Facebook launches programme to boost coding skills of students

Facebook launches programme to boost coding skills of students

  September 27, 2018

Facebook has launched in the US free online education programme CodeFWD to increase the numbers of underrepresented and female students interested in pursuing computer programming.

"We're working on a number of initiatives like CodeFWD to widen the pipeline of diverse talent studying computer science so the next generation of tech innovators reflects and incorporates diverse perspectives, building a future that benefits us all," Lauryn Ogbechie, Education Partnerships Director at Facebook, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Created in partnership with connected toys maker Sphero, CodeFWD by Facebook, has been designed for both English and Spanish speakers.

To help educators inspire students to pursue computer programming, today we’re introducing CodeFWD by Facebook. CodeFWD is a free online education program created in partnership with Sphero to increase the amount of underrepresented and female students interested in studying computer science.

Schools and learning communities are among the most important communities that we all belong to. At Facebook, we’re creating the programs, tools, and products to build diverse education communities that bring the world closer together. We’re working on a number of initiatives like CodeFWD to widen the pipeline of diverse talent studying computer science so the next generation of tech innovators reflects and incorporates diverse perspectives, building a future that benefits us all.

How CodeFWD Works

[Updated on September 25, 2018 at 10:10AM PT to clarify program’s scope.]

CodeFWD by Facebook – launching in the U.S. and designed for both English and Spanish speakers – is a three-step program where educators and organizations introduce computer programming to 4th through 8th grade students:

• I do: educators learning. CodeFWD prepares educators to introduce the basics of computer programming to their students, even as they may be discovering the concepts themselves.
• We do: educators and students learn together. The next set of online activities is designed for educators to use to introduce students to computer programming.
• You do: students practice their new skills. During this last set of activities, educators are supporting their students as they take what they’ve learned and apply it to block-based coding exercises.

After completing these three steps, educators who want to continue developing their students’ coding skills using a tangible, hands-on product can apply to earn a free classroom set of programmable robots from our partners at Sphero.

Educators and educational organizations are essential to expose more underrepresented and female students to computer programming and to create the next generation of diverse tech innovators. We hope CodeFWD by Facebook will help support educators and organizations as they introduce and inspire underrepresented students to study computer science.

Facebook is planning to change Stories, and you may not like it?

Facebook is planning to change Stories, and you may not like it?

  September 27, 2018

Social networking giant Facebook has announced that it is going to monetize its 24-hour ephemeral Stories it runs on its platform by allowing businesses to place ads. Mark Zuckerberg-led firm is already testing ads with brands including iHeartRadio, Kettle Chips and KFC and has claims thates ad campaigns as 62% of people said they became more interested in a brand or product after se they have "seen brand lift from their Facebook Storieing it in a story."

Facebook cited the data of its more than 300 million daily users of Facebook Stories and Messenger Stories and said, "An Ipsos survey of stories users commissioned by Facebook IQ found that 68% of people say they use stories on at least three apps regularly, and 63% plan to use stories more in the future."

"Facebook Stories ads support every objective that's currently available for Instagram Stories ads, including reach, brand awareness, video views, app install, conversion, traffic and lead generation. Facebook’s full suite of targeting and measurement capabilities is also available for stories ads across platforms."

For those unaware, the company rolled out ads on Instagram's Stories last year and Facebook's ads will work similar to that of Instagram's.

acebook-owned Instagram has been undergoing a lot of changes since the past couple of months with the photo-sharing app introducing itsy bitsy features to enhance the experience of its billions of users.

But now, according to a report by The Verge, Instagram is working on a new feature that "company executives have long resisted for fear it would corrupt the personal nature of the app."

According to the report, Instagram is working on introducing a way to re-share posts from other accounts to your own feed. Currently, in order to that, users have to download third-party apps. Allegedly being called “seamless sharing,” the feature is said to available in the app in the menu option that appears in the top-right corner of every post in the feed. Users can use this by tapping on “share to feed.” Once re-shared, the posts will appear in the feed below the username and photo of the user who shared it.

Screenshots obtained by The Verge revealed this for a business accounts offering merchandise for sale. "It seems possible that Instagram might limit the ability to re-share posts to businesses, which would be less likely to post misinformation and other unwanted content into the feed," said The Verge.

So far, Instagram has not said anything on the presence of the re-sharing feature for its app.

Facebook Stories available for PagesAlmost one year back in October, announced that is going to soon roll out the feature to use Stories for all pages, including brands, news publishers, athletes, entertainers and non-profits.

Facebook Stories adds group chat and reactionsFacebook Stories also rolled out new feature to allow users to interact with them. This includes tagging people in a reply and even post stickers in it. Users now see the option to tag other friends in their list while replying to a Facebook Story. This creates a new group thread inside Facebook Messenger. A user posting the story will be able to see the replies without leaving the app.

Access Stories

There are two ways that a user can view Facebook Stories. First by scrolling to the top of the feed, the users are able to view your friends' Stories and create a story. Second, swipe right from any screen on the Facebook app. Users can't "like" Stories, but can reply to them.

Views

If users post a story to a timeline it will appear at the top of the profile as if it were any other picture or video. And just like posting to a Timeline, users can decide who sees it (Public, Friends and so on).But posting to a "Story" will make it available to all friends for a 24-hour period and will appear as a bubble at the top of their feeds. Right now, there's no way to select who sees -- or doesn't see -- a Story. Users can see who screenshots the content by clicking on the story and scroll to the bottom. To delete a story, go to the bottom right of the screen and click view icon tab and can delete a story by pressing on the buttons on the three dots at the top

APPLE FINALLY COMPLETES THE APP SHAZAM ACQUISITION OF POPULAR MUSIC RECOGNITION APP'S

APPLE FINALLY COMPLETES THE APP SHAZAM ACQUISITION OF POPULAR MUSIC RECOGNITION APP'S

  September 25, 2018

Apple on 24 September announced it has completed the acquisition of Shazam, one of the world's most popular music recognition mobile apps.

Shazam has been downloaded over 1 billion times around the world and users identify songs using the Shazam app over 20 million times each day.

"Shazam was one of the first apps available when we launched the App Store and has become a favourite app for music fans everywhere," said Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music.

The app will soon offer its experience ad-free for all users so everyone can enjoy the best of Shazam without interruption, said Apple.

Built by Shazam Entertainment Ltd, a British app development company, Shazam helps people discover, interact with and share video, audio or printed content across devices.

According to earlier media reports, Apple struck a deal with Shazam for a likely sum of nearly $400 million.

Shazam lets users identify songs simply by listening to the music playing around them.

This will be a good option for those who enjoy Apple Music, and specifically for those who live in countries, where YouTube Music and Spotify aren't available.

Apple Music is the fastest growing music subscription in the world. With a total of 45 million songs on Apple Music, Apple says that it has surpassed 50 million paid subscribers on board. With the iOS 12 releasing this fall, Apple plans to maintain this upward trend of Apple Music by adding three new and significant features.

At a private preview, held in the Apple office in Gurgaon, Tech2 got a little sneak peek into what is soon to arrive on Apple Music. To check it out

MICROSOFT LAUNCHES CORTANA SKILLS KIT FOR DEVELOPMENT OF CUSTOM VOICE APPS

MICROSOFT LAUNCHES CORTANA SKILLS KIT FOR DEVELOPMENT OF CUSTOM VOICE APPS

  September 25, 2018

The kit will help enterprise developers use digital assistant's natural-language processing to create custom voice skills for businesses.

Currently available by invitation only, the development platform was unveiled at "Microsoft Ignite" conference in Orlando, Florida on Monday.

Microsoft is unveiling a platform for enterprises to enable the personal intelligent assistant Cortana to complete company-specific tasks, including correctly filing TPS reports, announced the American multinational technology company through a blog post.

To help businesses create custom voice apps for their employee and users,   Microsoft haslaunched the "Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise" for developers

The Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise was presented Monday at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida and the development platform is currently available by invitation only.

“At heart, we are about providing valuable assistance to users throughout their day. That assistance takes different forms depending on where the users are in their day and what they are trying to do,” said Javier Soltero, the Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of Cortana. “It’s important for enterprises to be able to enable their workforces to use Cortana to perform company-specific tasks.”

Now, a simple, natural language verbal request to Cortana frees Microsoft employees “to stay in the flow of what they are doing,” he added.

If such experiences prove successful in the workplace, modern workforce employees will be more likely to access Cortana outside of work, too. After all, few people carry two phones – one for work, one for personal use. Instead, they have one phone that’s loaded with both work apps and personal apps, work email and personal email, a work calendar and personal calendar.

“We can enable the blurring of those lines without compromising privacy or enterprise utility and, at the same time, delight the user,” explained Soltero, who led the successful development of the Outlook app for iOS and Android prior to working on Cortana.

Cortana, which was first demonstrated at the Microsoft Build Developer Conference in April 2013 held in San Francisco, is named after Cortana, a synthetic intelligence character in Microsoft’s Halo video game franchise originating in Bungie folklore.

The natural language processing capabilities of Cortana are derived from Tellme Networks, which was bought by Microsoft in 2007, and are coupled with a Semantic search database called Satori.

"It's important for enterprises to be able to enable their workforces to use Cortana to perform company-specific tasks," he added.

According to Vivek Goswami, a programme manager on Soltero's team, the platform is powered by the Azure Bot Service and leverages Language Understanding from Azure Cognitive Services, allowing developers to create company-specific skills for Cortana using known and trusted tools.

Additional features include control via Azure Active Directory over when skills are deployed and who can access them.

"The specific skills that enterprises will create for Cortana remain to be revealed," noted Goswami.

As a proof of concept, IT developers at Microsoft used the enterprise platform to create an IT help desk skill that enables Cortana to file tickets for employees who are having computer problems and connect them to someone who can help.

Microsoft contributes $40 million to enable use of AI for humanitarian causes

Microsoft contributes $40 million to enable use of AI for humanitarian causes

  September 25, 2018

At the conference, Microsoft also released an array of security programmes and products.

             AI for Humanitarian Action' is part of Microsoft's 'AI for Good initiative' that was launched in July last year.

Unveiled at the annual 'Microsoft Ignite 2018' conference here, the programme called 'AI for Humanitarian Action' is part of Microsoft's 'AI for Good initiative' that was launched in July last year.

Microsoft said its "AI for Humanitarian Action" programme will accelerate the pace of innovation by managing strategic AI projects that demonstrate new applications, delivering reusable solutions and partnering with others to expand and scale initial projects.

AI can address humanitarian causes in myriad ways. For example, AI technologies like machine vision can quickly analyse images of roads damaged or destroyed by an event, making way for a faster and safer response, Smith explained.

The company said it would collaborate with NGOs and humanitarian organisations to accelerate breakthrough solutions to help monitor, detect and prevent human rights abuses.

"We are hopeful the world will see what a compelling force for good AI can be when it's used well in partnership with innovative NGOs. By ensuring technology fulfils its promise to address the broadest societal needs, we can empower everyone to achieve more," Smith noted.

  September 05, 2018

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