Four short links: 12 May 2017
Amazons Competes with Investment, Answering Questions, Designing for Survivors, and Open Source Support
- Amazon Chows Into Its Seed Corn — Amazon invested in Nucleus via the Alexa Fund, then released their own version of Nucleus’ functionality. The move will also likely deal a blow to the Alexa Fund, the investment vehicle through which Amazon has been supporting startups building products and services to be controlled by voice.
- Inferring and Executing Programs for Visual Reasoning — Facebook Research’s paper that uses deep learning to answer questions like “Does the small sphere have the same color as the cube left of the gray cube?”. Code released on github. (via @PyTorch)
- Privacy & Security Practices when Coping with Intimate Partner Abuse — Google paper that combines technology practices with three phases of abuse to provide an empirically sound method for technology creators to consider how survivors of IPA can leverage new and existing technologies. Overall, our results suggest that the usability of and control over privacy and security functions should be or continue to be high priorities for technology creators seeking ways to better support survivors of IPA. (via Martin Shelton)
- How the TensorFlow Team Handles Open Source Support (Pete Warden) — A successful open source project is a denial-of-service attack on its maintainers’ time, so it’s really interesting to see how the Google team both prioritised support and automated much of the drudgery around it.
