AI Apps Like Chat Gpt

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  • NASA AI Assisted-Air Quality Monitoring Project

    NASA AI Assisted-Air Quality Monitoring Project

    The NASA Expert-System Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer (ES-ITMS) Project was a public-private partnership to develop an artificial intelligence assisted, air quality monitoring system and was qualified for use on the Space Shuttle. The partnership was also the first cost and intellectual property shared public-partnership implemented by NASA, which used the commercial Research and Development Limited Partnership (RDLP) model that had been adopted by the Reagan Administration for Department of Defense semiconductor development, and recommended for use by NASA for space commercialization. The project partners included NASA, the University of Florida and Finnigan MAT Corporation, was organized and administered by the NASA Joint Enterprise Institute (subsequently NASA Joint Sponsored Program) and ran from 1988 through 1990. The partnership concluded final testing in 1991, generating four patents, expert system software and application protocol reports. The system was space qualified for use on the Shuttle and elements of the ES-ITMS system were integrated into the product Improvements for Finnigan MAT corporation. The success of the partnership lead NASA to create a pilot program to develop partnership business models as an ongoing management practice. == Purpose and objectives == The need to monitor air quality in confined spaces represented an increasing challenge for NASA's planned space missions and private sector facility managers facing the increased scrutiny of possible air contaminants. Up to the early 1980's, air quality monitors generally required large spaces and human technicians to interpret readings. This created a need for miniaturized air quality monitors that could generate reliable and accurate analytic results without on-site technician presence. NASA initiated projects to develop..."mobile and/or portable mass spectrometers" that evaluated the "tradeoff between instrumentation capabilities and space, weight and power considerations." NASA selected a "commercial ITMS instrument capable of generating electron ionization, chemical ionization and mass spectrometry data", to develop a linked expert system to accomplish analysis without human intervention. The commercial instrumentation was from Finnigan MAT corporation while the scientific expertise to support expert system development was available at the University of Florida. The project managers at NASA Ames created a single, integrated project using the RDLP model with objectives to: Develop AI/expert system software for instrument control (NASA's role) Expand sensitivity, selectivity and speed of the spectrometer (Univ Florida role) Expand the spectrometer analytic capability and automate the screening (Finnigan role) == Membership == The partnership included seven specialists from five member organizations: Federal Government National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Commercial Finnigan MAT Corporation (Thermo-Fisher Scientific) TGS Technology, Inc. Research Management University of Florida == Organization, management and administration == The technical project was organized into two development teams, one located in at the NASA Ames Research Center covering expert systems and analytic capabilities and one in Florida covering improved sensitivity and testing. The partnership management and administration was provided by a non-profit, partnership support organization: the Joint Enterprise Institute operating through San Francisco State University Foundation (SFSUF) with a NASA employee liaison, Syed Shariq. == Public-private partnership == The partnership structure was as a prototype test of a pilot NASA program to develop public-private partnership business models. The pilot program was known as the NASA Joint Sponsored Research Program (JSRP), which operated as the NASA Joint Enterprise Institute between 1988 and 1991. The partnership was the first public-private, research and development partnership implemented by NASA in response to national policy shifts to increase technology transfer and space commercialization. The partnership structure included a two year technology development and testing plan that cost $610,000, of which NASA funded $310,000, Finnigan $175,000 and the University of Florida $95,000. == Results and commercialization == The project generated patents (4), software (2) and application protocol reports (8). NASA gained use of the patents and jointly development software while Finnigan received commercial utilization rights. The results were commercialized within eighteen months of project completion. == Recognition == NASA recognized the project as a space qualified instrument. Its achievements were reported to the NASA Administrator, directly leading to establishment of the agency-wide Joint Sponsored Research Program.

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  • Mean squared prediction error

    Mean squared prediction error

    In statistics the mean squared prediction error (MSPE), also known as mean squared error of the predictions, of a smoothing, curve fitting, or regression procedure is the expected value of the squared prediction errors (PE), the square difference between the fitted values implied by the predictive function g ^ {\displaystyle {\widehat {g}}} and the values of the (unobservable) true value g. It is an inverse measure of the explanatory power of g ^ , {\displaystyle {\widehat {g}},} and can be used in the process of cross-validation of an estimated model. Knowledge of g would be required in order to calculate the MSPE exactly; in practice, MSPE is estimated. == Formulation == If the smoothing or fitting procedure has projection matrix (i.e., hat matrix) L, which maps the observed values vector y {\displaystyle y} to predicted values vector y ^ = L y , {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}=Ly,} then PE and MSPE are formulated as: P E i = g ( x i ) − g ^ ( x i ) , {\displaystyle \operatorname {PE_{i}} =g(x_{i})-{\widehat {g}}(x_{i}),} MSPE = E ⁡ [ PE i 2 ] = ∑ i = 1 n PE i 2 ⁡ / n . {\displaystyle \operatorname {MSPE} =\operatorname {E} \left[\operatorname {PE} _{i}^{2}\right]=\sum _{i=1}^{n}\operatorname {PE} _{i}^{2}/n.} The MSPE can be decomposed into two terms: the squared bias (mean error) of the fitted values and the variance of the fitted values: MSPE = ME 2 + VAR , {\displaystyle \operatorname {MSPE} =\operatorname {ME} ^{2}+\operatorname {VAR} ,} ME = E ⁡ [ g ^ ( x i ) − g ( x i ) ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {ME} =\operatorname {E} \left[{\widehat {g}}(x_{i})-g(x_{i})\right]} VAR = E ⁡ [ ( g ^ ( x i ) − E ⁡ [ g ( x i ) ] ) 2 ] . {\displaystyle \operatorname {VAR} =\operatorname {E} \left[\left({\widehat {g}}(x_{i})-\operatorname {E} \left[{g}(x_{i})\right]\right)^{2}\right].} The quantity SSPE=nMSPE is called sum squared prediction error. The root mean squared prediction error is the square root of MSPE: RMSPE=√MSPE. == Computation of MSPE over out-of-sample data == The mean squared prediction error can be computed exactly in two contexts. First, with a data sample of length n, the data analyst may run the regression over only q of the data points (with q < n), holding back the other n – q data points with the specific purpose of using them to compute the estimated model’s MSPE out of sample (i.e., not using data that were used in the model estimation process). Since the regression process is tailored to the q in-sample points, normally the in-sample MSPE will be smaller than the out-of-sample one computed over the n – q held-back points. If the increase in the MSPE out of sample compared to in sample is relatively slight, that results in the model being viewed favorably. And if two models are to be compared, the one with the lower MSPE over the n – q out-of-sample data points is viewed more favorably, regardless of the models’ relative in-sample performances. The out-of-sample MSPE in this context is exact for the out-of-sample data points that it was computed over, but is merely an estimate of the model’s MSPE for the mostly unobserved population from which the data were drawn. Second, as time goes on more data may become available to the data analyst, and then the MSPE can be computed over these new data. == Estimation of MSPE over the population == When the model has been estimated over all available data with none held back, the MSPE of the model over the entire population of mostly unobserved data can be estimated as follows. For the model y i = g ( x i ) + σ ε i {\displaystyle y_{i}=g(x_{i})+\sigma \varepsilon _{i}} where ε i ∼ N ( 0 , 1 ) {\displaystyle \varepsilon _{i}\sim {\mathcal {N}}(0,1)} , one may write n ⋅ MSPE ⁡ ( L ) = g T ( I − L ) T ( I − L ) g + σ 2 tr ⁡ [ L T L ] . {\displaystyle n\cdot \operatorname {MSPE} (L)=g^{\text{T}}(I-L)^{\text{T}}(I-L)g+\sigma ^{2}\operatorname {tr} \left[L^{\text{T}}L\right].} Using in-sample data values, the first term on the right side is equivalent to ∑ i = 1 n ( E ⁡ [ g ( x i ) − g ^ ( x i ) ] ) 2 = E ⁡ [ ∑ i = 1 n ( y i − g ^ ( x i ) ) 2 ] − σ 2 tr ⁡ [ ( I − L ) T ( I − L ) ] . {\displaystyle \sum _{i=1}^{n}\left(\operatorname {E} \left[g(x_{i})-{\widehat {g}}(x_{i})\right]\right)^{2}=\operatorname {E} \left[\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left(y_{i}-{\widehat {g}}(x_{i})\right)^{2}\right]-\sigma ^{2}\operatorname {tr} \left[\left(I-L\right)^{T}\left(I-L\right)\right].} Thus, n ⋅ MSPE ⁡ ( L ) = E ⁡ [ ∑ i = 1 n ( y i − g ^ ( x i ) ) 2 ] − σ 2 ( n − tr ⁡ [ L ] ) . {\displaystyle n\cdot \operatorname {MSPE} (L)=\operatorname {E} \left[\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left(y_{i}-{\widehat {g}}(x_{i})\right)^{2}\right]-\sigma ^{2}\left(n-\operatorname {tr} \left[L\right]\right).} If σ 2 {\displaystyle \sigma ^{2}} is known or well-estimated by σ ^ 2 {\displaystyle {\widehat {\sigma }}^{2}} , it becomes possible to estimate MSPE by n ⋅ M S P E ^ ⁡ ( L ) = ∑ i = 1 n ( y i − g ^ ( x i ) ) 2 − σ ^ 2 ( n − tr ⁡ [ L ] ) . {\displaystyle n\cdot \operatorname {\widehat {MSPE}} (L)=\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left(y_{i}-{\widehat {g}}(x_{i})\right)^{2}-{\widehat {\sigma }}^{2}\left(n-\operatorname {tr} \left[L\right]\right).} Colin Mallows advocated this method in the construction of his model selection statistic Cp, which is a normalized version of the estimated MSPE: C p = ∑ i = 1 n ( y i − g ^ ( x i ) ) 2 σ ^ 2 − n + 2 p . {\displaystyle C_{p}={\frac {\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left(y_{i}-{\widehat {g}}(x_{i})\right)^{2}}{{\widehat {\sigma }}^{2}}}-n+2p.} where p the number of estimated parameters p and σ ^ 2 {\displaystyle {\widehat {\sigma }}^{2}} is computed from the version of the model that includes all possible regressors. That concludes this proof.

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  • Multilinear principal component analysis

    Multilinear principal component analysis

    Multilinear principal component analysis (MPCA) is a multilinear extension of principal component analysis (PCA) that is used to analyze M-way arrays, also informally referred to as "data tensors". M-way arrays may be modeled by linear tensor models, such as CANDECOMP/Parafac, or by multilinear tensor models, such as multilinear principal component analysis (MPCA) or multilinear (tensor) independent component analysis (MICA). In 2005, Vasilescu and Terzopoulos introduced the Multilinear PCA terminology as a way to better differentiate between multilinear data models that employed 2nd order statistics versus higher order statistics to compute a set of independent components for each mode, such as Multilinear ICA Multilinear PCA may be applied to compute the causal factors of data formation, or as signal processing tool on data tensors whose individual observation have either been vectorized, or whose observations are treated as a collection of column/row observations, an "observation as a matrix", and concatenated into a data tensor. The latter approach is suitable for compression and reducing redundancy in the rows, columns and fibers that are unrelated to the causal factors of data formation. Vasilescu and Terzopoulos in their paper "TensorFaces" introduced the M-mode SVD algorithm which are algorithms misidentified in the literature as the HOSVD or the Tucker which employ the power method or gradient descent, respectively. Vasilescu and Terzopoulos framed the data analysis, recognition and synthesis problems as multilinear tensor problems. Data is viewed as the compositional consequence of several causal factors, that are well suited for multi-modal tensor factor analysis. The power of the tensor framework was showcased by analyzing human motion joint angles, facial images or textures in the following papers: Human Motion Signatures (CVPR 2001, ICPR 2002), face recognition – TensorFaces, (ECCV 2002, CVPR 2003, etc.) and computer graphics – TensorTextures (Siggraph 2004). == The algorithm == The MPCA solution follows the alternating least square (ALS) approach. It is iterative in nature. As in PCA, MPCA works on centered data. Centering is a little more complicated for tensors, and it is problem dependent. == Feature selection == MPCA features: Supervised MPCA is employed in causal factor analysis that facilitates object recognition while a semi-supervised MPCA feature selection is employed in visualization tasks. == Extensions == Various extension of MPCA: Robust MPCA (RMPCA) Multi-Tensor Factorization, that also finds the number of components automatically (MTF)

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  • Transkribus

    Transkribus

    Transkribus is a platform for the text recognition, image analysis and structure recognition of historical documents. The platform was created in the context of the two EU projects "tranScriptorium" (2013–2015) and "READ" (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents – 2016–2019). It was developed by the University of Innsbruck. Since July 1, 2019 the platform has been directed and further developed by the READ-COOP, a non-profit cooperative. The platform integrates tools developed by research groups throughout Europe, including the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) group of the Technical University of Valencia and the Computational Intelligence Technology Lab (CITlab) group of University of Rostock. Comparable programs that offer similar functions are eScriptorium and OCR4All.

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  • Ciscogate

    Ciscogate

    Ciscogate, also known as the Black Hat Bug, is the name given to a legal incident that occurred at the Black Hat Briefings security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 27, 2005. On the morning of the first day of the conference, July 26, 2005, some attendees noticed that 30 pages of text had been physically ripped out of the extensive conference presentation booklet the night before at the request of Cisco Systems and the CD-ROM with presentation slides was not included. It was determined the pages covered a talk to be given by Michael Lynn, a security researcher with Atlanta-based IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS). Instead of the pages with the details, attendees found a photographed copy of a notice from Black Hat saying "Due to some last minute changes beyond Black Hat's control, and at the request of the presenter, the included materials aren't up to the standards Black Hat tries to meet. Black Hat will be the first to apologize. We hope the vendors involved will follow suit." According to Lynn's lawyer, his employer had approved of the talk leading up to the conference but changed their minds two days before the scheduled talk, forbidding him from presenting. Lynn's original presentation was to cover a vulnerability in Cisco routers. The presentation was one of four scheduled to follow Jeff Moss' keynote address on the first day of the conference, titled "Cisco IOS Security Architecture". After being told by his employer that he could not present on the topic, Lynn chose an alternate topic. Cisco and ISS had offered to give new joint presentation but this was turned down by Black Hat because the original speaking slot was given to Lynn, not Cisco. Lynn's presentation began by covering security issues in services that allow users to make Voice over IP telephone calls. Shortly after beginning the presentation Lynn changed back to his original topic and began disclosing some technical details of the vulnerability he found in Cisco routers stating that he would rather resign from his job at ISS than keep the details private. == Lawsuit == Shortly after Lynn concluded his talk he met Jennifer Granick, who would soon become his lawyer. During their initial meeting Lynn told Granick that he expected to be sued. Later in the evening Lynn had heard that Cisco and ISS had filed a lawsuit and requested a temporary restraining order against Black Hat but not himself. A public relations representative from Black Hat told Granick that the lawsuit was against both Black Hat and Lynn and that the companies had scheduled an Ex parte hearing in San Francisco the next morning to request the restraining order. That night, Andrew Valentine, an attorney for ISS and Cisco called Lynn who directed them to Granick. During the conversation Valentine explained the claims and accusations against Lynn, which included three things: 1) ISS claimed copyright over the presentation that Lynn gave, 2) Cisco claimed copyright over the decompiled machine code obtained from the router which was included in the presentation, and 3) Cisco claimed the presentation contained trade secrets. These complaints were outlined in a civil complaint at the U.S. Northern District of California and filed against both Lynn and Black Hat. According to Granick, she and Valentine were able agree to an injunction to settle the case without court proceedings. This deal was almost called off due to an inadvertent mistake by Black Hat in which they had restored Lynn's presentation on their web server. Black Hat, Granick, and the plaintiff's lawyers were able to resolve this problem and the deal stood. One condition of the settlement required Lynn to provide an image of all computer data he used in his research to be provided to a third party for forensic analysis before erasing his research and any Cisco data from his systems. The settlement also stipulated that Lynn was prohibited from talking about the vulnerability in the future. == FBI Investigation == Shortly after lawyers for Lynn and ISS / Cisco filed settlement papers, FBI agents from the Las Vegas office arrived at the conference to begin asking questions. According to Granick, they were there at the request of the Atlanta FBI office and Lynn was not of interest. Granick asserted the Fifth and Sixth amendment rights on behalf of her client, Lynn. Granick asserted his rights for the Atlanta office and asked if an arrest warrant had been issued for Lynn. Over the next 24 hours Granick was not able to ascertain the status of a warrant but ultimately determined no warrant was issued. When the FBI was asked about the case by a journalist, spokesman Paul Bresson declined to discuss the case saying "Our policy is to not make any comment on anything that is ongoing. That's not to confirm that something is, because I really don't know". Granick would only confirm to journalists that the "investigation has to do with the presentation". == Response == === Attendees === Attendees of Black Hat Briefings, as well as many that also attended DEF CON, were not happy with vendors threatening legal action over vulnerability disclosure. The term "Ciscogate" was coined quickly by an unknown person, but some attendees were quick to create shirts to commemorate the incident. === Cisco === Mojgan Khalili, a senior manager for corporate PR at Cisco, issued a statement to the press saying "It is important to note that the information Mr. Lynn presented was not a disclosure of a new vulnerability or a flaw with Cisco IOS software. Mr. Lynn's research explores possible ways to expand exploitations of existing security vulnerabilities impacting routers." === ISS === Kim Duffy, managing director of ISS Australia, was asked about ISS's response to the incident. Duffy responded that it was "business as usual" as the company handled the incident "strictly by the book". He gave a brief statement to ZDNet UK saying "ISS has published rules for disclosure and that is what we stick to. We didn't care to publish [the disclosure] because we were not ready. We had not completed the research to our satisfaction so it was not ready to be disclosed". ISS spokesperson Roger Fortier confirmed that Lynn was no longer employed with the company and that ISS was still working with Cisco on the matter. He gave a statement to the Washington Post saying "ISS and Cisco have been working on this in the background and didn't feel at this time that the material was ready for publication. The decision was made on Monday to pull the presentation because we wanted to make sure the research was fully baked."

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  • Inductive logic programming

    Inductive logic programming

    Inductive logic programming (ILP) is a subfield of symbolic artificial intelligence which uses logic programming as a uniform representation for examples, background knowledge and hypotheses. The term "inductive" here refers to philosophical (i.e. suggesting a theory to explain observed facts) rather than mathematical (i.e. proving a property for all members of a well-ordered set) induction. Given an encoding of the known background knowledge and a set of examples represented as a logical database of facts, an ILP system will derive a hypothesised logic program which entails all the positive and none of the negative examples. Schema: positive examples + negative examples + background knowledge ⇒ hypothesis. Bioinformatics and drug design have been highlighted as a principal application area of inductive logic programming techniques. == History == Building on earlier work on Inductive inference, Gordon Plotkin was the first to formalise induction in a clausal setting around 1970, adopting an approach of generalising from examples. In 1981, Ehud Shapiro introduced several ideas that would shape the field in his new approach of model inference, an algorithm employing refinement and backtracing to search for a complete axiomatisation of given examples. His first implementation was the Model Inference System in 1981: a Prolog program that inductively inferred Horn clause logic programs from positive and negative examples. The term Inductive Logic Programming was first introduced in a paper by Stephen Muggleton in 1990, defined as the intersection of machine learning and logic programming. Muggleton and Wray Buntine introduced predicate invention and inverse resolution in 1988. Several inductive logic programming systems that proved influential appeared in the early 1990s. FOIL, introduced by Ross Quinlan in 1990 was based on upgrading propositional learning algorithms AQ and ID3. Golem, introduced by Muggleton and Feng in 1990, went back to a restricted form of Plotkin's least generalisation algorithm. The Progol system, introduced by Muggleton in 1995, first implemented inverse entailment, and inspired many later systems. Aleph, a descendant of Progol introduced by Ashwin Srinivasan in 2001, is still one of the most widely used systems as of 2022. At around the same time, the first practical applications emerged, particularly in bioinformatics, where by 2000 inductive logic programming had been successfully applied to drug design, carcinogenicity and mutagenicity prediction, and elucidation of the structure and function of proteins. Unlike the focus on automatic programming inherent in the early work, these fields used inductive logic programming techniques from a viewpoint of relational data mining. The success of those initial applications and the lack of progress in recovering larger traditional logic programs shaped the focus of the field. Recently, classical tasks from automated programming have moved back into focus, as the introduction of meta-interpretative learning makes predicate invention and learning recursive programs more feasible. This technique was pioneered with the Metagol system introduced by Muggleton, Dianhuan Lin, Niels Pahlavi and Alireza Tamaddoni-Nezhad in 2014. This allows ILP systems to work with fewer examples, and brought successes in learning string transformation programs, answer set grammars and general algorithms. == Setting == Inductive logic programming has adopted several different learning settings, the most common of which are learning from entailment and learning from interpretations. In both cases, the input is provided in the form of background knowledge B, a logical theory (commonly in the form of clauses used in logic programming), as well as positive and negative examples, denoted E + {\textstyle E^{+}} and E − {\textstyle E^{-}} respectively. The output is given as a hypothesis H, itself a logical theory that typically consists of one or more clauses. The two settings differ in the format of examples presented. === Learning from entailment === As of 2022, learning from entailment is by far the most popular setting for inductive logic programming. In this setting, the positive and negative examples are given as finite sets E + {\textstyle E^{+}} and E − {\textstyle E^{-}} of positive and negated ground literals, respectively. A correct hypothesis H is a set of clauses satisfying the following requirements, where the turnstile symbol ⊨ {\displaystyle \models } stands for logical entailment: Completeness: B ∪ H ⊨ E + Consistency: B ∪ H ∪ E − ⊭ false {\displaystyle {\begin{array}{llll}{\text{Completeness:}}&B\cup H&\models &E^{+}\\{\text{Consistency: }}&B\cup H\cup E^{-}&\not \models &{\textit {false}}\end{array}}} Completeness requires any generated hypothesis H to explain all positive examples E + {\textstyle E^{+}} , and consistency forbids generation of any hypothesis H that is inconsistent with the negative examples E − {\textstyle E^{-}} , both given the background knowledge B. In Muggleton's setting of concept learning, "completeness" is referred to as "sufficiency", and "consistency" as "strong consistency". Two further conditions are added: "Necessity", which postulates that B does not entail E + {\textstyle E^{+}} , does not impose a restriction on H, but forbids any generation of a hypothesis as long as the positive facts are explainable without it. "Weak consistency", which states that no contradiction can be derived from B ∧ H {\textstyle B\land H} , forbids generation of any hypothesis H that contradicts the background knowledge B. Weak consistency is implied by strong consistency; if no negative examples are given, both requirements coincide. Weak consistency is particularly important in the case of noisy data, where completeness and strong consistency cannot be guaranteed. === Learning from interpretations === In learning from interpretations, the positive and negative examples are given as a set of complete or partial Herbrand structures, each of which are themselves a finite set of ground literals. Such a structure e is said to be a model of the set of clauses B ∪ H {\textstyle B\cup H} if for any substitution θ {\textstyle \theta } and any clause h e a d ← b o d y {\textstyle \mathrm {head} \leftarrow \mathrm {body} } in B ∪ H {\textstyle B\cup H} such that b o d y θ ⊆ e {\textstyle \mathrm {body} \theta \subseteq e} , h e a d θ ⊆ e {\displaystyle \mathrm {head} \theta \subseteq e} also holds. The goal is then to output a hypothesis that is complete, meaning every positive example is a model of B ∪ H {\textstyle B\cup H} , and consistent, meaning that no negative example is a model of B ∪ H {\textstyle B\cup H} . == Approaches to ILP == An inductive logic programming system is a program that takes as an input logic theories B , E + , E − {\displaystyle B,E^{+},E^{-}} and outputs a correct hypothesis H with respect to theories B , E + , E − {\displaystyle B,E^{+},E^{-}} . A system is complete if and only if for any input logic theories B , E + , E − {\displaystyle B,E^{+},E^{-}} any correct hypothesis H with respect to these input theories can be found with its hypothesis search procedure. Inductive logic programming systems can be roughly divided into two classes, search-based and meta-interpretative systems. Search-based systems exploit that the space of possible clauses forms a complete lattice under the subsumption relation, where one clause C 1 {\textstyle C_{1}} subsumes another clause C 2 {\textstyle C_{2}} if there is a substitution θ {\textstyle \theta } such that C 1 θ {\textstyle C_{1}\theta } , the result of applying θ {\textstyle \theta } to C 1 {\textstyle C_{1}} , is a subset of C 2 {\textstyle C_{2}} . This lattice can be traversed either bottom-up or top-down. === Bottom-up search === Bottom-up methods to search the subsumption lattice have been investigated since Plotkin's first work on formalising induction in clausal logic in 1970. Techniques used include least general generalisation, based on anti-unification, and inverse resolution, based on inverting the resolution inference rule. ==== Least general generalisation ==== A least general generalisation algorithm takes as input two clauses C 1 {\textstyle C_{1}} and C 2 {\textstyle C_{2}} and outputs the least general generalisation of C 1 {\textstyle C_{1}} and C 2 {\textstyle C_{2}} , that is, a clause C {\textstyle C} that subsumes C 1 {\textstyle C_{1}} and C 2 {\textstyle C_{2}} , and that is subsumed by every other clause that subsumes C 1 {\textstyle C_{1}} and C 2 {\textstyle C_{2}} . The least general generalisation can be computed by first computing all selections from C 1 {\textstyle C_{1}} and C 2 {\textstyle C_{2}} , which are pairs of literals ( L , M ) ∈ ( C 1 × C 2 ) {\displaystyle (L,M)\in (C_{1}\times C_{2})} sharing the same predicate symbol and negated/unnegated status. Then, the least general generalisation is obtained as the disjunction of the least general generalisations of the indi

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  • Multimodal learning

    Multimodal learning

    Multimodal learning is a type of deep learning that integrates and processes multiple types of data, referred to as modalities, such as text, audio, images, or video. This integration allows for a more holistic understanding of complex data, improving model performance in tasks like visual question answering, cross-modal retrieval, text-to-image generation, aesthetic ranking, and image captioning. Multimodal learning was proposed in 2011 at the beginning of the deep learning period. Large multimodal models, such as Google Gemini and GPT-4o, have become increasingly popular since 2023, enabling increased versatility and a broader understanding of real-world phenomena. == Motivation == Data usually comes with different modalities which carry different information. For example, it is very common to caption an image to convey the information not presented in the image itself. Similarly, sometimes it is more straightforward to use an image to describe information which may not be obvious from text. As a result, if different words appear in similar images, then these words likely describe the same thing. Conversely, if a word is used to describe seemingly dissimilar images, then these images may represent the same object. Thus, in cases dealing with multi-modal data, it is important to use a model which is able to jointly represent the information such that the model can capture the combined information from different modalities. == Multimodal transformers == Models such as CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining) learn joint representations of images and text by optimizing contrastive objectives, allowing the model to match images with their corresponding textual descriptions. == Multimodal deep Boltzmann machines == A Boltzmann machine is a type of stochastic neural network invented by Geoffrey Hinton and Terry Sejnowski in 1985. Boltzmann machines can be seen as the stochastic, generative counterpart of Hopfield nets. They are named after the Boltzmann distribution in statistical mechanics. The units in Boltzmann machines are divided into two groups: visible units and hidden units. Each unit is like a neuron with a binary output that represents whether it is activated or not. General Boltzmann machines allow connection between any units. However, learning is impractical using general Boltzmann Machines because the computational time is exponential to the size of the machine. A more efficient architecture is called restricted Boltzmann machine where connection is only allowed between hidden unit and visible unit, which is described in the next section. Multimodal deep Boltzmann machines can process and learn from different types of information, such as images and text, simultaneously. This can notably be done by having a separate deep Boltzmann machine for each modality, for example one for images and one for text, joined at an additional top hidden layer. == Applications == Multimodal machine learning has numerous applications across various domains: Cross-modal retrieval: cross-modal retrieval allows users to search for data across different modalities (e.g., retrieving images based on text descriptions), improving multimedia search engines and content recommendation systems. Classification and missing data retrieval: multimodal Deep Boltzmann Machines outperform traditional models like support vector machines and latent Dirichlet allocation in classification tasks and can predict missing data in multimodal datasets, such as images and text. Healthcare diagnostics: multimodal models integrate medical imaging, genomic data, and patient records to improve diagnostic accuracy and early disease detection, especially in cancer screening. Content generation: models like DALL·E generate images from textual descriptions, benefiting creative industries, while cross-modal retrieval enables dynamic multimedia searches. Robotics and human-computer interaction: multimodal learning improves interaction in robotics and AI by integrating sensory inputs like speech, vision, and touch, aiding autonomous systems and human-computer interaction. Emotion recognition: combining visual, audio, and text data, multimodal systems enhance sentiment analysis and emotion recognition, applied in customer service, social media, and marketing.

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  • Curriculum learning

    Curriculum learning

    Curriculum learning is a technique in machine learning in which a model is trained on examples of increasing difficulty, where the definition of "difficulty" may be provided externally or discovered as part of the training process. This is intended to attain good performance more quickly, or to converge to a better local optimum if the global optimum is not found. == Approach == Most generally, curriculum learning is the technique of successively increasing the difficulty of examples in the training set that is presented to a model over multiple training iterations. This can produce better results than exposing the model to the full training set immediately under some circumstances; most typically, when the model is able to learn general principles from easier examples, and then gradually incorporate more complex and nuanced information as harder examples are introduced, such as edge cases. This has been shown to work in many domains, most likely as a form of regularization. There are several major variations in how the technique is applied: A concept of "difficulty" must be defined. This may come from human annotation or an external heuristic; for example in language modeling, shorter sentences might be classified as easier than longer ones. Another approach is to use the performance of another model, with examples accurately predicted by that model being classified as easier (providing a connection to boosting). Difficulty can be increased steadily or in distinct epochs, and in a deterministic schedule or according to a probability distribution. This may also be moderated by a requirement for diversity at each stage, in cases where easier examples are likely to be disproportionately similar to each other. Applications must also decide the schedule for increasing the difficulty. Simple approaches may use a fixed schedule, such as training on easy examples for half of the available iterations and then all examples for the second half. Other approaches use self-paced learning to increase the difficulty in proportion to the performance of the model on the current set. Since curriculum learning only concerns the selection and ordering of training data, it can be combined with many other techniques in machine learning. The success of the method assumes that a model trained for an easier version of the problem can generalize to harder versions, so it can be seen as a form of transfer learning. Some authors also consider curriculum learning to include other forms of progressively increasing complexity, such as increasing the number of model parameters. It is frequently combined with reinforcement learning, such as learning a simplified version of a game first. Some domains have shown success with anti-curriculum learning: training on the most difficult examples first. One example is the ACCAN method for speech recognition, which trains on the examples with the lowest signal-to-noise ratio first. == History == The term "curriculum learning" was introduced by Yoshua Bengio et al in 2009, with reference to the psychological technique of shaping in animals and structured education for humans: beginning with the simplest concepts and then building on them. The authors also note that the application of this technique in machine learning has its roots in the early study of neural networks such as Jeffrey Elman's 1993 paper Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of starting small. Bengio et al showed good results for problems in image classification, such as identifying geometric shapes with progressively more complex forms, and language modeling, such as training with a gradually expanding vocabulary. They conclude that, for curriculum strategies, "their beneficial effect is most pronounced on the test set", suggesting good generalization. The technique has since been applied to many other domains: Natural language processing: Part-of-speech tagging Intent detection Sentiment analysis Machine translation Speech recognition Language model pre-training Image recognition: Facial recognition Object detection Reinforcement learning: Game-playing Graph learning Matrix factorization

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  • Game Jolt

    Game Jolt

    Game Jolt is a social community platform for video games, gamers and content creators. Founded by Yaprak and David DeCarmine, it is available on iOS, Android, and on the web and as a desktop app for Windows and Linux. Users share interactive content through a variety of formats including images, videos, live streams, chat rooms, and virtual events. == Features == === Crowd streaming === In 2021 Game Jolt revealed their own live streaming feature called Firesides. Firesides allowed multiple users to simultaneously livestream together with nearly no delay. The feature launched with a virtual concert showcasing its ability to accommodate multiple streamers. On October 16, 2023, Firesides were removed from Game Jolt. === Mobile app === Game Jolt Social by Game Jolt Inc. launched on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in March 2022. "It's clear to us that Gen Z is tired of generic social media and they want a place specifically for gaming that supports all types of content they're creating–art, videos, thoughts, and livestreams all in one place." said Game Jolt founder and CEO Yaprak DeCarmine, in a statement to VentureBeat. === Game API === The Game Jolt Application Programming Interface (usually known as the Game Jolt Game API) allows any developer using a game development platform that supports HTTP operations and MD5 or SHA-1. Game Jolt advertises that the API can: Create multiple "scoreboards" which collect high scores from players made publicly available on the game's profile and give user accounts EXP Award player's trophies which give user accounts EXP Store game data on Game Jolt's data servers Log whether a user is currently playing a game they're logged into via the GJAPI == Game jams and competitions == Game Jolt regularly hosts game jams where participants are encouraged to develop games for a chance to win prizes. They hosted their first game jam in 2009, Shocking Contest. In November 2014, Game Jolt announced the "Indies vs PewDiePie" game jam, partnering with the popular YouTuber Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg. Developers were given a weekend (21–24 November) to create a game with the theme of "fun to play, fun to watch" to suit the Let's Plays entertainment style. Users could rate entries afterwards until December 1 when the scores were counted up. The prize to the top 10 rated games was Felix playing the games on his channel as a means of promotion for the developers, although later he played other entries. One of the participants of the jam, now known as Outerminds Inc. was discovered and hired by PewDiePie to develop his mobile game, Legend of the Brofist. Game Jolt partnered with Felix, Sean "Jacksepticeye" McLoughlin and Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach to host "Indies vs Gamers" in July 2015. The requirements for entries were arcade games using the Game Jolt Game API highscore tables, to be made between the July 17–20 and the top 5 games were played on the partner's YouTube channels. Following the "Indies vs PewDiePie" game jam in 2014, Game Jolt released their internal jam hosting tools public for all users to use as a service, to create their own game jams that integrated with the main site. Today, Game Jolt focuses on hosting and co-hosting game competitions with established brands in order to bring monetary and educational opportunities to their users. On April 15, 2024, an announcement was made about a collaboration with Pocket Worlds for the "HighRise Game Jam". Pocket Worlds had sold NFTs up until roughly 2022, causing a community outburst. The situation was addressed, and the situation started to disperse. == Contests == == Events == Game Jolt hosts both physical and virtual events to entertain and prank its users, which consists of the following: == History == Game Jolt has supported independent creators with a central platform to manage their content and communities since its start in 2003. David DeCarmine began development of Game Jolt at the age of 14 for a group of hobbyists, making games and sharing on forums in an early iteration known as Holo World. The original intention was to create a platform for gamers where new games could be discoverable and quickly playable, and where feedback could be provided directly to the creators, allowing them to continue improving their games. In 2008, Game Jolt was registered as an LLC, then incorporated as Game Jolt Inc. in September 2020. A new site launched in 2015 featuring a responsive design, automated curation for both games and game news articles which weighs how recent a game was uploaded and how popular it is ("hot") and filtering options on game listings for platform, maturity rating and development status. In March 2022, Game Jolt launched a mobile application simultaneously on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store targeted at Gen Z gamers and creators. While in beta, the mobile app had 100,000 installs pre-launch. === Game store === Game Jolt continues to host a large library of independent games. Game developers can upload their games directly to the site to share or sell. They would allow distribution for downloadable games, later adding support for Adobe Flash, Unity and Java games which allowed support for browser based games. In February 2013, Game Jolt built support for browser-based HTML5 games as well. A user levelling system was released into public beta in April 2013, incorporating the GJAPI trophies and highscores, as well as site activity, to generate 'EXP' (experience points). Game Jolt Jams released in early 2014 as a service to allow users to create their own game jams that integrated with the main site. In April 2016, an online marketplace was announced and released the following month with an exclusive set of game titles, including Bendy and the Ink Machine, allowing developers to sell their games on the site. In January 2016, Game Jolt released source code of the client and site's front end on GitHub under MIT license. In January 2022, Game Jolt banned adult games from appearing on the site, stating in an email to developers that the site had become a "social media platform" and they "had to make decisions around the direction and future of the brand which has now included the removal of hosted games with explicitly adult content." In response to a tweet by Itch.io saying the site is not for prudes, they wrote in their own tweet: "Game Jolt is a platform with a large audience of 13-16 year olds. Our users asked us to clean up, so here we are." == Investments == After bootstrapping Game Jolt with revenue earned from ads on the website for years, the DeCarmines secured venture capital in 2020 from SoftBank, doing so again in 2021 from founders of Twitch, Rec Room, Modio and more.

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  • Dendrogram

    Dendrogram

    A dendrogram is a diagram representing a tree graph. This diagrammatic representation is frequently used in different contexts: in hierarchical clustering, it illustrates the arrangement of the clusters produced by the corresponding analyses. in computational biology, it shows the clustering of genes or samples, sometimes in the margins of heatmaps. in phylogenetics, it displays the evolutionary relationships among various biological taxa. In this case, the dendrogram is also called a phylogenetic tree. The name dendrogram derives from the two ancient greek words δένδρον (déndron), meaning "tree", and γράμμα (grámma), meaning "drawing, mathematical figure". == Clustering example == For a clustering example, suppose that five taxa ( a {\displaystyle a} to e {\displaystyle e} ) have been clustered by UPGMA based on a matrix of genetic distances. The hierarchical clustering dendrogram would show a column of five nodes representing the initial data (here individual taxa), and the remaining nodes represent the clusters to which the data belong, with the arrows representing the distance (dissimilarity). The distance between merged clusters is monotone, increasing with the level of the merger: the height of each node in the plot is proportional to the value of the intergroup dissimilarity between its two daughters (the nodes on the right representing individual observations all plotted at zero height).

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  • Dynamic time warping

    Dynamic time warping

    In time series analysis, dynamic time warping (DTW) is an algorithm for measuring similarity between two temporal sequences, which may vary in speed. For instance, similarities in walking could be detected using DTW, even if one person was walking faster than the other, or if there were accelerations and decelerations during the course of an observation. DTW has been applied to temporal sequences of video, audio, and graphics data — indeed, any data that can be turned into a one-dimensional sequence can be analyzed with DTW. A well-known application has been automatic speech recognition, to cope with different speaking speeds. Other applications include speaker recognition and online signature recognition. It can also be used in partial shape matching applications. In general, DTW is a method that calculates an optimal match between two given sequences (e.g. time series) with certain restriction and rules: Every index from the first sequence must be matched with one or more indices from the other sequence, and vice versa The first index from the first sequence must be matched with the first index from the other sequence (but it does not have to be its only match) The last index from the first sequence must be matched with the last index from the other sequence (but it does not have to be its only match) The mapping of the indices from the first sequence to indices from the other sequence must be monotonically increasing, and vice versa, i.e. if j > i {\displaystyle j>i} are indices from the first sequence, then there must not be two indices l > k {\displaystyle l>k} in the other sequence, such that index i {\displaystyle i} is matched with index l {\displaystyle l} and index j {\displaystyle j} is matched with index k {\displaystyle k} , and vice versa We can plot each match between the sequences 1 : M {\displaystyle 1:M} and 1 : N {\displaystyle 1:N} as a path in a M × N {\displaystyle M\times N} matrix from ( 1 , 1 ) {\displaystyle (1,1)} to ( M , N ) {\displaystyle (M,N)} , such that each step is one of ( 0 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 0 ) , ( 1 , 1 ) {\displaystyle (0,1),(1,0),(1,1)} . In this formulation, we see that the number of possible matches is the Delannoy number. The optimal match is denoted by the match that satisfies all the restrictions and the rules and that has the minimal cost, where the cost is computed as the sum of absolute differences, for each matched pair of indices, between their values. The sequences are "warped" non-linearly in the time dimension to determine a measure of their similarity independent of certain non-linear variations in the time dimension. This sequence alignment method is often used in time series classification. Although DTW measures a distance-like quantity between two given sequences, it doesn't guarantee the triangle inequality to hold. In addition to a similarity measure between the two sequences (a so called "warping path" is produced), by warping according to this path the two signals may be aligned in time. The signal with an original set of points X(original), Y(original) is transformed to X(warped), Y(warped). This finds applications in genetic sequence and audio synchronisation. In a related technique sequences of varying speed may be averaged using this technique see the average sequence section. This is conceptually very similar to the Needleman–Wunsch algorithm. == Implementation == This example illustrates the implementation of the dynamic time warping algorithm when the two sequences s and t are strings of discrete symbols. For two symbols x and y, d ( x , y ) {\displaystyle d(x,y)} is a distance between the symbols, e.g., d ( x , y ) = | x − y | {\displaystyle d(x,y)=|x-y|} . int DTWDistance(s: array [1..n], t: array [1..m]) { DTW := array [0..n, 0..m] for i := 0 to n for j := 0 to m DTW[i, j] := infinity DTW[0, 0] := 0 for i := 1 to n for j := 1 to m cost := d(s[i], t[j]) DTW[i, j] := cost + minimum(DTW[i-1, j ], // insertion DTW[i , j-1], // deletion DTW[i-1, j-1]) // match return DTW[n, m] } where DTW[i, j] is the distance between s[1:i] and t[1:j] with the best alignment. We sometimes want to add a locality constraint. That is, we require that if s[i] is matched with t[j], then | i − j | {\displaystyle |i-j|} is no larger than w, a window parameter. We can easily modify the above algorithm to add a locality constraint (differences marked). However, the above given modification works only if | n − m | {\displaystyle |n-m|} is no larger than w, i.e. the end point is within the window length from diagonal. In order to make the algorithm work, the window parameter w must be adapted so that | n − m | ≤ w {\displaystyle |n-m|\leq w} (see the line marked with () in the code). int DTWDistance(s: array [1..n], t: array [1..m], w: int) { DTW := array [0..n, 0..m] w := max(w, abs(n-m)) // adapt window size () for i := 0 to n for j:= 0 to m DTW[i, j] := infinity DTW[0, 0] := 0 for i := 1 to n for j := max(1, i-w) to min(m, i+w) DTW[i, j] := 0 for i := 1 to n for j := max(1, i-w) to min(m, i+w) cost := d(s[i], t[j]) DTW[i, j] := cost + minimum(DTW[i-1, j ], // insertion DTW[i , j-1], // deletion DTW[i-1, j-1]) // match return DTW[n, m] } == Warping properties == The DTW algorithm produces a discrete matching between existing elements of one series to another. In other words, it does not allow time-scaling of segments within the sequence. Other methods allow continuous warping. For example, Correlation Optimized Warping (COW) divides the sequence into uniform segments that are scaled in time using linear interpolation, to produce the best matching warping. The segment scaling causes potential creation of new elements, by time-scaling segments either down or up, and thus produces a more sensitive warping than DTW's discrete matching of raw elements. == Complexity == The time complexity of the DTW algorithm is O ( N M ) {\displaystyle O(NM)} , where N {\displaystyle N} and M {\displaystyle M} are the lengths of the two input sequences. The 50 years old quadratic time bound was broken in 2016: an algorithm due to Gold and Sharir enables computing DTW in O ( N 2 / log ⁡ log ⁡ N ) {\displaystyle O({N^{2}}/\log \log N)} time and space for two input sequences of length N {\displaystyle N} . This algorithm can also be adapted to sequences of different lengths. Despite this improvement, it was shown that a strongly subquadratic running time of the form O ( N 2 − ϵ ) {\displaystyle O(N^{2-\epsilon })} for some ϵ > 0 {\displaystyle \epsilon >0} cannot exist unless the Strong exponential time hypothesis fails. While the dynamic programming algorithm for DTW requires O ( N M ) {\displaystyle O(NM)} space in a naive implementation, the space consumption can be reduced to O ( min ( N , M ) ) {\displaystyle O(\min(N,M))} using Hirschberg's algorithm. == Fast computation == Fast techniques for computing DTW include PrunedDTW, SparseDTW, FastDTW, and the MultiscaleDTW. A common task, retrieval of similar time series, can be accelerated by using lower bounds such as LB_Keogh, LB_Improved, or LB_Petitjean. However, the Early Abandon and Pruned DTW algorithm reduces the degree of acceleration that lower bounding provides and sometimes renders it ineffective. In a survey, Wang et al. reported slightly better results with the LB_Improved lower bound than the LB_Keogh bound, and found that other techniques were inefficient. Subsequent to this survey, the LB_Enhanced bound was developed that is always tighter than LB_Keogh while also being more efficient to compute. LB_Petitjean is the tightest known lower bound that can be computed in linear time. == Average sequence == Averaging for dynamic time warping is the problem of finding an average sequence for a set of sequences. NLAAF is an exact method to average two sequences using DTW. For more than two sequences, the problem is related to that of multiple alignment and requires heuristics. DBA is currently a reference method to average a set of sequences consistently with DTW. COMASA efficiently randomizes the search for the average sequence, using DBA as a local optimization process. == Supervised learning == A nearest-neighbour classifier can achieve state-of-the-art performance when using dynamic time warping as a distance measure. == Amerced Dynamic Time Warping == Amerced Dynamic Time Warping (ADTW) is a variant of DTW designed to better control DTW's permissiveness in the alignments that it allows. The windows that classical DTW uses to constrain alignments introduce a step function. Any warping of the path is allowed within the window and none beyond it. In contrast, ADTW employs an additive penalty that is incurred each time that the path is warped. Any amount of warping is allowed, but each warping action incurs a direct penalty. ADTW significantly outperforms DTW with windowing when applied as a nearest neighbor classifier on a set of benchmark time series classification tasks. == Alternative approaches == In functional data analysis, time series are regarde

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  • Apache Mahout

    Apache Mahout

    Apache Mahout is a project of the Apache Software Foundation to produce free implementations of distributed or otherwise scalable machine learning algorithms focused primarily on linear algebra. In the past, many of the implementations use the Apache Hadoop platform, however today it is primarily focused on Apache Spark. Mahout also provides Java/Scala libraries for common math operations (focused on linear algebra and statistics) and primitive Java collections. Mahout is a work in progress; a number of algorithms have been implemented. == Features == === Samsara === Apache Mahout-Samsara refers to a Scala domain-specific language (DSL) that allows users to use R-like syntax as opposed to traditional Scala-like syntax. This allows user to express algorithms concisely and clearly. === Backend agnostic === Apache Mahout's code abstracts the domain-specific language from the engine where the code is run. While active development is done with the Apache Spark engine, users are free to implement any engine they choose- H2O and Apache Flink have been implemented in the past and examples exist in the code base. === GPU/CPU accelerators === The JVM has notoriously slow computation. To improve speed, "native solvers" were added which move in-core, and by extension, distributed BLAS operations out of the JVM, offloading to off-heap or GPU memory for processing via multiple CPUs and/or CPU cores, or GPUs when built against the ViennaCL library. ViennaCL is a highly optimized C++ library with BLAS operations implemented in OpenMP, and OpenCL. As of release 14.1, the OpenMP build considered to be stable, leaving the OpenCL build is still in its experimental proof-of-concept phase. === Recommenders === Apache Mahout features implementations of Alternating Least Squares, Co-Occurrence, and Correlated Co-Occurrence, a unique-to-Mahout recommender algorithm that extends co-occurrence to be used on multiple dimensions of data. == History == === Transition from Map Reduce to Apache Spark === While Mahout's core algorithms for clustering, classification and batch based collaborative filtering were implemented on top of Apache Hadoop using the map/reduce paradigm, it did not restrict contributions to Hadoop-based implementations. Contributions that run on a single node or on a non-Hadoop cluster were also welcomed. For example, the 'Taste' collaborative-filtering recommender component of Mahout was originally a separate project and can run stand-alone without Hadoop. Starting with the release 0.10.0, the project shifted its focus to building a backend-independent programming environment, code named "Samsara". The environment consists of an algebraic backend-independent optimizer and an algebraic Scala DSL unifying in-memory and distributed algebraic operators. Supported algebraic platforms are Apache Spark, H2O, and Apache Flink. Support for MapReduce algorithms started being gradually phased out in 2014. === Release history === === Developers === Apache Mahout is developed by a community. The project is managed by a group called the "Project Management Committee" (PMC). The current PMC is Andrew Musselman, Andrew Palumbo, Drew Farris, Isabel Drost-Fromm, Jake Mannix, Pat Ferrel, Paritosh Ranjan, Trevor Grant, Robin Anil, Sebastian Schelter, Stevo Slavić.

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  • Right to explanation

    Right to explanation

    In the regulation of algorithms, particularly artificial intelligence and its subfield of machine learning, a right to [an] explanation is a right to be given an explanation for an output of the algorithm. Such rights primarily refer to individual rights to be given an explanation for decisions that significantly affect an individual, particularly legally or financially. For example, a person who applies for a loan and is denied may ask for an explanation, which could be "Credit bureau X reports that you declared bankruptcy last year; this is the main factor in considering you too likely to default, and thus we will not give you the loan you applied for." Some such legal rights already exist, while the scope of a general "right to explanation" is a matter of ongoing debate. There have been arguments made that a "social right to explanation" is a crucial foundation for an information society, particularly as the institutions of that society will need to use digital technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning. In other words, that the related automated decision making systems that use explainability would be more trustworthy and transparent. Without this right, which could be constituted both legally and through professional standards, the public will be left without much recourse to challenge the decisions of automated systems. == Examples == === Credit scoring in the United States === Under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (Regulation B of the Code of Federal Regulations), Title 12, Chapter X, Part 1002, §1002.9, creditors are required to notify applicants who are denied credit with specific reasons for the detail. As detailed in §1002.9(b)(2): (2) Statement of specific reasons. The statement of reasons for adverse action required by paragraph (a)(2)(i) of this section must be specific and indicate the principal reason(s) for the adverse action. Statements that the adverse action was based on the creditor's internal standards or policies or that the applicant, joint applicant, or similar party failed to achieve a qualifying score on the creditor's credit scoring system are insufficient. The official interpretation of this section details what types of statements are acceptable. Creditors comply with this regulation by providing a list of reasons (generally at most 4, per interpretation of regulations), consisting of a numeric reason code (as identifier) and an associated explanation, identifying the main factors affecting a credit score. An example might be: 32: Balances on bankcard or revolving accounts too high compared to credit limits === European Union === The European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, enacted 2016, taking effect 2018) extends the automated decision-making rights in the 1995 Data Protection Directive to provide a legally disputed form of a right to an explanation, stated as such in Recital 71: "[the data subject should have] the right ... to obtain an explanation of the decision reached". In full: The data subject should have the right not to be subject to a decision, which may include a measure, evaluating personal aspects relating to him or her which is based solely on automated processing and which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her, such as automatic refusal of an online credit application or e-recruiting practices without any human intervention. ... In any case, such processing should be subject to suitable safeguards, which should include specific information to the data subject and the right to obtain human intervention, to express his or her point of view, to obtain an explanation of the decision reached after such assessment and to challenge the decision. However, the extent to which the regulations themselves provide a "right to explanation" is heavily debated. There are two main strands of criticism. There are significant legal issues with the right as found in Article 22 — as recitals are not binding, and the right to an explanation is not mentioned in the binding articles of the text, having been removed during the legislative process. In addition, there are significant restrictions on the types of automated decisions that are covered — which must be both "solely" based on automated processing, and have legal or similarly significant effects — which significantly limits the range of automated systems and decisions to which the right would apply. In particular, the right is unlikely to apply in many of the cases of algorithmic controversy that have been picked up in the media. The UK has also recently amended its implementation of Article 22. A second potential source of such a right has been pointed to in Article 15, the "right of access by the data subject". This restates a similar provision from the 1995 Data Protection Directive, allowing the data subject access to "meaningful information about the logic involved" in the same significant, solely automated decision-making, found in Article 22. Yet this too suffers from alleged challenges that relate to the timing of when this right can be drawn upon, as well as practical challenges that mean it may not be binding in many cases of public concern. Other EU legislative instruments contain explanation rights. The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act provides in Article 86 a "[r]ight to explanation of individual decision-making" of certain high risk systems which produce significant, adverse effects to an individual's health, safety or fundamental rights. The right provides for "clear and meaningful explanations of the role of the AI system in the decision-making procedure and the main elements of the decision taken", although only applies to the extent other law does not provide such a right. The Digital Services Act in Article 27, and the Platform to Business Regulation in Article 5, both contain rights to have the main parameters of certain recommender systems to be made clear, although these provisions have been criticised as not matching the way that such systems work. The Platform Work Directive, which provides for regulation of automation in gig economy work as an extension of data protection law, further contains explanation provisions in Article 11, using the specific language of "explanation" in a binding article rather than a recital as is the case in the GDPR. Scholars note that remains uncertainty as to whether these provisions imply sufficiently tailored explanation in practice which will need to be resolved by courts. === France === In France the 2016 Loi pour une République numérique (Digital Republic Act or loi numérique) amends the country's administrative code to introduce a new provision for the explanation of decisions made by public sector bodies about individuals. It notes that where there is "a decision taken on the basis of an algorithmic treatment", the rules that define that treatment and its "principal characteristics" must be communicated to the citizen upon request, where there is not an exclusion (e.g. for national security or defence). These should include the following: the degree and the mode of contribution of the algorithmic processing to the decision- making; the data processed and its source; the treatment parameters, and where appropriate, their weighting, applied to the situation of the person concerned; the operations carried out by the treatment. Scholars have noted that this right, while limited to administrative decisions, goes beyond the GDPR right to explicitly apply to decision support rather than decisions "solely" based on automated processing, as well as provides a framework for explaining specific decisions. Indeed, the GDPR automated decision-making rights in the European Union, one of the places a "right to an explanation" has been sought within, find their origins in French law in the late 1970s. == Criticism == Some argue that a "right to explanation" is at best unnecessary, at worst harmful, and threatens to stifle innovation. Specific criticisms include: favoring human decisions over machine decisions, being redundant with existing laws, and focusing on process over outcome. Authors of study "Slave to the Algorithm? Why a 'Right to an Explanation' Is Probably Not the Remedy You Are Looking For" Lilian Edwards and Michael Veale argue that a right to explanation is not the solution to harms caused to stakeholders by algorithmic decisions. They also state that the right of explanation in the GDPR is narrowly defined, and is not compatible with how modern machine learning technologies are being developed. With these limitations, defining transparency within the context of algorithmic accountability remains a problem. For example, providing the source code of algorithms may not be sufficient and may create other problems in terms of privacy disclosures and the gaming of technical systems. To mitigate this issue, Edwards and Veale argue that an auditing system could be more effective, to allow auditors to loo

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  • Independent component analysis

    Independent component analysis

    In signal processing, independent component analysis (ICA) is a computational method for separating a multivariate signal into additive subcomponents. This is done by assuming that at most one subcomponent is Gaussian and that the subcomponents are statistically independent from each other. ICA was invented by Jeanny Hérault and Christian Jutten in 1985. ICA is a special case of blind source separation. A common example application of ICA is the "cocktail party problem" of listening in on one person's speech in a noisy room. == Introduction == Independent component analysis attempts to decompose a multivariate signal into independent non-Gaussian signals. As an example, sound is usually a signal that is composed of the numerical addition, at each time t, of signals from several sources. The question then is whether it is possible to separate these contributing sources from the observed total signal. When the statistical independence assumption is correct, blind ICA separation of a mixed signal gives very good results. It is also used for signals that are not supposed to be generated by mixing for analysis purposes. A simple application of ICA is the "cocktail party problem", where the underlying speech signals are separated from a sample data consisting of people talking simultaneously in a room. Usually the problem is simplified by assuming no time delays or echoes. Note that a filtered and delayed signal is a copy of a dependent component, and thus the statistical independence assumption is not violated. Mixing weights for constructing the M {\textstyle M} observed signals from the N {\textstyle N} components can be placed in an M × N {\textstyle M\times N} matrix. An important thing to consider is that if N {\textstyle N} sources are present, at least N {\textstyle N} observations (e.g. microphones if the observed signal is audio) are needed to recover the original signals. When there are an equal number of observations and source signals, the mixing matrix is square ( M = N {\textstyle M=N} ). Other cases of underdetermined ( M < N {\textstyle M N {\textstyle M>N} ) have been investigated. The success of ICA separation of mixed signals relies on two assumptions and three effects of mixing source signals. Two assumptions: The source signals are independent of each other. The values in each source signal have non-Gaussian distributions. Three effects of mixing source signals: Independence: As per assumption 1, the source signals are independent; however, their signal mixtures are not. This is because the signal mixtures share the same source signals. Normality: According to the Central Limit Theorem, the distribution of a sum of independent random variables with finite variance tends towards a Gaussian distribution.Loosely speaking, a sum of two independent random variables usually has a distribution that is closer to Gaussian than any of the two original variables. Here we consider the value of each signal as the random variable. Complexity: The temporal complexity of any signal mixture is greater than that of its simplest constituent source signal. Those principles contribute to the basic establishment of ICA. If the signals extracted from a set of mixtures are independent and have non-Gaussian distributions or have low complexity, then they must be source signals. Another common example is image steganography, where ICA is used to embed one image within another. For instance, two grayscale images can be linearly combined to create mixed images in which the hidden content is visually imperceptible. ICA can then be used to recover the original source images from the mixtures. This technique underlies digital watermarking, which allows the embedding of ownership information into images, as well as more covert applications such as undetected information transmission. The method has even been linked to real-world cyberespionage cases. In such applications, ICA serves to unmix the data based on statistical independence, making it possible to extract hidden components that are not apparent in the observed data. Steganographic techniques, including those potentially involving ICA-based analysis, have been used in real-world cyberespionage cases. In 2010, the FBI uncovered a Russian spy network known as the "Illegals Program" (Operation Ghost Stories), where agents used custom-built steganography tools to conceal encrypted text messages within image files shared online. In another case, a former General Electric engineer, Xiaoqing Zheng, was convicted in 2022 for economic espionage. Zheng used steganography to exfiltrate sensitive turbine technology by embedding proprietary data within image files for transfer to entities in China. == Defining component independence == ICA finds the independent components (also called factors, latent variables or sources) by maximizing the statistical independence of the estimated components. We may choose one of many ways to define a proxy for independence, and this choice governs the form of the ICA algorithm. The two broadest definitions of independence for ICA are Minimization of mutual information Maximization of non-Gaussianity The Minimization-of-Mutual information (MMI) family of ICA algorithms uses measures like Kullback-Leibler Divergence and maximum entropy. The non-Gaussianity family of ICA algorithms, motivated by the central limit theorem, uses kurtosis and negentropy. Typical algorithms for ICA use centering (subtract the mean to create a zero mean signal), whitening (usually with the eigenvalue decomposition), and dimensionality reduction as preprocessing steps in order to simplify and reduce the complexity of the problem for the actual iterative algorithm. == Mathematical definitions == Linear independent component analysis can be divided into noiseless and noisy cases, where noiseless ICA is a special case of noisy ICA. Nonlinear ICA should be considered as a separate case. === General Derivation === In the classical ICA model, it is assumed that the observed data x i ∈ R m {\displaystyle \mathbf {x} _{i}\in \mathbb {R} ^{m}} at time t i {\displaystyle t_{i}} is generated from source signals s i ∈ R m {\displaystyle \mathbf {s} _{i}\in \mathbb {R} ^{m}} via a linear transformation x i = A s i {\displaystyle \mathbf {x} _{i}=A\mathbf {s} _{i}} , where A {\displaystyle A} is an unknown, invertible mixing matrix. To recover the source signals, the data is first centered (zero mean), and then whitened so that the transformed data has unit covariance. This whitening reduces the problem from estimating a general matrix A {\displaystyle A} to estimating an orthogonal matrix V {\displaystyle V} , significantly simplifying the search for independent components. If the covariance matrix of the centered data is Σ x = A A ⊤ {\displaystyle \Sigma _{x}=AA^{\top }} , then using the eigen-decomposition Σ x = Q D Q ⊤ {\displaystyle \Sigma _{x}=QDQ^{\top }} , the whitening transformation can be taken as D − 1 / 2 Q ⊤ {\displaystyle D^{-1/2}Q^{\top }} . This step ensures that the recovered sources are uncorrelated and of unit variance, leaving only the task of rotating the whitened data to maximize statistical independence. This general derivation underlies many ICA algorithms and is foundational in understanding the ICA model. ==== Reduced Mixing Problem ==== Independent component analysis (ICA) addresses the problem of recovering a set of unobserved source signals s i = ( s i 1 , s i 2 , … , s i m ) T {\displaystyle s_{i}=(s_{i1},s_{i2},\dots ,s_{im})^{T}} from observed mixed signals x i = ( x i 1 , x i 2 , … , x i m ) T {\displaystyle x_{i}=(x_{i1},x_{i2},\dots ,x_{im})^{T}} , based on the linear mixing model: x i = A s i , {\displaystyle x_{i}=A\,s_{i},} where the A {\displaystyle A} is an m × m {\displaystyle m\times m} invertible matrix called the mixing matrix, s i {\displaystyle s_{i}} represents the m‑dimensional vector containing the values of the sources at time t i {\displaystyle t_{i}} , and x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} is the corresponding vector of observed values at time t i {\displaystyle t_{i}} . The goal is to estimate both A {\displaystyle A} and the source signals { s i } {\displaystyle \{s_{i}\}} solely from the observed data { x i } {\displaystyle \{x_{i}\}} . After centering, the Gram matrix is computed as: ( X ∗ ) T X ∗ = Q D Q T , {\displaystyle (X^{})^{T}X^{}=Q\,D\,Q^{T},} where D is a diagonal matrix with positive entries (assuming X ∗ {\displaystyle X^{}} has maximum rank), and Q is an orthogonal matrix. Writing the SVD of the mixing matrix A = U Σ V T {\displaystyle A=U\Sigma V^{T}} and comparing with A A T = U Σ 2 U T {\displaystyle AA^{T}=U\Sigma ^{2}U^{T}} the mixing A has the form A = Q D 1 / 2 V T . {\displaystyle A=Q\,D^{1/2}\,V^{T}.} So, the normalized source values satisfy s i ∗ = V y i ∗ {\displaystyle s_{i}^{}=V\,y_{i}^{}} , where y i ∗ = D − 1 2 Q T x i ∗ . {\displaystyle y_{i}^{}=D^{-{\tfrac {1}{2}}}Q^{T}x_{i}^{}.} Thus, ICA reduces

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  • Log-linear model

    Log-linear model

    A log-linear model is a mathematical model that takes the form of a function whose logarithm equals a linear combination of the parameters of the model, which makes it possible to apply (possibly multivariate) linear regression. That is, it has the general form exp ⁡ ( c + ∑ i w i f i ( X ) ) {\displaystyle \exp \left(c+\sum _{i}w_{i}f_{i}(X)\right)} , in which the fi(X) are quantities that are functions of the variable X, in general a vector of values, while c and the wi stand for the model parameters. The term may specifically be used for: A log-linear plot or graph, which is a type of semi-log plot. Poisson regression for contingency tables, a type of generalized linear model. The specific applications of log-linear models are where the output quantity lies in the range 0 to ∞, for values of the independent variables X, or more immediately, the transformed quantities fi(X) in the range −∞ to +∞. This may be contrasted to logistic models, similar to the logistic function, for which the output quantity lies in the range 0 to 1. Thus the contexts where these models are useful or realistic often depends on the range of the values being modelled.

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