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Apache Pinot is an open-source analytics platform that utilizes an OLAP database to provide low-latency insights into large amounts of data. OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing and is a method in which data from multiple sources can be used together, allowing companies to group data from websites, applications, internal systems, and more together for analysis. “For example, a retailer stores data about all the products it sells, such as color, size, cost, and location. The retailer also collects customer purchase data, such as the name of the items ordered and total sales value, in a different system. OLAP combines the datasets to answer questions such as which color products are more popular or how product placement impacts sales,” AWS wrote in a post explaining OLAP. Key features of Apache Pinot include low-latency queries, the ability to handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent queries per second, batch and streaming ingestion, versatile joins, rich indexing options,

Anthropic has just released an update to its AI assistant Claude that will make it much more powerful, as the model now has the ability to interact with external tools and APIs. According to Anthropic, this will enable Claude to perform complex tasks, manipulate data, and provide more dynamic responses. For example, it can pull information from invoices to avoid manual data entry, convert prompts into structured API calls, answer questions by searching databases or using web APIs, or automate tasks through software APIs.  Developers will be able to specify which tool Claude should use or allow it to determine and use the tool it thinks is best for the job.  Tool use also works with images, enabling Claude to incorporate image inputs in applications.  “Claude with tool use is accurate and cost-effective, and now powers our live voice-enabled AI tutoring sessions. Within just a few days, we integrated tools into our platform,” said Ryan Trattner, CTO and co-founder at StudyFetch

The Dynamic JVM language world – especially the CFML language – has been static for some time. A big change is afoot with the creation of BoxLang, and SD Times recently had the opportunity to speak with Luis Majano, CEO of Ortus Solutions, which has brought BoxLang – currently in an open beta that will end next fall – into the world. Here’s our talk: SD Times: The software development industry has been waiting for a more modern approach in JVM languages, and BoxLang certainly fits that description. So let me ask, “Why now, and why you?” Luis Majano: Developers have had to settle for the status quo for too long. We’ve been spectators for long enough. BoxLang is a new, modern, and modular language for the JVM. It is here to empower us and give us the tools to create the future, not just witness it .   We have created open-source libraries and frameworks for over 18 years. These libraries and frameworks have mostly been targeted at the ColdFusion/CFML ecosystems and powering thousan

Thirty-five years ago, a group of technologists came together to support an object-oriented GUI from HP called New Wave. Bill Hoffman recalls: “ Back then, there weren’t a lot of folks familiar with OO development.”  It turned out to be a longer run than he expected, because by showing they could shepherd projects along by bringing people to the table and getting agreement on what would become standards, The Object Management Group was founded, and this year is celebrating 35 years of existence. Since that first effort, the consortium has led the way in the creation of such widely adopted technologies as CORBA, UML and SysML (with V2 coming some time this year) and the Unified Architecture Framework (UAF), all the way to today’s Artificial Intelligence Platform Task Force and System Assurance Platform Task Force. CORBA has been hugely successful, having been embraced by defense agencies in the United States, Canada, the UK, Japan and NATO. Hoffman said “It’s running in things such a

OpenAI has formed a new Safety and Security Committee as it begins training its next frontier model.  Over the next 90 days, the committee will begin evaluating the company’s current processes and safeguards. Then, it will share its findings with OpenAI’s Board, which will then share the updated recommendations publicly.  The overall goal of the committee is to be able to provide guidance for how OpenAI can continue innovating on AI in a safe manner.  “OpenAI has recently begun training its next frontier model and we anticipate the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI. While we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment,” OpenAI wrote in a post . The committee will be led by Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Nicole Seligman, and Sam Altman. OpenAI’s Aleksander Madry, Lilian Weng, John Schulman, Matt Knight, and Jakub Pachocki will also b

JFrog Ltd  (Nasdaq: FROG), the Liquid Software company and creators of the  JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform , and  GitHub , the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform, announced today a new partnership to drive a best of breed, integrated platform solution, allowing joint customers to holistically manage EveryOps for developers, including DevOps, DevSecOps, MLOps and GenAI-powered apps. Development teams must manage both source code and binaries, making a bi-directional integration between JFrog and GitHub a natural fit. A jointly-built roadmap developed by the two companies focuses on seamless navigation and traceability between source code and binaries, continuous integration and deployment with GitHub Actions and JFrog Artifactory, a unified view of security findings to provide one solution for software supply chain security and policies across GitHub & JFrog Advanced Security offerings, and the ability to leverage  GitHub Copilot  to chat and query artifact and pip

As artificial intelligence advances at breakneck speed, using it safely while also increasing its workload is a critical concern. Traditional methods of training safe AI have focused on filtering training data or fine-tuning models post-training to mitigate risks. However, in late May, Anthropic created a detailed map of the inner workings of its Claude 3 Sonnet model, revealing how neuron-like features affect its output. These interpretable features, which can be understood across languages and modalities like sound or images, are crucial for improving AI safety. Features inside the AI can highlight, in real time, how the model is processing prompts and images. With this information, it is possible to ensure that production-grade models avoid bias and unwanted behaviors that could put safety at risk. Large language models, such as Claude 3 alongside its predecessor, Claude 2, and rival model GPT-4, are revolutionizing how we interact with technology. As all of these AI models gain

The Eclipse Foundation has just announced its largest release ever of Eclipse Temurin, which is an open source build of Java based on OpenJDK, otherwise known as Eclipse Adoptium .  The new release supports 54 different platform and version combinations and five major versions of OpenJDK. According to the Eclipse Foundation, this flexibility highlights the organization’s efforts in supporting a diverse range of builds and architectures. It also now supports RISC-V microprocessors, which are commonly used for embedded technologies, IoT applications, and high-performance computing.  “The incredible growth of Eclipse Temurin reflects a strong demand among developers for secure, TCK certified, and community-driven open source Java runtimes,” said Thabang Mashologu, vice president of Community and Outreach for the Eclipse Foundation. “The Adoptium Working Group’s efforts have been instrumental in delivering high performance, enterprise-ready runtime binaries and expanding the potential

AI company QX Lab AI has announced the launch of Ask QX Pro, which is a multimodal generative AI platform, designed specifically for use in European regions.  It builds on the company’s existing platform, Ask QX, and adds multimodal capabilities such as text to image, image to text, document analysis, and text to code.  This enables it to generate images from text prompts, create a description of an image, or generate code from a text prompt. It also includes a code editing feature so that developers can edit the generated code, add to it, or fix any errors.  According to QX Lab AI, the model was trained on 665 billion parameters, or 20+ trillion tokens. It also supports over 120 languages, and is focused on the EU at the moment, so it includes languages such as English, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish (Gaelic), and Cornish. Though designed for that region, it is also available globally.  “We believe that Europe is a crucial market for any technology company like ours, especially g

The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), which is a Linux Foundation project devoted to improving open source software security, has announced a collaboration with the Eclipse Foundation’s Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group to work on the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act. The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) establishes security requirements for hardware and software products for sale in the EU.   Together, the OpenSSF and Eclipse Foundation, will contribute to the development of security standards. Their goal is to come up with standards that are practical, effective, and reflect the latest open source security advancements.  They will work closely with policymakers, industry leaders, and security experts to ensure that the standards and specifications meet real-world needs.  “The E.U. CRA seeks to fortify cybersecurity across the software supply chain by implementing stringent security measures and compliance standards for software products. Recognizing the critical role of op

Phi-3 is a family of open source small language models developed and made available by Microsoft.  “Small language models are designed to perform well for simpler tasks, are more accessible and easier to use for organizations with limited resources, and they can be more easily fine-tuned to meet specific needs. They are well suited for applications that need to run locally on a device, where a task doesn’t require extensive reasoning and a quick response is needed,” Misha Bilenko, corporate vice president for Microsoft GenAI, wrote in a blog post .  The idea behind developing a model so small was inspired by Microsoft researcher Ronan Elden reading a bedtime story to his daughter, which led him to think “how did she learn this word? How does she know how to connect these words?” Applying this to AI, Elden wondered what would happen if an AI model was trained just on words that would be understood by a 4-year-old.  Phi-3 comes in a variety of options:  Phi-3-vision is a 4.2B pa

JetBrains has just released Kotlin 2.0, which it says is a major update to the programming language. It was announced at KotlinConf 2024 , happening May 22-24, which is an event full of talks about using Kotlin. “Today we are excited to release Kotlin 2.0 with a stable K2 compiler, which is multiplatform from the ground up, understands your code better, and compiles it twice as fast,” Egor Tolstoy, project lead for Kotlin at JetBrains, wrote in a blog post .  One of the main highlights of this release is that it includes a stable version of the K2 compiler , which is a complete rewrite of Kotlin’s original compiler that unifies all platforms supported by Kotlin, and offers a faster and more extensible architecture, addresses technical debt from the old compiler, fixes bugs, and lays the foundation for future language extensions.  According to JetBrains, around 15,000 developers have already used K2, and Meta has already migrated large portions of its codebase to it.  “The everyd

IBM hosted its annual conference, THINK, this week, and at the event it unveiled its current strategy and vision around AI, along with several innovations to back it up.  One of the points CEO Arvind Krishna touched on in his opening keynote is the desire to invest in and contribute to the open-source AI community.  “We firmly believe in bringing open innovation to AI. We want to use the power of open source to do with AI what was successfully done with Linux and OpenShift,” said Krishna. “Open means choice. Open means more eyes on the code, more minds on the problems, and more hands on the solutions. For any technology to gain velocity and become ubiquitous, you’ve got to balance three things: competition, innovation, and safety. Open source is a great way to achieve all three.” To that end, IBM has open sourced a new set of its Granite AI models , which can be used for tasks like application modernization, code generation, troubleshooting, documentation, and maintaining repositor

At Microsoft Build, Microsoft unveiled updates across the .NET ecosystem, including AI innovations, new features for cloud-native development, general availability of .NET Aspire, and more capabilities in the upcoming .NET 9. Microsoft and OpenAI’s ongoing partnership has resulted in the creation of an official OpenAI .NET library, which will be available in a few weeks. The library provides parity with .NET and other programming languages, provides a unified experience across OpenAI and Azure OpenAI, and gives access to OpenAI features and models, including GPT-4o and Assistants v2. Microsoft is also working on a partnership with Weavite to provide .NET vector database options. Additionally, several of its internal teams (Semantic Kernel, Azure SQL, and Azure AI Search) have been working behind-the-scenes to build a seamless developer experience for working with AI.  RELATED CONTENT: Microsoft Build: Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric, new GitHub Copilot extensions, and mor

The software testing company Parasoft has announced new updates for API, microservices, and accessibility testing. For API testing, the company is using AI to offer auto-parameterization of API scenario tests generated by the OpenAI integration.  According to Parasoft, this update will streamline the process of developing test scenarios that validate data flow.  In the realm of microservices testing, the platform now offers a single test environment for collecting code coverage metrics from multiple parallel test executions for Java and .NET microservices.   Additionally, code coverage can now be published under a single project in Parasoft DTP, which provides tests an aggregated view of their microservices coverage, Parasoft explained. And finally, for web accessibility, the company has added support for WCAG 2.2 as well as new reporting capabilities in Parasoft SOAtest and DTP.    The post Parasoft offers new capabilities to API, microservices, and accessibility testing in la

The feature flag company LaunchDarkly has announced a number of new additions to its platform that will help developers “ship at the speed of now.” These announcements were unveiled at LaunchDarkly’s annual user conference, Galaxy ‘24, happening today and tomorrow in San Francisco. First, the company announced several user experience updates, such as improved navigation, multi-environment views, dashboard shortcuts, and the ability to track changes for all resources.  Additionally, to enable smoother releases, the company announced Release Assistant, which helps standardize and automate aspects of the software release process. It enables users to create and manage their release pipelines, define audiences for each release phase, control approval and requirements, and automate rollouts.  It also announced a new LaunchDarkly CLI where developers can work in their development environments, documentation, and GUI without switching between them, and an extension for GitHub Copilot that

Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Microsoft Build , kicked off today in Seattle, WA. This year, the theme of the announcements is improving developer productivity with AI.  Today’s announcements build on yesterday’s announcement of Copilot+ PCs, which is a new generation of Windows computers designed for AI. Copilot+ PCs are capable of over 40 trillion operations per second, access to advanced AI models, and more.  “Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English,” Yusuf Mehdi, consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.  Today’s announcements are also AI-related, including Real-Time Intelligence within Microsoft Fabric, the ability to further customize your GitHub Copilot experience, the availability of GPT-4o in Azure AI Studio, and more.  Re

Komprise , a company that provides management capabilities for unstructured data, has announced the release of a new service that will enable companies to more easily integrate their data with AI services.  According to Komprise, two of the biggest challenges to incorporating AI are discovering and feeding the right data and enriching data sets for AI, both of which are highly manual processes. Komprise Smart Data Workflow Manager aims to alleviate those challenges by simplifying and automating those processes.  It includes a point-and-click UI wizard for setting up AI data workflows, which can handle tasks like searching for data sets, configuring and tuning the AI service, and defining tags and frequency of workflows.  The solution also enables use of Komprise Deep Analytics to search across all of a company’s data, regardless of where it is stored.  It offers a single interface for monitoring all workloads, which provides information such as the status of each workflow, how man

Coursera and Microsoft are partnering to offer four new Professional Certificate courses designed for entry-level tech job seekers. The four courses include: IT Support Specialist Professional Certificate , which teaches IT support skills, such as data backup, cloud computing, and mobile device management Cloud Support Associate Professional Certificate , which teaches skills in Microsoft Azure solutions and services Business Analyst Professional Certificate , which teaches data science skills, such as data-driven decision making, change management, and process modeling Project Manager Professional Certificate , which teaches project management principles, methodologies, and tools The first three courses are available now, and the project management certificate is open for pre-enrollment and will launch this summer.  They add to Microsoft’s existing lineup of entry-level Professional Certificates that are available on Coursera , such as its Cybersecurity Analyst course and it

Synthetic data is a class of data artificially generated through advanced methods like machine learning that can be used when real-world data is unavailable. It offers a multitude of compelling advantages, such as its flexibility and control, which allows engineers to model a wide range of scenarios that might not be possible with production data. Market awareness of synthetic data for software testing has been very low and its potential has not yet been realized by software engineering leaders. Gartner has found that 34% of software engineering leaders have identified improving software quality as one of their top three performance objectives. However, many software engineering leaders are inadequately equipped to achieve these objectives because their teams rely on antiquated development and testing strategies. These leaders should evaluate the feasibility of synthetic data to boost software quality and accelerate delivery. Take Advantage of the Benefits of Synthetic Data Whi

GitLab has announced the latest version of its platform. GitLab 17 introduces new features such as GitLab Duo Enterprise, a new CI/CD catalog, and Native Secrets Manager. GitLab Duo Enterprise is a new AI add-on that builds on the capabilities of GitLab Duo Pro. It can be used to detect and fix security issues, summarize issue discussions and merge requests, resolve CI/CD bottlenecks, and improve team collaboration.  It also includes an AI impact dashboard that provides insights into the impact of AI on the software development life cycle so that teams can assess whether their AI usage is delivering actual value.  GitLab expects that this offering will be available in the next couple of months to GitLab Ultimate customers. Another new feature in GitLab 17 is a new CI/CD catalog that allows developers to discover, reuse, and contribute CI/CD components. Organizations can also create their own private catalog that can only be accessed internally.  The company also added a Native Se

Flow-IPC is an open-source project created by Akamai to enable developers to instantly make in-memory transfers of data, images, and videos between different applications.  Inter-process communication (IPC) allows different programs to communicate and share data with each other, and it is crucial for distributed low-latency applications. According to Yuri Goldfeld, senior principal software engineer at Akamai and lead developer for Flow-IPC, IPC often requires a tradeoff between elegance and performance. “And even the slow approaches aren’t all that elegant,” he said. The aim of Flow-IPC is to do away with that tradeoff and give developers the best of both worlds. It is offered as a C++ toolkit to facilitate transmission of data between different application processes.  It provides API entry points at each IPC level, which allows developers to solve problems as they are encountered without needing to reorganize their application’s data representation or event loop. Goldfeld sa

Google has announced the Home APIs to enable developers to create experiences for Google Home devices.  The Home APIs provide access to over 600 million devices, Matter devices and infrastructure, and a Google intelligence-powered automation engine. “The home offers a unique opportunity for developers to create seamless and deeper relationships with users, but developing for the smart home is harder than it needs to be. Building for the smart home means integrations with many device makers, operating hubs and Matter fabrics, and operating automations engines driven by intelligent signals. Whether you build an app specifically for smart home devices or build apps that have nothing to do with the smart home – like a fitness app or delivery app – the Home APIs will let you create app experiences that offer your customers delightful and differentiated experiences on both Android and iOS,” Matt Van Der Staay, engineering director of Google Home, wrote in a blog post .  There are three