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Bayesian networks in Scala [closed]

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I'm looking for a library to create Bayes nets and perform learning and inference on them in Scala (or Java, in case of lack of a better solution). The library should be actively maintained, performant, preferably easy, definitely well-documented unless the usage is really straightforward. Free, open-source and commercial alternatives are ok, but for commercial solutions a free trial is required.
An ideal solution would be the equivalent of what in the .NET world is Infer.NET by Microsoft Research, but more documented.
Thanks in advance!

FACTORIE is a young project, but it fits the bill and is implemented in Scala:
FACTORIE is a toolkit for deployable probabilistic modeling,
implemented as a software library in Scala. It provides its users with
a succinct language for creating relational factor graphs, estimating
parameters and performing inference.
It's developed by Andrew McCallum and his lab at UMass, who are also responsible for the hugely useful MALLET machine learning toolkit.

You might want to look into SMILE. It is free and has Java API. Other free options in Java are UnBBayes and SamIam.
SMILE
SMILE (Structural Modeling, Inference, and Learning Engine) is a fully
portable library of C++ classes implementing graphical
decision-theoretic methods, such as Bayesian net-works and influence
diagrams, directly amenable to inclusion in intelligent systems.
UnBBayes
UnBBayes is a probabilistic network framework written in Java. It has
both a GUI and an API with inference, sampling, learning and
evaluation. It supports BN, ID, MSBN, OOBN, HBN, MEBN/PR-OWL, PRM,
structure, parameter and incremental learning.
SamIam
Samiam includes two main components: a graphical user interface and a
reasoning engine. The graphical interface lets users develop Bayesian
network models and save them in a variety of formats. The reasoning
engine supports many tasks including: classical inference; parameter
estimation; time-space tradeoffs; sensitivity analysis; and
explanation-generation based on MAP and MPE.
Pure Scala and free options are FACTORIE (already mentioned) and Figaro. But Figaro currently lacks learning part.
Figaro - Probabilistic Modeling
Figaro models are data structures in the Scala programming language,
which is interoperable with Java, and can be constructed, manipulated,
and used directly within any Scala or Java program.

Perhaps Banjo fits the bill? I'm not sure how actively it is developed, but I know it has been around for at least a few years ... (never used it myself).
Banjo: Bayesian Network Inference with Java Objects

Some Java alternatives to Infer.NET were presented as answers to this question. So, I think basically you're asking about either a follow up to that question (it was asked during the second half of 2010) with respect to Java or fully Scala-based solution.

There is a Scala lib out there by now:
https://github.com/danielkorzekwa/bayes-scala

High-End 2D Java (SE) Graphics Library [closed]

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I am looking for a high-end graphics library for Java Standard Edition. I know some fairly low-level libraries: AWT/Swing, JOGL, SDL. Are/is there an alternative?
My requirements are (atleast):
Anti-aliased
Fullscreen support
Alpha channel
Blend modes and Z-depth
Rasterized Effects: (motion) blur, glow, gloom, etc.
And, optionally:
Hardware acceleration
Vector graphics (scale/rotate/translate in floating point precision)
Well documentated, easy to get started.
I understand if there are no libraries/frameworks matching all requirements, if so, can you comment on how well it's extendible?
Edit:
Are there any other alternatives besides Processing? Is Processing usable (and easy?) as a library?

All of the effects you ask for can be done with Java 2D fairly simply and Java2D is to some degree hardware accelerated. The book Filthy Rich Clients shows how to implement all of these effects and many others. Painters in the SwingX has also implemented several of these effects.
Another possibility is JavaFx. It has a lot of effects built in. A year and a half ago when I tried it, it was still a little slow, but at least one version has been released since then. It may be more performant now. It's built on top of Java2D, so it should be able to take advantage of the hardware acceleration in Java2D.
As far as full screen support here's more information.

Maybe Processing (homepage) can be a good tradeoff.
it has 4 kinds of backing, including OpenGL
it has AA
it is 2d or 3d
it supports hw acceleration
it supports transformations
its syntax is quite easy to learn
it's easily embeddable
everything you need to learn is in this page

Not really a graphics library but rather an advanced applet AND graphics library:
PulpCore
Be sure to grab a quite recent version (maybe even fetch the source via mercurial and build it yourself) because the filter effects you mentioned (blur etc.) aren't available in earlier versions.
I know it might not be exactly what you're looking for; it is not a processing alternative, but it might be the better choice, depending on what you're planning to do.

Take a look at http://processing.org

Starting out NLP - Python + large data set [closed]

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I've been wanting to learn python and do some NLP, so have finally gotten round to starting. Downloaded the english wikipedia mirror for a nice chunky dataset to start on, and have been playing around a bit, at this stage just getting some of it into a sqlite db (havent worked with dbs in the past unfort).
But I'm guessing sqlite is not the way to go for a full blown nlp project(/experiment :) - what would be the sort of things I should look at ? HBase (.. and hadoop) seem interesting, i guess i could run then im java, prototype in python and maybe migrate the really slow bits to java... alternatively just run Mysql.. but the dataset is 12gb, i wonder if that will be a problem? Also looked at lucene, but not sure how (other than breaking the wiki articles into chunks) i'd get that to work..
What comes to mind for a really flexible NLP platform (i dont really know at this stage WHAT i want to do.. just want to learn large scale lang analysis tbh) ?
Many thanks.

NLTK is where you should start from (it's Python-based -- not sure why you're already thinking about parallelizing your processing at such an early stage... start with a more flexible experimental setup, is my advice). sqlite should be fine for a few GB -- if you need more advanced and standard SQL power you could consider postgresql.

There is a related talk on PyCon 2010 "The Python and the Elephant: Large Scale Natural Language Processing with NLTK and Dumbo".
The link has introductory information, slides and video.
I think sqlite is still a good choice for 12G size data. I have a text classification training set which has the similar size, both sqlite and plain text is fine as long as just iterator it line by line.

It is most likely that you are going to use Vector Space Model to represent the text while doing the anlaysis.
In which case, you should look at platforms that can help you store term vectors with term frequencies. It makes your life so much easier.
Have a look at Apache Lucene which has a python library to access Java Lucene. Elasticsearch is also a good alternative, which uses Apache Lucene underneath and has a really good python package. Elasticsearch also exposes a REST API.
Postgresql is also really good at storing tokens. Check out this article to learn more.
I have worked with sizable language data before and I personally prefer Lucene/Elasticsearch for analysis projects.
Cheers.

Summary from the internet:
Spacy is a natural language processing (NLP) library for Python designed to have fast performance, and with word embedding models built in, it’s perfect for a quick and easy start.
Gensim is a topic modelling library for Python that provides access to Word2Vec and other word embedding algorithms for training, and it also allows pre-trained word embeddings that you can download from the internet to be loaded.
NLTK details already given above.
Standford NLP has recently launched 50+ langauge supported python framework. You should check it out for sure.
There are many others but the above 4 are most usable in the sense of community support and latest features
I personally prefer Spacy.
Spacy is one of fastest of all and can use gensim/other APIs integrated into its model.
Moreover, Spacy models has a lots of languages in its alpha stage making it a perfect choice for multilingual apps.
Scaling is whole different thing[you can use alot of tools].But lets stick to scaling in NLP: Spacy gives so much control over different pipelines that you can disable unwanted pipelines making it faster.
Look into it try yourself and explore.

OpenGL for space simulators [closed]

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with a few friends we started this amateur platform-independent java-based project for a space combat simulator game (something like the long dead saga of wing commander). None of us though is a 3D programmer, so the road is gonna be long.
My question is: in our place would you start learning OpenGL (maybe via GLUT) or is there a better possibility today? What about Direct3D? Any books you may suggest? We ordered a couple, specifically
Dave Shriner's OpenGL Programming Guide
Luke Benstead's Beginning OpenGL Game Programming

Consider using an open source 3d engine like Ogre3D or Irrlicht. This way you can focus on making a game: content, gameplay.
Both engines define an abstraction layer that can map to Direct3D or OpenGL backends.
EDIT: at first I didn't notice you mentioned Java, anyway both engines support Java bindings.

If you decide to learn the low level graphics programming instead of using a higher level 3d engine like Ogre3D or Irrlicht, I recommend starting with OpenGL ES 2.X, which is a subset of OpenGL.
OpenGL ES 2.X is a simplified subset of OpenGL for embedded systems with programmable hardware such as phones. For example, in OpenGL there may be multiple ways to accomplish tasks, but in Open GL ES 2.X, there's only one way. Because there's less choice in OpenGL ES 2.X, there's so much less to learn to master OpenGL ES 2.X. The OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide is 480 pages, and the OpenGL Programming Guide, Seventh Edition is 936 pages.
Furthermore, using OpenGL ES 2.X will give you a wider hardware audience for your game. Because it is a subset of OpenGL, code written for OpenGL ES 2.X will work on a full OpenGL system with little or no modification. Your game's graphics can work on a range of target machines from desktops to smart phones.

You could choose an open source 3D engine like Ogre3D.
But if you really want to write the graphics engine on your own (quite interesting), start by learning linear algebra. Not the quite advanced stuff, but you should be very comfortable with expressing yourself in translation vectors, rotation matrices and the like.
If you already familiar with those concepts, choose either Direct3D or OpenGL - this depends more on the available platform. If you like to code in a Mircosoft Environment, choose Direct3D, everything else, choose OpenGL.
The choice of additional libraries depends on the programming language. Better alternatives than GLUT are probably SDL (C) or Qt(C++).

Well, if you've never done 3D graphics programming before, go for simplicity and learn-as-you-go.
There used to be a set of really nice tutorials by NeHe (Neon Helium) for OpenGL, which was the route I took.

I found OpenGL easier to start with as learning curve is not so steep. You can get quick results which helps a lot with initial frustration/motivation. Tons of help etc. Words of warning though - 3D programming is inherently complex and you'll spend more energy on building graphics technology than game itself. Consider adopting Ogre3D if you really want to see the game finished :o) (disclaimer: I know there are also other engines but Ogre is stable, proven and comes with good documentation)

If you want to stay platform-independent DirectX won't do as it is restricted to Microsoft Windows Platforms

Pros and Cons of JavaFX and Silverlight [closed]

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I know there is already a question about the performance of Flex, JavaFX, and Silverlight. My question is a bit more broad:
We are evaluating the merits of JavaFX and Silverlight to serve as the GUI technology that controls/configures our back-end service (currently written in Java). The service and GUI are usually on the same machine, but remote management (via browser) must also be supported. We are currently split into 2 teams: one .Net and one Java, although the Java developers also have some .Net experience.
As I see it, the pros & cons are currently the following:
Silverlight 4:
Pros:
Excellent IDE integration
Good developer-designer workflow
Performance
Extensive 3rd-party support (tools, controls, etc)
Lots of momentum and drive from Microsoft
Very good out-of-browser integration
Cons:
Only supported on Mac & Windows (Moonlight support is not up to standard)
JavaFX 1.2:
Pros:
Wide platform support
Cons:
Only supports Latin character sets (at this time)
Fewer designer tools
Little or no out-of-browser integration. Update: apparently there is out-of-browser support.
Performance (at least on the demos I viewed at www.javafx.com)
Maturity
Please let me know if I'm missing anything or mistaken about something, and what else I haven't considered. We also looked at Adobe AIR, but ruled it out because all our developers already have experience in Java and/or .Net.
Please don't start any flame wars here. This is not a religious question, and I really would like some practical advice and facts.

I have been playing around with JavaFX the last months and i would not recommend anyone to start using it unless the limitations (like lack of Linux support) are too harsh. The IDE support for JavaFX is ridiculous at the moment. You have no refactoring help, no autoformat and not even help with indentaion.
I like JavaFX and will continue to play around with it, but for 2 equally good languages, the huge IDE different is hard to overcome.
Silverlight has got Expression Blend as well, for (kind of) WYSIWYG.
I think a solution in JavaFX would be better, but creating it will probably be alot more difficult.

Several thinks about JavaFX.
Only supports Latin character sets (at this time) (false) JavaFx uses standard Java string representation and also rendering is fully capable to handle non Latin characters.
Fewer designer tools (true) but take a look at newest NetBeans (more # link text)
Little or no out-of-browser integration (false) JavaFX runs in web/desktop, mobile and new platforms are planned.
Performance is improving with each release.
Maturity has same as Silverlight, but with better market share based on installed JVMs.
Your evaluation of JavaFX is kind of wrong.

I've been developing some materials in JavaFX recently.
The performance of JavaFX has improved markedly over the last 6 months (between 1.0 and 1.2), and is supposed to improve yet again with the 1.3 release.
"Out of browser integration" is essentially JNLP (ie, Web-start). It's perfectly reasonable from what I can tell. For instance, WidgetFX have written a Vista/7-like desktop sidebar entirely in JavaFX http://widgetfx.org/
There is supposedly "momentum and drive" from Oracle -- Larry Ellison has been publicly enthusing about it -- but that of course is held up by the EU's investigation of the Oracle-Sun merger.
Note that JavaFX does not use Java syntax. It is, however, a very concise and quick language to write a GUI in, but does have a (relatively short) learning curve of its own. It can however include any Swing components (and there are quite a few libraries of them out there), and can use Java classes.

I wanted to expand a bit on your point about the IDE and dev/designer workflow - I've been working with Silverlight for a year and half now, and I have to say the key to my success has been the tooling. On the dev side the ability to step through code in the debugger from client side to server side across a web service call is very helpful. We've hired designers with experience in the Adobe toolset and seen them become immediately productive in Blend (animating UIs, transitioning screens, hiding/showing elements, etc). Couple that with the fact that both Visual Studio and Blend can share the same source control system and you've got a great ecosystem for rapidly pulling together good looking web apps.
One other pro for Silverlight is the language independence. If you choose C# you also get LINQ, lambda expression and (soon) parallel foreach loops.