Google has announced the second developer preview of Android Things, the company’s Internet of Things solution for building connected devices with Android. The latest preview includes new features and bug fixes.
“Now any Android developer can quickly build a smart device using Android APIs and Google services, while staying highly secure with updates direct from Google,” wrote Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate for IoT at Google, in a blog post. “It includes familiar tools such as Android Studio, the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), Google Play Services, and Google Cloud Platform.”
New features include native I/O and user drivers, support for USB audio to the hardware abstraction layer, bug fixes related to peripheral I/O, support for Intel’s Joule platform, and TensorFlow for Android Things.
Facebook open-sources ResNeXt
Facebook has open-sourced ResNeXt, its implementation of a classification framework from the paper “Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks,” written by researchers from UC San Diego and Facebook AI Research.
The repository contains a Torch implementation for the ResNeXt algorithm for image classification, with the code based on fb.resnet.torch. It’s a simple, modularized network architecture for image classification. It’s built by repeating a building block that aggregates a set of transformations with the same topology, according to the GitHub page.
Developers can find code and more information here.
Nokia releases worldwide IoT network
Nokia wants to ensure IoT connectivity with its new worldwide IoT network grid (WING). WING is designed to manage IoT connective and service needs of clients’ assets as they move around the globe. WING can be used to provide connectivity, subscription and device management, security, and analytics.
“IoT connectivity as a managed service is an answer for enterprises to the current IoT deployments that are hampered by the patchwork of business agreements to connect devices around the world,” said Igor Leprince, global head of services at Nokia. “Nokia WING will provide one global IoT grid. We cannot do this alone, and we are reaching out to communication service providers across the globe to collaborate with us so that we can extend the benefits of the connected world to more industries.”
Rust 1.15.1 released
The Rust programming team has announced the latest version of its systems programming language. Rust 1.15.1 fixes two issues: a soundness bug, and a regression where certain C opponents of Rust were not compiled.
“In Rust we take pride in not breaking APIs, but since this is a new, minor feature, and the present implementation is spectacularly unsound, we decided to go ahead and release the fix immediately, hopefully before too many codebases pick it up—that is, we don’t consider this a breaking change that requires a careful transition, but a necessary bug fix,” the Rust core team wrote in a blog post.
Python GitHub migration scheduled for today
Python is moving to GitHub today, meaning non-core developers can start using GitHub to submit their changes instead of uploading patches.
“For those of you who use the current GitHub mirror to create patches, do be aware that the hashes will most likely be changing, so don’t expect your checkout to work past Thursday (you can always generate a patch and apply it to a fresh checkout),” wrote Brett Cannon, Python core development team member, in an e-mail.
More information on contributing to Python is available here.
