We start your weekend off with a review of the stories we couldn’t cover with a look at what what going on in the world of APIs. We start off with news that Yandex, the Russian search engine company, has announced that they are open-sourcing CatBoost, a machine learning library. The library is based on gradient boosting, a machine learning technique described by TechCrunch as being “designed to help “teach” systems when you have a very sparse amount of data, and especially when the data may not all be sensorial (such as audio, text or imagery), but includes transactional or historical data, too.” Yandex is freely releasing CatBoost for anyone to use under an Apache License. This move is similar to what we saw from Google when they open sourced TensorFlow in late 2015. As the demand for artificial intelligence solutions backed by machine learning platforms continues to grow, moves like this serve to help a wide range of developers take advantage of the technology.
Address validation company SmartSoft launched their new Email Verification REST API this week. The API allows users to validate the quality of email addresses collected via an application, website, or CRM system. Some of the functionality exposed includes: a quality score applied to email addresses, determination of whether an address is deliverable, alerting of email addresses generated by services used for creating disposable emails, recognition of emails associated with a business function instead of a person and more.
Finally, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Software has announced an update to an Adaptive Backup and Recovery Suite of data protection tools that aim to help customers protect their backup environment. Included with the new update is a set of REST APIs upon which the protection modules are built. As organizations try to consolidate their data protection processes, their efforts will continue to be aided by solutions that can present unified interfaces across various modules due to the common underlying APIs.