FOSS

BYTES

will become the new 

custom gradient,” 

said Alexandre 

Prokoudine in the 

release announcement. 

He added that, “Since 

this feature is useful for 

more than just gradients, 

it was made generic 

enough to be used for 

brushes and other types of resources in the future. We expect to revisit this in the 

future releases of GIMP.”

The release announcement also states that the PSD plug-in has been fixed to 

properly handle Photoshop files with deeply nested layer groups, and preserve 

the expanded state of groups for both importing and exporting. Additional 

changes fix the mask position and improve layer opacity for importing/exporting.

India’s first FIWARE Lab node to be operational  

from April 2018

Addressing the growing demand for smart city applications across India, 

NEC Corporation and NEC Technologies India Private Limited (NECTI) 

will soon establish a FIWARE Lab node in India. Having a FIWARE Lab 

node within India will encourage more participation from Asian countries, 

as they can keep all experimental and research data within the boundaries 

of the region.

FIWARE is an open source platform which enables real-time smart 

services through data sharing across verticals and agencies via open 

standards based APIs. It focuses on specifications for common context 

information APIs, data publication platforms and standard data models 

in order to achieve and improve cross-sector interoperability for smart 

applications, with FIWARE NGSI as a starting point. The technology 

is in use in more than 100 cities in 23 countries in Europe and other 

regions. It is royalty-free and avoids any vendor lock-in.

The Lab node in India will help to foster a culture of collaboration 

between various participating entities and promote their solutions in 

the FIWARE community.

“The FIWARE Foundation welcomes the new FIWARE Lab node starting 

in India. FIWARE is used by an increasing number of cities in Europe and 

other regions and I wish this new 

FIWARE Lab node will trigger 

the adoption of FIWARE both in 

India and other APAC countries,” 

said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the 

FIWARE Foundation. “It is also 

our pleasure to have the commitment of the NEC Technologies India team to 

contribute to the FIWARE community, which will strengthen the FIWARE 

technology as well as its globalisation as a smart city platform,” he added.

The facility is expected to start operations from April 2018, and is endorsed 

by the FIWARE Foundation. Organisations, entrepreneurs and individuals 

can use this lab to learn FIWARE, as well as to test their applications while 

capitalising on open data published by cities and other organisations.

Google’s AI division 

releases open source 

update to DeepVariant

Google has released the open 

source version of DeepVariant, 

a deep learning technology to 

reconstruct the true genome 

sequence from HTS sequencer 

data with significantly greater 

accuracy than previous classical 

methods. This work is the 

product of more than two years 

of research by the Google Brain 

team, in collaboration with Verily 

Life Sciences.

The Brain team programmed 

it in TensorFlow, a library of 

open source programming code 

for numerical computation that 

is popular for deep learning 

applications. The technology 

works well on data from all 

types of sequencers and eases 

the process of transitioning 

to new sequencers.

DeepVariant is being released as 

open source software to encourage 

collaboration and to accelerate the 

use of this technology to solve real 

world problems. The software will 

make it easier to receive inputs 

from researchers about the use cases 

they were interested in. This is 

part of a broader effort to make the 

data of genomics compatible with 

the way deep learning machinery 

works. Also, this move will push 

Google technologies to healthcare 

and other scientific applications, 

and make the results of these efforts 

broadly accessible.

|

 JANUARY 2018 

|

 OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU 

|

 www.OpenSourceForU.com