The latest release of Intel’s Reinforcement Learning Coach incorporates newer and stronger RL algorithms, and maintains and extends the APIs to improve usability. 

“Batch reinforcement learning allows RL to learn from a dataset, while also exercising the dataset for off-policy evaluation of the goodness of the learned policy,” Intel wrote in a post. 

The new release also features several new algorithms, support for Batch Reinforcement Learning, improved documentation, bug fixes and new APIs that enable the use of Coach as a Python library.

Amazon provides educational tools for machine learning
Amazon partnered up with edX to introduce an interactive course to help users get started with machine learning called Amazon SageMaker: Simplifying Machine Learning Application Development. 

Amazon explained that this is “an intermediate-level digital course that provides a baseline understanding of ML and how applications can be built, trained, and deployed using Amazon SageMaker.” 

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed, modular service that helps users prepare data, choose an algorithm, train the model, tune and optimize it for deployment. The interactive course was developed by AWS experts. 

The full details are available here.

Apple acquires Intel’s smartphone modem business
Apple announced that it is acquiring the majority of Intel’s smartphone modem business for $1 billion and is expected to close in Q4 2019.

“This agreement enables us to focus on developing technology for the 5G network while retaining critical intellectual property and modem technology that our team has created,” said Bob Swan, the CEO of Intel. 

As a result of the acquisition, Apple will hold over 17,000 wireless technology patents, ranging from cellular standards to modem architecture and modem operation, while Intel will develop modems for non-smartphone applications.

Redgate acquires Flyway for cross-platform database migration
Database development solutions provider Redgate announced that it is investing $10 million in the acquisition and development of cross-platform open-source database migration tool, Flyway. 

“We’ve spent the last five years developing a portfolio of SQL Server tools that enable developers to include the database in DevOps, and we want to give those same advantages to every developer on any platform. With Flyway, we’ve just taken a huge leap forward in that direction,” said Simon Galbraith, the CEO and co-founder of Redgate. 

Flyway supports databases such as Oracle to MySQL, PostgreSQL to Amazon Redshift and looks to extend to new database platforms. 

The acquisition of the tool will also provide resources to furthering tSQLt, the database unit testing framework, SQL Cover, the code coverage tool for T-SQL, and tSQLt Test Adapter, the Visual Studio tool for discovering and executing tSQLt tests.