VentureBeat: Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the ‘Hey Firefox’ wakeword for voice-based web browsing. “Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Common Voice now contains over 7,226 total hours of contributed voice data in 54 different languages, up from 1,400 hours across 18 languages in February 2019.”
open source
ITPro Today: Meet the Groundswell of Open Source COVID-19 Efforts
ITPro Today: Meet the Groundswell of Open Source COVID-19 Efforts. “Open source communities around the world have been on the forefront of assisting medical researchers, health care professionals and government health agencies with research on the coronavirus responsible for the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the world.”
BetaNews: IBM launches open source tool to help COVID-19 data analysis
BetaNews: IBM launches open source tool to help COVID-19 data analysis. “COVID notebooks is designed to help with tasks including obtaining authoritative data on the current status of the outbreak, cleaning up the most serious data-quality problems, collating the data into a format amenable to easy analysis with tools like Pandas and Scikit-Learn, and building an initial set of example reports and graphs.”
EurekAlert: Predicting side effects
EurekAlert: Predicting side effects. “A multi-institutional group of researchers led by Harvard Medical School and the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research has created an open-source machine learning tool that identifies proteins associated with drug side effects.”
EurekAlert: Scientists produce first open source all-atom models of full-length COVID-19 ‘S’ protein
EurekAlert: Scientists produce first open source all-atom models of full-length COVID-19 ‘S’ protein. “The virus SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the known cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The ‘spike’ or S protein facilitates viral entry into host cells. Now a group of researchers from Seoul National University in South Korea, University of Cambridge in UK, and Lehigh University in USA, have worked together to produce the first open-source all-atom models of a full-length S protein. The researchers say this is of particular importance because the S protein plays a central role in viral entry into cells, making it a main target for vaccine and antiviral drug development.”
BetaNews: LibreOffice 7.0 Beta 1 arrives with ODF 1.3 document support
BetaNews: LibreOffice 7.0 Beta 1 arrives with ODF 1.3 document support . “The Document Foundation has released the first public beta of its upcoming LibreOffice 7.0 office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. Users are encouraged to download and test the software — which installs alongside any existing production release — ahead its final release, expected to be in August. The new release doesn’t boast any major new features, but does update ODF support to 1.3, plus unveils improvements both major and minor to the suite’s major components — in particular Writer.”
ParamSpider: New tool helps in the discovery of URL parameter vulnerabilities (The Daily Swig)
The Daily Swig: ParamSpider: New tool helps in the discovery of URL parameter vulnerabilities. “ParamSpider, a new open source tool, automates the discovery of parameters in URL addresses, a key step in probing websites and applications for vulnerabilities. Developed by indie security researcher Devansh Batham (aka Asm0d3us), the tool scrapes the parameters of a target website using the Internet Archive API. Bug bounty hunters and security researchers can then feed this data to a fuzzer to find potential vulnerabilities.”
TechCrunch: The ‘Wikipedia of COVID-19’ has launched a crowdfunding drive to keep going
TechCrunch: The ‘Wikipedia of COVID-19’ has launched a crowdfunding drive to keep going. “The Handbook has created a free online library, not unlike Wikipedia, where technologists, doctors and other specialists can find projects, share best practices, and communicate. This prevents them from wasting time working on the same problems associated with the pandemic, or at least seeing how others have solved them before attempting anything new. The CTH is already at over five hundred pages, including everything from community finance tools to ventilator designs and has now been viewed over 500,000 times in the UK and abroad. The launch of the Handbook has enabled UK doctors to advise their peers in Ecuador on developing safe personal protective equipment; mutual aid groups in the UK to sharing ways of organizing volunteers and their finances; and the exchange of models, data and infographics charting the progress in stopping the virus.”
The Next Web: Boston Dynamics is open-sourcing its robot tech to help hospitals fight coronavirus
The Next Web: Boston Dynamics is open-sourcing its robot tech to help hospitals fight coronavirus. “We’ve seen Boston Dynamics‘ Spot robot walking, running, dancing, and opening doors. Now, the company has assigned it a more important task during the coronavirus pandemic: telemedicine. In this new solution, the iPad mounted on the robot lets health workers communicate with patients remotely, saving time, reducing exposure, and preserving personal protective equipment (PPE). The newly developed application is already under trial in Bringham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts. ”
IT Pro Today: 2020 Open Source Conferences That Have Moved Online
IT Pro Today: 2020 Open Source Conferences That Have Moved Online. “Although open source developers are unlikely to fly to some cool and groovy city to spend a few days fellowshipping and learning from fellow geeks, they can still attend open source conferences from the comfort of their shelter-in-place abode, since many of the cancelled conferences are holding safe and sanitary online conferences. Even better news: Attending a conference in person can cost a king’s ransom once attendees shell out $1,000 or more for admission to a major event, plus airfare and hotel fees. In contrast, most of these virtual conferences are absolutely free. All anyone has to do is register.”
Duke Today: Duke Creates Open-source Protective Respirator
Duke Today: Duke Creates Open-source Protective Respirator. “A protective respirator created by a Duke University medical and engineering task force is now being used by Duke Health doctors as they treat patients with suspected cases of COVID-19. In an effort to combat the worldwide shortage of protective medical equipment, Duke is making the design widely available as an open-source design.”
ZDNet: Mapzen open-source mapping project revived under the Urban Computing Foundation
ZDNet: Mapzen open-source mapping project revived under the Urban Computing Foundation. “The Mapzen open-source mapping platform has a hard history. On the one hand, Mapzen, which is based on OpenStreetMap, is used by over 70,000 developers and it’s the backbone of such mapping services as , Remix and Carto. But, as a business, Mapzen failed in 2018. Mapzen’s code and service lived on as a Linux Foundation Project. Now, it’s moved on to the Urban Computing Foundation (UCF), another Linux Foundation group with more resources. UCF is devoted to helping create smarter cities, multimodal transportation, and autonomous vehicles.”
EurekAlert: Rice University emergency ventilator plans now online
EurekAlert: Rice University emergency ventilator plans now online. “The plans for Rice University’s ApolloBVM, an open-source emergency ventilator design that could help patients in treatment for COVID-19, are now online and freely available to everyone in the world. The project first developed by students as a senior design project in 2019 has been brought up to medical grade by Rice engineers and one student, with the help of Texas Medical Center doctors. The device costs less than $300 in parts and can squeeze a common bag valve mask for hours on end.”
ZDNet: Debian Linux readies an anti-coronavirus hack-a-thon
ZDNet: Debian Linux readies an anti-coronavirus hack-a-thon. “Open-source programmers and engineers have been working on a wide variety of projects to beat coronavirus. These range from hospital management programs to speeding up drug development to building inexpensive ventilators. Now, Debian Linux, one of the oldest and largest Linux distribution communities, is throwing its programming resources behind a hack-a-thon trying to beat COVID-19. “
The Register: Singapore to open-source national Coronavirus encounter-tracing app and the Bluetooth research behind it
The Register: Singapore to open-source national Coronavirus encounter-tracing app and the Bluetooth research behind it. “The app, named TraceTogether and its government is urging citizens to run so that if they encounter a Coronavirus carrier, it’s easier to trace who else may have been exposed to the virus. With that info in hand, health authorities are better-informed about who needs to go into quarantine and can focus their resources on those who most need assistance.”
