AuthorsChristos Chrysafis, Ben Collins, Scott Dugas, Jay Dunkelberger, Moussa Ehsan, Scott Gray, Alec Grieser, Ori Herrnstadt, Kfir Lev-Ari, Tao Lin, Mike McMahon, Nicholas Schiefer, Alexander Shraer
The FoundationDB Record Layer is an open source library that provides a record-oriented data store with semantics similar to a relational database implemented on top of FoundationDB, an ordered, transactional key-value store. The Record Layer provides a lightweight, highly extensible way to store structured data. It offers schema management and a rich set of query and indexing facilities, some of which are not usually found in traditional relational databases, such as nested record types, indexes on commit versions, and indexes that span multiple record types. The Record Layer is stateless and built for massive multi-tenancy, encapsulating and isolating all of a tenant's state, including indexes, into a separate logical database. We demonstrate how the Record Layer is used by CloudKit, Apple's cloud backend service, to provide powerful abstractions to applications serving hundreds of millions of users. CloudKit uses the Record Layer to host billions of independent databases, many with a common schema. Features provided by the Record Layer enable CloudKit to provide richer APIs and stronger semantics with reduced maintenance overhead and improved scalability.
Understanding how people use their devices often helps in improving the user experience. However, accessing the data that provides such insights — for example, what users type on their keyboards and the websites they visit — can compromise user privacy. We develop a system architecture that enables learning at scale by leveraging local differential privacy, combined with existing privacy best practices. We design efficient and scalable local differentially private algorithms and provide rigorous analyses to demonstrate the tradeoffs among utility, privacy, server computation, and device bandwidth. Understanding the balance among these factors leads us to a successful practical deployment using local differential privacy. This deployment scales to hundreds of millions of users across a variety of use cases, such as identifying popular emojis, popular health data types, and media playback preferences in Safari. We provide additional details about our system in the full version.
Siri is a personal assistant that communicates using speech synthesis. Starting in iOS 10 and continuing with new features in iOS 11, we base Siri voices on deep learning. The resulting voices are more natural, smoother, and allow Siri’s personality to shine through. This article presents more details about the deep learning based technology behind Siri’s voice.
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