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Data Science and the Art of Producing Entertainment at Netflix

Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism

Which has more problem-solving power—the brain or the computer? Given the rapid advances in computer technology in the past decades, you might think that the computer has the edge. Indeed, computers have been built and programmed to defeat human masters in complex games, such as chess in the 1990s and recently Go, as well as encyclopedic knowledge contests, such as the TV show Jeopardy!

Fluree DB – A scalable blockchain database

Develop blockchain applications with a powerful graph database. FlureeDB’s blockchain database allows developers to build decentralized applications on blockchain technology. Support for GraphQL, JavaScript, and React built in.

The 315-Year-Old Science Experiment

The most arrogant astronomer in Switzerland in the mid-20th century was a solar physicist named Max Waldmeier. Colleagues were so relieved when he retired in 1980 that they nearly retired the initiative he led as director of the Zurich Observatory. Waldmeier was in charge of a practice that dated back to Galileo and remains one of the longest continuous scientific practice in history: counting sunspots.

A new way to automatically build road maps from aerial images

Artificial antimicrobial peptides could help overcome drug-resistant bacteria

Researchers at MIT and the Catholic University of Brasilia have now developed a streamlined approach to developing artificial antimicrobial peptides. Their strategy, which relies on a computer algorithm that mimics the natural process of evolution, has yielded one potential drug candidate that successfully killed bacteria in mice.

Rethinking GPS: Engineering Next-Gen Location at Uber

Location and navigation using global positioning systems (GPS) is deeply embedded in our daily lives, and is particularly crucial to Uber’s services. To orchestrate quick, efficient pickups, our GPS technologies need to know the locations of matched riders and drivers, as well as provide navigation guidance from a driver’s current location to where the rider needs to be picked up, and then, to the rider’s chosen destination. For this process to work seamlessly, the location estimates for riders and drivers need to be as precise as possible.

A Face-Detection Library in 200 Lines of JavaScript

The pico.js library is a JavaScript implementation of the method described in 2013 by Markuš et al. in a technical report. The reference implementation is written in C and available on GitHub: https://github.com/nenadmarkus/pico.

Drilling with Curiosity

Remotely operating a rover on another planet so that it can gather and analyze samples requires extensive planning, failure work-arounds, and compromise.

Doctors tried to lower $148K cancer drug cost; makers triple price of pill