Google has announced a new partnership with Udacity to provide beginner and advanced Android training courses. The courses will be taught by experts from the company’s developer platform team.
In addition, developers can sign up for the new Android Nanodegree. Users enrolled in the Nanodegree program will have access to coaches who will review their code, provide guidance and answer questions. The Nanodegree courses currently include Android App Development for Beginners, Developing Android Apps, Advanced Android App Development, Google Pay Services, Android Ubiquitous Computing, Android Performance, Android Design for Developers, and Gradle for Android and Java.
Google updates diversity report
Google recently released an updated version of its diversity report, which shows the company has made improvement, but it still has a ways to go. Overall, the company reported that female employees now represent 30% of the company, but its numbers for African-Americans and Hispanics are still low. Only 18% of women currently are part of the company’s technology business.
“It’s going to take time to get there, but we’re on the road to increasing access to opportunity for everyone,” the company wrote on its website.
More information is available here.
SourceForge changes policies after reports of project tampering
Software repository SourceForge has announced third-party policy changes to its platform after reports and allegations surfaced of it repurposing inactive projects as advertising malware.
The repository came under fire for another instance of malware back in March, and the latest misappropriation concerns the takeover of the SourceForge account for the Windows version of the open-source GIMP image editing tool. Since the GIMP project left SourceForge, the account has been used to distribute bundleware ads. The newly announced changes to SourceForge policy state the repository will stop presenting third-party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects.
More details are available in a story from Ars Technica.
IBM announces Watson Tradeoff Analytics
IBM has announced the general availability of a new cognitive service available on Bluemix for developers to use Watson’s machine learning capabilities to weigh business decisions.
IBM Watson Tradeoff Analytics, imbued since the beta release with expanded language support, additional client library customization and categorial date/time value input, is an API that acts as a mathematical comparison tool for complex decision-making.More information can be found here.
