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Whether you’re interested in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to drive better health outcomes, reduce your operational costs, or improve fraud detection, one way you can better unlock these capabilities is through leveraging blockchain.

In my last blog, “Improving Patient Care through AI and Blockchain – Part 1,” I discussed several opportunities for blockchain to help advance AI in healthcare, from sourcing more training data from across a consortium, to tracking provenance of data, improving the quality of AI with auditing, and protecting the integrity of AI using blockchain. In this second blog, take a look at four more reasons to consider blockchain for advancing AI in healthcare.

1. Shared models
   In cases where constraints exist that preclude the sharing of raw training data from across a consortium of healthcare organizations, for legal or other reasons, it may be possible to incrementally train shared models, enabled by the blockchain. In this approach the AI / ML models themselves can be shared across the network of healthcare organizations in the consortium, rather than the raw training data, and these shared models can be incrementally trained by each organization using its training data, and within its firewall. Blockchain can then be used to share the models as well as metadata about training data, results, validations, audit trails, and so forth.
2. Incentivizing collaboration using cryptocurrencies and tokens
   Cryptocurrencies and tokens on blockchain can be used to incent and catalyze collaboration to advance AI / ML in healthcare. From sharing of training data, to collaboration on shared models, results, validations, and so forth, healthcare organizations can be rewarded with cryptocurrencies or tokens proportional to their participation and contribution. Depending on how the blockchain is setup these cryptocurrencies or tokens could be redeemed by participating healthcare organizations for meaningful rewards, or monetized. This can be useful in any AI / ML blockchain initiative both as an accelerant, and could also be critical to overcome potential impediments and reservations to collaboration that can arise where the size / value of contributions from organizations across the consortium are asymmetrical.
3. Validating inference results and building trust fasterBefore AI / ML models can be used for patient care they must be validated to ensure safety and efficacy. A single organization validating a model alone will take more time to achieve an acceptable level of trust than would be the case for a consortium of healthcare organizations concurrently collaborating to validate a shared model. Blockchain can be used to coordinate and collaborate around such validation to increase synergy, minimize redundant efforts, accelerate validation, and establish trust in a new model faster.
4. Automation through smart contracts and DAOsExecutable code for processing transactions associated with AI / ML, whether procurement of training data or otherwise, can be implemented on blockchains in the form of smart contracts. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) such as non-profits can also be built using smart contracts to automate whole enterprises that can facilitate advancing AI / ML in healthcare at scale.

Keep the conversation going

If you’re interested in using AI, ML, or blockchain for healthcare, you know that new opportunities are constantly surfacing and with it come a whole host of new questions. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter to get updates on these topics as well as cloud computing, security, privacy, and compliance. If you would like to explore a partnership as you work to implement AI and/or blockchain for your healthcare organization, we’d love to hear from you.

For more resources and tips on blockchain for healthcare, take a look at part 1 of this series here.

Living in the south of England, just outside London, I’m naturally a Manchester United fan. Supporting this Red Devils in the post-Fergie era is not easy. The current manager is world-class, they’ve got plenty of high-calibre international players at the club and at times they still play some excellent football, but at the same time their style of play can be very frustrating to watch, their form is inconsistent and they keep failing to seriously challenge for the major honours again. It hasn’t yet started getting any better from one season to the next.

Football Manager Touch has followed a similar pattern in the few years that it’s been around. Like with watching Man United these days, Sports Interactive’s sports simulation for tablets has a lot of quality running through it and is truly great at times but it leaves you feeling slightly underwhelmed and wanting more. This year’s edition, FM19 Touch, leaves the same impression.

I’ll return to this later for my conclusion – but for now, let’s go over some basics and some positives.

Football Manager Touch is the more advanced, and expensive at £20, of the two handheld versions of the premier football management sim. It’s somewhere in-between the streamlined Mobile game and the full-blooded PC game. This is the fifth tablet instalment of FM Touch, which started in 2015 as FM Classic in reference to how it offered a retro-inspired, stripped-back and speedier experience compared to the desktop game while still offering a good amount of the depth and complexity.

I’m not going to go all the way back to the beginning and explain what type of game Football Manager is because I’m going to assume you know already. If you are here reading this and don’t know what it’s all about then that’s weirder than Paul Pogba’s penalty run-ups. Suffice to say, in the main career mode you take charge of a real-world football club and then manage them through seasons as you pick the team, sign new players, choose tactics for matches and hopefully lead them to glory rather than get the sack from your virtual employer.

FM Touch is designed to give wannabe bosses who are ‘bursting with ambition but short on time’ an on-the-go management experience that dispenses of distractions like the ‘media circus’ and offers instant results on match days to help blast through fixtures. It’s a streamlined format with less micro-managing compared to the bigger, bulkier main title but it still provides a weighty, immersive and addictive game.
Sports Interactive has settled into a routine of annual releases of its three Football Manager, including Touch. Like with other franchises, players are expected to pay out again for the ‘new’ game which is basically the same as the previous year save for updated rules and rosters along with a few tweaks and added features.

One change for this year is the presentation has been given a bit of a revamp, with a fresher and brighter new look. Like when your team unveils a new kit, this doesn’t make much difference to how the game plays but it looks nice. The user interface and screen layout are much the same as before, being intuitive and easy to use for the most part. It can occasionally be slightly fiddly to tap on the correct part of the screen and there’s a minor new annoyance this time in how information in certain text boxes is cut short.

A more significant addition for FM19 is tactical styles which put another layer on top of the already immense range of option for setting up your team. You can now choose from a selection of pre-set systems such as high-intensity gegenpress, the Spanish-flavoured tiki-taka or the more rudimentary route one, which serve as the overall philosophy for how your team plays. There is a vast amount of customisations for each of these structures as you put plans in place across the three phases of possession, transition and not-in-possession. Then on top of this you can choose from numerous formations, or create your own, while also assigning roles and detailed instructions to individual players. 

The tactical possibilities are insane and overwhelming, but they are also a big part of the game’s appeal. One small gripe is there is sometimes a lack of information easily available in the game to explain what all the options mean. The new inductions (tutorials on certain parts of the job) are useful, but having a more easily accessible glossary at your fingertip on particular screens would be handy.

As well as enhancements to the tactical side of the game, training has also been given something of a revamp. You now get a rating of 1 to 10 for each player showing well are they performing in training, and you can also set several aspects of each player’s training routine. You can dictate which position, role and duty each player trains on, which areas they will have additional focus on, such as strength or speed, and what intensity they will train at. Beyond this, you can encourage certain traits in players across various categories including movement, passing and technique.

I suspect most people will still leave the training to their in-game assistant manager because it does remain one of drier more number-driven parts of the game, but it does provide plenty of scope to get hands-on with the development of your squad should you want to. The rest of the game remains much the same as last year, and the year before. Further changes are either unnoticeable or insignificant.

I called the 2018 version of FM Touch a “magnificent game in many ways” and the 2019 edition is every bit as worthy of this description. There is still so much to like about it and it continues to be a huge, absorbing and generally enjoyable game, with the new features I’ve described only adding to its authenticity and complexity. But … there has to be a but as I swing back around to my opening when I compared FM Touch to Man United and said it can leave you feeling slightly underwhelmed and wanting more.

Another thing I said in my review of last year’s game was that it needed to deliver more next time to stop the series going stale. Sadly, it hasn’t really delivered more, and the series is starting to go stale. The game hasn’t evolved very far from when it first arrived in 2015. There have been improvements around the edges, including this year’s tactics and training alterations, but none of these have been very big steps forward.

Whether through picking a new coach and plotting a different direction or signing players who bring extra quality, football teams are constantly looking to better themselves – at least those teams that want to get to the top or stay there. This is what Sports Interactive should be doing with FM Touch; always looking to make each new game distinct and distinctly superior to the previous one. But they don’t seem to do that – each new game is at best an incremental improvement on the previous year.

Whether it’s a lack of ambition (perhaps evidenced by the addition of the German league being one of the main new features this year – big whoop), a lack of resource or just not prioritising this version, it feels like the effort is rather half-hearted. The two big things I’ve been calling for are media work such as press conferences and staff interactions such as being able to talk to your players. Both of these features are again absent in FM19 Touch, and that’s to the game’s detriment. It means there is no opportunity to show any personality or stamp your identity on anything.

Sports Interactive continues to boast that its games “skips the pre-match proceedings and media circus to focus your attention on the best bits – squad building and match day”. I respectfully disagree with them about these being the best bits and about leaving out the other bits. I don’t want the Touch game to become as bloated and time-consuming as the PC version, but there needs to be something better than a few adjustments to justify charging people £20 (a massive amount in mobile game terms) for essentially the same game again next year.

For now, FM19 Touch is easily top of the league because there are no other similar games that even come close to it – but, like my Old Trafford outfit, you feel it could and possibly should be doing better.

GNOME is the default desktop environment shipped with Fedora Workstation. GNOME Shell provides an awesome, minimal, default experience that is easy to pick up and use. However, GNOME Shell Extensions make it easy to add to and change the behavior of GNOME.

The extensions.gnome.org website is the canonical source for quality GNOME extensions, and previously, the easiest way to install was directly from the website. However, recent updates to the GNOME Software application now allow you to browse, search, install, and update extensions from extensions.gnome.org. This how to covers the basics of installing these extensions using GNOME Software.

Check the Software Sources

On a Fedora Workstation install, extensions.gnome.org should already be enabled by default as a software source. However, it pays to check that it is enabled before proceeding.

First open the Software Repositories dialog by in Software’s application menu:

Then scroll down, finding the extensions.gnome.org item, and checking it is enabled, and enabling it if needed.

Browse Extensions

With the correct software source enabled, extensions from extensions.gnome.org will start appearing in searches in the Software application. To browse just the extensions, click on the Add-Ons category on the main Software page:

The Shell Extension tab then lists all the available extensions:

Note that some of the extensions above are doubled-up. This is because these extensions are also available as RPMs in the official Fedora repositories.

Installing an Extension

Installing an extension is done in the same manner as any other item in the Software Application — simply press the install button and you will be right to go. Note too, that once an extension is installed, you are easily able to launch the extension settings from the details page. Additionally, note the Source item in the details. This shows you if the extension you are installing is from the official Fedora repos, or the extensions.gnome.org source.

It was May 2018 in Copenhagen, and the Kubernetes community was enjoying the contributor summit at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, complete with the first run of the New Contributor Workshop. As a time of tremendous collaboration between contributors, the topics covered ranged from signing the CLA to deep technical conversations. Along with the vast exchange of information and ideas, however, came continued scrutiny of the topics at hand to ensure that the community was being as inclusive and accommodating as possible. Over that spring week, some of the pieces under the microscope included the many themes being covered, and how they were being presented, but also the overarching characteristics of the people contributing and the skill sets involved. From the discussions and analysis that followed grew the idea that the community was not benefiting as much as it could from the many people who wanted to contribute, but whose strengths were in areas other than writing code.

This all led to an effort called the Non-Code Contributor’s Guide.

Now, it’s important to note that Kubernetes is rare, if not unique, in the open source world, in that it was defined very early on as both a project and a community. While the project itself is focused on the codebase, it is the community of people driving it forward that makes the project successful. The community works together with an explicit set of community values, guiding the day-to-day behavior of contributors whether on GitHub, Slack, Discourse, or sitting together over tea or coffee.

By having a community that values people first, and explicitly values a diversity of people, the Kubernetes project is building a product to serve people with diverse needs. The different backgrounds of the contributors bring different approaches to the problem solving, with different methods of collaboration, and all those different viewpoints ultimately create a better project.

The Non-Code Contributor’s Guide aims to make it easy for anyone to contribute to the Kubernetes project in a way that makes sense for them. This can be in many forms, technical and non-technical, based on the person’s knowledge of the project and their available time. Most individuals are not developers, and most of the world’s developers are not paid to fully work on open source projects. Based on this we have started an ever-growing list of possible ways to contribute to the Kubernetes project in a Non-Code way!

Get Involved

Some of the ways that you can contribute to the Kubernetes community without writing a single line of code include:

The guide to get started with Kubernetes project contribution is documented on Github, and as the Non-Code Contributors Guide is a part of that Kubernetes Contributors Guide, it can be found here. As stated earlier, this list is not exhaustive and will continue to be a work in progress.

To date, the typical Non-Code contributions fall into the following categories:

• Roles that are based on skill sets other than “software developer”
• Non-Code contributions in primarily code-based roles
• “Post-Code” roles, that are not code-based, but require knowledge of either the code base or management of the code base

If you, dear reader, have any additional ideas for a Non-Code way to contribute, whether or not it fits in an existing category, the team will always appreciate if you could help us expand the list.

If a contribution of the Non-Code nature appeals to you, please read the Non-Code Contributions document, and then check the Contributor Role Board to see if there are any open positions where your expertise could be best used! If there are no listed open positions that match your skill set, drop on by the #sig-contribex channel on Slack, and we’ll point you in the right direction.

We hope to see you contributing to the Kubernetes community soon!

This article originally appeared on the Kubernetes Blog.

Substance Painter, the popular PBR based texturing application, just received a major update.  The fall update comes with a completely new rendering engine resulting in better performance with lower hardware demands by incorporating Sparse Virtual Textures, which simulate large textures using less memory.  The new engine also supports up to 300 UV Tiles at once enabling support for massive scenes.  There are also several new tools aimed at mobile users including a new 2D viewport exporter with the ability to bake into a single high resolution texture and more.

Complete details on new features from the release notes:

Added:

• Summary: a huge boost in performance, viewport upgrades, proper 2D view export, new UI helpers, an enhanced symmetry tool and new content
  
• [SVT][Engine] Sparse Virtual Textures (SVT)
  
• [SVT][Preferences][UI] SVT hardware support acceleration option
  
• [SVT][Log] Additional information for Sparse Virtual Texturing feature (e.g. size disk)
  
• [SVT][UI] Message window at start if size on disk too low for the cache
  
• [SVT][Preferences][UI] Substance Painter global cache location
  
• [SVT] New environment variable to specify the path of the cache of Substance Painter
  
• [SVT] New environment variable to activate the SVT hardware support acceleration
  
• [SVT] Detect sparse support by hardware
  
• [SVT][Hardware Sparse] Raise minimum driver version for Nvidia GPU
  
• [SVT][Shader][[Viewport][UI] Warn user if artefacts present with Sparse Virtual Texturing at project opening
  
• [Anti-aliasing][Viewport] New temporal anti-aliasing filtering for 3D viewport (via Display Settings)
  
• [Export] Export the content of the 2D viewport as a single texture
  
• [Export][Dithering] Expose dithering at export
  
• [Layer stack] Colors on layers and folders
  
• [Layer stack] Quick activation and deactivation of multiple layers and effects
  
• [Layer stack] Easier navigation for blending modes with up down keys and mouse scroll
  
• [Proj][UI] Additional rotation manipulator on all three axis for triplanar
  
• [Proj][Shorcuts] – and + to change the UV projection manipulator size
  
• [Shader] Control coated layer parameters with channels in the PBR-coated shader
  
• [Substance] Expose new mesh-based texture inputs for filters and generators
  
• [Symmetry][Viewport][UI] Control symmetry offset with manipulators
  
• [Symmetry][Contextual toolbar][UI] New symmetry panel with options
  
• [Symmetry] New symmetry line intersection mode
  
• [Symmetry] New symmetry clone cursor
  
• [Symmetry][Shortcuts] Q to hide and -, + to change size and shift to snap
  
• [Log] Improve error messages when unable to export textures
  
• [Scripting] Allow to change or update the resources in Display Settings
  
• [Scripting] Allow to create or remove channels in Texture Sets
  
• [Content][Shaders] Add support for anisotropy with a dedicated shader (pbr-metal-rough-anisotropy-angle)
  
• [Content] Update of the preview sphere with anisotropy and modified angle
  
• [Content] Updated matFx shutline
  
• [Content] New Texturing.XYZ seamless face scan
  
• [Content] New anisotropic procedurals
  
• [Content] New filter: baked lighting stylized
  
• [Content] New environment map: studio automotive neutral
  
• [Content] New project template: PBR – metallic roughness Anisotropy angle (with anisotropy channels)
  
• [Content] New project template: PBR – metallic roughness Coated

Fixed:

• [Color Picker] Painting cursor appearing when trying to pick a color
  
• Crash by Selecting or Unselecting layers in a specific order can lead to crash
  
• Crash when pasting as an instance a layer with a mask
  
• [User Channel][Regression] Crash when renaming user channel
  
• [User Channel] Grayed brush preview
  
• [Alembic] Only one texture set from several materials after import
  
• [Engine] Exported texture differs from viewport for brush stamps
  
• [Engine] Invert with a level effect does not fully affect a texture
  
• [Material picker is applying a brush stroke while picking
  
• Switching resolution to 128x128px leads to a crash
  
• Mesh map links are not updated properly when rebaking or instancing layers
  
• [Substance] UserData ColorSpace does not work on Baked Mesh Normal requested as input
  
• MDL association mismatch when using multiple shaders instances
  
• [Symmetry][Fill Layer] Symmetry plane and its manipulator active in Fill Layer
  
• [Viewport] Pivot point for translation not always updated after clicking
  
• [UI] Fixed icons and removal of placeholders for HDPI monitors

Known Issues:

• Computation freeze on AMD VEGA GPUs
  
• Huion tablet issue with shortcuts on Windows OS
  
• Anti-aliasing and shadows when active together may give unexpected results

You can learn a great deal more about this release in this blog post.

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