FPGAs have become a hot topic in the IT industry, thanks to the unprecedented computing power that they bring to demanding HPC applications, and AWS recently introduced FPGA-powered instances (aka F1 instances) to make the process simpler and quicker. Julien Simon walks you through building an FPGA-enabled application, from design to simulation to synthesis to execution on an F1 instance.

Claire Le Goues shares recent advances in academic software engineering and programming languages research that aims to bring that dream to reality, using everything from metaheuristic search to program synthesis to machine learning and search over big databases of existing code to make it happen.

Creating sophisticated, intelligent applications that listen and respond in natural language is getting easier. Greg Bulmash walks you through building a cross-platform application that works on both mobile and desktop clients and uses Amazon's Lex and Polly services to perform a number of useful tasksand a few entertaining ones.