AI Analytics For Retail

AI Analytics For Retail — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Knowledge graph embedding

    Knowledge graph embedding

    In representation learning, knowledge graph embedding (KGE), also called knowledge representation learning (KRL), or multi-relation learning, is a machine learning task of learning a low-dimensional representation of a knowledge graph's entities and relations while preserving their semantic meaning. Leveraging their embedded representation, knowledge graphs can be used for various applications such as link prediction, triple classification, entity recognition, clustering, and relation extraction. == Definition == A knowledge graph G = { E , R , F } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {G}}=\{E,R,F\}} is a collection of entities E {\displaystyle E} , relations R {\displaystyle R} , and facts F {\displaystyle F} . A fact is a triple ( h , r , t ) ∈ F {\displaystyle (h,r,t)\in F} that denotes a link r ∈ R {\displaystyle r\in R} between the head h ∈ E {\displaystyle h\in E} and the tail t ∈ E {\displaystyle t\in E} of the triple. Another notation that is often used in the literature to represent a triple (or fact) is ⟨ head , relation , tail ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle {\text{head}},{\text{relation}},{\text{tail}}\rangle } . This notation is called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A knowledge graph represents the knowledge related to a specific domain; leveraging this structured representation, it is possible to infer a piece of new knowledge from it after some refinement steps. However, nowadays, people have to deal with the sparsity of data and the computational inefficiency to use them in a real-world application. The embedding of a knowledge graph is a function that translates each entity and each relation into a vector of a given dimension d {\displaystyle d} , called embedding dimension. It is even possible to embed the entities and relations with different dimensions. The embedding vectors can then be used for other tasks. A knowledge graph embedding is characterized by four aspects: Representation space: The low-dimensional space in which the entities and relations are represented. Scoring function: A measure of the goodness of a triple-embedded representation. Encoding models: The modality in which the embedded representation of the entities and relations interact with each other. Additional information: Any additional information coming from the knowledge graph that can enrich the embedded representation. Usually, an ad hoc scoring function is integrated into the general scoring function for each additional piece of information. == Embedding procedure == All algorithms for creating a knowledge graph embedding follow the same approach. First, the embedding vectors are initialized to random values. Then, they are iteratively optimized using a training set of triples. In each iteration, a batch of size b {\displaystyle b} triples is sampled from the training set, and a triple from it is sampled and corrupted—i.e., a triple that does not represent a true fact in the knowledge graph. The corruption of a triple involves substituting the head or the tail (or both) of the triple with another entity that makes the fact false. The original triple and the corrupted triple are added in the training batch, and then the embeddings are updated, optimizing a scoring function. Iteration stops when a stop condition is reached. Usually, the stop condition depends on the overfitting of the training set. At the end, the learned embeddings should have extracted semantic meaning from the training triples and should correctly predict unseen true facts in the knowledge graph. === Pseudocode === The following is the pseudocode for the general embedding procedure. algorithm Compute entity and relation embeddings input: The training set S = { ( h , r , t ) } {\displaystyle S=\{(h,r,t)\}} , entity set E {\displaystyle E} , relation set R {\displaystyle R} , embedding dimension k {\displaystyle k} output: Entity and relation embeddings initialization: the entities e {\displaystyle e} and relations r {\displaystyle r} embeddings (vectors) are randomly initialized while stop condition do S b a t c h ← s a m p l e ( S , b ) {\displaystyle S_{batch}\leftarrow sample(S,b)} // Sample a batch from the training set for each ( h , r , t ) {\displaystyle (h,r,t)} in S b a t c h {\displaystyle S_{batch}} do ( h ′ , r , t ′ ) ← s a m p l e ( S ′ ) {\displaystyle (h',r,t')\leftarrow sample(S')} // Sample a corrupted fact T b a t c h ← T b a t c h ∪ { ( ( h , r , t ) , ( h ′ , r , t ′ ) ) } {\displaystyle T_{batch}\leftarrow T_{batch}\cup \{((h,r,t),(h',r,t'))\}} end for Update embeddings by minimizing the loss function end while == Performance indicators == These indexes are often used to measure the embedding quality of a model. The simplicity of the indexes makes them very suitable for evaluating the performance of an embedding algorithm even on a large scale. Given Q {\displaystyle {\ce {Q}}} as the set of all ranked predictions of a model, it is possible to define three different performance indexes: Hits@K, MR, and MRR. === Hits@K === Hits@K or in short, H@K, is a performance index that measures the probability to find the correct prediction in the first top K model predictions. Usually, it is used k = 10 {\displaystyle k=10} . Hits@K reflects the accuracy of an embedding model to predict the relation between two given triples correctly. Hits@K = | { q ∈ Q : q < k } | | Q | ∈ [ 0 , 1 ] {\displaystyle ={\frac {|\{q\in Q:q Read more →

  • Cleverbot

    Cleverbot

    Cleverbot is a chatterbot web application. It was created by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter and launched in October 2008. It was preceded by Jabberwacky, a chatbot project that began in 1988 and went online in 1997. In its first decade, Cleverbot held several thousand conversations with Carpenter and his associates. Since launching on the web, the number of conversations held has exceeded 150 million. Besides the web application, Cleverbot is also available as an iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app. == Operation == Cleverbot's responses are not pre-programmed because it learns from human input: Humans type into the box below the Cleverbot logo and the system finds all keywords or an exact phrase matching the input. After searching through its saved conversations, it responds to the input by finding how a human responded to that input when it was asked, in part or in full, by Cleverbot. Cleverbot participated in a formal Turing test at the 2011 Techniche festival at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati on 3 September 2011. Out of the 1334 votes cast, Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, compared to the rating of 63.3% human achieved by human participants. A score of 50.05% or higher is often considered to be a passing grade. The software running for the event had to handle just 1 or 2 simultaneous requests, whereas online Cleverbot is usually talking to around 10,000 to 50,000 people at once. == Developments == Cleverbot is constantly growing in data size at the rate of 4 to 7 million interactions per day. Updates to the software have been mostly behind the scenes. In 2014, Cleverbot was upgraded to use GPU serving techniques. Unlike Eliza, the program does not respond in a fixed way, instead choosing its responses heuristically using fuzzy logic, the whole of the conversation being compared to the millions that have taken place before. Cleverbot now uses over 279 million interactions, about 3-4% of the data it has already accumulated. The developers of Cleverbot are attempting to build a new version using machine learning techniques. An app that uses the Cleverscript engine to play a game of 20 Questions has been launched under the name Clevernator. Unlike other such games, the player asks the questions and it is the role of the AI to understand, and answer factually. An app that allows owners to create and talk to their own small Cleverbot-like AI has been launched, called Cleverme! for Apple products. == In popular culture == Cleverbot received media attention after being featured in the popular 2010 creepypasta ARG web serial Ben Drowned by Alexander D. Hall. In early 2017, a Twitch stream of two Google Home devices modified to talk to each other using Cleverbot garnered over 700,000 visitors and over 30,000 peak concurrent viewers.

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  • Inception (deep learning architecture)

    Inception (deep learning architecture)

    Inception is a family of convolutional neural network (CNN) for computer vision, introduced by researchers at Google in 2014 as GoogLeNet (later renamed Inception v1). The series was historically important as an early CNN that separates the stem (data ingest), body (data processing), and head (prediction), an architectural design that persists in all modern CNN. == Version history == === Inception v1 === In 2014, a team at Google developed the GoogLeNet architecture, an instance of which won the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The name came from the LeNet of 1998, since both LeNet and GoogLeNet are CNNs. They also called it "Inception" after a "we need to go deeper" internet meme, a phrase from Inception (2010) the film. Because later, more versions were released, the original Inception architecture was renamed again as "Inception v1". The models and the code were released under Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. The Inception v1 architecture is a deep CNN composed of 22 layers. Most of these layers were "Inception modules". The original paper stated that Inception modules are a "logical culmination" of Network in Network and (Arora et al, 2014). Since Inception v1 is deep, it suffered from the vanishing gradient problem. The team solved it by using two "auxiliary classifiers", which are linear-softmax classifiers inserted at 1/3-deep and 2/3-deep within the network, and the loss function is a weighted sum of all three: L = 0.3 L a u x , 1 + 0.3 L a u x , 2 + L r e a l {\displaystyle L=0.3L_{aux,1}+0.3L_{aux,2}+L_{real}} These were removed after training was complete. This was later solved by the ResNet architecture. The architecture consists of three parts stacked on top of one another: The stem (data ingestion): The first few convolutional layers perform data preprocessing to downscale images to a smaller size. The body (data processing): The next many Inception modules perform the bulk of data processing. The head (prediction): The final fully-connected layer and softmax produces a probability distribution for image classification. This structure is used in most modern CNN architectures. === Inception v2 === Inception v2 was released in 2015, in a paper that is more famous for proposing batch normalization. It had 13.6 million parameters. It improves on Inception v1 by adding batch normalization, and removing dropout and local response normalization which they found became unnecessary when batch normalization is used. === Inception v3 === Inception v3 was released in 2016. It improves on Inception v2 by using factorized convolutions. As an example, a single 5×5 convolution can be factored into 3×3 stacked on top of another 3×3. Both has a receptive field of size 5×5. The 5×5 convolution kernel has 25 parameters, compared to just 18 in the factorized version. Thus, the 5×5 convolution is strictly more powerful than the factorized version. However, this power is not necessarily needed. Empirically, the research team found that factorized convolutions help. It also uses a form of dimension-reduction by concatenating the output from a convolutional layer and a pooling layer. As an example, a tensor of size 35 × 35 × 320 {\displaystyle 35\times 35\times 320} can be downscaled by a convolution with stride 2 to 17 × 17 × 320 {\displaystyle 17\times 17\times 320} , and by maxpooling with pool size 2 × 2 {\displaystyle 2\times 2} to 17 × 17 × 320 {\displaystyle 17\times 17\times 320} . These are then concatenated to 17 × 17 × 640 {\displaystyle 17\times 17\times 640} . Other than this, it also removed the lowest auxiliary classifier during training. They found that the auxiliary head worked as a form of regularization. They also proposed label-smoothing regularization in classification. For an image with label c {\displaystyle c} , instead of making the model to predict the probability distribution δ c = ( 0 , 0 , … , 0 , 1 ⏟ c -th entry , 0 , … , 0 ) {\displaystyle \delta _{c}=(0,0,\dots ,0,\underbrace {1} _{c{\text{-th entry}}},0,\dots ,0)} , they made the model predict the smoothed distribution ( 1 − ϵ ) δ c + ϵ / K {\displaystyle (1-\epsilon )\delta _{c}+\epsilon /K} where K {\displaystyle K} is the total number of classes. === Inception v4 === In 2017, the team released Inception v4, Inception ResNet v1, and Inception ResNet v2. Inception v4 is an incremental update with even more factorized convolutions, and other complications that were empirically found to improve benchmarks. Inception ResNet v1 and v2 are both modifications of Inception v4, where residual connections are added to each Inception module, inspired by the ResNet architecture. === Xception === Xception ("Extreme Inception") was published in 2017. It is a linear stack of depthwise separable convolution layers with residual connections. The design was proposed on the hypothesis that in a CNN, the cross-channels correlations and spatial correlations in the feature maps can be entirely decoupled. Training each network took 3 days on 60 K80 GPUs, or approximately 0.5 petaFLOP-days.

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  • Lesk algorithm

    Lesk algorithm

    The Lesk algorithm is a classical algorithm for word sense disambiguation introduced by Michael E. Lesk in 1986. It operates on the premise that words within a given context are likely to share a common meaning. This algorithm compares the dictionary definitions of an ambiguous word with the words in its surrounding context to determine the most appropriate sense. Variations, such as the Simplified Lesk algorithm, have demonstrated improved precision and efficiency. However, the Lesk algorithm has faced criticism for its sensitivity to definition wording and its reliance on brief glosses. Researchers have sought to enhance its accuracy by incorporating additional resources like thesauruses and syntactic models. == Overview == The Lesk algorithm is based on the assumption that words in a given "neighborhood" (section of text) will tend to share a common topic. A simplified version of the Lesk algorithm is to compare the dictionary definition of an ambiguous word with the terms contained in its neighborhood. Versions have been adapted to use WordNet. An implementation might look like this: for every sense of the word being disambiguated one should count the number of words that are in both the neighborhood of that word and in the dictionary definition of that sense the sense that is to be chosen is the sense that has the largest number of this count. A frequently used example illustrating this algorithm is for the context "pine cone". The following dictionary definitions are used: PINE 1. kinds of evergreen tree with needle-shaped leaves 2. waste away through sorrow or illness CONE 1. solid body which narrows to a point 2. something of this shape whether solid or hollow 3. fruit of certain evergreen trees As can be seen, the best intersection is Pine #1 ⋂ Cone #3 = 2. == Simplified Lesk algorithm == In Simplified Lesk algorithm, the correct meaning of each word in a given context is determined individually by locating the sense that overlaps the most between its dictionary definition and the given context. Rather than simultaneously determining the meanings of all words in a given context, this approach tackles each word individually, independent of the meaning of the other words occurring in the same context. "A comparative evaluation performed by Vasilescu et al. (2004) has shown that the simplified Lesk algorithm can significantly outperform the original definition of the algorithm, both in terms of precision and efficiency. By evaluating the disambiguation algorithms on the Senseval-2 English all words data, they measure a 58% precision using the simplified Lesk algorithm compared to the only 42% under the original algorithm. Note: Vasilescu et al. implementation considers a back-off strategy for words not covered by the algorithm, consisting of the most frequent sense defined in WordNet. This means that words for which all their possible meanings lead to zero overlap with current context or with other word definitions are by default assigned sense number one in WordNet." Simplified LESK Algorithm with smart default word sense (Vasilescu et al., 2004) The COMPUTEOVERLAP function returns the number of words in common between two sets, ignoring function words or other words on a stop list. The original Lesk algorithm defines the context in a more complex way. == Criticisms == Unfortunately, Lesk’s approach is very sensitive to the exact wording of definitions, so the absence of a certain word can radically change the results. Further, the algorithm determines overlaps only among the glosses of the senses being considered. This is a significant limitation in that dictionary glosses tend to be fairly short and do not provide sufficient vocabulary to relate fine-grained sense distinctions. A lot of work has appeared offering different modifications of this algorithm. These works use other resources for analysis (thesauruses, synonyms dictionaries or morphological and syntactic models): for instance, it may use such information as synonyms, different derivatives, or words from definitions of words from definitions. == Lesk variants == Original Lesk (Lesk, 1986) Adapted/Extended Lesk (Banerjee and Pederson, 2002/2003): In the adaptive lesk algorithm, a word vector is created corresponds to every content word in the wordnet gloss. Concatenating glosses of related concepts in WordNet can be used to augment this vector. The vector contains the co-occurrence counts of words co-occurring with w in a large corpus. Adding all the word vectors for all the content words in its gloss creates the Gloss vector g for a concept. Relatedness is determined by comparing the gloss vector using the Cosine similarity measure. There are a lot of studies concerning Lesk and its extensions: Wilks and Stevenson, 1998, 1999; Mahesh et al., 1997; Cowie et al., 1992; Yarowsky, 1992; Pook and Catlett, 1988; Kilgarriff and Rosensweig, 2000; Kwong, 2001; Nastase and Szpakowicz, 2001; Gelbukh and Sidorov, 2004.

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  • ISSCO Graphics

    ISSCO Graphics

    Integrated Software Systems Corporation (ISSCO), doing business as ISSCO Graphics, was an American software developer and publisher based in San Diego, California, and active from 1970 to 1986. They were best known for their enterprise graphics software packages, including Tellagraf, CueChart and Disspla. == History == ISSCO Graphics had considered acquiring Breakthrough Software, whose software focus involved PC DOS, as a means of getting into the PC arena, but backed off when Computer Associates made an offer to acquire ISSCO. By early 1987 it was reported that "Issco users breathe sigh of relief" that all was well. The ISSCO User's Group was founded in 1976. ISSCO, which was founded in 1970 by Peter Preuss, was acquired by Computer Associates in 1986. == Notable products == === Tellagraf === ISSCO's Tellagraf is an early software package designed to allow end-users to "turn out full color, professional quality charts" with initial results displayed on a screen, modified as needed, and then "a final 'hard-copy' can be made .. or made into 35mm color transparencies for projection onto a screen." Users of Tellagraf often had access to CueChart and Disspla software. Often computer sites having one had all three. Terminals with varying degrees of graphics, such as the DEC's VT100 and Tektronix's Tektronix 4xxx family of text and graphics terminals. were supported, and the software ran on popular computing platforms. Four years are important to Tellagraf's early history: 1978: ease of use 1980: graphic-artist quality 1982: introduction of CueChart, and recognition by IEEE. 1983: "quality graphics enters the mainstream of data processing with ..." Tellegraf was eventually acquired by Computer Associates and renamed CA-Tellegraf. SAS users found it helpful. Universities, research institutes and financial services firms were among early users. === Disspla === Disspla is a package of data plotting subroutines that can be used from high level languages. It was also acquired by Computer Associates. === Tellaplan === In 1983 ISSCO introduced Tellaplan, "a project planning, report and schedule charting system for Tell-A- Graf users in IBM MVS or CMS or Digital Equipment Corp. VAX computers" atop which they built "two visual project management software packages" three years later.

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  • Cuboid (computer vision)

    Cuboid (computer vision)

    In computer vision, the term cuboid is used to describe a small spatiotemporal volume extracted for purposes of behavior recognition. The cuboid is regarded as a basic geometric primitive type and is used to depict three-dimensional objects within a three dimensional representation of a flat, two dimensional image. == Production == Cuboids can be produced from both two-dimensional and three-dimensional images. One method used to produce cuboids utilizes scene understanding (SUN) primitive databases, which are collections of pictures that already contain cuboids. By sorting through SUN primitive databases with machine learning tools, computers observe the conditions in which cuboids are produced in images from SUN primitive databases and can learn to produce cuboids from other images. RGB-D images, which are RGB images that also record the depth of each pixel, are occasionally used to produce cuboids because computers no longer need to determine the depth of an object, as they typically do because depth is already recorded. Cuboid production is sensitive to changes in color and illumination, blockage, and background clutter. This means that it is difficult for computers to produce cuboids of objects that are multicolored, irregularly illuminated, or partially covered, or if there are many objects in the background. This is partially due to the fact that algorithms for producing cuboids are still relatively simple. == Usage == Cuboids are created for point cloud-based three-dimensional maps and can be utilized in various situations such as augmented reality, the automated control of cars, drones, and robots, and object detection. Cuboids allow for software to identify a scene through geometric descriptions in an “object-agnostic” fashion. Interest points, locations within images that are identified by a computer as essential to identifying the image, created from two-dimensional images can be used with cuboids for image matching, identifying a room or scene, and instance recognition. Interest points created from three dimensional images can be used with cuboids to recognize activities. This is possible because interest points aid software to focus on only the most important aspects of the images. RGB-D images and SLAM systems are used together in RGB-D SLAM systems, which are employed by Computer-aided design systems to generate point cloud-based three-dimensional maps. Most industrial multi-axis machining tools use computer-aided manufacturing and subsequently work in cuboid work spaces.

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  • Lexxe

    Lexxe

    Lexxe is an internet search engine that applies Natural Language Processing in its semantic search technology. Founded in 2005 by Dr. Hong Liang Qiao, Lexxe is based in Sydney, Australia. Today, Lexxe's key focus is on sentiment search with the launch of a news sentiment search site at News & Moods (www.newsandmoods.com). Lexxe has experienced several stages of change of focus in search technology: Lexxe launched its Alpha version in 2005, featuring Natural Language question answering (i.e. users could ask questions in English to the search engine apart from keyword searches — this feature has been suspended for redevelopment since 2010). It used only algorithms to extract answers from web pages, with no question-answer pair databases prepared in advance. In 2011, Lexxe launched a beta version with a new search technology called Semantic Key. Semantic Keys enable users to query with a conceptual keyword (or a keyword with a special meaning, hence the term Semantic Key) in order to find instances under the concept, e.g. price → $5.95 or €200, color → red, yellow, white. For example, “price: a pound of apples”, “color: ferrari”. With initial 500 Semantic Keys at the Beta launch, Lexxe became the first search engine in the world to offer this unique and useful search technology to the users. The cost of building Semantic Keys was too heavy though. In 2017, Lexxe launched News & Moods (www.newsandmoods.com), an open platform for news sentiment search, a first step towards sentiment search feature for the entire Internet search in Lexxe search engine. News & Moods also comes with smartphone apps in Android and iOS.

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  • Machine vision

    Machine vision

    Machine vision is the technology and methods used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision refers to many technologies, software and hardware products, integrated systems, actions, methods and expertise. Machine vision as a systems engineering discipline can be considered distinct from computer vision, a form of computer science. It attempts to integrate existing technologies in new ways and apply them to solve real world problems. The term is the prevalent one for these functions in industrial automation environments but is also used for these functions in other environment vehicle guidance. The overall machine vision process includes planning the details of the requirements and project, and then creating a solution. During run-time, the process starts with imaging, followed by automated analysis of the image and extraction of the required information. == Definition == Definitions of the term "Machine vision" vary, but all include the technology and methods used to extract information from an image on an automated basis, as opposed to image processing, where the output is another image. The information extracted can be a simple good-part/bad-part signal, or more a complex set of data such as the identity, position and orientation of each object in an image. The information can be used for such applications as automatic inspection and robot and process guidance in industry, for security monitoring and vehicle guidance. This field encompasses a large number of technologies, software and hardware products, integrated systems, actions, methods and expertise. Machine vision is practically the only term used for these functions in industrial automation applications; the term is less universal for these functions in other environments such as security and vehicle guidance. Machine vision as a systems engineering discipline can be considered distinct from computer vision, a form of basic computer science; machine vision attempts to integrate existing technologies in new ways and apply them to solve real world problems in a way that meets the requirements of industrial automation and similar application areas. The term is also used in a broader sense by trade shows and trade groups such as the Automated Imaging Association and the European Machine Vision Association. This broader definition also encompasses products and applications most often associated with image processing. The primary uses for machine vision are automatic inspection and industrial robot/process guidance. In more recent times the terms computer vision and machine vision have converged to a greater degree. See glossary of machine vision. == Imaging based automatic inspection and sorting == The primary uses for machine vision are imaging-based automatic inspection and sorting and robot guidance.; in this section the former is abbreviated as "automatic inspection". The overall process includes planning the details of the requirements and project, and then creating a solution. This section describes the technical process that occurs during the operation of the solution. === Methods and sequence of operation === The first step in the automatic inspection sequence of operation is acquisition of an image, typically using cameras, lenses, and lighting that has been designed to provide the differentiation required by subsequent processing. MV software packages and programs developed in them then employ various digital image processing techniques to extract the required information, and often make decisions (such as pass/fail) based on the extracted information. === Equipment === The components of an automatic inspection system usually include lighting, a camera or other imager, a processor, software, and output devices. === Imaging === The imaging device (e.g. camera) can either be separate from the main image processing unit or combined with it in which case the combination is generally called a smart camera or smart sensor. Inclusion of the full processing function into the same enclosure as the camera is often referred to as embedded processing. When separated, the connection may be made to specialized intermediate hardware, a custom processing appliance, or a frame grabber within a computer using either an analog or standardized digital interface (Camera Link, CoaXPress). MV implementations also use digital cameras capable of direct connections (without a framegrabber) to a computer via FireWire, USB or Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. While conventional (2D visible light) imaging is most commonly used in MV, alternatives include multispectral imaging, hyperspectral imaging, imaging various infrared bands, line scan imaging, 3D imaging of surfaces and X-ray imaging. Key differentiations within MV 2D visible light imaging are monochromatic vs. color, frame rate, resolution, and whether or not the imaging process is simultaneous over the entire image, making it suitable for moving processes. Though the vast majority of machine vision applications are solved using two-dimensional imaging, machine vision applications utilizing 3D imaging are a growing niche within the industry. The most commonly used method for 3D imaging is scanning based triangulation which utilizes motion of the product or image during the imaging process. A laser is projected onto the surfaces of an object. In machine vision this is accomplished with a scanning motion, either by moving the workpiece, or by moving the camera & laser imaging system. The line is viewed by a camera from a different angle; the deviation of the line represents shape variations. Lines from multiple scans are assembled into a depth map or point cloud. Stereoscopic vision is used in special cases involving unique features present in both views of a pair of cameras. Other 3D methods used for machine vision are time of flight and grid based. One method is grid array based systems using pseudorandom structured light system as employed by the Microsoft Kinect system circa 2012. === Image processing === After an image is acquired, it is processed. Central processing functions are generally done by a CPU, a GPU, a FPGA or a combination of these. Deep learning training and inference impose higher processing performance requirements. Multiple stages of processing are generally used in a sequence that ends up as a desired result. A typical sequence might start with tools such as filters which modify the image, followed by extraction of objects, then extraction (e.g. measurements, reading of codes) of data from those objects, followed by communicating that data, or comparing it against target values to create and communicate "pass/fail" results. Machine vision image processing methods include; Stitching/Registration: Combining of adjacent 2D or 3D images. Filtering (e.g. morphological filtering) Thresholding: Thresholding starts with setting or determining a gray value that will be useful for the following steps. The value is then used to separate portions of the image, and sometimes to transform each portion of the image to simply black and white based on whether it is below or above that grayscale value. Pixel counting: counts the number of light or dark pixels Segmentation: Partitioning a digital image into multiple segments to simplify and/or change the representation of an image into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyze. Edge detection: finding object edges Color Analysis: Identify parts, products and items using color, assess quality from color, and isolate features using color. Blob detection and extraction: inspecting an image for discrete blobs of connected pixels (e.g. a black hole in a grey object) as image landmarks. Neural network / deep learning / machine learning processing: weighted and self-training multi-variable decision making Circa 2019 there is a large expansion of this, using deep learning and machine learning to significantly expand machine vision capabilities. The most common result of such processing is classification. Examples of classification are object identification,"pass fail" classification of identified objects and OCR. Pattern recognition including template matching. Finding, matching, and/or counting specific patterns. This may include location of an object that may be rotated, partially hidden by another object, or varying in size. Barcode, Data Matrix and "2D barcode" reading Optical character recognition: automated reading of text such as serial numbers Gauging/Metrology: measurement of object dimensions (e.g. in pixels, inches or millimeters) Comparison against target values to determine a "pass or fail" or "go/no go" result. For example, with code or bar code verification, the read value is compared to the stored target value. For gauging, a measurement is compared against the proper value and tolerances. For verification of alpha-numberic codes, the

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  • Relational data mining

    Relational data mining

    Relational data mining is the data mining technique for relational databases. Unlike traditional data mining algorithms, which look for patterns in a single table (propositional patterns), relational data mining algorithms look for patterns among multiple tables (relational patterns). For most types of propositional patterns, there are corresponding relational patterns. For example, there are relational classification rules (relational classification), relational regression tree, and relational association rules. There are several approaches to relational data mining: Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) Graph Mining Propositionalization Multi-view learning == Algorithms == Multi-Relation Association Rules: Multi-Relation Association Rules (MRAR) is a new class of association rules which in contrast to primitive, simple and even multi-relational association rules (that are usually extracted from multi-relational databases), each rule item consists of one entity but several relations. These relations indicate indirect relationship between the entities. Consider the following MRAR where the first item consists of three relations live in, nearby and humid: “Those who live in a place which is near by a city with humid climate type and also are younger than 20 -> their health condition is good”. Such association rules are extractable from RDBMS data or semantic web data. == Software == Safarii: a Data Mining environment for analysing large relational databases based on a multi-relational data mining engine. Dataconda: a software, free for research and teaching purposes, that helps mining relational databases without the use of SQL. == Datasets == Relational dataset repository: a collection of publicly available relational datasets.

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  • Mistral Vibe

    Mistral Vibe

    Mistral Vibe or Vibe (Le Chat until May 2026), is a chatbot that uses generative artificial intelligence developed in France by Mistral AI. Mistral Vibe is available in iOS and Android. Its services are operated on a freemium model. == History == In February 2024, Mistral AI released Le Chat. In January 2025, Mistral AI made a content deal with Agence France-Presse (AFP) that lets Le Chat query AFP's entire archive dating back to 1983. On 6 February 2025, a mobile app for Le Chat was released for iOS and Android, and a subscription tier, Pro, was introduced at a cost of $14.99 per month. In July 2025, Mistral AI released Voxtral, an open-source language model that understands and generates audio. Mistral introduced a voice mode for chatting that uses Voxtral, and projects, which allows grouping chats and files. In September 2025, Le Chat introduced the capability to remember previous conversations. In May 2026, Mistral AI announced the rebrand from Le Chat to Mistral Vibe and new features were introduced at the same time.

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  • Textual case-based reasoning

    Textual case-based reasoning

    Textual case-based reasoning (TCBR) is a subtopic of case-based reasoning, in short CBR, a popular area in artificial intelligence. CBR suggests the ways to use past experiences to solve future similar problems, requiring that past experiences be structured in a form similar to attribute-value pairs. This leads to the investigation of textual descriptions for knowledge exploration whose output will be, in turn, used to solve similar problems. == Subareas == Textual case-base reasoning research has focused on: measuring similarity between textual cases mapping texts into structured case representations adapting textual cases for reuse automatically generating representations.

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  • Kleene star

    Kleene star

    In formal language theory, the Kleene star (or Kleene operator or Kleene closure) refers to two related unary operations, that can be applied either to an alphabet of symbols or to a formal language, a set of strings (finite sequences of symbols). The Kleene star operator on an alphabet V generates the set V of all finite-length strings over V, that is, finite sequences whose elements belong to V; in mathematics, it is more commonly known as the free monoid construction. The Kleene star operator on a language L generates another language L, the set of all strings that can be obtained as a concatenation of zero or more members of L. In both cases, repetitions are allowed. The Kleene star operators are named after American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene, who first introduced and widely used it to characterize automata for regular expressions. == Of an alphabet == Given an alphabet V {\displaystyle V} , define V 0 = { ε } {\displaystyle V^{0}=\{\varepsilon \}} (the set consists only of the empty string), V 1 = V , {\displaystyle V^{1}=V,} and define recursively the set V i + 1 = { w v : w ∈ V i and v ∈ V } {\displaystyle V^{i+1}=\{wv:w\in V^{i}{\text{ and }}v\in V\}} for each i > 0 , {\displaystyle i>0,} where w v {\displaystyle wv} denotes the string obtained by appending the single character v {\displaystyle v} to the end of w {\displaystyle w} . Here, V i {\displaystyle V^{i}} can be understood to be the set of all strings of length exactly i {\displaystyle i} , with characters from V {\displaystyle V} . The definition of Kleene star on V {\displaystyle V} is V ∗ = ⋃ i ≥ 0 V i = V 0 ∪ V 1 ∪ V 2 ∪ V 3 ∪ V 4 ∪ ⋯ . {\displaystyle V^{}=\bigcup _{i\geq 0}V^{i}=V^{0}\cup V^{1}\cup V^{2}\cup V^{3}\cup V^{4}\cup \cdots .} == Of a language == Given a language L {\displaystyle L} (any finite or infinite set of strings), define L 0 = { ε } {\displaystyle L^{0}=\{\varepsilon \}} (the language consisting only of the empty string), L 1 = L , {\displaystyle L^{1}=L,} and define recursively the set L i + 1 = { w v : w ∈ L i and v ∈ L } {\displaystyle L^{i+1}=\{wv:w\in L^{i}{\text{ and }}v\in L\}} for each i > 0 , {\displaystyle i>0,} where w v {\displaystyle wv} denotes the string obtained by concatenating w {\displaystyle w} and v {\displaystyle v} . Here, L i {\displaystyle L^{i}} can be understood to be the set of all strings that can be obtained by concatenating exactly i {\displaystyle i} strings from L {\displaystyle L} , allowing repetitions. The definition of Kleene star on L {\displaystyle L} is L ∗ = ⋃ i ≥ 0 L i = L 0 ∪ L 1 ∪ L 2 ∪ L 3 ∪ L 4 ∪ ⋯ . {\displaystyle L^{}=\bigcup _{i\geq 0}L^{i}=L^{0}\cup L^{1}\cup L^{2}\cup L^{3}\cup L^{4}\cup \cdots .} == Kleene plus == In some formal language studies, (e.g. AFL theory) a variation on the Kleene star operation called the Kleene plus is used. The Kleene plus omits the V 0 {\displaystyle V^{0}} or L 0 {\displaystyle L^{0}} term in the above unions. In other words, the Kleene plus on V {\displaystyle V} is V + = ⋃ i ≥ 1 V i = V 1 ∪ V 2 ∪ V 3 ∪ ⋯ , {\displaystyle V^{+}=\bigcup _{i\geq 1}V^{i}=V^{1}\cup V^{2}\cup V^{3}\cup \cdots ,} or V + = V ∗ V . {\displaystyle V^{+}=V^{}V.} == Examples == Example of Kleene star applied to a set of strings: {"ab","c"} = { ε, "ab", "c", "abab", "abc", "cab", "cc", "ababab", "ababc", "abcab", "abcc", "cabab", "cabc", "ccab", "ccc", ...}. Example of Kleene star applied to a set of strings without the prefix property: {"a","ab","b"} = { ε, "a", "ab", "b", "aa", "aab", "aba", "abab", "abb", "ba", "bab", "bb", ...};In this example, the string "aab" can be obtained in two different ways. The Sardinas-Patterson algorithm can be used to check for a given V whether any member of V can be obtained in more than one way. Example of Kleene and Kleene plus applied to a set of characters (following the C programming language convention where a character is denoted by single quotes and a string is denoted by double quotes): {'a', 'b', 'c'} = { ε, "a", "b", "c", "aa", "ab", "ac", "ba", "bb", "bc", "ca", "cb", "cc", "aaa", "aab", ...}. {'a', 'b', 'c'}+ = { "a", "b", "c", "aa", "ab", "ac", "ba", "bb", "bc", "ca", "cb", "cc", "aaa", "aab", ...}. == Properties == If V {\displaystyle V} is any finite or countably infinite set of characters, then V ∗ {\displaystyle V^{}} is a countably infinite set. As a result, each formal language over a finite or countably infinite alphabet Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } is countable, since it is a subset of the countably infinite set Σ ∗ {\displaystyle \Sigma ^{}} . ( L ∗ ) ∗ = L ∗ {\displaystyle (L^{})^{}=L^{}} , which means that the Kleene star operator is an idempotent unary operator, as ( L ∗ ) i = L ∗ {\displaystyle (L^{})^{i}=L^{}} for every i ≥ 1 {\displaystyle i\geq 1} . V ∗ = { ε } {\displaystyle V^{}=\{\varepsilon \}} , if V {\displaystyle V} is the empty set ∅. For the version of the Kleene star operator on languages, L ∗ = { ε } {\displaystyle L^{}=\{\varepsilon \}} when L {\displaystyle L} is either the empty set ∅ or the singleton set { ε } {\displaystyle \{\varepsilon \}} . == Generalization == Strings form a monoid with concatenation as the binary operation and ε the identity element. In addition to strings, the Kleene star is defined for any monoid. More precisely, let (M, ⋅) be a monoid, and S ⊆ M. Then S is the smallest submonoid of M containing S; that is, S contains the neutral element of M, the set S, and is such that if x,y ∈ S, then x⋅y ∈ S. Furthermore, the Kleene star is generalized by including the -operation (and the union) in the algebraic structure itself by the notion of complete star semiring.

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  • FastTrack Automation Studio

    FastTrack Automation Studio

    FastTrack Automation Studio (formerly known as FastTrack Scripting Host), often referred to as just FastTrack, is a scripting language for Windows IT System Administrators. The product’s goal is to handle any kind of scripting that might be required to automate processes with Microsoft Windows networks. == Manufacturer == FastTrack is produced by FastTrack Software, which is headquartered in Aalborg, Denmark. The product is promoted by the manufacturer as a one-stop shop for Windows script writers and its development paradigm is “one operation = one script line”. Script writers use a purpose-built editor to create scripts, inserting script lines via menus, drag’n drop, or simply typing them in. Scripts may be used out of the box, created from scratch, imported from forums or other users, or customized from product documentation. == Types of scripts == Simple scripts include: Outlook Signatures Login scripts Backup and replication scripts Inventory and asset management Automated Windows OS installation and deployment Automated application software deployment Active Directory scripts More advanced scripts include: SCCM task sequences Citrix ICA and RDP Clients built-in Deploying applications to server farms Deploying GPO MSI files SQL Server scripts == Basic structure == Under the hood, scripts comprise commands, functions, collections, and conditions. When a script is executed these components are converted into many lines of C# code, sometimes hundreds of lines, depending on the particular script operation. Scripts can be compiled into EXE files or MSI packages and treated as standalone Windows applications. == History == FastTrack Scripting Host (FastTrack) was first developed around 2006 to ease the administration burden of IT System Administrators on Windows networks. === Product idea === The idea for the product came from founder and President of FastTrack Software, Lars Pedersen, who has a background in systems administration. Previously with Telenor, Denmark’s major telephone company, Pedersen performed various roles in systems administration, programming and web development. He also worked as a consultant and developer on several major projects at various companies in Europe. Dissatisfied from his own experiences and frustrations administering Windows networks, Pederson looked for a way to make life easier for system administrators. In particular, he wanted something that could minimize the amount of time needed each day to perform routine and mundane tasks, which was a waste of time and expertise that should have been committed to other projects. === Development === Leading a small team of developers, Pedersen developed FastTrack Scripting Host to simplify and automate the routine tasks of system administrators. The resulting product is definitely a scripting language, but it can be used intuitively like a programming language, without requiring users to learn syntax or other concepts typically associated with programming languages. === Marketing === In April 2010, FastTrack Software entered into an agreement with Binary Research International Archived 2008-10-15 at the Wayback Machine, based in the city of Milwaukee, United States to market and sell the product globally. === Awards === FSH received a Windows IT Pro Community Choice award in 2012. == Versions == The first version was produced in June 2006 and contained 51 components, which are the commands, functions, conditions and collections making up FastTrack. The following table summarizes dates and components for major releases. Companies and organizations such as NOAA, Kawasaki, and Goodyear have used and implemented the FastTrack Scripting Host. == Comparison with other scripting software == FastTrack Scripting Host Kixtart PowerShell ScriptLogic VBScript

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  • Brill tagger

    Brill tagger

    The Brill tagger is an inductive method for part-of-speech tagging. It was described and invented by Eric Brill in his 1993 PhD thesis. It can be summarized as an "error-driven transformation-based tagger". It is: a form of supervised learning, which aims to minimize error; and, a transformation-based process, in the sense that a tag is assigned to each word and changed using a set of predefined rules. In the transformation process, if the word is known, it first assigns the most frequent tag, or if the word is unknown, it naively assigns the tag "noun" to it. High accuracy is eventually achieved by applying these rules iteratively and changing the incorrect tags. This approach ensures that valuable information such as the morphosyntactic construction of words is employed in an automatic tagging process. == Algorithm == The algorithm starts with initialization, which is the assignment of tags based on their probability for each word (for example, "dog" is more often a noun than a verb). Then "patches" are determined via rules that correct (probable) tagging errors made in the initialization phase: Initialization: Known words (in vocabulary): assigning the most frequent tag associated to a form of the word Unknown word == Rules and processing == The input text is first tokenized, or broken into words. Typically in natural language processing, contractions such as "'s", "n't", and the like are considered separate word tokens, as are punctuation marks. A dictionary and some morphological rules then provide an initial tag for each word token. For example, a simple lookup would reveal that "dog" may be a noun or a verb (the most frequent tag is simply chosen), while an unknown word will be assigned some tag(s) based on capitalization, various prefix or suffix strings, etc. (such morphological analyses, which Brill calls Lexical Rules, may vary between implementations). After all word tokens have (provisional) tags, contextual rules apply iteratively, to correct the tags by examining small amounts of context. This is where the Brill method differs from other part of speech tagging methods such as those using Hidden Markov Models. Rules are reapplied repeatedly, until a threshold is reached, or no more rules can apply. Brill rules are of the general form: tag1 → tag2 IF Condition where the Condition tests the preceding and/or following word tokens, or their tags (the notation for such rules differs between implementations). For example, in Brill's notation: IN NN WDPREVTAG DT while would change the tag of a word from IN (preposition) to NN (common noun), if the preceding word's tag is DT (determiner) and the word itself is "while". This covers cases like "all the while" or "in a while", where "while" should be tagged as a noun rather than its more common use as a conjunction (many rules are more general). Rules should only operate if the tag being changed is also known to be permissible, for the word in question or in principle (for example, most adjectives in English can also be used as nouns). Rules of this kind can be implemented by simple Finite-state machines. See Part of speech tagging for more general information including descriptions of the Penn Treebank and other sets of tags. Typical Brill taggers use a few hundred rules, which may be developed by linguistic intuition or by machine learning on a pre-tagged corpus. == Code == Brill's code pages at Johns Hopkins University are no longer on the web. An archived version of a mirror of the Brill tagger at its latest version as it was available at Plymouth Tech can be found on Archive.org. The software uses the MIT License.

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  • Topological deep learning

    Topological deep learning

    Topological deep learning (TDL) is a research field that extends deep learning to handle complex, non-Euclidean data structures. Traditional deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), excel in processing data on regular grids and sequences. However, scientific and real-world data often exhibit more intricate data domains encountered in scientific computations, including point clouds, meshes, time series, scalar fields graphs, or general topological spaces like simplicial complexes and CW complexes. TDL addresses this by incorporating topological concepts to process data with higher-order relationships, such as interactions among multiple entities and complex hierarchies. This approach leverages structures like simplicial complexes and hypergraphs to capture global dependencies and qualitative spatial properties, offering a more nuanced representation of data. TDL also encompasses methods from computational and algebraic topology that permit studying properties of neural networks and their training process, such as their predictive performance or generalization properties. The mathematical foundations of TDL are algebraic topology, differential topology, and geometric topology. Therefore, TDL can be generalized for data on differentiable manifolds, knots, links, tangles, curves, etc. == History and motivation == Traditional techniques from deep learning often operate under the assumption that a dataset is residing in a highly-structured space (like images, where convolutional neural networks exhibit outstanding performance over alternative methods) or a Euclidean space. The prevalence of new types of data, in particular graphs, meshes, and molecules, resulted in the development of new techniques, culminating in the field of geometric deep learning, which originally proposed a signal-processing perspective for treating such data types. While originally confined to graphs, where connectivity is defined based on nodes and edges, follow-up work extended concepts to a larger variety of data types, including simplicial complexes and CW complexes, with recent work proposing a unified perspective of message-passing on general combinatorial complexes. An independent perspective on different types of data originated from topological data analysis, which proposed a new framework for describing structural information of data, i.e., their "shape," that is inherently aware of multiple scales in data, ranging from local information to global information. While at first restricted to smaller datasets, subsequent work developed new descriptors that efficiently summarized topological information of datasets to make them available for traditional machine-learning techniques, such as support vector machines or random forests. Such descriptors ranged from new techniques for feature engineering over new ways of providing suitable coordinates for topological descriptors, or the creation of more efficient dissimilarity measures. Contemporary research in this field is largely concerned with either integrating information about the underlying data topology into existing deep-learning models or obtaining novel ways of training on topological domains. == Learning on topological spaces == One of the core concepts in topological deep learning is considering the domain upon which this data is defined and supported. In case of Euclidean data, such as images, this domain is a grid, upon which the pixel value of the image is supported. In a more general setting this domain might be a topological domain. Studying and developing deep learning models that are supported ln topological domains constitute the essence of topological deep learning. Next, we introduce the most common topological domains that are encountered in a deep learning setting. These domains include, but not limited to, graphs, simplicial complexes, cell complexes, combinatorial complexes and hypergraphs. Given a finite set S of abstract entities, a neighborhood function N {\displaystyle {\mathcal {N}}} on S is an assignment that attach to every point x {\displaystyle x} in S a subset of S or a relation. Such a function can be induced by equipping S with an auxiliary structure. Edges provide one way of defining relations among the entities of S. More specifically, edges in a graph allow one to define the notion of neighborhood using, for instance, the one hop neighborhood notion. Edges however, limited in their modeling capacity as they can only be used to model binary relations among entities of S since every edge is connected typically to two entities. In many applications, it is desirable to permit relations that incorporate more than two entities. The idea of using relations that involve more than two entities is central to topological domains. Such higher-order relations allow for a broader range of neighborhood functions to be defined on S to capture multi-way interactions among entities of S. Next we review the main properties, advantages, and disadvantages of some commonly studied topological domains in the context of deep learning, including (abstract) simplicial complexes, regular cell complexes, hypergraphs, and combinatorial complexes. ==== Comparisons among topological domains ==== Each of the enumerated topological domains has its own characteristics, advantages, and limitations: Simplicial complexes Simplest form of higher-order domains. Extensions of graph-based models. Admit hierarchical structures, making them suitable for various applications. Hodge theory can be naturally defined on simplicial complexes. Require relations to be subsets of larger relations, imposing constraints on the structure. Cell Complexes Generalize simplicial complexes. Provide more flexibility in defining higher-order relations. Each cell in a cell complex is homeomorphic to an open ball, attached together via attaching maps. Boundary cells of each cell in a cell complex are also cells in the complex. Represented combinatorially via incidence matrices. Hypergraphs Allow arbitrary set-type relations among entities. Relations are not imposed by other relations, providing more flexibility. Do not explicitly encode the dimension of cells or relations. Useful when relations in the data do not adhere to constraints imposed by other models like simplicial and cell complexes. Combinatorial Complexes : Generalize and bridge the gaps between simplicial complexes, cell complexes, and hypergraphs. Allow for hierarchical structures and set-type relations. Combine features of other complexes while providing more flexibility in modeling relations. Can be represented combinatorially, similar to cell complexes. ==== Hierarchical structure and set-type relations ==== The properties of simplicial complexes, cell complexes, and hypergraphs give rise to two main features of relations on higher-order domains, namely hierarchies of relations and set-type relations. ===== Rank function ===== A rank function on a higher-order domain X is an order-preserving function rk: X → Z, where rk(x) attaches a non-negative integer value to each relation x in X, preserving set inclusion in X. Cell and simplicial complexes are common examples of higher-order domains equipped with rank functions and therefore with hierarchies of relations. ===== Set-type relations ===== Relations in a higher-order domain are called set-type relations if the existence of a relation is not implied by another relation in the domain. Hypergraphs constitute examples of higher-order domains equipped with set-type relations. Given the modeling limitations of simplicial complexes, cell complexes, and hypergraphs, we develop the combinatorial complex, a higher-order domain that features both hierarchies of relations and set-type relations. The learning tasks in TDL can be broadly classified into three categories: Cell classification: Predict targets for each cell in a complex. Examples include triangular mesh segmentation, where the task is to predict the class of each face or edge in a given mesh. Complex classification: Predict targets for an entire complex. For example, predict the class of each input mesh. Cell prediction: Predict properties of cell-cell interactions in a complex, and in some cases, predict whether a cell exists in the complex. An example is the prediction of linkages among entities in hyperedges of a hypergraph. In practice, to perform the aforementioned tasks, deep learning models designed for specific topological spaces must be constructed and implemented. These models, known as topological neural networks, are tailored to operate effectively within these spaces. === Topological neural networks === Central to TDL are topological neural networks (TNNs), specialized architectures designed to operate on data structured in topological domains. Unlike traditional neural networks tailored for grid-like structures, TNNs are adept at handling more intricate data representations, such as graphs

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