Easy-To-Read Summary of Important AI Research Papers of 2018

Trying to keep up with AI research papers can feel like an exercise in futility given how quickly the industry moves. If you’re buried in papers to read that you haven’t quite gotten around to, you’re in luck. To help you catch up, we’ve summarized 10 important AI research papers from 2018 to give you a broad overview of machine learning advancements this year. There are many more breakthrough papers worth reading as well, but we think this is a good list for you to start with.
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Amazon makes its machine learning courses available for free

Amazon announced today that it’s making its range of machine learning courses available to all developers signed up to its AWS platform for free. This program was previously available only to Amazon employees, but anyone can now take advantage of it at no charge by signing up to Amazon Web Services’ free plan. It includes 30 courses in total, with over 45 hours of course material, videos, and lab tests.
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Sentiment Analysis: What’s with the Tone?

Sentiment analysis is widely applied in voice of the customer (VOC) applications. In this article, authors discuss NLP-based Sentiment Analysis based on machine learning (ML) and lexicon-based approaches using KNIME data analysis tools. Source: infoq.com

Solving the challenges of debugging microservices on a container platform

Microservices have become mainstream in the enterprise. This proliferation of microservices applications generates new problems, which requires a new approach to managing problems. A microservice is a small, independently deployable, and independently scalable software service that is designed to encapsulate a specific semantic function in the larger applicationl. This article explores several approaches to deploying tools to debug microservices applications on a Kubernetes platform like Red Hat OpenShift, includingOpenTracing, Squash, Telepresence, and creating a Squash Operator in Red Hat Ansible Automation.
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AWS re:Invent 2018: Firecracker’s minimalist VM lights up the serverless sky

Firecracker is an eye-catching virtual machine from AWS. It is lightweight, secure, and uses Linux. Forget bloat, minimalism is the future of serverless. Firecracker is a new virtualization technology that enables customers to deploy lightweight micro Virtual Machines or microVMs. Firecracker microVMs combine the security and workload isolation properties of traditional VMs with the speed, agility and resource efficiency enabled by containers. They provide a secure, trusted environment for multitenant services, while maintaining minimal overhead.
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Protecting Consul from RCE Risk in Specific Configurations

We’ve recently become aware of a set of malware targeting Consul nodes with a specific configuration which allows remote code execution. Members of our community also (responsibly) reported incidents caused by this malware, and worked with us to include a patch in a recent version of Consul that protects from this threat in the wild. This post details how this malware may affect users, depending on their configuration, as well as outlines the steps we’ve taken to backport a patch for versions 1.
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Montezuma’s Revenge Solved by Go-Explore, a New Algorithm for Hard-exploration Problems

In deep reinforcement learning (RL), solving the Atari games Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall has been a grand challenge. These games represent a broad class of challenging, real-world problems called “hard-exploration problems,” where an agent has to learn complex tasks with very infrequent or deceptive feedback. The state-of-the-art algorithm on Montezuma’s Revenge gets an average score of 11,347, a max score of 17,500, and solved the first level at one point in one of ten tries.
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FastMRI open source tools from Facebook and NYU

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and NYU School of Medicine’s Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI²R) are sharing new open source tools and data as part of fastMRI, a joint research project to spur development of AI systems to speed MRI scans by up to 10x. Today’s releases include new AI models and baselines for this task(as described in our paper here). It also includes the first large-scale MRI data set of its kind, which can serve as a benchmark for future research.
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Humanizing Customer Complaints using NLP Algorithms

Last Christmas, I went through the most frustrating experience as a consumer. I was doing some last minute holiday shopping and after standing in a long line, I finally reached the blessed register only to find out that my debit card was blocked. I could sense the old lady at the register judging me with her narrowed eyes. Feeling thoroughly embarrassed, I called my bank right away. To my horror, they told me that my savings account was hacked and thousands of dollars were already gone!
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What’s in a Docker image?

It’s a good question, and before you know the answer, Docker images can seem pretty mysterious. Not only do I want to give you the answer, but I want to show you how I got there. Let’s start at the beginning. Hopefully you’re all familiar with a Dockerfile – the instructions on how Docker will build an image for you. Here’s a simple example. Each of these lines are instructions to Docker on how to build an image.
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