This week as I was looking for articles, there was one particular article that caught my eye almost immediately. It is called, “Artificial fly brain can tell who’s who” I knew that I had to write about this article. This article was posted in mid October (October 18th to be exact), so it is actually fairly recent.

This article talks about how researchers at the University of Guelph and the University of Toronto have built a neural network that almost perfectly matches that of a fruit fly’s visual system, and it can even tell the difference between other flies and even re-identify them. They obtained this by combining the expertise knowledge of the biology of the common fruit fly and machine learning to produce a biologically-based algorithm.

The article then talks more about the biology of the fruit fly, and talks more about the computer program in the following paragraph. The article then concludes by talking more about the future of neural networks and AI.

I throughly enjoyed this article, and I truly believe that it was well worth the read, and I encourage others to also find the time to read this article. The part that I found the most interesting was that using this neural-network-machine-learning-based program, this “artificial fly” was able to identify other flies with a score of .75 or about 75%. They tested this by recording the fly for two whole days and then testing the program on the third day to see if it was in fact able to identify it. They also tested just the algorithm without the fly biology constraints, and this scored a .85 and .83. This is only slightly better than the program which is very good results. They also went on to compare it to human fly biologists, and they only scored a .08. Lastly, on top of all of these comparisons, they included that random chance would only score a .05. This is unbelievable in my opinion. The fact that a computer program scored that much higher than a human is truly insane. I think that this research is a huge step in the right direction for AI. After reading this article, I am much more interested in AI, and plan to continue to research the topic more.

Article URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181025142010.htm

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In our Software Construction class, we have been going over the design patterns used by developers everywhere. Our last test covered all of the design patterns, and after I got the test back, I decided to research more into the design patterns topic and I found the article, “How to make the perfect Singleton?” I found this article whilst browsing the internet looking for other articles, and this one jumped out at me.

The article starts off by discussing the purpose of the Singleton. I liked this section of the article because it provided some specific examples of when this pattern would and should be used. For example, it said it is “used when you have to control resources” (Patel), and it is used in database connections or sockets.

The article then goes on to show the reader how to create the perfect Singleton. It explains how to initialize it, and it explains how to make the class thread, reflection, and serialization safe. I actually didn’t know what it meant to make a class thread, reflection, and serialization safe until I read this article.

The interesting part of this article is how many new terms it introduced me to. The volatile keyword was brought up in this article, and I personally haven’t seen this keyword anywhere in my few years at Worcester State. The volatile modifier makes it so that the write of a certain variable is guaranteed to happen before the read of said variable. I also learned that making classes thread safe is essential for any “multi-threaded application environment” (Patel). They use Android applications as an example. I also learned how to make my Singleton class safe from Serialization, which is simply just preventing others from creating new instances by serializing and deserializing the singleton. I also learned how to prevent Singleton failure due to reflection. This was also very simple as you just have to throw a run-time exception in the constructor.

This article was a great read and contained a lot of useful information. I plan on using this information that I obtained in the future when I create more classes using the singleton pattern.

Link: https://medium.com/exploring-code/how-to-make-the-perfect-singleton-de6b951dfdb0

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Today I read an article titled “Software Development Trends in 2018 That Will Dominate in 2019” This was a very interesting article that talks about the current trends involved in software development and how they will continue to be a force to be reckoned with in 2019. The article talks about 5 different trends that will be huge in 2019: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Progressive Web Apps, Blockchain Technology, Cybersecurity, and Low-code Development.

I chose to write about this article because I already knew that AI is one of the biggest current trends in software development, but I thought it would be interesting to read up on other trends in the world of software development. This article did not disappoint as I was able to learn more about Blockchain technology. I personally never heard of that before reading this article. I read that it was being used in the medical field, and it was being applied to the medical data in order to store it safely within a network. This appealed to me because my sister, and mother both work in the medical field, and I am sure that this could be useful in their line of work.

Although, I knew that AI was going to continue to be a huge trend in Software Development, I learned that AI will be used by “more than 40% of the organizations to automate their business in 2019” (Williams).

This article didn’t elaborate on low-code development too much unfortunately, but basically, it allows developers to build software without much expertise in coding. This part actually brings up an intriguing thought. While it does help people without expertise code more, could this be a bad thing for other developers? If everyone is given the opportunity to easily learn code, will that possibly take away opportunities from the extremely hard working developers? I don’t believe that will actually happen because the software development field is constantly evolving, so those with expertise in the field will continue to thrive.

Cybersecurity was the last trend that will continue into 2019, and I do feel like this is a given. The article mentions that 18% of companies did report at least one security incident in 2018. This is still an alarming number because some companies have a lot of important information that shouldn’t be leaked or taken. The trend that will continue is that these companies will look for Cybersecurity developers and thus, better programs will constantly be developed to virtually guarantee complete protection for any company’s data.

Article: https://medium.com/@Jessicawlm/software-development-trends-in-2018-that-will-dominate-2019-db1a1681c84d

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.