Microsoft open sourcing Bing smarts, Tor comes to Android, NASA releases robots, and more news

Catch up on the biggest open source headlines from the past two weeks.

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Opensource.com

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Microsoft open sourcing Bing smarts, Tor comes to Android, NASA releases robots, and more.

Microsoft open sources algorithm that gives Bing some of its smarts

Microsoft shared a significant algorithm in the suite of machine learning behind the Bing search engine this week. The algorithm is called SPTAG ("Space Partition Tree and Graph") and is the brains behind answering questions like "How tall is the Empire State Building?" Take a look for yourself on GitHub.

Tor browser comes to Android mobile devices

The wildly popular anonymity tool, Tor, is now available on most Android mobile devices. This new way to browse with greater privacy is based on Mozilla's Firefox browser and could mean a major win for privacy advocates.

NASA releases space robot software

In one of the more wild releases of this week, NASA shares its flying robots called Astrobees that will inhabit the International Space Station (ISS) as part of technology testing in zero gravity environments. The documentation is significant, including everything from the conceptual research, localization methodology, and recommendations for "guest Scientists" to implement the design.

Stanford University robotics club releases open source robodog

Speaking of robots, a student robotics club at Stanford University released its robodog project, aptly named Stanford Doggo, as an open source project. The goal of the project was to build a robot "from scratch," and the source code and documentation looks sufficient to do so. The repository includes detailed instructions, parts lists, and code available on GitHub.