Four short links: 12 July 2019
Hosting Hate, Releasing, Government Innovation, and Voice Cloning
- The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online (Gizmodo) — an interesting rundown of who is hosting some of the noxious sites on the web.
- Releasing Fast and Slow — Our research shows that: rapid releases are more commonly delayed than their non-rapid counterparts; however, rapid releases have shorter delays; rapid releases can be beneficial in terms of reviewing and user-perceived quality; rapidly released software tends to have a higher code churn, a higher test coverage, and a lower average complexity; challenges in rapid releases are related to managing dependencies and certain code aspects—e.g., design debt.
- Embracing Innovation in Government (OECD) — a global review that explores how governments are innovating and taking steps to make innovation a routine and integrated practice across the globe.
- Learning to Speak Fluently in a Foreign Language: Multilingual Speech Synthesis and Cross-Language Voice Cloning — We present a multispeaker, multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis model based on Tacotron that is able to produce high-quality speech in multiple languages. Moreover, the model is able to transfer voices across languages—e.g., synthesize fluent Spanish speech using an English speaker’s voice, without training on any bilingual or parallel examples. Such transfer works across distantly related languages—e.g. English and Mandarin.