AI Analytics And Strategic Decision Making

AI Analytics And Strategic Decision Making — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Vicarious (company)

    Vicarious (company)

    Vicarious was an artificial intelligence company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. They use the theorized computational principles of the brain to attempt to build software that can think and learn like a human. Vicarious describes its technology as "a turnkey robotics solution integrator using artificial intelligence to automate tasks too complex and versatile for traditional automations". Alphabet Inc acquired the company in 2022 for an undisclosed amount. == Founders == The company was founded in 2010 by D. Scott Phoenix and Dileep George. Before co-founding Vicarious, Phoenix was Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Fund and CEO of Frogmetrics, a touchscreen analytics company he co-founded through the Y Combinator incubator program. Previously, George was Chief Technology Officer at Numenta, a company he co-founded with Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky while completing his PhD at Stanford University. == Funding == The company launched in February 2011 with funding from Founders Fund, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo (former Facebook CTO and co-founder of Quora), Felicis Ventures, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. In August 2012, in its Series A round of funding, it raised an additional $15 million. The round was led by Good Ventures; Founders Fund, Open Field Capital and Zarco Investment Group also participated. The company received $40 million in its Series B round of funding. The round was led by individuals including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others. An additional undisclosed amount was later contributed by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Skype co-founder Janus Friis and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. == Recursive Cortical Network == Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. One such software is a vision system known as the Recursive Cortical Network (RCN), it is a generative graphical visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. The system is powered by a balanced approach that takes sensory data, mathematics, and biological plausibility into consideration. On October 22, 2013, beating CAPTCHA, Vicarious announced its model was reliably able to solve modern CAPTCHAs, with character recognition rates of 90% or better when trained on one style. However, Luis von Ahn, a pioneer of early CAPTCHA and founder of reCAPTCHA, expressed skepticism, stating: "It's hard for me to be impressed since I see these every few months." He pointed out that 50 similar claims to that of Vicarious had been made since 2003. Vicarious later published their findings in peer-reviewed journal Science. Vicarious has indicated that its AI was not specifically designed to complete CAPTCHAs and its success at the task is a product of its advanced vision system. Because Vicarious's algorithms are based on insights from the human brain, it is also able to recognize photographs, videos, and other visual data.

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  • SHRDLU

    SHRDLU

    SHRDLU is an early natural-language understanding computer program that was developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In the program, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and querying the state of a simplified "blocks world", essentially a virtual box filled with different blocks. SHRDLU was written in the Micro Planner and Lisp programming language on the DEC PDP-6 computer and a DEC graphics terminal. Later additions were made at the computer graphics labs at the University of Utah, adding a full 3D rendering of SHRDLU's "world". The name SHRDLU was derived from ETAOIN SHRDLU, the arrangement of the letter keys on a Linotype machine, arranged in descending order of usage frequency in English. == Functionality == SHRDLU is primarily a language parser that allows user interaction using English terms. The user instructs SHRDLU to move various objects around in the "blocks world" containing various basic objects such as blocks, cones and balls. SHRDLU combined four simple ideas to make the simulation of "understanding" more convincing. One was that SHRDLU's world is so simple that the entire set of objects and locations could be described by including as few as 50 words: nouns like "block" and "cone", verbs like "place on" and "move to", and adjectives like "big" and "blue". The possible combinations of these basic language building blocks are quite simple. SHRDLU also includes a basic memory to supply context. One could ask SHRDLU to "put the green cone on the red block" and then "take the cone off"; "the cone" would be taken to mean the green cone one had just talked about. SHRDLU can search back further through the interactions to find the proper context in most cases when additional adjectives were supplied. One could also ask questions about the history; for instance, one could ask "did you pick up anything before the cone?" A side effect of this memory, and the original rules SHRDLU was supplied with, is that the program can answer questions about what was possible in the world and what was not. For instance, SHRDLU can deduce that blocks could be stacked by looking for examples, but also realize that triangles could not be stacked, after having tried it. The "world" contains basic physics to make blocks fall over, independent of the language parser. Finally, SHRDLU can also remember names given to objects, or arrangements of them. For instance one could say "a steeple is a small triangle on top of a tall rectangle"; SHRDLU can then answer questions about steeples in the blocks world, and build new ones. This is an example of a SHRDLU session: Person: Pick up a big red block. Computer: OK. Person: Grasp the pyramid. Computer: I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHICH PYRAMID YOU MEAN. Person (changing their mind): Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box. Computer: BY "IT", I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE BLOCK WHICH IS TALLER THAN THE ONE I AM HOLDING. Computer: OK. Person: What does the box contain? Computer: THE BLUE PYRAMID AND THE BLUE BLOCK. Person: What is the pyramid supported by? Computer: THE BOX. Person: How many blocks are not in the box? Computer: FOUR OF THEM. Person: Is at least one of them narrower than the one which i told you to pick up? Computer: YES, THE RED CUBE. Person: Is it supported? Computer: YES, BY THE TABLE. Person: Can the table pick up blocks? Computer: NO. Person: Can a pyramid be supported by a block? Computer: YES. Person: Can a pyramid support a pyramid? Computer: I DON'T KNOW. Person: Stack up two pyramids. Computer: I CAN'T. Person: Will you please stack up both of the red blocks and either a green cube or a pyramid? Computer: OK. Person: Which cube is sitting on the table? Computer: THE LARGE GREEN ONE WHICH SUPPORTS THE RED PYRAMID. Person: Is there a large block behind a pyramid? Computer: YES, THREE OF THEM: A LARGE RED ONE, A LARGE GREEN CUBE, AND THE BLUE ONE. Person: Put a small one onto the green cube which supports a pyramid. Computer: OK. Person: Put the littlest pyramid on top of it. Computer: OK. Person: Does the shortest thing the tallest pyramid's support supports support anything green? Computer: YES, THE GREEN PYRAMID. Person: What color is it? Computer: BY "IT", I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE SHORTEST THING THE TALLEST PYRAMID'S SUPPORT SUPPORTS. Computer: RED Person: How many things are on top of green cubes? Computer: I'M NOT SURE WHAT YOU MEAN BY "ON TOP OF" IN THE PHRASE "ON TOP OF GREEN CUBES" . DO YOU MEAN: 1 - DIRECTLY ON THE SURFACE 2 - ANWHERE ON TOP OF ? Person: 2 Computer: THREE OF THEM. Person: Had you touched any pyramid before you put the green one on the little cube? Computer: YES, THE GREEN ONE. Person: When did you pick it up? Computer: WHILE I WAS STACKING UP THE RED CUBE, A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE. Person: Why? Computer: TO GET RID OF IT. Person: Why did you do that? Computer: TO CLEAN OFF THE RED CUBE. Person: Why did you clear off that cube? Computer: TO PUT IT ON A LARGE GREEN CUBE. Person: Why did you do that? Computer: TO STACK UP THE RED CUBE , A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE. Person: Why did you do that? Computer: BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME TO. Person: How did you do it? Computer: BY PUTTING A LARGE RED BLOCK ON THE TABLE ; THEN LETTING GO OF IT ; THEN PUTTING A LARGE GREEN CUBE ON IT ; THEN LETTING GO OF THAT CUBE ; THEN PUTTING THE RED CUBE ON THAT CUBE; THEN LETTING GO OF THAT CUBE. Person: How many objects did you touch while you were doing it? Computer: FOUR OF THEM. Person: What did the red cube support before you started to clean it off? Computer: THE GREEN PYRAMID. Person: There were five blocks to the left of the box then. Computer: NO, ONLY FOUR OF THEM: THE RED CUBE, TWO LARGE GREEN CUBES AND A LARGE RED BLOCK. Person: Put the blue pyramid on the block in the box. Computer: OK. Person: Is there anything which is bigger than every pyramid but is not as wide as the thing that supports it? Computer: YES, THE BLUE BLOCK. Person: Does a steeple Computer (interrupting): SORRY, I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "STEEPLE". Person: A "steeple" is a stack which contains two green cubes and a pyramid. Computer: I UNDERSTAND. Person: Are there any steeples now? Computer: NO. Person: Build one. Computer: OK. Person: Call the biggest block "superblock". Computer: OK. Person: Have you picked superblock up since we began? Computer: YES. Person: Why did you drop it? Computer: BY "IT", I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE SUPERBLOCK. I CAN'T EXPLAIN A NON-EXISTENT EVENT. Person: Is there anything to the right of the red pyramid? Computer: YES, FOUR THINGS: THE BOX, THE RED CUBE, THE BLUE PYRAMID AND THE BLOCK NAMED SUPERBLOCK Person: Thank you. Computer: YOU'RE WELCOME! == Consequences == SHRDLU was considered a tremendously successful demonstration of artificial intelligence (AI). This led other AI researchers to excessive optimism which was soon lost when later systems attempted to deal with situations with a more realistic level of ambiguity and complexity. Subsequent efforts of the SHRDLU type, such as Cyc, have tended to focus on providing the program with considerably more information from which it can draw conclusions. In a 1991 interview, Winograd said about SHRDLU: [...] the famous dialogue with SHRDLU where you could pick up a block, and so on, I very carefully worked through, line by line. If you sat down in front of it, and asked it a question that wasn't in the dialogue, there was some probability it would answer it. I mean, if it was reasonably close to one of the questions that was there in form and in content, it would probably get it. But there was no attempt to get it to the point where you could actually hand it to somebody and they could use it to move blocks around. And there was no pressure for that whatsoever. Pressure was for something you could demo. Take a recent example, Negroponte's Media Lab, where instead of "perish or publish" it's "demo or die." I think that's a problem. I think AI suffered from that a lot, because it led to "Potemkin villages", things which - for the things they actually did in the demo looked good, but when you looked behind that there wasn't enough structure to make it really work more generally. Though not intentionally developed as such, SHRDLU is considered the first known formal example of interactive fiction, as the user interacts with simple commands to move objects around a virtual environment, though lacking the distinct story-telling normally present in the interactive fiction genre. The 1976-1977 game Colossal Cave Adventure is broadly considered to be the first true work of interactive fiction.

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  • Allen's interval algebra

    Allen's interval algebra

    Allen's interval algebra is a calculus for temporal reasoning that was introduced by James F. Allen in 1983. The calculus defines possible relations between time intervals and provides a composition table that can be used as a basis for reasoning about temporal descriptions of events. == Formal description == === Relations === The following 13 base relations capture the possible relations between two intervals. To see that the 13 relations are exhaustive, note that each point of X {\displaystyle X} can be at 5 possible locations relative to Y {\displaystyle Y} : before, at the start, within, at the end, after. These give 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15 {\displaystyle 5+4+3+2+1=15} possible relative positions for the start and the end of X {\displaystyle X} . Of these, we cannot have X 0 = X 1 = Y 0 {\displaystyle X_{0}=X_{1}=Y_{0}} since X 0 < X 1 {\displaystyle X_{0} Read more →

  • Integrated Operations in the High North

    Integrated Operations in the High North

    Integrated Operations in the High North (IOHN, IO High North or IO in the High North) is a unique collaboration project that during a four-year period starting May 2008 is working on designing, implementing and testing a Digital Platform for what in the upstream oil and gas industry is called the next or second generation of Integrated Operations. The work on the Digital platform is focussed on capture, transfer and integration of real-time data from the remote production installations to the decision makers. A risk evaluation across the whole chain is also included. The platform is based on open standards and enables a higher degree of interoperability. Requirements for the digital platform come from use cases defined within the Drilling and Completion, Reservoir and Production and Operations and Maintenance domains. The platform will subsequently be demonstrated through pilots within these three domains. The project was a sidecar initiative for Statoil’s Global Operations Data Integration Project. This was part of a very ambitious Master Plan IT (MapIT), which also included the Real Time Visualization (RTV) tender. The RTV tender aimed to be an ontology-aware information workspace for a wide range of disciplines, as per the IO Capability Stack. Additionally, the sidecar project aimed to increase the semantic web knowledge among suppliers in the industry. This new platform is considered an important enabler for safe and sustainable operations in remote, vulnerable and hazardous areas such as the High North, but the technology is clearly also applicable in more general applications. The IOHN project consortium consists of 23 participants, including operators, service providers, software vendors, technology providers, research institutions and universities. In addition, the Norwegian Defence Force is working with the project to resolve common infrastructural and interoperability challenges. The project is managed by Det Norske Veritas (DNV). Nils Sandsmark was the project manager during the initiation and start-up phase. Frédéric Verhelst took over as project manager from the beginning of 2009. Financing comes from the participants and the Research Council of Norway (RCN) for parts of the project (GOICT and AutoConRig). == Participants == The consortium consists of the following 22 participants (in alphabetical order):

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  • CrocBITE

    CrocBITE

    CrocBITE (currently CrocAttack) was an online database of wild crocodilian attacks reported on humans in the world. The non-profit online research tool helped to scientifically analyze crocodilian behavior via complex models. Users were encouraged to feed information in a crowdsourcing manner. This website excludes captive crocodilian attacks, as well as non-fatal bites on professional handlers, rangers, staff, or researchers, and crocodilian attacks on pets and livestock, because its primary goal is to analyze natural human-crocodilian conflict in the wild for conservation and management purposes, and that these incidents do are not considered indicative of natural species behavior or typical human-wildlife conflict, as well as not providing enough useful data and helping researchers understand wild population behavior or typical human-wildlife conflict dynamics and helps create safety strategies for people living or working near wild crocodilians, rather than tracking workplace accidents in zoos or farms. While fatal incidents involving handlers are sometimes included on the website, typical captive incidents (such as handlers being bitten by them in zoos) are excluded because they are considered manageable professional risks rather than general public safety threats. == About == The online database was established in 2013 (2013) by Dr Adam Britton, a researcher at Charles Darwin University, his student Brandon Sideleau and Erin Britton. It was a compilation of government records, individual reports, registered contributors and historical data. Dr Simon Pooley, Junior Research fellow, Imperial College London joined hands to further the studies. The collaboration culminated when Dr Pooley met Dr Britton at the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group, in Louisiana in 2014. The program received funds from Economic and Social Research Council, United Kingdom to the tune of A$30,000 and unspecified resourced plus amount from Big Gecko Crocodilian Research, Crocodillian.com and Charles Darwin University. The research yielded pertinent observations that provide inside into crocodile attacks. It was observed that most attacks on humans occur from bites of Saltwater crocodile as against the popular understanding of Nile crocodiles taking the top spot. This is not, however, believed to be the actual case, as most attacks by the Nile crocodile are believed to go unreported or only reported on a local level. The broad category of Nile crocodile attacks were segmented into West African crocodile and Crocodylus niloticus (the Nile Crocodile) species to get a clear understanding of their respective attack zones. The objective was that the information would be used by communities and conservation managers to help inform and educate people about how to keep safe. The information was vital for Australia and Africa where such attacks are more likely than in other parts of the world. This was the only database of its kind with such comprehensive collection of information made available online. The database is no longer online, and its founder Adam Britton is in custody having pleaded guilty to charges of bestiality on September 25, 2023. It has been rebranded and renamed CrocAttack, and serves as a updated database focusing on human-crocodilian conflict and records over 8,500 incidents from the past decades.

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  • Darkforest

    Darkforest

    Darkforest is a computer go program developed by Meta Platforms, based on deep learning techniques using a convolutional neural network. Its updated version Darkfores2 combines the techniques of its predecessor with Monte Carlo tree search. The MCTS effectively takes tree search methods commonly seen in computer chess programs and randomizes them. With the update, the system is known as Darkfmcts3. Darkforest is of similar strength to programs like CrazyStone and Zen. It has been tested against a professional human player at the 2016 UEC cup. Google's AlphaGo program won against a professional player in October 2015 using a similar combination of techniques. Darkforest is named after Liu Cixin's science fiction novel The Dark Forest. == Background == Competing with top human players in the ancient game of Go has been a long-term goal of artificial intelligence. Go's high branching factor makes traditional search techniques ineffective, even on cutting-edge hardware, and Go's evaluation function could change drastically with one stone change. However, by using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network designed for long-term predictions, Darkforest has been able to substantially improve the win rate for bots over more traditional Monte Carlo Tree Search based approaches. === Matches === Against human players, Darkfores2 achieves a stable 3d ranking on KGS Go Server, which roughly corresponds to an advanced amateur human player. However, after adding Monte Carlo Tree Search to Darkfores2 to create a much stronger player named darkfmcts3, it can achieve a 5d ranking on the KGS Go Server. ==== Against other AI ==== darkfmcts3 is on par with state-of-the-art Go AIs such as Zen, DolBaram and Crazy Stone, but lags behind AlphaGo. It won 3rd place in January 2016 KGS Bot Tournament against other Go AIs. === News coverage === After Google's AlphaGo won against Fan Hui in 2015, Facebook made its AI's hardware designs public, alongside releasing the code behind DarkForest as open-source, in addition to heavy recruiting to strengthen its team of AI engineers. == Style of play == Darkforest uses a neural network to sort through the 10100 board positions, and find the most powerful next move. However, neural networks alone cannot match the level of good amateur players or the best search-based Go engines, and so Darkfores2 combines the neural network approach with a search-based machine. A database of 250,000 real Go games were used in the development of Darkforest, with 220,000 used as a training set and the rest used to test the neural network's ability to predict the next moves played in the real games. This allows Darkforest to accurately evaluate the global state of the board, but local tactics were still poor. Search-based engines have poor global evaluation, but are good at local tactics. Combining these two approaches is difficult because search-based engines work much faster than neural networks, a problem which was solved in Darkfores2 by running the processes in parallel with frequent communication between the two. === Conventional strategies === Go is generally played by analyzing the position of the stones on the board. Various advanced players have described it as playing in some part subconsciously. Unlike chess and checkers, where AI players can simply look further forward at moves than human players, but with each round of Go having on average 250 possible moves, that approach is ineffective. Instead, neural networks copy human play by training the AI systems on images of successful moves, the AI can effectively learn how to interpret how the board looks, as many grandmasters do. In November 2015, Facebook demonstrated the combination of MCTS with neural networks, which played with a style that "felt human". === Flaws === It has been noted that Darkforest still has flaws in its playstyle. The bot sometimes plays tenuki ("move elsewhere") pointlessly when local powerful moves are required. When the bot is losing, it shows the typical behavior of MCTS, it plays bad moves and loses more. The Facebook AI team has acknowledged these as areas of future improvement. == Program architecture == The family of Darkforest computer go programs is based on convolution neural networks. The most recent advances in Darkfmcts3 combined convolutional neural networks with more traditional Monte Carlo tree search. Darkfmcts3 is the most advanced version of Darkforest, which combines Facebook's most advanced convolutional neural network architecture from Darkfores2 with a Monte Carlo tree search. Darkfmcts3 relies on a convolution neural networks that predicts the next k moves based on the current state of play. It treats the board as a 19x19 image with multiple channels. Each channel represents a different aspect of board information based upon the specific style of play. For standard and extended play, there are 21 and 25 different channels, respectively. In standard play, each players liberties are represented as six binary channels or planes. The respective plane is true if the player one, two, or three or more liberties available. Ko (i.e. illegal moves) is represented as one binary plane. Stone placement for each opponent and empty board positions are represented as three binary planes, and the duration since a stone has been placed is represented as real numbers on two planes, one for each player. Lastly, the opponents rank is represented by nine binary planes, where if all are true, the player is a 9d level, if 8 are true, an 8d level, and so forth. Extended play additionally considers the border (binary plane that is true at the border), position mask (represented as distance from the board center, i.e. x ( − 0.5 ∗ d i s t a n c e 2 ) {\displaystyle x^{(-0.5distance^{2})}} , where x {\displaystyle x} is a real number at a position), and each player's territory (binary, based on which player a location is closer to). Darkfmct3 uses a 12-layer full convolutional network with a width of 384 nodes without weight sharing or pooling. Each convolutional layer is followed by a rectified linear unit, a popular activation function for deep neural networks. A key innovation of Darkfmct3 compared to previous approaches is that it uses only one softmax function to predict the next move, which enables the approach to reduce the overall number of parameters. Darkfmct3 was trained against 300 random selected games from an empirical dataset representing different game stages. The learning rate was determined by vanilla stochastic gradient descent. Darkfmct3 synchronously couples a convolutional neural network with a Monte Carlo tree search. Since the convolutional neural network is computationally taxing, the Monte Carlo tree search focuses computation on the more likely game play trajectories. By running the neural network synchronously with the Monte Carlo tree search, it is possible to guarantee that each node is expanded by the moves predicted by the neural network. == Comparison with other systems == Darkfores2 beats Darkforest, its neural network-only predecessor, around 90% of the time, and Pachi, one of the best search-based engines, around 95% of the time. On the Kyu rating system, Darkforest holds a 1-2d level. Darkfores2 achieves a stable 3d level on KGS Go Server as a ranked bot. With the added Monte Carlo tree search, Darkfmcts3 with 5,000 rollouts beats Pachi with 10k rollouts in all 250 games; with 75k rollouts it achieves a stable 5d level in KGS server, on par with state-of-the-art Go AIs (e.g., Zen, DolBaram, CrazyStone); with 110k rollouts, it won the 3rd place in January KGS Go Tournament.

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  • Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy

    Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy

    The Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy is an international norms and arms control proposal by the U.S. government for artificial intelligence in the military. It was announced at the Summit on Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain by Bonnie Jenkins, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. As of January 2024, fifty-one countries have signed the declaration. The US government sees it as an extension of the Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 which is the current US policy on autonomous weapons. It covers areas such as Lethal autonomous weapons and weapons decision-making.

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  • Sriram Krishnan

    Sriram Krishnan

    Sriram Krishnan (born 1984) is a tech executive and White House official, currently serving as the Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence. Krishnan was named a Time Person of the Year in 2025 as an "Architect of Artificial Intelligence." He was described in Time as providing the "wake-up call that we needed" to the other AI builders, leading to "a multiyear, $500 billion initiative dubbed Stargate" to push American-made AI, as well as numerous other AI initiatives. Also in December 2025, President Trump said of Krishnan, "without him, things on AI would not function well" and cited Krishnan as the leading figure behind the American executive order on AI. As the leader of the United States' policy team regarding artificial intelligence, Krishnan plays "a significant role in shaping the administration’s approach to AI and driving measures to advance federal adoption of AI." The role calls for removing barriers to AI adoption within the government, driving vendors toward solutions suitable for federal needs, designing sensible regulation of private-sector AI, and conducting "AI diplomacy". He has stated a policy goal of "reinvigorating US dominance in emerging technologies," including AI. He also represents the United States' interests in AI abroad, such as at the Paris AI Summit. He is one of the authors of the American "AI Action Plan" released in July, 2025, which he contends is necessary to win the "existential race with China" for AI supremacy. Krishnan, a U.S. citizen born in India, is also a venture capitalist, podcaster, product manager and author. Early in his career, he led product teams at Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Snap. In addition to his work as an investor and technologist, he and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, rose to additional prominence in 2021 as podcast hosts. He served as a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and led its London office. In 2022, Krishnan announced that he was working with Elon Musk on the rebuilding of Twitter following Musk's acquisition of the company. On December 22, 2024, US president-elect Donald Trump announced that Krishnan would be Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in his incoming administration; in 2026 he joined the National Economic Council. == Early life and education == Krishnan was born in Chennai, India. He earned his Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology from SRM University (2001–2005), moved to the United States in 2007 to join Microsoft, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2016. == Career == === Early career === In 2007, he began working at Microsoft where he served as a program manager for Visual Studio. At Facebook, Krishnan built the Facebook Audience Network, a competitive platform to Google's ad technologies. At Twitter, he led product and core user experience, driving a 20% annual user growth rate and launching a redesigned home page and events experience. === Andreessen Horowitz === Krishnan was appointed a general partner of American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ("a16z") in February 2021. He was anticipated to serve consumer and social markets, however he has also theorized on the impact of "deep tech" on society. In 2023 he was appointed to lead the firm's London office, its first non-US location. The office is expected to serve Web3 investments as well as AI and other fields. Krishnan announced that he would leave the firm at the end of 2024. === Social media and AI === In 2022, various news media reported that Krishnan was assisting Elon Musk in the revamp of Twitter following Musk's takeover of the company. Additional reports named Krishnan as the leading candidate for the role of CEO of the newly private company. Krishnan penned a 2023 New York Times opinion column regarding social media, AI, and related fields. He predicted a rise in the number and diversity of online spaces due to decentralization and platforms like Farcaster, Bluesky and Mastodon. === Public office === In 2024, the Financial Times reported that Krishnan was active in international affairs, reintroducing Boris Johnson to Elon Musk, following Musk's nomination to the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. Krishnan was also reported as potentially leaving a16z at the end of the year to "be jumping into something I've wanted to spend [his] energy on," which was widely reported as being related to Musk's and Vivek Ramaswamy's work at DOGE. Others reported to be involved include Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreesen, Bill Ackman, and Travis Kalanick. On December 22, 2024, US president-elect Donald Trump announced that he would be Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in his incoming administration. On February 6, 2025, Reuters reported that Krishnan would be accompanying Vice President Vance to the Paris AI Summit, a "major artificial intelligence" event later that month. Other members of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy would also be joining the event with around 100 other countries to "focus on AI's potential." Krishnan joined a U.S. technology policy delegation to the Middle East in advance of President Trump's visit in May 2025. Conducting "AI diplomacy," Krishnan negotiated the spread of U.S. AI technologies with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, as well as other means to strengthen bilateral trade in artificial intelligence technologies. He explained that the goal of the diplomatic mission was that "we want American A.I. to spread." Krishnan, along with David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, were credited as authors of the American AI Action Plan released in July 2025. The plan is "the administration’s most significant policy directive" regarding artificial intelligence; it calls for financing to support the global spread of American AI models and a policy to enforce neutrality in models. The Washington Post referred to the plan as a "bold action to ensure that American AI remains at the cutting edge." The AI Action Plan is a continuation of prior efforts to reduce barriers to U.S. production of AI systems and the removal of rules that were considered to hinder such growth. Later in 2025, at the POLITICO AI & Tech Summit, Krishnan called national AI development "an existential race with China." He suggested that private companies are best positioned to create new models, quipping "let them cook." He further suggested that state-by-state regulation of AI technologies may hinder national AI competitiveness. Also in 2025, at the Axios AI+ Summit, Krishnan stated that the United States and China are in a race for AI supremacy, in which the winner will be judged by market share. Winning the race is a "business strategy" to Krishnan. Krishnan was named in the 2025 Time Person of the Year article as an "AI Architect". === The Aarthi and Sriram Show and other media === In early 2021, Krishnan and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, launched a Clubhouse talk show that "focuses on organic conversations on anything from startups to venture capitalism and cryptocurrencies." An early appearance by Elon Musk on the Good Time Show was described as the first show that "broke Clubhouse" by rapidly exceeding the limit of 5,000 simultaneous users. The desire to interact with a larger community led to a variety of later innovations to allow streaming and replaying of Clubhouse chats. On that episode, Elon Musk grilled Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev regarding the GameStop trading controversy. As of December 2021, the show had over 187,000 subscribers, plus 735,000 subscribers between Krishnan and Ramamurthy's personal Clubhouse accounts. Other guests have included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Diane von Fürstenberg, Tony Hawk, MrBeast, and A.R. Rahman. In 2022, the Good Time Show moved to YouTube. It then evolved to a podcasting format under the name The Aarthi and Sriram Show, with both audio and video content. The Hollywood Reporter reported that the podcast had received more than 1 million downloads by early 2023. == Personal life == Krishnan is married to Aarthi Ramamurthy, co-host of The Aarthi and Sriram Show (formerly the Good Time Show) and a serial entrepreneur. They met in college in 2003 through a Yahoo! chat room related to a coding project and began dating in 2006 and eloped in 2010. == Awards == Time Person of the Year - 2025

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  • Datasource

    Datasource

    A datasource or DataSource is a name given to the connection set up to a database from a server. The name is commonly used when creating a query to the database. The data source name (DSN) need not be the same as the filename for the database. For example, a database file named friends.mdb could be set up with a DSN of school. Then DSN school would be used to refer to the database when performing a query. == Sun's version of DataSource [1] == A factory for connections to the physical data source that this DataSource object represents. An alternative to the DriverManager facility, a DataSource object is the preferred means of getting a connection. An object that implements the DataSource interface will typically be registered with a naming service based on the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) API. The DataSource interface is implemented by a driver vendor. There are three types of implementations: Basic implementation — produces a standard Connection object Connection pooling implementation — produces a Connection object that will automatically participate in connection pooling. This implementation works with a middle-tier connection pooling manager. Distributed transaction implementation — produces a Connection object that may be used for distributed transactions and almost always participates in connection pooling. This implementation works with a middle-tier transaction manager and almost always with a connection pooling manager. A DataSource object has properties that can be modified when necessary. For example, if the data source is moved to a different server, the property for the server can be changed. The benefit is that because the data source's properties can be changed, any code accessing that data source does not need to be changed. A driver that is accessed via a DataSource object does not register itself with the DriverManager. Rather, a DataSource object is retrieved through a lookup operation and then used to create a Connection object. With a basic implementation, the connection obtained through a DataSource object is identical to a connection obtained through the DriverManager facility. == Sun's DataSource Overview [2] == A DataSource object is the representation of a data source in the Java programming language. In basic terms, a data source is a facility for storing data. It can be as sophisticated as a complex database for a large corporation or as simple as a file with rows and columns. A data source can reside on a remote server, or it can be on a local desktop machine. Applications access a data source using a connection, and a DataSource object can be thought of as a factory for connections to the particular data source that the DataSource instance represents. The DataSource interface provides two methods for establishing a connection with a data source. Using a DataSource object is the preferred alternative to using the DriverManager for establishing a connection to a data source. They are similar to the extent that the DriverManager class and DataSource interface both have methods for creating a connection, methods for getting and setting a timeout limit for making a connection, and methods for getting and setting a stream for logging. Their differences are more significant than their similarities, however. Unlike the DriverManager, a DataSource object has properties that identify and describe the data source it represents. Also, a DataSource object works with a Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) naming service and can be created, deployed, and managed separately from the applications that use it. A driver vendor will provide a class that is a basic implementation of the DataSource interface as part of its Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) 2.0 or 3.0 driver product. What a system administrator does to register a DataSource object with a JNDI naming service and what an application does to get a connection to a data source using a DataSource object registered with a JNDI naming service are described later in this chapter. Being registered with a JNDI naming service gives a DataSource object two major advantages over the DriverManager. First, an application does not need to hardcode driver information, as it does with the DriverManager. A programmer can choose a logical name for the data source and register the logical name with a JNDI naming service. The application uses the logical name, and the JNDI naming service will supply the DataSource object associated with the logical name. The DataSource object can then be used to create a connection to the data source it represents. The second major advantage is that the DataSource facility allows developers to implement a DataSource class to take advantage of features like connection pooling and distributed transactions. Connection pooling can increase performance dramatically by reusing connections rather than creating a new physical connection each time a connection is requested. The ability to use distributed transactions enables an application to do the heavy duty database work of large enterprises. Although an application may use either the DriverManager or a DataSource object to get a connection, using a DataSource object offers significant advantages and is the recommended way to establish a connection. Since 1.4 Since Java EE 6 a JNDI-bound DataSource can alternatively be configured in a declarative way directly from within the application. This alternative is particularly useful for self-sufficient applications or for transparently using an embedded database. == Yahoo's version of DataSource [3] == A DataSource is an abstract representation of a live set of data that presents a common predictable API for other objects to interact with. The nature of your data, its quantity, its complexity, and the logic for returning query results all play a role in determining your type of DataSource. For small amounts of simple textual data, a JavaScript array is a good choice. If your data has a small footprint but requires a simple computational or transformational filter before being displayed, a JavaScript function may be the right approach. For very large datasets—for example, a robust relational database—or to access a third-party webservice you'll certainly need to leverage the power of a Script Node or XHR DataSource.

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  • Daniel Wolfe

    Daniel Wolfe

    Daniel Wolfe (born 1960) is an American activist, advocate, and writer whose work advances health programs and policy that balance scientific research and community expertise. His career has focused on support for community health movements, particularly among groups often regarded as criminal or socially suspect, including gay men and people who use illicit drugs. == Early life == Wolfe was raised between Arizona—including time on Rancho Linda Vista, a commune outside of Tucson—and East Hampton, NY. He received his undergraduate degree in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, and following time studying Arabic in Egypt, worked as the junior ghostwriter on the autobiographies of First Lady of Egypt Jehan Sadat and Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Upon return to New York, he was an assistant at the Council on Foreign Relations to Richard W. Murphy, former US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Disagreement with US killing of Iraqi civilians during the 1990 Gulf War—and the rising toll of HIV in NY—moved Wolfe to leave Middle East studies and work full-time on AIDS in 1990. == Education == Wolfe was Community Scholar at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Healthwhere he received his Masters in Public Health in 2004. He holds a Masters of Philosophy (in history) from Columbia University, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He was the recipient of a Charles H. Revson Foundation fellowship for urban leaders who have made a substantial contribution to New York City, and a fellow at the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad in Cairo, Egypt. == AIDS and gay activism == Wolfe was part of the media committee for ACT UP’s 1998 action to seize control of the FDA, and helped organize ACT UP NY’s challenge to Governor Cuomo to do better on the AIDS response and other actions.Wolfe also joined ACT UP colleagues Gregg Bordowitz, David Barr, Richard Elovich, Jean Carlomusto and others to work at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the nation’s first AIDS organization, where he served as director of communications and spokesperson on issues including opposition to NY State cuts to the AIDS budget, the disclosure that Olympic Champion Greg Louganis had HIV, reports of the FBI spying on AIDS activists, and GMHC’s move to offer HIV testing and targeted support to those who were HIV-negative. Wolfe also continued cultural work, making art, performance and video as a member of the gay and lesbian collective GANG with artists and ACT UP members including Zoe Leonard, Suzanne Wright, Loring McAlpin, Wellington Love, Adam Rolston and others, and writing a biography of Lawrence of Arabia for a series for young adults on famous gay men and lesbians in history edited by Martin Duberman. Controversy followed, with North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms waving a GANG piece in an issue of the Movement Research Performance Journal on the floor of Congress to show the "rottenness" of publicly funded art, and a number of schools banning the biography series for young adults from their libraries. Wolfe and others challenged the move as continuing the longstanding and homophobic demand that notable gay men and lesbians stay silent about essential details of their private lives even while being celebrated for their professional achievements. == Gay health == The approval of antiretroviral therapy for HIV in 1996 opened up new space for discussions of gay health beyond HIV, and new directions for Wolfe. Working from hundreds of interviews, surveys, workshops, and with a team of writers, Wolfe was the author of Men Like Us, the Our Bodies, Ourselves-inspired GMHC Complete Guide to Gay Men’s Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Well-being, covering issues from spirituality to sexual health to aging. The move to frame gay health beyond condoms and pills—and to offer a guide to health that “did not need to be translated from the original heterosexual”—was part of a larger gay health movement encompassing wellness and pleasure, and focused less on health disparity than on individual and community resilience. Wolfe was a keynote speaker and workshop leader, along with Eric Rofes, Chris Bartlett, and other organizers, at the first National Gay Men’s Health Summit held in Boulder, Colorado in 2002. Awarded a Charles H. Revson Fellowship for urban leaders in the City of New York, Wolfe became a community scholar at Columbia University’s Center of History and Ethics of Public Health, where he received his MPH in 2003, and was a contributor to Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America. == International harm reduction == Wolfe was Director of International Harm Reduction Development at the Open Society Foundations (2005-2021) where he led grantmaking and advocacy to protect the health and rights of people who use drugs in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Wolfe challenged approaches that conditioned support on abstinence or that sought to treat people who use illegal drugs like drugs themselves, as something to be controlled or contained. As with the gay health movement, he advocated a focus on community resilience and strengths, and on supporting individuals and communities to negotiate the balance between risk and pleasure of activities integral to life. Noting what he called the “antisocial behavior of health systems,” Wolfe’s analysis elevated issues such as forced labor and harsh punishment delivered in the name of addiction treatment and rehabilitation, the role of criminalization, imprisonment and stigma in interrupting or impeding HIV treatment, and the bias toward coercive approaches in studying and delivering addiction treatments. He also pointed to defects in national and international drug control policies and human rights violations as a root cause of HIV, hepatitis, and other health challenges faced by people who used drugs. Concrete advocacy supported by Open Society’s International Harm Reduction Development program under his direction included rebuffing US government efforts to force the UN to remove all references to harm reduction in its materials, addition of the addiction treatment medicines methadone and buprenorphine to the World Health Organization’s essential medicines list, and WHO endorsement of lay distribution of the opioid overdose antidote naloxone. Wolfe and OSF colleagues also advocated for new approaches to intellectual property and data sharing in research and development of medicines and vaccines to lower price and improve access to medicines globally to those in need. == AI and patient rights == Reports of patients denied opioid prescriptions based on an algorithm purporting to calculate their risk of overdose led Wolfe to work on AI, first as a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and then as Executive Director of a new UCSF UC Berkeley program pioneering efforts to join AI, clinical and public health practice, and equity. In keeping with his earlier (analog) work on HIV, Wolfe has highlighted concerns about health systems using algorithms to gauge the merit of treatments for those regarded as socially suspect, the importance of moving beyond proprietary, black box algorithms toward an architecture of health data as a public good, and the need to maximize benefit for patients and communities, as well health systems, in the use of large language models.

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  • Ramification problem

    Ramification problem

    In philosophy and artificial intelligence (especially, knowledge based systems), the ramification problem is concerned with the indirect consequences of an action. It might also be posed as how to represent what happens implicitly due to an action or how to control the secondary and tertiary effects of an action. It is strongly connected to, and is opposite the qualification side of, the frame problem. Limit theory helps in operational usage. For instance, in KBE derivation of a populated design (geometrical objects, etc., similar concerns apply in shape theory), equivalence assumptions allow convergence where potentially large, and perhaps even computationally indeterminate, solution sets are handled deftly. Yet, in a chain of computation, downstream events may very well find some types of results from earlier resolutions of ramification as problematic for their own algorithms.

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  • MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

    MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

    Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research. == Research activities == CSAIL's research activities are organized around a number of semi-autonomous research groups, each of which is headed by one or more professors or research scientists. These groups are divided up into seven general areas of research: Artificial intelligence Computational biology Graphics and vision Language and learning Theory of computation Robotics Systems (includes computer architecture, databases, distributed systems, networks and networked systems, operating systems, programming methodology, and software engineering, among others) == History == Computing Research at MIT began with Vannevar Bush's research into a differential analyzer and Claude Shannon's electronic Boolean algebra in the 1930s, the wartime MIT Radiation Laboratory, the post-war Project Whirlwind and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and MIT Lincoln Laboratory's SAGE in the early 1950s. At MIT, research in the field of artificial intelligence began in the late 1950s. === Project MAC === On July 1, 1963, Project MAC (the Project on Mathematics and Computation, later backronymed to Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer) was launched with a $2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Project MAC's original director was Robert Fano of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Fano decided to call MAC a "project" rather than a "laboratory" for reasons of internal MIT politics – if MAC had been called a laboratory, then it would have been more difficult to raid other MIT departments for research staff. The program manager responsible for the DARPA grant was J. C. R. Licklider, who had previously been at MIT conducting research in RLE, and would later succeed Fano as director of Project MAC. Project MAC would become famous for groundbreaking research in operating systems, artificial intelligence, and the theory of computation. Its contemporaries included Project Genie at Berkeley, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and (somewhat later) University of Southern California's (USC's) Information Sciences Institute. An "AI Group" including Marvin Minsky (the director), John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp), and a talented community of computer programmers were incorporated into Project MAC. They were interested principally in the problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language, which they view as the keys to more intelligent machines. In the 1960s and 1970s the AI Group developed a time-sharing operating system called Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) which ran on PDP-6 and later PDP-10 computers. The early Project MAC community included Fano, Minsky, Licklider, Fernando J. Corbató, and a community of computer programmers and enthusiasts among others who drew their inspiration from former colleague John McCarthy. These founders envisioned the creation of a computer utility whose computational power would be as reliable as an electric utility. To this end, Corbató brought the first computer time-sharing system, Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), with him from the MIT Computation Center, using the DARPA funding to purchase an IBM 7094 for research use. One of the early focuses of Project MAC would be the development of a successor to CTSS, Multics, which was to be the first high availability computer system, developed as a part of an industry consortium including General Electric and Bell Laboratories. In 1966, Scientific American featured Project MAC in the September thematic issue devoted to computer science, that was later published in book form. At the time, the system was described as having approximately 100 TTY terminals, mostly on campus but with a few in private homes. Only 30 users could be logged in at the same time. The project enlisted students in various classes to use the terminals simultaneously in problem solving, simulations, and multi-terminal communications as tests for the multi-access computing software being developed. === AI Lab and LCS === In the late 1960s, Minsky's artificial intelligence group was seeking more space, and was unable to get satisfaction from project director Licklider. Minsky found that although Project MAC as a single entity could not get the additional space he wanted, he could split off to form his own laboratory and then be entitled to more office space. As a result, the MIT AI Lab was formed in 1970, and many of Minsky's AI colleagues left Project MAC to join him in the new laboratory, while most of the remaining members went on to form the Laboratory for Computer Science. Talented programmers such as Richard Stallman, who used TECO to develop EMACS, flourished in the AI Lab during this time. Those researchers who did not join the smaller AI Lab formed the Laboratory for Computer Science and continued their research into operating systems, programming languages, distributed systems, and the theory of computation. Two professors, Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, chose to remain neutral—their group was referred to variously as Switzerland and Project MAC for the next 30 years. Among much else, the AI Lab led to the invention of Lisp machines and their attempted commercialization by two companies in the 1980s: Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc. === CSAIL === On the fortieth anniversary of Project MAC's establishment, July 1, 2003, LCS was merged with the AI Lab to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. This merger created the largest laboratory (over 600 personnel) on the MIT campus. In 2018, CSAIL launched a five-year collaboration program with IFlytek, a company sanctioned the following year for allegedly using its technology for surveillance and human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In October 2019, MIT announced that it would review its partnerships with sanctioned firms such as iFlyTek and SenseTime. In April 2020, the agreement with iFlyTek was terminated. CSAIL moved from the School of Engineering to the newly formed Schwarzman College of Computing by February 2020. == Offices == From 1963 to 2004, Project MAC, LCS, the AI Lab, and CSAIL had their offices at 545 Technology Square, taking over more and more floors of the building over the years. In 2004, CSAIL moved to the new Ray and Maria Stata Center, which was built specifically to house it and other departments. == Outreach activities == The IMARA (from Swahili word for "power") group sponsors a variety of outreach programs that bridge the global digital divide. Its aim is to find and implement long-term, sustainable solutions which will increase the availability of educational technology and resources to domestic and international communities. These projects are run under the aegis of CSAIL and staffed by MIT volunteers who give training, install and donate computer setups in greater Boston, Massachusetts, Kenya, Native American Indian tribal reservations in the American Southwest such as the Navajo Nation, the Middle East, and Fiji Islands. The CommuniTech project strives to empower under-served communities through sustainable technology and education and does this through the MIT Used Computer Factory (UCF), providing refurbished computers to under-served families, and through the Families Accessing Computer Technology (FACT) classes, it trains those families to become familiar and comfortable with computer technology. == Notable researchers == (Including members and alumni of CSAIL's predecessor laboratories) MacArthur Fellows Tim Berners-Lee, Erik Demaine, Dina Katabi, Daniela L. Rus, Regina Barzilay, Peter Shor, Richard Stallman, and Joshua Tenenbaum Turing Award recipients Leonard M. Adleman, Fernando J. Corbató, Shafi Goldwasser, Butler W. Lampson, John McCarthy, Silvio Micali, Marvin Minsky, Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, Barbara Liskov, and Michael Stonebraker IJCAI Computers and Thought Award recipients Terry Winograd, Patrick Winston, David Marr, Gerald Jay Sussman, Rodney Brooks Rolf Nevanlinna Prize recipients Madhu Sudan, Peter Shor, Constantinos Daskalakis Gödel Prize recipients Shafi Goldwasser (two-time recipient), Silvio Micali, Maurice Herlihy, Charles Rackoff, Johan Håstad, Peter Shor, and Madhu Sudan Grace Murray Hopper Award recipients Robert Metcalfe, Shafi Goldwasser, Guy L. Steele, Jr., Richard Stallman, and W. Daniel Hillis Textbook authors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, Richard Stallman, Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Patrick Winston, Ronald L.

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  • Aggregation (linguistics)

    Aggregation (linguistics)

    In linguistics, aggregation is a subtask of natural language generation, which involves merging syntactic constituents (such as sentences and phrases) together. Sometimes aggregation can be done at a conceptual level. == Examples == A simple example of syntactic aggregation is merging the two sentences John went to the shop and John bought an apple into the single sentence John went to the shop and bought an apple. Syntactic aggregation can be much more complex than this. For example, aggregation can embed one of the constituents in the other; e.g., we can aggregate John went to the shop and The shop was closed into the sentence John went to the shop, which was closed. From a pragmatic perspective, aggregating sentences together often suggests to the reader that these sentences are related to each other. If this is not the case, the reader may be confused. For example, someone who reads John went to the shop and bought an apple may infer that the apple was bought in the shop; if this is not the case, then these sentences should not be aggregated. == Algorithms and issues == Aggregation algorithms must do two things: Decide when two constituents should be aggregated Decide how two constituents should be aggregated, and create the aggregated structure The first issue, deciding when to aggregate, is poorly understood. Aggegration decisions certainly depend on the semantic relations between the constituents, as mentioned above; they also depend on the genre (e.g., bureaucratic texts tend to be more aggregated than instruction manuals). They probably should depend on rhetorical and discourse structure. The literacy level of the reader is also probably important (poor readers need shorter sentences). But we have no integrated model which brings all these factors together into a single algorithm. With regard to the second issue, there have been some studies of different types of aggregation, and how they should be carried out. Harbusch and Kempen describe several syntactic aggregation strategies. In their terminology, John went to the shop and bought an apple is an example of forward conjunction Reduction Much less is known about conceptual aggregation. Di Eugenio et al. show how conceptual aggregation can be done in an intelligent tutoring system, and demonstrate that performing such aggregation makes the system more effective (and that conceptual aggregation make a bigger impact than syntactic aggregation). == Software == Unfortunately there is not much software available for performing aggregation. However the SimpleNLG system does include limited support for basic aggregation. For example, the following code causes SimpleNLG to print out The man is hungry and buys an apple.

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  • Ashish Vaswani

    Ashish Vaswani

    Ashish Vaswani is an Indian computer scientist and entrepreneur. He conducted research at Google Brain, co-founded Adept AI, and, as of 2025, was co-founder and chief executive officer of Essential AI. Vaswani is a co-author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the Transformer neural network architecture. The Transformer model has been used in the development of subsequent NLP models BERT, ChatGPT, and their successors. == Career == Vaswani completed his engineering in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra (BIT Mesra) in 2002. In 2004, he enrolled at the University of Southern California for graduate studies. He earned his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California supervised by David Chiang. During his research career at Google, Vaswani was part of the Google Brain team, where he conducted the work leading to the 'Attention Is All You Need' publication. Prior to joining Google, he was affiliated with the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. After Google, Vaswani co-founded Adept AI, a machine learning-focused startup that developed AI agents and tools for software automation. He has since left the company. He later co-founded Essential AI with Niki Parmar. As of 2025, he was chief executive officer of Essential AI. == Notable works == Vaswani's most notable paper, "Attention Is All You Need", was published in 2017. The paper introduced the Transformer model, which uses self-attention mechanisms instead of recurrence for sequence-to-sequence tasks. The Transformer architecture has become foundational to modern language models and NLP systems, including BERT (2018), GPT-2, GPT-3 (2019–2020) and many more recent models. The "Attention Is All You Need" paper is among the most cited papers in machine learning.

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  • David Krueger (professor)

    David Krueger (professor)

    David Krueger is an American machine learning professor and advocate for the reduction of risks related to artificial intelligence. Krueger is an assistant professor in Robust, Reasoning, and Responsible AI at the University of Montreal and a Core Academic Member at Mila. == Early life and education == Krueger obtained a B.A. in mathematics from Reed College, and completed his MSc and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Montreal. He trained in deep learning under Yoshua Bengio, Roland Memisevic, and Aaron Courville from 2013 to 2021. Krueger was also an intern on Google DeepMind's AI Safety team in 2018. == Career == Krueger researches deep learning, AI alignment, and AI safety. His work is focused on reducing the risk of human extinction resulting from out-of-control AI systems. Krueger was an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge from 2021 to 2024, before taking a faculty position at the University of Montreal in 2024. In 2023, he was a founding research director at the UK AI Security Institute. That same year, Krueger initiated the Statement on AI Risk, which argues that AI could cause human extinction and was signed by Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, AI expert Geoffrey Hinton, and other leaders. In April 2026, Krueger discussed the risks of advanced AI at a Capitol Hill event hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders. === Evitable === In 2025, Krueger founded Evitable, a nonprofit organization that advocates for an AI moratorium. == Views == Krueger argues that AI will lead to a "gradual disempowerment" of workers, likening AI chips to nuclear bombs. He also says the military use of AI "poses an existential risk to humanity."

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