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Getting Better at Understanding Academic Papers: a Brief Guide for Beginners (Part 1)

Reading time4 min
Views6.5K
«Nothing makes you feel stupid quite like reading a scientific journal article» — writes the TV presenter and molecular biologist Adam Ruben. In a way, he's right — many of us get lost in the often confusing language of peer-reviewed papers. But the situation does not have to be hopeless. A bit of effort on the readers' part can go a long way. We looked at the techniques actual scientists use to navigate academic content.

And compiled them into this two-part guide (part 2).


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Glaucoma — not heard of it? Meet the serial silent view killer

Reading time8 min
Views1.8K
Among the eye diseases are those that are especially dangerous. At first they are asymptomatic — nothing hurts, there are no complaints, they can “disguise” as other “mild” diseases and, most importantly, appear at any age and irrevocably “destroy” their eyesight.

Imagine if you left your left eye accidentally, but with your right, everything is “like a fog”! Read on the Internet how to help yourself or call your friends, and they — do not worry, blink. While they were waiting, it seemed that the fog was really over. This is how periods of anxiety recur, but at first there is little concern. And he (the murderer) began his insidious business. And as a rule, in both eyes, even if the second does not bother! And age is not an obstacle — children are also susceptible to this disease — 10% of children are blind from glaucoma.

Glaucoma is quite common in all countries — in 15% of cases of blindness, it is she who is the cause. This puts her in second place to the causes of incurable blindness!

And all is why — because the human brain very well «replaces» the dips in the field of view, if they arise gradually, adapt, and only when 30-40% of the optic nerve the feeling of «fog» begins. And all — hello, lost non-renewable!
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Working with light: Starting your career at ITMO University

Reading time4 min
Views1.6K
One of our previous articles featured an overview of our photonics department students’ work lives. Today we’re going to expand on this topic by looking at four related MA programs: “Light Guide Photonics and Programmable Electronics”, “LED technologies and optoelectronics”, “Photonic materials” and “Laser technologies”. We sat down with some of the folks currently enrolled in these programs, as well as recent graduates, to talk about the role ITMO University played in kickstarting their careers.

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Research in rejuvenation biotechnology – where are we now?

Reading time2 min
Views1.5K


Certainly this event is an example of some of the people in our longevity community coming in and just taking over a little bit of somebody else's conference to talk about longevity… but really exposing the rest of the community to it. I'm finding that at every event I go to, I'd really love to have conference presentations where I get to talk about some interesting thing about the longevity industry, because there are a lot of really interesting things going on.

But every presentation turns out to be «hey, we exist, please notice us — because this is really, really important.» Everything that you guys think that you are doing in medicine is about to be up-ended, because suddenly we're going to be actually able to stop people from getting sick and incapacitated and debilitated in old age. This is happening right now, the first rejuvenation therapies exist. But nobody notices.
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MEMS accelerometers, magnetometers and orientation angles

Reading time8 min
Views13K


When it's necessary to evaluate the orientation angles of an object you may have the question — which MEMS sensor to choose. Sensors manufacturers provide a great amount of different parameters and it may be hard to understand if the sensor fit your needs.

Brief: this article is the description of the Octave/Matlab script which allows to estimate the orientation angles evaluation errors, derived from MEMS accelerometers and magnetometers measurements. The input data for the script are datasheet parameters for the sensors. Article can be useful for those who start using MEMS sensors in their devices. You can find the project on GitHub.
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Indebted to the Pioneers: How the Need for Innovation Sparked the Birth of the Tech Industry

Reading time4 min
Views1.1K
Successful startups often emphasize their grassroots aspects. In part one of this series, we talked about the origins of startup culture and the DIY attitude that is prevalent in the tech industry. However, there’s more to modern startup culture than that. Today, it is in many ways defined by the innovation infrastructure that got things started and allowed the tech space to blossom, and that is the focus of this article.

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Writing a laptop driver for fun and profit, or How to commit to kernel even if you're not that smart

Reading time5 min
Views2.7K

Where it all began


Let’s start with our problem statement. We have 1 (one) laptop. A new, gamer laptop. With some RGB-backlight on its keyboard. It looks like this:

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Picture taken from lenovo.com

There’s also a program installed on this laptop. That’s the thing that controls our backlight.

One problem – the program runs under Windows, and we want everything to work on our favourite Linux. Want LEDs to flash and those pretty colours to blink on and off and such. A natural question arises, can we do all that without reverse-engineering and writing our own drivers?

A natural answer arises, no. Let’s open IDA and get cracking.

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WebRTC streaming in and around virtual reality

Reading time6 min
Views3.9K


Virtual reality is on the rise these days. The equipment that was previously the exclusive preserve of crazy scientists geeks with big money from the Ministry of Defense back in the The Lawnmower Man days, is currently affordable for ordinary people; those whose pockets are empty, can assemble a VR headset from cardboard and a smartphone according to many recipes.

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A Second Year of Q#

Reading time3 min
Views1K
You can see all of the release notes for the year here.

Remember How We Started


Our first release of our second year, 0.4, was a triumph! we got a customer request for a big integer type on January 1st, and were able to respond by shipping a new BigInt data type just 29 short days later!!! Remember, we’re outside Seattle, pretty far north, so our winter days are really short.

Our secret? We had started working on the BigInt type in December.

We also decided to change our release cadence for our second year of Q#. Our first year, we had shipped releases sporadically, when we had some major feature to share, or possibly just a fix to an annoying bug. For our second year, we moved to a more regular release cadence, putting out a new release every month. We hoped that this would make things more predictable for our users and easier for us to manage.

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Channel quality indicator for server WebRTC over TCP

Reading time5 min
Views2.7K


Publish and Play


There exist two main functions of WebRTC operation on the server side in the field of streaming video: publishing and playing. In the case of publishing, the video stream is captured from the web camera and moves from the browser to the server. In the case of playing, the stream moves in the opposite direction, from the server to the browser, is decoded and played in the browser’s HTML5 <video> element on the device’s screen.

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SpaceFusion: Structuring the unstructured latent space for conversational AI

Reading time4 min
Views1.4K
A palette makes it easy for painters to arrange and mix paints of different colors as they create art on the canvas before them. Having a similar tool that could allow AI to jointly learn from diverse data sources such as those for conversations, narratives, images, and knowledge could open doors for researchers and scientists to develop AI systems capable of more general intelligence.


A palette allows a painter to arrange and mix paints of different colors. SpaceFusion seeks to help AI scientists do similar things for different models trained on different datasets.
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Top profitable ride-hailing business models implemented by growing Uber like taxi apps

Reading time5 min
Views4.8K
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There was a time when moving from one place to another was a matter of utility. People did not Care About Us lyrics like comfort. Public transportation was dominating the landscape of movement and private transport was considered a luxury.

Today, we live in a world where people expect more than just the movement. They do not want to compromise on the aspects of comfort and convenience. They would like to be picked up from their doorstep and they would like to be dropped precisely in the place that they want to be.

These transformations have given rise to the business of ride-hailing. There are a lot of companies that provide the service of transportation by picking people from one place and dropping them in a place of their choice.

The constructive onslaught of Smartphones enabled with GPS made the business of ride-hailing efficient, profitable and delightful to the customer.
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How to Write a Smart Contract with Python on Ontology? Part 4: Native API

Reading time4 min
Views1.8K
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Earlier, I have introduced the Ontology Smart Contract in
Part 1: Blockchain & Block API and
Part 2: Storage API
Part 3: Runtime API
Today, let’s talk about how to invoke an Ontology native smart contract through the Native API. One of the most typical functions of invoking native contract is asset transfer.
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How we created IoT system for managing solar energy usage

Reading time5 min
Views1.3K

If you have no idea about the development architecture and mechanical/electrical design behind IoT solutions, they could seem like "having seemingly supernatural qualities or powers". For example, if you show a working IoT system to 18th century people, they'd think it's magic.This article is sort of busting such myth. Or, to put it more technically, about hints for fine-tuning the IoT development for an awesome project in solar energy management area.

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Human pose estimation on images for iOS

Reading time5 min
Views9.2K

Human pose estimation


A few months ago I came across one interesting open source project on the Internet — Openpose the aim of which is to estimate a human pose in real-time on a video stream. Due to my professional activities, I was interested to run it on the latest iOS device from Apple to check the performance and figure out if it is possible at all. It was also interesting to see how the performance of the neural network framework for iOS has been changed in the last years.

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Top 10 Chat, Audio & Video Calling API & SDK Providers for Enterprise Business

Reading time8 min
Views45K
The Worlds Leading Real-time Messaging, Audio & Video Chat Solutions That Made Biggest Impact In 2019

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With the growing trend of digitalization, most enterprises have transformed their communication methodology from mainstream to digital. In order to keep up with competitors, companies regularly upgrade their services, specially the way they relay information to their customers as well as their employees. Today, seamless real-time networking plays a critical role in engaging with individuals and enterprises, and the best way to implement such a feat is onboarding a Real-Time Chat, Voice & Video Calling SDK/API providers.
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