Batch files are one of Windows’ hidden secrets for productivity. With just a bit of work, you can automate monotonous tasks and never worry about them again. Power users should learn all about batch scripting sooner rather than later. One thing you’ll need to know when writing your first batch files is the if-else statement. As you might know if you have any programming experience, the if-else statement is a way to control scripting logic. It allows you to specify a condition that branches into different blocks of code. If the condition is true, the code in the if block executes....
Are you still running Windows 10 Build 1511? If so, your machine is now officially insecure. On October 10, 2017, Microsoft announced it would no longer update Build 1511 with security patches. Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Education, and Windows 10 Enterprise are all affected. Your computer will still work, but the longer you wait, the more vulnerable you will be. It won’t take long until hackers and cyber-criminals have exploited every bug, no matter how small. You will be a walking target. So, what should you do? Check Your Build Number The first step is to...
Just as pre-teens in the 1990s were warned away from dialing 1-900 numbers, kids now need to learn how to navigate social media responsibly. Kudos, an app for kids aged eight to 13 with around-the-clock moderation, positions itself as a safe introduction to social media that also teaches its young users, some of whom were born before the first iPhone was released, how to be “good… Read More Read Full Article
Paper sizes matter, and choosing the right paper size isn’t only about money. Think of paper sizes as the “frame” for your message. Everything from printed index cards to billboards need their own specific paper sizes. And if you’re a photographer or designer, then you need to know about different sizing options and the benefits of each size. Paper sizes also differ across the world. If you’re in the U.S., you might choose Letter size while someone in Europe might opt for A4, and they aren’t exactly the same. Find the International Standard for Paper Sizes A readily accessible index of...
Google is permanently axing all “top touch” functionality from its new Home Mini device after a nasty bug was documented yesterday that essentially recorded everything around the gadget and sent it to Google. These things happen! Either the company couldn’t be sure it could fix it or it couldn’t be sure people would trust that it did — so they made the choice to… Read More
Google is permanently axing all “top touch” functionality from its new Home Mini device after a nasty bug was documented yesterday that essentially recorded everything around the gadget and sent it to Google. These things happen! Either the company couldn’t be sure it could fix it or it couldn’t be sure people would trust that it did — so they made the choice to… Read More Read Full Article
Instagram initially leaped into the public consciousness as a way for people to quickly upload and share photos from their mobile devices. It let users share snaps of their pets, vacations, and day-to-day activities with their friends and family. But since its launch in 2010, Instagram has become so much more than that. Today, everyone from brands and creative professionals to amateur photographers and governments uses the platform to promote, sell, and influence. As such, the old limitations of only uploading images from phones have become too constrictive. Users need a way to upload photos without a mobile device, thus...
Medium, the popular blogging platform on which millenials like to pen wordy opinion pieces, is opening up its Partner Program to let anyone and everyone earn money from their writing. Medium previously only invited certain publications and writers to join its Partner Program. Everyone else was stuck letting any old riffraff read their carefully chosen words for free. But now, everyone is being invited to place their content behind Medium’s paywall in the hopes of making some money. The problem is they’ll be more people chasing after those Claps from members. Medium Members Hand Out Claps Last March, Medium started...
Standalone headsets, VR replacements for your computer monitor, and ways to share VR to the News Feed were highlights of today’s big Oculus conference. Click through or scroll down to get just the need-to-know info and GIFs from our in-depth coverage of Facebook’s vision for the future of virtual reality. Read More Read Full Article
Today, Facebook’s VR ambitions looked inwards. The newly announced $199 Oculus Go headset and upcoming high-end “Santa Cruz” standalone will come with something past headsets haven’t: power buttons. Read More Read Full Article
Google recently introduced four new smart home products: Google Home Mini, Google Home Max, Google Clips, and Nest Hello. Before buying any of these new products, here are some questions to ask yourself. 1. Do You Want Google Having a Camera in Your Home? Unlike many smart home cameras on the market, Google Clips does not store images on a cloud service. Instead, the device saves the files. These clips are viewable via Wi-Fi using your mobile device. While Google could technically view your images from afar thanks to the Wi-Fi connection, they almost certainly wouldn’t do this. Can you...
If you’ve tried all the advice from the productivity gurus out there but still find yourself drowning under the weight of your to-do list, these unconventional, science-backed tips might just save your sanity. When it comes to productivity advice, most of what we read online is simply anecdotal. If you’ve tried implementing any of these tips, you’ll instantly know that just because it worked for them, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for you, too. And then you have the more evidence-based productivity tips that are repeated all over the show. Find your perfect morning routine. Start a meditation practice. Get...
Facebook wants to let you create virtual objects in its Oculus Medium sculpting platform or Facebook Spaces VR hangouts and then share them with friends who don’t have a VR headset. Today at Oculus Connect 4, Facebook previewed 3D posts, a new type of News Feed post where users can grab, spin, and interact with a 3D object to look at it from all angles. Below you can see how you can… Read More Read Full Article
Facebook wants to let you create virtual objects in its Oculus Medium sculpting platform or Facebook Spaces VR hangouts and then share them with friends who don’t have a VR headset. Today at Oculus Connect 4, Facebook previewed 3D posts, a new type of News Feed post where users can grab, spin, and interact with a 3D object to look at it from all angles. Below you can see how you can… Read More
Oculus Rift has a whole new user interface that lets you customize your VR Home space and replace your traditional computer monitor with nearly-unlimited VR screenspace. Oculus Core 2.0 is rolling out in beta in December. Oculus Dash Dash is reminiscent of a Minority Report-style interface, where windows dangle in the air and can be moved around with the wave of a hand. Dash will let you… Read More Read Full Article
In today’s world, dating can be difficult for some. Before the digital age, one could try going to bars or other public places to try and find “the one,” but this doesn’t work as well now, especially with introverts. Fortunately, we live in a time that’s ruled by apps and services on our smartphones to help us find our soulmate. However, with so many different dating apps out there, how do you know which one is the right one for you? Don’t worry, we’re going to break down four popular choices for you so you don’t have to guess which...
Amazon has unveiled the All-New Kindle Oasis. And while it’s still an expensive proposition, it also boasts some improvements over its predecessor. The biggest of which is its ability to survive getting wet, which means, for the first time ever, you can feel confident reading your Kindle in the bath. All-New Kindle Oasis E-reader - 7" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi), Waterproof, Built-In Audible, 8 GB, Wi-Fi - Includes Special Offers All-New Kindle Oasis E-reader - 7" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi), Waterproof, Built-In Audible, 8 GB, Wi-Fi - Includes Special Offers Our largest, highest resolution display- 7" and 300 ppi, reads...
Posted by Maya Gupta, Research Scientist, Jan Pfeifer, Software Engineer and Seungil You, Software Engineer (Cross-posted on the Google Open Source Blog)
Machine learning has made huge advances in many applications including natural language processing, computer vision and recommendation systems by capturing complex input/output relationships using highly flexible models. However, a remaining challenge is problems with semantically meaningful inputs that obey known global relationships, like “the estimated time to drive a road goes up if traffic is heavier, and all else is the same.” Flexible models like DNNs and random forests may not learn these relationships, and then may fail to generalize well to examples drawn from a different sampling distribution than the examples the model was trained on.
Today we present TensorFlow Lattice, a set of prebuilt TensorFlow Estimators that are easy to use, and TensorFlow operators to build your own lattice models. Lattices are multi-dimensional interpolated look-up tables (for more details, see [1--5]), similar to the look-up tables in the back of a geometry textbook that approximate a sine function. We take advantage of the look-up table’s structure, which can be keyed by multiple inputs to approximate an arbitrarily flexible relationship, to satisfy monotonic relationships that you specify in order to generalize better. That is, the look-up table values are trained to minimize the loss on the training examples, but in addition, adjacent values in the look-up table are constrained to increase along given directions of the input space, which makes the model outputs increase in those directions. Importantly, because they interpolate between the look-up table values, the lattice models are smooth and the predictions are bounded, which helps to avoid spurious large or small predictions in the testing time.
How Lattice Models Help You
Suppose you are designing a system to recommend nearby coffee shops to a user. You would like the model to learn, “if two cafes are the same, prefer the closer one.” Below we show a flexible model (pink) that accurately fits some training data for users in Tokyo (purple), where there are many coffee shops nearby. The pink flexible model overfits the noisy training examples, and misses the overall trend that a closer cafe is better. If you used this pink model to rank test examples from Texas (blue), where businesses are spread farther out, you would find it acted strangely, sometimes preferring farther cafes!
Slice through a model’s feature space where all the other inputs stay the same and only distance changes. A flexible function (pink) that is accurate on training examples from Tokyo (purple) predicts that a cafe 10km-away is better than the same cafe if it was 5km-away. This problem becomes more evident at test-time if the data distribution has shifted, as shown here with blue examples from Texas where cafes are spread out more.
A monotonic flexible function (green) is both accurate on training examples and can generalize for Texas examples compared to non-monotonic flexible function (pink) from the previous figure.
In contrast, a lattice model, trained over the same example from Tokyo, can be constrained to satisfy such a monotonic relationship and result in a monotonic flexible function (green). The green line also accurately fits the Tokyo training examples, but also generalizes well to Texas, never preferring farther cafes.
In general, you might have many inputs about each cafe, e.g., coffee quality, price, etc. Flexible models have a hard time capturing global relationships of the form, “if all other inputs are equal, nearer is better, ” especially in parts of the feature space where your training data is sparse and noisy. Machine learning models that capture prior knowledge (e.g. how inputs should impact the prediction) work better in practice, and are easier to debug and more interpretable.
Pre-built Estimators
We provide a range of lattice model architectures as TensorFlow Estimators. The simplest estimator we provide is the calibrated linear model, which learns the best 1-d transformation of each feature (using 1-d lattices), and then combines all the calibrated features linearly. This works well if the training dataset is very small, or there are no complex nonlinear input interactions. Another estimator is a calibrated lattice model. This model combines the calibrated features nonlinearly using a two-layer single lattice model, which can represent complex nonlinear interactions in your dataset. The calibrated lattice model is usually a good choice if you have 2-10 features, but for 10 or more features, we expect you will get the best results with an ensemble of calibrated lattices, which you can train using the pre-built ensemble architectures. Monotonic lattice ensembles can achieve 0.3% -- 0.5% accuracy gain compared to Random Forests [4], and these new TensorFlow lattice estimators can achieve 0.1 -- 0.4% accuracy gain compared to the prior state-of-the-art in learning models with monotonicity [5].
Build Your Own
You may want to experiment with deeper lattice networks or research using partial monotonic functions as part of a deep neural network or other TensorFlow architecture. We provide the building blocks: TensorFlow operators for calibrators, lattice interpolation, and monotonicity projections. For example, the figure below shows a 9-layer deep lattice network [5].
Example of a 9-layer deep lattice network architecture [5], alternating layers of linear embeddings and ensembles of lattices with calibrators layers (which act like a sum of ReLU’s in Neural Networks). The blue lines correspond to monotonic inputs, which is preserved layer-by-layer, and hence for the entire model. This and other arbitrary architectures can be constructed with TensorFlow Lattice because each layer is differentiable.
In addition to the choice of model flexibility and standard L1 and L2 regularization, we offer new regularizers with TensorFlow Lattice:
Monotonicity constraints [3] on your choice of inputs as described above.
Laplacian regularization [3] on the lattices to make the learned function flatter.
Torsion regularization [3] to suppress un-necessary nonlinear feature interactions.
We hope TensorFlow Lattice will be useful to the larger community working with meaningful semantic inputs. This is part of a larger research effort on interpretability and controlling machine learning models to satisfy policy goals, and enable practitioners to take advantage of their prior knowledge. We’re excited to share this with all of you. To get started, please check out our GitHub repository and our tutorials, and let us know what you think!
Acknowledgements Developing and open sourcing TensorFlow Lattice was a huge team effort. We’d like to thank all the people involved: Andrew Cotter, Kevin Canini, David Ding, Mahdi Milani Fard, Yifei Feng, Josh Gordon, Kiril Gorovoy, Clemens Mewald, Taman Narayan, Alexandre Passos, Christine Robson, Serena Wang, Martin Wicke, Jarek Wilkiewicz, Sen Zhao, Tao Zhu
You have a love for music and a desire to make your own melodies. But you just don’t know where to begin. Maybe you are interested in rocking a guitar like Eric Clapton or striking the ivory keys like Liberace. Does this sound like you? Using online lessons means you can learn to play an instrument at your own pace and when you have the time. Whatever your musical taste or instrument of choice, this list of sites is the perfect start to creating those sweet sounds. Learn Music Theory and Sheet Music Reading notes, learning musical terms, and understanding...
Here in Seattle, we are proposing to convert Interstate-5 between Seattle and Vancouver, over a number of years, into an autonomous vehicle-only highway. Seattle and Vancouver are vibrant cities, but the transportation between them is tedious and impedes valuable economic partnerships. Read More Read Full Article
Just as pre-teens in the 1990s were warned away from dialing 1-900 numbers, kids now need to learn how to navigate social media responsibly. Kudos, an app for kids aged eight to 13 with around-the-clock moderation, positions itself as a safe introduction to social media that also teaches its young users, some of whom were born before the first iPhone was released, how to be “good… 
Google is permanently axing all “top touch” functionality from its new Home Mini device after a nasty bug was documented yesterday that essentially recorded everything around the gadget and sent it to Google. These things happen! Either the company couldn’t be sure it could fix it or it couldn’t be sure people would trust that it did — so they made the choice to… 
Standalone headsets, VR replacements for your computer monitor, and ways to share VR to the News Feed were highlights of today’s big Oculus conference. Click through or scroll down to get just the need-to-know info and GIFs from our in-depth coverage of Facebook’s vision for the future of virtual reality. 
Today, Facebook’s VR ambitions looked inwards. The newly announced $199 Oculus Go headset and upcoming high-end “Santa Cruz” standalone will come with something past headsets haven’t: power buttons. 
Facebook wants to let you create virtual objects in its Oculus Medium sculpting platform or Facebook Spaces VR hangouts and then share them with friends who don’t have a VR headset. Today at Oculus Connect 4, Facebook previewed 3D posts, a new type of News Feed post where users can grab, spin, and interact with a 3D object to look at it from all angles. Below you can see how you can… 
Oculus Rift has a whole new user interface that lets you customize your VR Home space and replace your traditional computer monitor with nearly-unlimited VR screenspace. Oculus Core 2.0 is rolling out in beta in December. Oculus Dash Dash is reminiscent of a Minority Report-style interface, where windows dangle in the air and can be moved around with the wave of a hand. Dash will let you… 
