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Join Michael Levin in this video interview with Jonathan Schwartz, former Sun Microsystems CEO. "Jonathan Ian Schwartz (born October 20, 1965) is an American...
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Here’s a blast from the past. Wikipedia CTO Brion Vibber walks us through the beginnings of Wikipedia. Enjoy! Click here to hear the podcast.
Swampcast features Tim Westergren, Pandora CEOJoin Michael Levin in this Swampcast interview with Tim Westergren, Pandora CEO. Click here to listen. Photo credit: Gala
In 2007, Tim started touring the USA giving presentations about a new music service on the web called Pandora. I met Tim in Orlando. There's quite a bit of background about Pandora that Tim describes in this interview. He deferred to his CTO, Tom Conrad when I asked him about technical details. Tom and I did a Swampcast interview shortly after this one.
From Wikipedia:
In 1999 Westergren started Pandora Media along with two co-founders: Will Glaser and Jon Kraft. The Oakland, Calif., company went public in 2011,[3] reporting $138 million in revenue that fiscal year.
As an early project, Westergren and Glaser created the Music Genome Project, a mathematical algorithm to organize music.[1] As the company's chief strategy officer, Westergren spends the majority of his time traveling the nation and gathering feedback from Pandora Radio users. In 2010 he was listed by Time magazine as one among the 100 most influential people in the world.[4]
In April 2016, Pandora Media announced that Tim Westergren would replace Brian McAndrews as CEO. He had previously served as CEO and president from May 2002 to July 2004.[5]
In June 2017, he announced that he is going to step down as CEO.[6]"
This is one of the most deeply technical Swampcasts - fascinating!
https://codetown.com/profiles/blogs/pandora-swampcast-features-pand...
#pandora #tomconrad #swampcast #mikelevin
Here's a Swampcast featuring Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Enjoy!
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
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DoorDash has launched a multimodal machine learning system that aligns product images, text, and user queries in a shared embedding space. Trained on 32 million labeled query-product pairs using contrastive learning, the system improves semantic search, product ranking, and advertising relevance. Embeddings also support other machine learning tasks across the marketplace.
By Leela Kumili
Stefan Dirnstorfer discusses the shift from DOM-based testing to visual UI agents. He explains why LLMs often fail at precision tasks - like spotting one-pixel shifts or broken road networks - and shares how advanced image registration and "Chain-of-Thought" vision processing are essential for reliable QA. Learn why combining generative AI with classical algorithms is the future of automation.
By Stefan Dirnstorfer
Celebrating its 23rd year, Devnexus 2026 was held from March 4-6, 2026 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The event featured speakers from the Java community who delivered workshops and talks under tracks such as: AI Generative; AI in Practice; Core Java; Java Frameworks; and Security and Developer Tools.
By Michael RedlichAndres Almiray, a serial open-source contributor and the creator of JReleaser, discusses the project's state, noting that the tool is usable across any ecosystem, not just Java. He also touches on the Common House Foundation's mission.
By Andres Almiray
This article introduces practical methods for evaluating AI agents operating in real-world environments. It explains how to combine benchmarks, automated evaluation pipelines, and human review to measure reliability, task success, and multi-step agent behavior. The article also discusses the challenges of evaluating systems that plan, use tools, and operate across multiple interaction turns.
By Amit Kumar Padhy
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
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