Author: O'Reilly Media

Feed: Radar. Author: Pamela Rucker. In a fast-paced digital world, it is tempting to suppose that deploying the latest technology is the lynchpin to competitive advantage. Extremely powerful digital technologies are now accessible to most companies—meaning you must find new ways to distinguish yourself in a crowded field. One very effective method for unearthing strategies that differentiate your organization from everyone else is to leverage your people as a competitive advantage. “Using people,” in this context, means placing an emphasis on any full-time employee, contractor, partner, supplier, gig worker, etc., who is part of your extended ecosystem of strategy and ... Read More

Feed: Radar. Author: Mike Loukides. For the past year, 5G cell technology has generated a lot of excitement–and a lot of hype. The specifications are impressive: 5G will provide a peak data rate of up to 20 Gbps (with 100 Mbps of “user experienced data rate”) to mobile devices: cell phones, smart cars, and a lot of devices that haven’t been invented yet. It’s difficult to imagine mobile applications that will require that much data, and 5G’s proponents seem willing to promise just about anything. What will 5G mean in practice? If it’s going to make any real difference, we’ll ... Read More

Feed: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Upcoming Titles. Author: O'Reilly Media, Inc.. Currently used at many colleges, universities, and high schools, this hands-on introduction to computer science is ideal for people with little or no programming experience. The goal of this concise book is not just to teach you Java, but to help you think like a computer scientist. You’ll learn how to program—a useful skill by itself—but you’ll also discover how to use programming as a means to an end. Authors Allen Downey and Chris Mayfield start with the most basic concepts and gradually move into topics that are more complex, ... Read More

Feed: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Upcoming Titles. Author: O'Reilly Media, Inc.. C# is undeniably one of the most versatile programming languages available to engineers today. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn just how powerful the combination of C# and .NET can be. Author Ian Griffiths guides you through C# 8.0 fundamentals and techniques for building cloud, web, and desktop applications. Designed for experienced programmers, this book provides many code examples to help you work with the nuts and bolts of C#, such as generics, LINQ, and asynchronous programming features. You’ll get up to speed on .NET Core and the latest C# ... Read More

Feed: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Upcoming Titles. Author: O'Reilly Media, Inc.. Ready to dive into smart contract development for the blockchain? With this practical guide, experienced engineers and beginners alike will quickly learn the entire process for building smart contracts for Ethereum—the open source blockchain-based distributed computing platform. You’ll get up to speed with the fundamentals and quickly move into builder mode. Kevin Solorio, Randall Kanna, and Dave Hoover show you how to create and test your own smart contract, create a frontend for users to interact with, and more. It’s the perfect resource for people who want to break into ... Read More

Feed: Radar. Author: Jenn Webb. In this interview from O’Reilly Foo Camp 2019, Dean Wampler, vice president at Lightbend, talks about moving AI and machine learning into real-time production environments. Highlights from the interview include: Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther. Facilitating the transition from research to production in a robust way introduces a number of complications, Wampler says, including governance, GDPR, and traceability rules. Noting the importance of traceability, he offers an example: “If I deploy a model that’s making credit card authorizations, and I keep rejecting someone’s card, and they come on and say, ‘I’m a member of ... Read More

Feed: Radar. Author: Sunil Ranka, Roger Magoulas and Steve Swoyer. In a classic 1983 paper, cognitive psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge drew attention to a curious irony: so-called “automated” systems were, in practice, usually attended by one or more human operators. The more advanced the system, she observed, “the more crucial…the contribution of the human operator.” Bainbridge believed that automation designers were in denial about this, however. As she saw it, designers approached the problem of automation as if the human factor were not, in fact, a factor. This resulted in systems that left their (inevitable) human operators “with an arbitrary collection ... Read More

Feed: Radar. Author: Jenn Webb. In this interview from O’Reilly Foo Camp 2019, Adventures in Coderland author Andrew Smith discusses the journey he’s taken while learning to code. Having started from a place of not knowing anything about coding, Smith says he went much deeper into it than he thought he would. Highlights from the interview include: Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther. Smith decided to write a book about what he’s learned, a sort of “I’m learning to code so you don’t have to” kind of tome. “I understood nothing about [coding] at all, about how it works, or ... Read More

Feed: Radar. Author: Jenn Webb. In this interview from O’Reilly Foo Camp 2019, Hands-On Unsupervised Learning Using Python author Ankur Patel discusses the challenges and opportunities in making machine learning and AI accessible and financially viable for enterprise applications. Highlights from the interview include: Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther. The biggest hurdle businesses face when implementing machine learning or AI solutions is cleaning and preparing unstructured data that exists across silos. Patel says commoditized infrastructure from companies like Amazon and Google is one of the most significant advancements toward a solution in this area: “A lot of the work ... Read More

Feed: Radar. Author: Jenn Webb. In this interview from O’Reilly Foo Camp 2019, Eric Jonas, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, pierces the hype around artificial intelligence. Highlights from the interview include: Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther. Jonas argues that “AI is a lie”—meaning that our expectations far outsize the reality of what’s currently possible. One of the issues arising from that disconnect is a level of corporate investment in the research process that hasn’t been seen before. He argues this has led to “a lot questions about whether robots are going to take our jobs, and these ... Read More