InfoQ Homepage Social Networking Content on InfoQ
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WhatsApp Adopts the Signal Protocol for Secure Multi-Device Communication
WhatsApp is testing its new architecture aimed to enable true multi-device message synchronization while preserving end-to-end cryptographic security. To this aim, WhatsApp is adopting the Signal protocol.
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Facebook Open-Sources Expire-Span Method for Scaling Transformer AI
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open-sourced Expire-Span, a deep-learning technique that learns which items in an input sequence should be remembered, reducing the memory and computation requirements for AI. FAIR showed that Transformer models that incorporate Expire-Span can scale to sequences of tens of thousands of items with improved performance compared to previous models.
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Why the Most Resilient Companies Want More Incidents
According to John Egan, the incident management process is meant to be a cycle of not just the response, but also the account of root cause and the updating of internal processes and practices across the industry. Lowering the barrier to reporting incidents, holding effective incident review meetings using blameless postmortems, and giving everyone access to postmortems is what he advises.
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Facebook Compression Algorithm Zstandard 1.5 Improves Performance
Facebook open sourced Zstandard almost six years ago with the aim of outperforming Zlib in both speed and efficiency. Zstandard 1.5 improves compression speed at intermediate compression levels, compression ratio at higher levels, and brings faster decompression speed.
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Relay Hooks Released, Improves User Experience with Data Prefetching
Robert Balicki and Juan Tejada, software engineers at Facebook, recently released Relay Hooks, a set of new APIs for fetching and managing GraphQL data. Relay Hooks have been battle-tested on the Facebook.com rewrite, and are the recommended way to use Relay at Facebook.
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Facebook Announces ZionEX Platform for Training AI Models with 12 Trillion Parameters
A team of scientists at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) announced a system for training deep-learning recommendation models (DLRM) using PyTorch on a custom-built AI hardware platform, ZionEX. Using this system, the team trained models with up to 12T parameters and achieved nearly an order-of-magnitude speedup in training time compared to other systems.
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Developing Testing Skills outside of Working Hours
Gamifying your way of testing, joining online testing communities of practice, and virtual traveling; these are examples of activities you can do outside of working hours that can make you a better tester. You can practice continuous learning with other testers in the world, and then implement things you learned at your workplace and share them with your team to improve ways of testing.
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Facebook Open-Sources AI Model to Predict COVID-19 Patient Outcomes
A team from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and New York University (NYU) School of Medicine has developed deep-learning models that use chest X-rays to predict COVID-19 patient prognosis. In a comparison study, the models outperformed human radiologists, and could be used to help hospitals predict the demand for supplemental oxygen or intensive care.
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Thrift for Haskell Aims to Eliminate Bugs from RPC Code
Originally created at Facebook and now part of Apache, Thrift is an interface definition language and binary communication protocol aimed to enable efficient RPC at scale across services written in multiple languages. Facebook has recently open sourced hsthrift, which makes it possible to use Thrift in Haskell projects and take advantage of its dependent types to eliminate bugs in production.
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Facebook Open-Sources Multilingual Speech Recognition Deep-Learning Model
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open-sourced Cross-Lingual Speech Recognition (XSLR), a multilingual speech recognition AI model. XSLR is trained on 53 languages and outperforms existing systems when evaluated on common benchmarks.
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Facebook Open-Sources Game Playing AI ReBeL
Facebook AI Research published a paper on Recursive Belief-based Learning (ReBeL), their new AI for playing imperfect-information games that can defeat top human players in poker. The algorithm combines reinforcement learning with state-space search and converges to a Nash equilibrium for any two-player zero-sum game. Code for training the algorithm to play Liar's Dice has been open-sourced.
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Facebook.com Redesign: Stack and Strategies for Sustainable Performance
Facebook detailed in a blog post the technologies and strategies powering FB5, the latest iteration of the facebook.com website. Facebook rearchitected its website and standardized its technological stack around React, GraphQL, Relay, and its custom CSS-in-JS library. The goal of the rewrite was to increase performance and make it easy to add new features.
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Facebook Open-Sources Machine-Learning Privacy Library Opacus
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has announced the release of Opacus, a high-speed library for applying differential privacy techniques when training deep-learning models using the PyTorch framework. Opacus can achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup compared to other privacy libraries.
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Facebook Releases AI Model for Protein Sequence Processing
A team of scientists at Facebook AI Research have released a deep-learning model for processing protein data from DNA sequences. The model contains approximately 700M parameters, was trained on 250 million protein sequences, and learned representations of biological properties that can be used to improve current state-of-the-art in several genomics prediction tasks.
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Twitter Launches New Developer API
Twitter recently released the new Twitter API (early access) to be used by third-party developers. The new Twitter API features three new product tracks: standard, academic research, and business. The new API offers conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, real-time tweet tracking, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language.