Technology

New Amazon capabilities put machine learning in reach of more developers

Today, Amazon announced a new approach that it says will put machine learning technology in reach of more developers and line of business users. Amazon has been making a flurry of announcements ahead of its re:Invent customer conference next week in Las Vegas.

While the company offers plenty of tools for data scientists to build machine learning models and to process, store and visualize data, it wants to put that capability directly in the hands of developers with the help of the popular database query language, SQL.

By taking advantage of tools like Amazon QuickSight, Aurora and Athena in combination with SQL queries, developers can have much more direct access to machine learning models and underlying data without any additional coding, says VP of artificial intelligence at AWS, Matt Wood.

&This announcement is all about making it easier for developers to add machine learning predictions to their products and their processes by integrating those predictions directly with their databases,& Wood told TechCrunch.

For starters, Wood says developers can take advantage of Aurora, the companyMySQL (and Postgres)-compatible database to build a simple SQL query into an application, which will automatically pull the data into the application and run whatever machine learning model the developer associates with it.

The second piece involves Athena, the companyserverless query service. As with Aurora, developers can write a SQL query — in this case, against any data store — and based on a machine learning model they choose, return a set of data for use in an application.

The final piece is QuickSight, which is Amazondata visualization tool. Using one of the other tools to return some set of data, developers can use that data to create visualizations based on it inside whatever application they are creating.

&By making sophisticated ML predictions more easily available through SQL queries and dashboards, the changes we&re announcing today help to make ML more usable and accessible to database developers and business analysts. Now anyone who can write SQL can make — and importantly use — predictions in their applications without any custom code,& AmazonMatt Asay wrote in a blog post announcing these new capabilities.

Asay added that this approach is far easier than what developers had to do in the past to achieve this. &There is often a large amount of fiddly, manual work required to take these predictions and make them part of a broader application, process or analytics dashboard,& he wrote.

As an example, Wood offers a lead-scoring model you might use to pick the most likely sales targets to convert. &Today, in order to do lead scoring you have to go off and wire up all these pieces together in order to be able to get the predictions into the application,& he said. With this new capability, you can get there much faster.

&Now, as a developer I can just say that I have this lead scoring model which is deployed in SageMaker, and all I have to do is write literally one SQL statement that I do all day long into Aurora, and I can start getting back that lead scoring information. And then I just display it in my application and away I go,& Wood explained.

As for the machine learning models, these can come pre-built from Amazon, be developed by an in-house data science team or purchased in a machine learning model marketplace on Amazon, says Wood.

Todayannouncements from Amazon are designed to simplify machine learning and data access, and reduce the amount of coding to get from query to answer faster.

AWS releases SageMaker to make it easier to build and deploy machine learning models

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You&ve probably heard murmurs about Google forthcoming Ambient Mode for Android . The company first announced this feature, which essentially turns an Android device into a smart display while itcharging, in September. Now, in a Twitter post, Google confirmed that it will launch soon, starting with a number of select devices that run Android 8.0 or later.

At the time, Google said Ambient Mode was coming to the Lenovo Smart Tab M8 HD and Smart Tab tablets, as well as the Nokia 7.2 and 6.2 phones. According to the Verge, it&ll also come to Sony, Nokia, Transsion and Xiaomi phones, though Googleown Pixels aren&t on the companylist yet.

&The ultimate goal for proactive Assistant is to help you get things done faster, anticipate your needs and accomplish your tasks as quickly and as easily as possible,& said Google Assistant product manager Arvind Chandrababu in the announcement. &Itfundamentally about moving from an app-based way of doing things to an intent-based way of doing things. Right now, users can do most things with their smartphones, but it requires quite a bit of mental bandwidth to figure out, hey, I need to accomplish this task, so let me backtrack and figure out all the steps that I need to do in order to get there.&

Those are pretty lofty goals. In practice, what this means, for now, is that you will be able to set an alarm with just a few taps from the ambient screen, see your upcoming appointments, turn off your connected lights and see a slideshow of your images in the background. I don&t think that any of those tasks really consumed a lot of mental bandwidth in the first place, but Google says it has more proactive experiences planned for the future.

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NSWsmartphone-detecting traffic cams go live this weekendNSW’s smartphone-detecting traffic cams go live this weekend

Transport for NSW is warning drivers that 45 new mobile phone detection cameras are finally going live across NSW this Sunday, with the devices designed to catch drivers who illegally use their smartphone when behind the wheel. 

Unlike the state’s speed and red light cameras, these new cameras won’t have any signage to warn drivers of their pre

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Samsung65-inch Q60 QLED 4K TV dips below $999 for Black FridaySamsung’s 65-inch Q60 QLED 4K TV dips below $999 for Black Friday

While most Black Friday shoppers out there are chasing after the cheapest TVs they can get their hands on, we've gotten a number of emails asking us which TV we'd buy if we were shopping for a new big-screen.

Among our recommendations is the Samsung Q60R QLED TV that's on sale at Amazon for $800 off its regular price.

So what makes us recommend this

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fingerprinters

Mozilla has announced that it will block fingerprinters by default in Firefox 72 as part of its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature.

Unlike tracking cookies which require users to opt in, fingerprinters are a tracking method that allow companies to track you without your consent based on the characteristics of your computer.

They work by building a

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You can experience ray tracing at 60 FPS+ with the GeForce RTX 2060

With its series of RTX graphics cards, NVIDIA is wowing the gaming world. Thanks to NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, they are capable of powering real-time ray tracing, which is a feature that overhauls a game’s lighting and makes it realistically and dynamically shift as you move throughout the environment. This means that your games will look and fe

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