v0.8

New functionality:

• We are now uploading MMLSpark as a Azure/mmlspark spark package.
  Use --packages Azure:mmlspark:0.8 with the Spark command-line tools.

• Add a bi-directional LSTM medical entity extractor to the
  ModelDownloader, and new jupyter notebook for medical entity
  extraction using NLTK, PubMed Word embeddings, and the Bi-LSTM.

• Add ImageSetAugmenter for easy dataset augmentation within image
  processing pipelines.

Improvements:

• Optimize the performance of CNTKModel. It now broadcasts a loaded
  model to workers and shares model weights between partitions on the
  same worker. Minibatch padding (an internal workaround of a CNTK bug)
  is now no longer used, eliminating excess computations when there is a
  mismatch between the partition size and minibatch size.

• Bugfix: CNTKModel can work with models with unnamed outputs.

Docker image improvements:

• Environment variables are now part of the docker image (in addition to
  being set in bash).

• New docker images:

  • microsoft/mmlspark:latest: plain image, as always,
  • microsoft/mmlspark:gpu: GPU variant based on an nvidia/cuda image.
  • microsoft/mmlspark:plus and microsoft/mmlspark:plus-gpu: these
    images contain additional packages for internal use; they will
    probably be based on an older Conda version too in future releases.

Updates:

• The Conda environment now includes NLTK.

• Updated Java and SBT versions.