermal management

Alongside a 200MHz increase in peak CPU clock frequency, we have roughly three times the wired and wireless network throughput, and the ability to sustain high performance for much longer periods."

Raspberry Pi 3B+ Specs and Benchmarks - The MagPi MagazineThe MagPi Magazine


Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B+ - 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 with 1GB RAM ID: 3775 - $35.00 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

100,000 Events Per Second on Azure Functions

Processing 100,000 Events Per Second on Azure Functions | Azure App Service Team Blog



link from:
Philly Azure March Meeting | Philly Azure (Malvern, PA) | Meetup

pi day: Calculate Pi in Azure Notebook

Interesting usage of iPython-like Notebooks for a web article:

This Pi Day, Calculate the Value of Pi for Yourself | WIRED
Calculating area of half-cicrle of radius r=1 as sum of vertical slices
The surface area of circle is r**2 * pi = pi  for r==1
Area of a slice is y * dx
x**2 + y**2 = r**2 = 1  =>  y = sqrt(1-x**2)

def calcPiSlices(n):
    dx = 2. / n # step size
    area = 0 # sum of all areas of half-circle
    for x in numpy.arange(-1, 1, dx):
        area = area + math.sqrt(1-x**2) * dx # area of a vertical slice
    return 2*area # *2 to get area of whole circle = pi

Here is the calculation in "real" Jupyter Notebook on 

  https://notebooks.azure.com/dragansr/libraries/calcPi

Pi - Wikipedia  |  5 Ways to Calculate Pi - wikiHow

faster: Nilakantha series method
π = 3 + 4/(2*3*4) - 4/(4*5*6) + 4/(6*7*8) - 4/(8*9*10) + 4/(10*11*12) - 4/(12*13*14) ... 

def calcPiNilakantha(n):
    pi = 3.0
    for x in range(2, n, 4):
        pi += (4 / (x*(x+1)*(x+2))) - (4 / ((x+2)*(x+3)*(x+4)))
    return pi

Azure GeoAI by Microsoft & Esri

Microsoft and Esri launch Geospatial AI on Azure | Blog | Microsoft Azure

"Microsoft and Esri will be offering the GeoAI Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) as part of our Data Science Virtual Machine/Deep Learning Virtual Machine family of products on Azure."

Introduction to the Geo Artificial Intelligence Data Science Virtual Machine - Azure | Microsoft Docs

ArcGIS Pro | Professional 2D & 3D GIS Mapping Software

draw.io: cloud architecture diagrams tools

Online drawing tools, often used for (AWS) cloud diagrams.

draw.io  it is free (for single user), and open source JGraph @ GitHub

Integrations – draw.io : works with Google Docs (GSuite)
"highest user rated productivity tool in the Chrome Web Store"

draw.io – Online Diagramming



AWS Simple Icons

other drawing tools:


Lucidchart Libraries »
AWS Marketplace listing »



Cacoo Store
Design Pattern Templates


Creately Templates

draw.io Diagram Editor

Cloudcraft smart AWS diagram editor


DC Solution Factory
Visual Architecture and Deployment



Download Microsoft Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Symbol / Icon Set
 - Visio stencil, PowerPoint, PNG, SVG from Official Microsoft Download Center

Icons and other assets for architectual diagrams | Microsoft Docs

Microsoft Azure Icon Set Download – Visio stencil, PowerPoint, PNG, SVG – Build Azure

Google Cloud Platform Blog: Google Cloud Platform icons and sample architectural diagrams, for your designing pleasure

free ebook: Getting Started with AI

Free ebook: Getting Started with AI

"Getting Started with Artificial Intelligence:
A Practical Guide to Building Enterprise Applications
is full of case studies, implementation examples, and a survey of the current landscape. It's an ideal starting point for your journey into enterprise AI. And it's free courtesy of IBM."

AI class: How Google does Machine Learning @ Coursera

How Google does Machine Learning | Coursera

"About this course: What is machine learning, and what kinds of problems can it solve? Google thinks about machine learning slightly differently -- of being about logic, rather than just data. We talk about why such a framing is useful when thinking about building a pipeline of machine learning models. Then, we discuss the five phases of converting a candidate use case to be driven by machine learning, and consider why it is important the phases not be skipped. We end with a recognition of the biases that machine learning can amplify and how to recognize this.

... learning how to build and operationalize TensorFlow models."

some other ML classes:

• Machine Learning with Andrew Ng coursera and Deep Learning Specialization coursera
• fast.ai site
• Machine Learning with John W. Paisley edx
• Machine Learning Columbia University edx

links from:

Cloud AI with Dr. Fei-Fei Li | Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Microsoft Translation AI: DNN vs. statistical

Machine translation of human languages has improved significantly in last 10 years, but it is still far from perfect. Here are very good articles explaining how this works now,
and interesting web site that compares various methods of translation for select languages.

Microsoft Translator: What is a neural network based translation?

Machine Translation - Microsoft Translator

Both SMT (Statistical Machine Translation) and
DNN (Deep Neural Network) translation technologies
have two elements in common:

• Both require large amounts of pre-human translated content (up to millions of translated sentences) to train the systems.
• Neither act as bilingual dictionaries, translating words based on a list of potential translations, but translate based on the context of the word that is used in a sentence."

Try and Compare - Microsoft Translator

Artificial Intelligence, powered by neural networks:
used to be about 20 languages, now only Chinese; site sometimes works

Bing Microsoft Translator

Classic "statistical" translator: about 60 languages; site works, and this is same as API

marketing pages:

Try Microsoft Translator for free:
Bing, Live conversations, Office 365 Word, Translate.ai

Translator Text API - Auto Translate | Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Translator | Conversations | Break the language barrier

API documentation:

docs: Microsoft Cognitive Services: Microsoft Translator Text API

Overview of Microsoft Translator API in Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs

Supported languages in the Microsoft Translator API | Microsoft Docs

sample code calling Microsoft Translation API (classic):

MicrosoftTranslator/DocumentTranslator: Microsoft Document Translator

Google Neural Machine Translation - Wikipedia

Google paper:

Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation

Stanford lecture:
Machine Translation and Advanced Recurrent LSTMs and GRUs - YouTube


Alternative:
Google Translate

AWS Lambda performance: Node.js, Python, Java, C#, Go

Interesting test. Functional language F# was the fastest for tested cloud functions :)

Comparing AWS Lambda performance of Node.js, Python, Java, C# and Go @ acloud.guru





code used for testing:
yunspace/lambda-platform-perf-comparison

base code for testing:
theburningmonk/lambda-platform-perf-comparison @ GitHub

related:
yunspace/serverless-golang: AWS Lambda Go functions using Serverless Framework and Python shim @ GitHub

Blockchain Fundamentals + Azure

a very good introductory article about how blockchains work

Blockchain - Blockchain Fundamentals @ MSDN Magazine




Merkle tree - Wikipedia

Merkle Trees – Hacker Noon


Blockchain technology | Microsoft Azure

Azure Blockchain Service

azure-blockchain-projects/EnterpriseSmartContracts.md at master · Azure/azure-blockchain-projects

coco-framework/Coco Framework whitepaper.pdf at master · Azure/coco-framework

Getting Started with Ethereum using Azure Blockchain – Premier Developer

free E-Book: Blockchain for Dummies @ IBM

Blog to Podcast, via AWS Polly cloud service

to skip "Alexa, read me this blog post"

Amazon launches a Polly WordPress plugin that turns blog posts into audio, including podcasts - AWS in the News

Amazon Polly for WordPress — WordPress Plugins

"Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. With dozens of voices across a variety of languages, you can select the ideal voice and build engaging speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries. The Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress is a sample application that shows how WordPress creators can easily add Text-to-Speech capabilities to written content with Amazon Polly. You can generate an audio feed for text-based content and insert it into an embedded player to increase the accessibility of your WordPress site. The sample code also enables you to publish podcasts directly from your site and make them available for listeners in the form of podcasts."

Amazon launches a Polly WordPress plugin that turns blog posts into audio, including podcasts | TechCrunch


Amazon Polly Pricing

"The Amazon Polly free tier includes 5 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request for speech.
$4.00 per 1 million characters for speech (~23 hours, 8 min)
Microsoft Azure "Cognitive Service" / Bing has a similar service / API, at least it used to have it.
Speech-to-text is still there. Current list of service does not include text-to-speech.
Similar API is available in Windows, but with smaller number of "Agent" voices.

Text to Speech API of Microsoft Speech Service | Microsoft Docs

Cognitive Service Try experience | Microsoft Azure


GCP also includes only speech-to-text, , no text-to-speech, only provides "reader" Android app.

Cloud Natural Language  |  Google Cloud Platform



Related, Amazon also started offering translation service with limited set of languages, but extensible

Amazon Translate – Neural Machine Translation - AWS

A quick look at Machine Translation with Amazon Translate

IoT startup by founder of Netscape: CommandScape

CommandScape - YouTube


Billionaire Netscape founder Jim Clark is back with a new, self-funded startup | TechCrunch

"CommandScape, a home-automation and building-control system that controls air conditioning, motorized shades, surveillance, lighting, fire alarms and other functions from a highly secure online platform that has cybersecurity at its core.

electronics journal CE Pro: CommandScape’s system is completely wired, delivering data and power to some products over a building’s existing AC wiring.

...passwords and usernames aren’t needed... Users are instead authenticated via their iPhones (with a systems administrator, or a parent, able to revoke permissions).

It could be an enormous company . . . in a slow-moving [$100 billion] market where technology is 15 years old,” Clark, now 73, told USA Today"

CommandScape : "Control and automate security, access control, lighting, HVAC, video surveillance, and more. All from one sleek and cybersecure integrated app."

Meet the Team: "Jim Clark is the founder of CommandScape TM, a fully integrated cybersecure operating and control system for commercial buildings and larger homes. Jim is a prolific entrepreneur and founder of Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD, MyCFO & Shutterfly."

Our Story: "CommandScapeTM integrates its cybersecure alarm panel, climate, access and lighting controls, video surveillance and connected devices into both residential and commercial installations of any size."

Technology: TLS, iOS, AWS, GoLang, Kubernetes

jobs: Current Listings

Jim Clark is still programming himself in Objective-C!

E756: Jim Clark (Netscape, Silicon Graphics) launches CommandScape, shares future of security, jobs - YouTube

may be related: Blockchain vs The Password – Capgemini Worldwide

Windows Developer Day: ML / AI, IoT

Windows Developer Day – March 7, 2018 - Windows app development
Focus of next update of Windows 10:

1. Modern Application Experiences
2. Intelligent Edge & Windows AI Platform
3. Windows Internet of Things

Desktop Bridge: Win32 + UWP

WebView control: Edge instead of IE 11; open source; 

running in a separate process, more robust, WebRTC

for WinForms, WPF and UWP

"Containers for (Windows) apps" : .MSIX = .appx + .MSI
(for all Win32, WinForms, WPF, UWP apps)
open sourced MSIX format
Microsoft/msix-packaging: MSIX Packaging SDK @ GitHub
"Advanced Installer" tool, VS integration

Three things you need to know about Windows Developer Day - Windows Developer BlogWindows Developer Blog


Windows 10’s next major update will include Windows ML, a new AI platform - The Verge
"(New AI platform) Windows ML will enable developers to create more powerful apps for consumers running Windows 10. Developers will be able to import existing learning models from different AI platforms and run them locally on PCs and devices running Windows 10"

AI Platform for Windows Developers - Windows Developer BlogWindows Developer Blog

Google Cloud Spanner (vs. Azure Cosmos DB vs. Amazon DynamoDB)

GCP Spanner is a very unusual tool: from outside it behaves as relational database,
but internals are more similar to NoSQL databases, scaling horizontally, no downtime.
From outside it behaves as a single server, but in fact it is globally distributed.
And it is production grade, tested for many years on Google scale.
In fact GCP itself runs on Spanner.

Cloud Spanner | Automatic Sharding with Transactional Consistency at Scale  |  Google Cloud Platform
"Cloud Spanner is the only enterprise-grade, globally-distributed, and strongly consistent database service built for the cloud specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scale. This combination delivers high-performance transactions and strong consistency across rows, regions, and continents with an industry-leading 99.999% availability SLA, no planned downtime, and enterprise-grade security."

Cloud Spanner 101: Google's mission-critical relational database (Google Cloud Next '17) - YouTube

Cloud Spanner 201: getting the most out of Cloud Spanner (Google Cloud Next '17) - YouTube

Spanner, the Google Database That Mastered Time, Is Now Open to Everyone | WIRED
"...they equipped Google's data centers with a series of GPS receivers and atomic clocks...
...This gives you faster-than-light coordination between two places," says Peter Mattis, a former Google engineer who founded CockroachDB, a startup working to build an open source version of Spanner."

Google Research Publication: Spanner (original paper explaining how it works)

Cloud Spanner Documentation  |  Cloud Spanner  |  Google Cloud Platform

Discover on Google Cloud Spanner – DeepQ Research Engineering Blog – Medium


Google's Cloud Spanner: how does it stack up? | ZDNet

"...Spanner is a relational database, geared to operational OLTP (online transactional processing) workloads, with full ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) functionality. Spanner's not a simple scale-up relational database service -- that's where Google Cloud SQL comes in. Spanner is not a data warehouse; Google BigQuery is designed to handle those workloads. And it's not a NoSQL database, either, as BigTable is Google's offering there.

So Spanner contrasts strongly with Amazon's DynamoDB, which is a NoSQL database employing so called "eventual consistency," and Microsoft's Cosmos DB, also a NoSQL database, and one which is configurable along a full spectrum of consistency models, ranging from an ACID model on one end to eventual consistency on the other, and two more consistency models in between."
Cloud Database Wars: Google Spanner vs. Microsoft CosmosDB | Simplilearn

Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Comparison


Practical Tradeoffs in Google Cloud Spanner, Azure Cosmos DB and YugaByte DB


A Chart Comparing Azure Cosmos DB Amazon DynamoDB and Google Cloud Spanner
GCP Spanner public features have changed since this chart was created...

IoT: $200 Self-driving Car with Raspberry Pi

$200 Self-driving Cars with RasPi and Tensorflow @ InfoQ

Donkey Car - Home

Build an Autonomous R/C Car with Raspberry Pi | Make:

IoT: Build A Raspberry Pi-Powered "Echo"

The Simplest Way to Build A Raspberry Pi-Powered Amazon Echo



How to Build Your Own Amazon Echo with a Raspberry Pi





Raspberry Pi Alexa: Build your own Amazon Echo - Pi My Life Up

Raspberry Pi · alexa/alexa-avs-sample-app Wiki @ GitHub