AI Art Detection

AI Art Detection — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Wix.com

    Wix.com

    Wix.com Ltd. (Hebrew: וויקס.קום, romanized: wix.com) or simply Wix is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It offers tools for creating HTML5 websites for desktop and mobile platforms using online drag-and-drop editing. Along with its headquarters and other offices in Israel, Wix also has offices in Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Ukraine, and Singapore. Users can add applications for social media, e-commerce, online marketing, contact forms, e-mail marketing, and community forums to their websites. The Wix website builder is built on a freemium business model, earning its revenues through premium upgrades. According to the W3Techs technology survey website, Wix was used by 2.5% of websites as of September 2023; at the end of May 2025, it was 3.8%. == History == === Corporate affairs === Wix was founded in 2006 by Israeli developers Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan. With its main offices in Tel Aviv, Wix was backed by investors Insight Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, and Benchmark Capital. By April 2010, Wix had 3.5 million users and raised US$10 million in Series C funding provided by Benchmark Capital and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners. In March 2011, Wix had 8.5 million users and raised US$40 million in Series D funding, bringing its total funding to that date to US$61 million. By August 2013, the Wix platform had more than 34 million registered users. On 5 November 2013, Wix had an initial public offering on NASDAQ, raising about US$127 million for the company and some share holders. In 2016, Mark Tluszcz became the chair of the board of directors. In 2020, Wix's revenue increased to $989 million, a 30% rise year-on-year, primarily due to the shift of businesses online during the coronavirus pandemic. The company added over 31 million new registered users in 2020, reaching a total of 196.7 million by year's end. Wix added approximately 1 million net new premium subscriptions in 2020, surpassing $1 billion in annual collections for the first time. By the end of the year, there were 5.5 million premium subscriptions, a 22% increase compared to the end of 2019. As of its most recent reporting in June 2024, Wix has over 260 million users worldwide. === Product development === ==== 2000s ==== Wix entered an open beta phase in 2007 using a platform based on Adobe Flash. ==== 2010s ==== In June 2011, Wix launched the Facebook store module, making its first step into social commerce. In March 2012, Wix launched a new HTML5 site builder, replacing the Adobe Flash technology. In October 2012, Wix launched an app market for users to sell applications built with the company's automated web development technology. In August 2014, Wix launched Wix Hotels, a booking system for hotels, bed and breakfasts, and vacation rentals that use Wix websites. In June 2016, Wix introduced Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence), a platform that uses artificial intelligence to design websites. ==== 2020s ==== In 2020, Wix launched an additional CMS, EditorX, which included additional CSS features to the original builder. In July 2023, Wix announced that it would be building on its ADI technology to create an AI powered website generator In October 2023, Wix launched the Wix Studio website builder. Co-founder and CEO, Avishai Abrahami described the platform as a “product for agencies”. In March 2024, the AI web builder, which uses a chatbot to help users create content was launched to the public. In March 2025, the digital publisher CNET has identified Wix as the "Best overall website builder overall." In August 2025, Wix announced it would launch banking services—including checking accounts and loans for small businesses—via a partnership with Israeli fintech Unit Finance, as it sought to diversify amid what it described as threats to its core website-building business from artificial intelligence. In January 2026, Wix launched Wix Harmony. Wix harmony is an AI website builder that uses agentic technology, generative design and vibe coding—with manual editing features for additional control. In May 2026, Wix announced layoffs affecting approximately 1,000 employees, or 20% of its workforce. CEO Avishai Abrahami cited two factors: the need to restructure around artificial intelligence and the appreciation of the Israeli shekel against the US dollar, which increased the cost of its Israel-based workforce relative to its dollar-denominated revenue. === Acquisitions === In April 2014, Wix announced the acquisition of Appixia, an Israeli startup for creating native mobile commerce (mCommerce) apps. In October 2014, Wix announced its acquisition of OpenRest, a developer of online ordering systems for restaurants. In April 2015, Wix acquired Moment.me, a mobile website builder for events and marketing tools for social lead generation. On 23 February 2017, Wix acquired the online art community DeviantArt for US$36 million. In January 2017, the company acquired Flok, a provider of customer loyalty programs tools. In February 2020, Wix acquired Inkfrog for eBay sellers, a web design company that provides customized business management software for eBay sellers. On 2 March 2021, Wix acquired SpeedETab, a Miami-based restaurant online technology provider. In May 2021, Wix acquired Rise.ai, a gift card and customer re-engagement package for online brands. A month later, Wix acquired Modalyst, a marketplace and drop-shipping platform. In May 2025, Wix acquired Hour One, a startup specializing in AI-powered video creation tools, to enhance its generative AI capabilities. In June 2025, the company acquired Base44, owned by independent entrepreneur Maor Shlomo, with the intention of integrating Base44's artificial intelligence capabilities and conversational interface into Wix's website and app building platform. == Description == Wix uses a freemium business model. Users can create websites for free then must purchase premium packages to connect their sites to their own domains, remove Wix ads, access the form builder, add e-commerce capabilities, or buy extra data storage and bandwidth. Wix provides customizable website templates and a drag-and-drop HTML5 website builder that includes apps, graphics, image galleries, fonts, vectors, animations, and other options. Users also may opt to create their web sites from scratch. In October 2013, Wix introduced a mobile editor for mobile viewing customization. Wix App Market offers both free and subscription-based applications, with a revenue split of 80% for the developer and 20% for Wix. Customers can integrate third-party applications into their own web sites, such as photograph feeds, blogging, music playlists, online community, e-mail marketing, and file management. Custom JavaScript code can be inserted into Wix webpages using the Velo API. == Controversies == === Use of WordPress code === In October 2016, there was a controversy over Wix's use of WordPress's GPL-licensed code. In response, Avishai Abrahami, Wix's CEO, published a response describing which open-source code was used and how Wix says it collaborates with the open-source community. However, it was subsequently noted that collaboration with the open-source community was not sufficient under the terms of the GPL license, which requires any code built on GPL-licensed code to be released under the same license. === Censorship === On 31 May 2021, 2021 Hong Kong Charter, a Wix-hosted website run by exiled Hong Kong activists, was shut down at the request of the Hong Kong Police. This was the first known case of Hong Kong's National Security Law being used to censor content on an overseas website. Wix later apologized for "mistakenly removing the website" and reinstated the website after it had been down for four days. In October 2023, Wix fired an employee in Dublin, Ireland, for having made social media posts critical of Israel. This incident led to criticism of Wix from members of the Oireachtas (the Irish parliament) and from the head of the Irish government, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who said it was "not okay to dismiss somebody because of their political views". Deputy head of government, Tánaiste Micheál Martin, also condemned their dismissal, stating "we tolerate debate with freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, and people have different opinions on these issues." The dismissed employee, Courtney Carey, successfully sued the company for unfair dismissal. Wix did not contest the charge, admitting liability. === Outreach abroad === In October 2023, The Irish Times reported that an Israeli advertising agency advised Wix staff how they can tailor posts for "outreach abroad". This included advice for Wix employees to “show Westernity” in social media posts supporting Israel, stating that “unlike the Gazans,

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  • Artificial intelligence systems integration

    Artificial intelligence systems integration

    The core idea of artificial intelligence systems integration is making individual software components, such as speech synthesizers, interoperable with other components, such as common sense knowledgebases, in order to create larger, broader and more capable A.I. systems. The main methods that have been proposed for integration are message routing, or communication protocols that the software components use to communicate with each other, often through a middleware blackboard system. Most artificial intelligence systems involve some sort of integrated technologies, for example, the integration of speech synthesis technologies with that of speech recognition. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing discussion on the importance of systems integration as a field in its own right. Proponents of this approach are researchers such as Marvin Minsky, Aaron Sloman, Deb Roy, Kristinn R. Thórisson and Michael A. Arbib. A reason for the recent attention A.I. integration is attracting is that there have already been created a number of (relatively) simple A.I. systems for specific problem domains (such as computer vision, speech synthesis, etc.), and that integrating what's already available is a more logical approach to broader A.I. than building monolithic systems from scratch. == Integration focus == The focus on systems' integration, especially with regard to modular approaches, derive from the fact that most intelligences of significant scales are composed of a multitude of processes and/or utilize multi-modal input and output. For example, a humanoid-type of intelligence would preferably have to be able to talk using speech synthesis, hear using speech recognition, understand using a logical (or some other undefined) mechanism, and so forth. In order to produce artificially intelligent software of broader intelligence, integration of these modalities is necessary. == Challenges and solutions == Collaboration is an integral part of software development as evidenced by the size of software companies and the size of their software departments. Among the tools to ease software collaboration are various procedures and standards that developers can follow to ensure quality, reliability and that their software is compatible with software created by others (such as W3C standards for webpage development). However, collaboration in fields of A.I. has been lacking, for the most part not seen outside the respected schools, departments or research institutes (and sometimes not within them either). This presents practitioners of A.I. systems integration with a substantial problem and often causes A.I. researchers to have to 're-invent the wheel' each time they want a specific functionality to work with their software. Even more damaging is the "not invented here" syndrome, which manifests itself in a strong reluctance of A.I. researchers to build on the work of others. The outcome of this in A.I. is a large set of "solution islands": A.I. research has produced numerous isolated software components and mechanisms that deal with various parts of intelligence separately. To take some examples: Speech synthesis FreeTTS from CMU Speech recognition Sphinx from CMU Logical reasoning OpenCyc from Cycorp Open Mind Common Sense Net from MIT With the increased popularity of the free software movement, a lot of the software being created, including A.I. systems, is available for public exploit. The next natural step is to merge these individual software components into coherent, intelligent systems of a broader nature. As a multitude of components (that often serve the same purpose) have already been created by the community, the most accessible way of integration is giving each of these components an easy way to communicate with each other. By doing so, each component by itself becomes a module, which can then be tried in various settings and configurations of larger architectures. Some challenging and limitations of using A.I. software is the uncontrolled fatal errors. For example, serious and fatal errors have been discovered in very precise fields such as human oncology, as in an article published in the journal Oral Oncology Reports entitled "When AI goes wrong: Fatal errors in oncological research reviewing assistance". The article pointed out a grave error in artificial intelligence based on GBT in the field of biophysics. Many online communities for A.I. developers exist where tutorials, examples, and forums aim at helping both beginners and experts build intelligent systems. However, few communities have succeeded in making a certain standard, or a code of conduct popular to allow the large collection of miscellaneous systems to be integrated with ease. == Methodologies == === Constructionist design methodology === The constructionist design methodology (CDM, or 'Constructionist A.I.') is a formal methodology proposed in 2004, for use in the development of cognitive robotics, communicative humanoids and broad AI systems. The creation of such systems requires the integration of a large number of functionalities that must be carefully coordinated to achieve coherent system behavior. CDM is based on iterative design steps that lead to the creation of a network of named interacting modules, communicating via explicitly typed streams and discrete messages. The OpenAIR message protocol (see below) was inspired by the CDM and has frequently been used to aid in the development of intelligent systems using CDM. == Examples == ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and QRIO, Sony's version of a humanoid robot. Cog, M.I.T. humanoid robot project under the direction of Rodney Brooks. AIBO, Sony's robot dog, integrates vision, hearing and motorskills. TOPIO, TOSY's humanoid robot can play ping-pong with human

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  • Knowledge processing for robots

    Knowledge processing for robots

    KnowRob (Knowledge processing for robots) is a system which combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods to acquire and ground knowledge. This system is the backbone of openEASE. both under developing at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen, Germany. == The framework == KnowRob can serve as a common sense framework for the integration of knowledge. This knowledge can be static encyclopedic knowledge, common sense knowledge, task descriptions, environment models, object information, observed actions, etc., which can come from different sources, like manually axiomatized, derived from observations, or imported from the web. KnowRob has been used by different research groups, as the Rice University using the ontological knowledge base in a robotic platform. As well by the Eindhoven University of Technology research group competing in the RoboCup league, in the "at Home" category, with the RoboEarth project. As well, KnowRob is mentioned in the work of some research groups from the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Middle East Technical University in their combination of different knowledge bases, Keio University as related work because of the ontology service, University of Texas at Austin as related work as well because of the relation with the work presented, Hanyang University as related work as an OWL based knowledge processing framework. == Representations == To represent the knowledge, KnowRob uses the OWL ontology language and an extended first-order logic knowledge representation with computable predicates. To give the order of subactions, KnowRob includes a pair-wise ordering constrain, which gives a partial ordering. KnowRob adopts the closed-world assumption Prolog, and an open-world assumption by the use of computables. To include reasoning rules into Prolog, KnowRob uses an inference procedure beyond the capabilities of OWL to extract information about tasks executions. In its second version, KnowRob provides a logic interface to the hybrid reasoning kernel as a logic based language. This language presents the hybrid reasoning kernel as if everything were entities retrievable by providing partial descriptions for them. This entities descriptions include objects, their parts, and articulation models, environments composed of objects, software components, actions, and events. === Episodic memories === Episodic memory is related to the experience information, which is organized temporally and spatially, alongside combined with context information. In KnowRob, an episodic memory is understood as a recording that the agent makes of the ongoing activity, which includes very detailed information about the actions, motions, their purposes, effects and the behavior they generate, it also includes the images captured during execution, etc. == Usage == The knowledge is computed by external methods using Prolog queries. In the second version of the KnowRob system, is included a better structure of the packages and documentations. Which includes some extensions from the previous version, as well as a logic based language. For example, a cup description from perception can be represented in this language as: entity(Cup,[an, object, [type, cup], [shape, cylinder], [color, orange]]) As well, a controller could represent the same object as: entity(Cup, [an, object, [type, cup], [proper_physical_parts, [an, object, [type, handle], [grasp−pose, G−pose]]]]) The interface language is comparable to other query languages for symbolic knowledge bases. KnowRob's query language integrates reasoning methods, such as the simulation-based reasoning. == Goals == The goal of the KnowRob framework is to make semantic knowledge available for service robots. It is able to answer queries about missing information in vague instructions for tasks. This is possible with the actions hierarchical representation and information about objects which can be included in certain action.

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  • Artificial intelligence systems integration

    Artificial intelligence systems integration

    The core idea of artificial intelligence systems integration is making individual software components, such as speech synthesizers, interoperable with other components, such as common sense knowledgebases, in order to create larger, broader and more capable A.I. systems. The main methods that have been proposed for integration are message routing, or communication protocols that the software components use to communicate with each other, often through a middleware blackboard system. Most artificial intelligence systems involve some sort of integrated technologies, for example, the integration of speech synthesis technologies with that of speech recognition. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing discussion on the importance of systems integration as a field in its own right. Proponents of this approach are researchers such as Marvin Minsky, Aaron Sloman, Deb Roy, Kristinn R. Thórisson and Michael A. Arbib. A reason for the recent attention A.I. integration is attracting is that there have already been created a number of (relatively) simple A.I. systems for specific problem domains (such as computer vision, speech synthesis, etc.), and that integrating what's already available is a more logical approach to broader A.I. than building monolithic systems from scratch. == Integration focus == The focus on systems' integration, especially with regard to modular approaches, derive from the fact that most intelligences of significant scales are composed of a multitude of processes and/or utilize multi-modal input and output. For example, a humanoid-type of intelligence would preferably have to be able to talk using speech synthesis, hear using speech recognition, understand using a logical (or some other undefined) mechanism, and so forth. In order to produce artificially intelligent software of broader intelligence, integration of these modalities is necessary. == Challenges and solutions == Collaboration is an integral part of software development as evidenced by the size of software companies and the size of their software departments. Among the tools to ease software collaboration are various procedures and standards that developers can follow to ensure quality, reliability and that their software is compatible with software created by others (such as W3C standards for webpage development). However, collaboration in fields of A.I. has been lacking, for the most part not seen outside the respected schools, departments or research institutes (and sometimes not within them either). This presents practitioners of A.I. systems integration with a substantial problem and often causes A.I. researchers to have to 're-invent the wheel' each time they want a specific functionality to work with their software. Even more damaging is the "not invented here" syndrome, which manifests itself in a strong reluctance of A.I. researchers to build on the work of others. The outcome of this in A.I. is a large set of "solution islands": A.I. research has produced numerous isolated software components and mechanisms that deal with various parts of intelligence separately. To take some examples: Speech synthesis FreeTTS from CMU Speech recognition Sphinx from CMU Logical reasoning OpenCyc from Cycorp Open Mind Common Sense Net from MIT With the increased popularity of the free software movement, a lot of the software being created, including A.I. systems, is available for public exploit. The next natural step is to merge these individual software components into coherent, intelligent systems of a broader nature. As a multitude of components (that often serve the same purpose) have already been created by the community, the most accessible way of integration is giving each of these components an easy way to communicate with each other. By doing so, each component by itself becomes a module, which can then be tried in various settings and configurations of larger architectures. Some challenging and limitations of using A.I. software is the uncontrolled fatal errors. For example, serious and fatal errors have been discovered in very precise fields such as human oncology, as in an article published in the journal Oral Oncology Reports entitled "When AI goes wrong: Fatal errors in oncological research reviewing assistance". The article pointed out a grave error in artificial intelligence based on GBT in the field of biophysics. Many online communities for A.I. developers exist where tutorials, examples, and forums aim at helping both beginners and experts build intelligent systems. However, few communities have succeeded in making a certain standard, or a code of conduct popular to allow the large collection of miscellaneous systems to be integrated with ease. == Methodologies == === Constructionist design methodology === The constructionist design methodology (CDM, or 'Constructionist A.I.') is a formal methodology proposed in 2004, for use in the development of cognitive robotics, communicative humanoids and broad AI systems. The creation of such systems requires the integration of a large number of functionalities that must be carefully coordinated to achieve coherent system behavior. CDM is based on iterative design steps that lead to the creation of a network of named interacting modules, communicating via explicitly typed streams and discrete messages. The OpenAIR message protocol (see below) was inspired by the CDM and has frequently been used to aid in the development of intelligent systems using CDM. == Examples == ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and QRIO, Sony's version of a humanoid robot. Cog, M.I.T. humanoid robot project under the direction of Rodney Brooks. AIBO, Sony's robot dog, integrates vision, hearing and motorskills. TOPIO, TOSY's humanoid robot can play ping-pong with human

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  • Microsoft Sway

    Microsoft Sway

    Microsoft Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Sway was offered for general release by Microsoft in August 2015. It allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create a presentable website. Users can pull content locally from the device in use, or from internet sources such as Bing, Facebook, OneDrive, and YouTube. Sway is distinguished from Microsoft FrontPage and Microsoft Expression Web – unrelated web design programs previously developed by Microsoft – in that Sway includes a method for hosting sites. Sway sites are stored on Microsoft's servers and are tied to the user's Microsoft account. They can be viewed and edited from any web browser through Office on the web. There is no offline editing or viewing function, but sites can be accessed using the app for Windows, and formerly iOS. == History == Sway was developed internally by Microsoft. In late 2014, the company announced an invite-only preview version of Sway and announced that Sway would not require an Office 365 subscription. An iOS app was released as a preview on 31 October 2014, but was discontinued on 17 December 2018 due to low usage. As of July 17, 2021, the Sway iOS app's discontinuance in 2018 was the last piece of news posted in the Sway tech blog. The Sway feature blog has not received an update since April 2017. The Microsoft Office Roadmap did not include any items related to Sway ever since. The iOS application is no longer under active development, and is not available for download. Since 2023, Microsoft has been consolidating the domains of its Microsoft 365 apps and services under cloud.microsoft. By 2025, the vast majority of services, including Sway, have already migrated to the cloud.microsoft domain. == Features == Users are able to add content from various sources into their Sway presentations. Some of the integrated services are owned by Microsoft, including OneNote, Bing, and other Sway sites. The program also provides native integration with other services, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Mixcloud, and Infogram.

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  • Portable Format for Analytics

    Portable Format for Analytics

    The Portable Format for Analytics (PFA) is a JSON-based predictive model interchange format conceived and developed by Jim Pivarski. PFA provides a way for analytic applications to describe and exchange predictive models produced by analytics and machine learning algorithms. It supports common models such as logistic regression and decision trees. Version 0.8 was published in 2015. Subsequent versions have been developed by the Data Mining Group. As a predictive model interchange format developed by the Data Mining Group, PFA is complementary to the DMG's XML-based standard called the Predictive Model Markup Language or PMML. == Release history == == Data Mining Group == The Data Mining Group is a consortium managed by the Center for Computational Science Research, Inc., a nonprofit founded in 2008. == Examples == reverse array: # reverse input array of doubles input: {"type": "array", "items": "double"} output: {"type": "array", "items": "double"} action: - let: { x : input} - let: { z : input} - let: { l : {a.len: [x]}} - let: { i : l} - while : { ">=" : [i,0]} do: - set : {z : {attr: z, path : [i] , to: {attr : x ,path : [ {"-":[{"-" : [l ,i]},1]}] } } } - set : {i : {-:[i,1]}} - z Bubblesort input: {"type": "array", "items": "double"} output: {"type": "array", "items": "double"} action: - let: { A : input} - let: { N : {a.len: [A]}} - let: { n : {-:[N,1]}} - let: { i : 0} - let: { s : 0.0} - while : { ">=" : [n,0]} do : - set : { i : 0 } - while : { "<=" : [i,{-:[n,1]}]} do : - if: {">": [ {attr: A, path : [i]} , {attr: A, path:[{+:[i,1]}]} ]} then : - set : {s : {attr: A, path: [i]}} - set : {A : {attr: A, path: [i], to: {attr: A, path:[{+:[i,1]}]} } } - set : {A : {attr: A, path: [{+:[i,1]}], to: s }} - set : {i : {+:[i,1]}} - set : {n : {-:[n,1]}} - A == Implementations == Hadrian (Java/Scala/JVM) - Hadrian is a complete implementation of PFA in Scala, which can be accessed through any JVM language, principally Java. It focuses on model deployment, so it is flexible (can run in restricted environments) and fast. Titus (Python 2.x) - Titus is a complete, independent implementation of PFA in pure Python. It focuses on model development, so it includes model producers and PFA manipulation tools in addition to runtime execution. Currently, it works for Python 2. Titus 2 (Python 3.x) - Titus 2 is a fork of Titus which supports PFA implementation for Python 3. Aurelius (R) - Aurelius is a toolkit for generating PFA in the R programming language. It focuses on porting models to PFA from their R equivalents. To validate or execute scoring engines, Aurelius sends them to Titus through rPython (so both must be installed). Antinous (Model development in Jython) - Antinous is a model-producer plugin for Hadrian that allows Jython code to be executed anywhere a PFA scoring engine would go. It also has a library of model producing algorithms.

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  • Knowledge space

    Knowledge space

    In mathematical psychology and education theory, a knowledge space is a combinatorial structure used to formulate mathematical models describing the progression of a human learner. Knowledge spaces were introduced in 1985 by Jean-Paul Doignon and Jean-Claude Falmagne, and remain in extensive use in the education theory. Modern applications include two computerized tutoring systems, ALEKS and the defunct RATH. Formally, a knowledge space assumes that a domain of knowledge is a collection of concepts or skills, each of which must be eventually mastered. Not all concepts are interchangeable; some require other concepts as prerequisites. Conversely, competency at one skill may ease the acquisition of another through similarity. A knowledge space marks out which collections of skills are feasible: they can be learned without mastering any other skills. Under reasonable assumptions, the collection of feasible competencies forms the mathematical structure known as an antimatroid. Researchers and educators usually explore the structure of a discipline's knowledge space as a latent class model. == Motivation == Knowledge Space Theory attempts to address shortcomings of standardized testing when used in educational psychometry. Common tests, such as the SAT and ACT, compress a student's knowledge into a very small range of ordinal ranks, in the process effacing the conceptual dependencies between questions. Consequently, the tests cannot distinguish between true understanding and guesses, nor can they identify a student's particular weaknesses, only the general proportion of skills mastered. The goal of knowledge space theory is to provide a language by which exams can communicate What the student can do and What the student is ready to learn. == Model structure == Knowledge Space Theory-based models presume that an educational subject S can be modeled as a finite set Q of concepts, skills, or topics. Each feasible state of knowledge about S is then a subset of Q; the set of all such feasible states is K. The precise term for the information (Q, K) depends on the extent to which K satisfies certain axioms: A knowledge structure assumes that K contains the empty set (a student may know nothing about S) and Q itself (a student may have fully mastered S). A knowledge space is a knowledge structure that is closed under set union: if, for each topic, there is an expert in a class on that topic, then it is possible, with enough time and effort, for each student in the class to become an expert on all those topics simultaneously. A quasi-ordinal knowledge space is a knowledge space that is also closed under set intersection: if student a knows topics A and B; and student c knows topics B and C; then it is possible for another student b to know only topic B. A well-graded knowledge space or learning space is a knowledge space satisfying the following axiom: If S∈K, then there exists x∈S such that S\{x}∈K In educational terms, any feasible body of knowledge can be learned one concept at a time. === Prerequisite partial order === The more contentful axioms associated with quasi-ordinal and well-graded knowledge spaces each imply that the knowledge space forms a well-understood (and heavily studied) mathematical structure: A quasi-ordinal knowledge space can be associated with a distributive lattice under set union and set intersection. The name "quasi-ordinal" arises from Birkhoff's representation theorem, which explains that distributive lattices uniquely correspond to partial orders. A well-graded knowledge space is an antimatroid, a type of mathematical structure that describes certain problems solvable with a greedy algorithm. In either case, the mathematical structure implies that set inclusion defines partial order on K, interpretable as an educational prerequirement: if a(⪯)b in this partial order, then a must be learned before b. === Inner and outer fringe === The prerequisite partial order does not uniquely identify a curriculum; some concepts may lead to a variety of other possible topics. But the covering relation associated with the prerequisite partial does control curricular structure: if students know a before a lesson and b immediately after, then b must cover a in the partial order. In such a circumstance, the new topics covered between a and b constitute the outer fringe of a ("what the student was ready to learn") and the inner fringe of b ("what the student just learned"). == Construction of knowledge spaces == In practice, there exist several methods to construct knowledge spaces. The most frequently used method is querying experts. There exist several querying algorithms that allow one or several experts to construct a knowledge space by answering a sequence of simple questions. Another method is to construct the knowledge space by explorative data analysis (for example by item tree analysis) from data. A third method is to derive the knowledge space from an analysis of the problem solving processes in the corresponding domain.

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  • Ilya Sutskever

    Ilya Sutskever

    Ilya Sutskever (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 1986) is a computer scientist who specializes in machine learning. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning, including sequence-to-sequence learning, reasoning models, GPT models, and contributions to CLIP, DALL-E, and AlphaGo. With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. One of the most highly cited computer scientists in history, he has won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award for his lasting impact on AI research three times in a row (2022–2024) and received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science in 2026. Sutskever co-founded and was chief scientist at OpenAI, where he oversaw the research breakthroughs that led to large language models and to the launch of ChatGPT. He also led the research that led to reasoning models such as o1. In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board that ousted Sam Altman as its CEO; Altman was reinstated a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence Inc., alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. Within a year, the company was valued at more than $30 billion. == Early life and education == Sutskever was born in 1986 into a Jewish family in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union). At the age of 5, he immigrated to Israel with his family and grew up in Jerusalem. Sutskever proved to be a good student in school, and in eighth grade started taking classes at the Open University of Israel. At 16, he moved with his family to Canada, where he attended high school for a month before being admitted to the University of Toronto in Ontario as a third-year undergraduate student. At the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005, a master's degree in computer science in 2007, and a PhD in computer science in 2013. His doctoral advisor was Geoffrey Hinton. In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. == Career and research == In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to the University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain. At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm, and worked on TensorFlow. He is also one of the AlphaGo paper's many co-authors. At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI. In 2022, Sutskever tweeted, "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious", which triggered debates about AI consciousness. He is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT, and later in leading the research that led to reasoning models. He is credited with establishing OpenAI’s scaling ethos. In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which was trying to solve the alignment of superintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade. Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controlled OpenAI. In November 2023, the board fired Sam Altman, saying that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board". He authored a 52-page memo that relied heavily on information from Mira Murati, accusing Altman of lying, manipulating executives, and fostering internal division. Sutskever submitted the memo to the board after months of tension and dissatisfaction with Altman's leadership style, and ultimately joined the board in voting for Altman's termination. In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty", but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster. Altman's firing and OpenAI's co-founder Greg Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI. After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board and was absent from OpenAI's office. Some sources suggested he was leading the team remotely, while others said he no longer had access to the team's work. In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him. His decision followed a turbulent period at OpenAI marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development and alignment protocols. Jan Leike, the other leader of the superalignment project, announced his departure hours later, citing an erosion of safety and trust in OpenAI's leadership. In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. In contrast to OpenAI, which releases revenue-generating products, Sutskever said the new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then". In September 2024, the company announced that it had raised $1 billion from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. In March 2025, Safe Superintelligence Inc. raised $2 billion more and reportedly reached a $32 billion valuation, notably due to Sutskever's reputation. In June 2025, SSI rejected an offer from Meta Platforms to buy the company. Sutskever became CEO of SSI shortly thereafter, after co-founder and CEO Gross left for Meta. In an October 2024 interview after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton expressed support for Sutskever's decision to fire Altman, emphasizing concerns about AI safety. During the Musk v. Altman trial in 2026, Sutskever confirmed he had a $7 billion stake in OpenAI. === Awards and honors === In 2015, Sutskever was named in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2018, he was the keynote speaker at Nvidia Ntech 2018 and AI Frontiers Conference 2018. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In 2023 and 2024, included in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in AI In 2022, 2023, and 2024, he won Neural Information Processing Systems’ Test of Time award, which recognizes papers that significantly shaped the AI field over at least ten years. In 2025, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Toronto In 2026, he received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science, presented for the first time in artificial intelligence.

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  • BLOOM (language model)

    BLOOM (language model)

    The BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model (BLOOM) is an open-access large language model (LLM) released in 2022. It was created by a volunteer-driven research effort to provide a transparently-created alternative to proprietary AI models. With 176 billion parameters, BLOOM is a transformer-based autoregressive model designed to generate text in 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages. The model is distributed under the project's "Responsible AI License". == Development == BLOOM is the main outcome of the BigScience initiative, a one-year-long research workshop. The project was coordinated by Hugging Face using funding from the French government and involved several hundred volunteer researchers and engineers from academia and the private sector. The model was trained between March and July 2022 on the Jean Zay public supercomputer in France, managed by GENCI and IDRIS (CNRS). Unlike GPT-3, BLOOM was trained to be multilingual. The source code is released under the Apache 2.0 license. The model's parameters are released under BigScience's "Responsible AI License" (RAIL), which grants open access and reuse rights but with some usage restrictions. BLOOM was used in the chatbots BLOOMChat and HuggingChat due to its multilingual abilities. BLOOM's training corpus, named ROOTS, combines data extracted from the then-latest version of the web-based OSCAR corpus (38% of ROOTS) and newly collected data extracted from a manually selected and documented list of language data sources. In total, the model was trained on approximately 366 billion (1.6TB) tokens. It was developed using the open-source libraries DeepSpeed Megatron. BigScience then released xP3, a multilingual dataset for LLM supervised learning. It also released BLOOMZ, a variant of BLOOM fine-tuned on xP3 to follow instructions.

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  • Thinking Machines Lab

    Thinking Machines Lab

    Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had completed an early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation. == History == By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI. Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitor Anthropic. In January 2026, it was reported that Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, departed the startup to return to OpenAI. Other former OpenAI employees who have been hired include Jonathan Lachman and Andrew Tulloch (although Tulloch departed after getting recruited for Meta Superintelligence Labs). Thinking Machines Lab's advisers include Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI's chief research officer, and Alec Radford, who was a lead researcher for OpenAI. On October 1, 2025, it announced Tinker, an API for fine-tuning language models. Users would submit jobs through the API for fine-tuning one of the various open-weight models supported. The Lab would run the jobs on its internal clusters and training infrastructure. == Business structure == Thinking Machines Lab grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders. In July 2025, Andreessen Horowitz was reported to have led the company's initial funding round, raising "about $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion". The government of Albania (Murati's country of origin) was also included in this round, making a $10 million investment which required an amendment to the country's 2025 budget. == Partnership == In March 2026, Thinking Machines Lab announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA involving an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity.

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  • Leela Chess Zero

    Leela Chess Zero

    Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero, lc0) is a free, open-source chess engine and volunteer computing project based on Google's AlphaZero engine. It was spearheaded by Gary Linscott, a developer for the Stockfish chess engine, and adapted from the Leela Zero Go engine. Like Leela Zero and AlphaGo Zero, early iterations of Leela Chess Zero started with no intrinsic chess-specific knowledge other than the basic rules of the game. It learned how to play chess through reinforcement learning from repeated self-play, using a distributed computing network coordinated at the Leela Chess Zero website. However, as of November 2024 most models used by the engine are trained through supervised learning on data generated by previous reinforcement learning runs. As of June 2025, Leela Chess Zero has played over 2.5 billion games against itself, playing around 1 million games every day, and is capable of play at a level that is comparable with Stockfish, the leading conventional chess program. == History == The Leela Chess Zero project was first announced on TalkChess.com on January 9, 2018, as an open-source, self-learning chess engine attempting to recreate the success of AlphaZero. Within the first few months of training, Leela Chess Zero had already reached the Grandmaster level, surpassing the strength of early releases of Rybka, Stockfish, and Komodo, despite evaluating orders of magnitude fewer positions due to the size of the deep neural network it uses as its evaluation function. In December 2018, the AlphaZero team published a paper in Science magazine revealing previously undisclosed details of the architecture and training parameters used for AlphaZero. These changes were soon incorporated into Leela Chess Zero and increased both its strength and training efficiency. Work on Leela Chess Zero has informed the AobaZero project for shogi. The engine has been rewritten and carefully iterated upon since its inception, and since 2019 has run on multiple backends, allowing it to run on both CPU and GPU. The engine can be configured to use different weights, including even different architectures. This same mechanism of substitutable weights can also be used for alternative chess rules, such as for the Fischer Random Chess variant, which was done in 2019. == Neural network == Like AlphaZero, Leela Chess Zero employs neural networks which output both a policy vector, a distribution over subsequent moves used to guide search, and a position evaluation. These neural networks are designed to run on GPU, unlike traditional engines. It originally used residual neural networks, but in 2022 switched to using a transformer-based architecture designed by Daniel Monroe and Philip Chalmers. These models represent a chessboard as a sequence of 64 tokens and apply a trunk consisting of a stack of Post-LN encoder layers, outputting a sequence of 64 encoded tokens which is used to generate a position evaluation and a distribution over subsequent moves. They use a custom domain-specific position encoding called smolgen to improve the self-attention layer. As of November 2024, the models used by the engine are significantly larger and more efficient than the residual network used by AlphaZero, reportedly achieving grandmaster-level strength at one position evaluation per move. These models are able to detect and exploit positional features like trapped pieces and fortresses to outmaneuver traditional engines, giving Leela a unique playstyle. There is also evidence that they are able to perform look-ahead. == Program and use == Like AlphaZero, Leela Chess Zero learns through reinforcement learning, continually training on data generated through self-play. However, unlike AlphaZero, Leela Chess Zero decentralizes its data generation through distributed computing, with volunteers generating self-play data on local hardware which is fed to the reinforcement algorithm. In order to contribute training games, volunteers must download the latest non-release candidate (non-rc) version of the engine and the client. The client connects to the Leela Chess Zero server and iteratively receives the latest neural network version and produces self-play games which are sent back to the server and use to train the network. In order to run the Leela Chess Zero engine, two components are needed: the engine binary used to perform search, and a network used to evaluate positions. The client, which is used to contribute training data to the project, is not needed for this purpose. Older networks can also be downloaded and used by placing those networks in the folder with the Lc0 binary. == Spinoffs == In season 15 of the Top Chess Engine Championship, the engine AllieStein competed alongside Leela. AllieStein is a combination of two different spinoffs from Leela: Allie, which uses the same neural network as Leela, but has a unique search algorithm for exploring different lines of play, and Stein, a network which was trained using supervised learning on existing game data from games between other engines. While neither of these projects were admitted to TCEC separately due to their similarity to Leela, the combination of Allie's search algorithm with the Stein network, called AllieStein, was deemed unique enough to warrant its inclusion in the competition. In early 2021, the LcZero blog announced Ceres, a transliteration of the engine to C# which introduced several algorithmic improvements. The engine has performed competitively in tournaments, achieving third place in the TCEC Swiss 7 and fourth place in the TCEC Cup 14. In 2024, the CeresTrain framework was announced to support training deep neural networks for chess in PyTorch. == Competition results == In April 2018, Leela Chess Zero became the first engine using a deep neural network to enter the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC), during Season 12 in the lowest division, Division 4. Out of 28 games, it won one, drew two, and lost the remainder; its sole victory came from a position in which its opponent, Scorpio 2.82, crashed in three moves. However, it improved quickly. In July 2018, Leela placed seventh out of eight competitors at the 2018 World Computer Chess Championship. In August 2018, it won division 4 of TCEC season 13 with a record of 14 wins, 12 draws, and 2 losses. In Division 3, Leela scored 16/28 points, finishing third behind Ethereal, which scored 22.5/28 points, and Arasan on tiebreak. By September 2018, Leela had become competitive with the strongest engines in the world. In the 2018 Chess.com Computer Chess Championship (CCCC), Leela placed fifth out of 24 entrants. The top eight engines advanced to round 2, where Leela placed fourth. Leela then won the 30-game match against Komodo to secure third place in the tournament. Leela participated in the "TCEC Cup", an event in which engines from different TCEC divisions can play matches against one another. Leela defeated higher-division engines Laser, Ethereal and Fire before finally being eliminated by Stockfish in the semi-finals. In December 2018, Leela participated in Season 14 of the Top Chess Engine Championship. Leela dominated divisions 3, 2, and 1, easily finishing first in all of them. In the premier division, Stockfish dominated while Houdini, Komodo and Leela competed for second place. It came down to a final-round game where Leela needed to hold Stockfish to a draw with black to finish second ahead of Komodo. Leela managed this and therefore met Stockfish in the superfinal. In a back and forth match, first Stockfish and then Leela took three game leads before Stockfish won by the narrow margin of 50.5–49.5. In February 2019, Leela scored its first major tournament win when it defeated Houdini in the final of the second TCEC cup. Leela did not lose a game the entire tournament. In April 2019, Leela won the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship 7: Blitz Bonanza, becoming the first neural-network project to take the title. In the season 15 of the Top Chess Engine Championship (May 2019), Leela defended its TCEC Cup title, this time defeating Stockfish with a score of 5.5–4.5 (+2 =7 −1) in the final after Stockfish blundered a seven-man tablebase draw. Leela also won the Superfinal for the first time, scoring 53.5–46.5 (+14 −7 =79) versus Stockfish, including winning as both white and black in the same predetermined opening in games 61 and 62. Season 16 of TCEC saw Leela finish in third place in premier division, missing qualification for the Superfinal to Stockfish and the new deep neural network engine AllieStein. Leela was the only engine not to suffer any losses in the Premier division, and defeated Stockfish in one of the six games they played. However, Leela only managed to score nine wins, while AllieStein and Stockfish both scored 14 wins. This inability to defeat weaker engines led to Leela finishing third, half a point behind AllieStein and a point behind Stockfish. In the fourth TCEC Cup, Leela was seeded first as the defending champion,

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  • Lisp machine

    Lisp machine

    Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations. Despite being modest in number (perhaps 7,000 units total as of 1988) Lisp machines commercially pioneered some now-commonplace technologies, including networking innovations such as Chaosnet, and effective garbage collection. Several firms built and sold Lisp machines in the 1980s: Symbolics (3600, 3640, XL1200, MacIvory, and other models), Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI Lambda), Texas Instruments (Explorer, MicroExplorer), and Xerox (Interlisp-D workstations). The operating systems were written in Lisp Machine Lisp, Interlisp (Xerox), and later partly in Common Lisp. == History == === Historical context === Artificial intelligence (AI) computer programs of the 1960s and 1970s intrinsically required what was then considered a huge amount of computer power, as measured in processor time and memory space. The power requirements of AI research were exacerbated by the Lisp symbolic programming language, when commercial hardware was designed and optimized for assembly- and Fortran-like programming languages. At first, the cost of such computer hardware meant that it had to be shared among many users. As integrated circuit technology shrank the size and cost of computers in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the memory needs of AI programs began to exceed the address space of the most common research computer, the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10, researchers considered a new approach: a computer designed specifically to develop and run large artificial intelligence programs, and tailored to the semantics of the Lisp language. To provide consistent performance for interactive programs, these machines would often not be shared, but would be dedicated to a single user at a time. === Initial development === In 1973, Richard Greenblatt and Thomas Knight, programmers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), began what would become the MIT Lisp Machine Project when they first began building a computer hardwired to run certain basic Lisp operations, rather than run them in software, in a 24-bit tagged architecture. The machine also did incremental (or Arena) garbage collection. More specifically, since Lisp variables are typed at runtime rather than compile time, a simple addition of two variables could take five times as long on conventional hardware, due to test and branch instructions. Lisp Machines ran the tests in parallel with the more conventional single instruction additions. If the simultaneous tests failed, then the result was discarded and recomputed; this meant in many cases a speed increase by several factors. This simultaneous checking approach was used as well in testing the bounds of arrays when referenced, and other memory management necessities (not merely garbage collection or arrays). Type checking was further improved and automated when the conventional byte word of 32 bits was lengthened to 36 bits for Symbolics 3600-model Lisp machines and eventually to 40 bits or more (usually, the excess bits not accounted for by the following were used for error-correcting codes). The first group of extra bits were used to hold type data, making the machine a tagged architecture, and the remaining bits were used to implement compressed data representation (CDR) coding (wherein the usual linked list elements are compressed to occupy roughly half the space), aiding garbage collection by reportedly an order of magnitude. A further improvement was two microcode instructions which specifically supported Lisp functions, reducing the cost of calling a function to as little as 20 clock cycles, in some Symbolics implementations. The first machine was called the CONS machine (named after the list construction operator cons in Lisp). Often it was affectionately referred to as the Knight machine, perhaps since Knight wrote his master's thesis on the subject; it was extremely well received. It was subsequently improved into a version called CADR (a pun; in Lisp, the cadr function, which returns the second item of a list, is pronounced /ˈkeɪ.dəɹ/ or /ˈkɑ.dəɹ/, as some pronounce the word "cadre") which was based on essentially the same architecture. About 25 of what were essentially prototype CADRs were sold within and without MIT for ~$50,000; it quickly became the favorite machine for hacking – many of the most favored software tools were quickly ported to it (e.g. Emacs was ported from ITS in 1975). It was so well received at an AI conference held at MIT in 1978 that Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began funding its development. === Commercializing MIT Lisp machine technology === In 1979, Russell Noftsker, being convinced that Lisp machines had a bright commercial future due to the strength of the Lisp language and the enabling factor of hardware acceleration, proposed to Greenblatt that they commercialize the technology. In a counter-intuitive move for an AI Lab hacker, Greenblatt acquiesced, hoping perhaps that he could recreate the informal and productive atmosphere of the Lab in a real business. These ideas and goals were considerably different from those of Noftsker. The two negotiated at length, but neither would compromise. As the proposed firm could succeed only with the full and undivided assistance of the AI Lab hackers as a group, Noftsker and Greenblatt decided that the fate of the enterprise was up to them, and so the choice should be left to the hackers. The ensuing discussions of the choice divided the lab into two factions. In February 1979, matters came to a head. The hackers sided with Noftsker, believing that a commercial venture-fund-backed firm had a better chance of surviving and commercializing Lisp machines than Greenblatt's proposed self-sustaining start-up. Greenblatt lost the battle. It was at this juncture that Symbolics, Noftsker's enterprise, slowly came together. While Noftsker was paying his staff a salary, he had no building or any equipment for the hackers to work on. He bargained with Patrick Winston that, in exchange for allowing Symbolics' staff to keep working out of MIT, Symbolics would let MIT use internally and freely all the software Symbolics developed. A consultant from CDC, who was trying to put together a natural language computer application with a group of West-coast programmers, came to Greenblatt, seeking a Lisp machine for his group to work with, about eight months after the disastrous conference with Noftsker. Greenblatt had decided to start his own rival Lisp machine firm, but he had done nothing. The consultant, Alexander Jacobson, decided that the only way Greenblatt was going to start the firm and build the Lisp machines that Jacobson desperately needed was if Jacobson pushed and otherwise helped Greenblatt launch the firm. Jacobson pulled together business plans, a board, a partner for Greenblatt (one F. Stephen Wyle). The newfound firm was named LISP Machine, Inc. (LMI), and was funded by CDC orders, via Jacobson. Around this time Symbolics (Noftsker's firm) began operating. It had been hindered by Noftsker's promise to give Greenblatt a year's head start, and by severe delays in procuring venture capital. Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics. Two AI Lab people were not hired by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky. Stallman, however, blamed Symbolics for the decline of the hacker community that had centered around the AI lab. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers. Regardless, after a series of internal battles, Symbolics did get off the ground in 1980/1981, selling the CADR as the LM-2, while Lisp Machines, Inc. sold it as the LMI-CADR. Symbolics did not intend to produce many LM-2s, since the 3600 family of Lisp machines was supposed to ship quickly, but the 3600s were repeatedly delayed, and Symbolics ended up producing ~100 LM-2s, each of which sold for $70,000. Both firms developed second-generation products based on the CADR: the Symbolics 3600 and the LMI-LAMBDA (of which LMI managed to sell ~200). The 3600, which shipped a year late, expanded on the CADR by widening the machine word to 36-bits, expanding the address space to 28-bits, and adding hardware to accelerate certain common functions that were implemented in microcode on the CADR. The LMI-LAMBDA, which came out a year after the 3600, in 1983, was compatible with the CADR (it could run CADR microcode), but hardware differences existed. Texas Instruments (TI) joined the fray whe

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  • EPUAP

    EPUAP

    ePUAP (Electronic Platform of Public Administration Services) is a Polish nationwide platform for communication of citizens with public administrations in a uniform and standardized way. Built as part of the ePUAP-WKP project (State Informatization Plan). Service providers are public administration units and public institutions (especially entities that perform tasks commissioned by the state). The platform provides service providers with technological infrastructure to provide services to citizens (recipients). Among the participants of ePUAP there are both central administration units and local governments, including municipal offices. Among the services offered by ePUAP is also Profil Zaufany (Trusted Profile), which enables electronic filing with legal effect without the need to use a qualified signature and SAML-based single sign-on mechanism, which enables the same ePUAP account to log on to websites of various service providers. The website www.epuap.gov.pl enables defining citizen and businesses service processes, creates channels of access to different systems of public administration and extends the package of public services provided electronically. Services available through the ePUAP platform may be accessed at the official website. Currently all administration services are available in Polish only. == Overview == It is described by the Polish government as "a coherent and systematic action program designed and developed to allow public institutions make their electronic services available to the public". The platform provides citizens, businesses and institutions with a number of services intended to ensure smooth and safe communication between: customer to administrations (C2A), business to administration (B2A), administration to administration (A2A). === Main goals === The main project objectives are to create a single, secure and electronic access channel to public services for citizens, businesses and public administration and also to reduce time and lower the costs of sharing information resources and functionalities of administration domain systems. Within the project, the following functionalities and services were delivered: Public services catalogue – a method of presenting and describing administration services, ePUAP platform – a web platform designed to provide public services on the Internet, Interoperability portal – a portal for experts working on recommendations for electronic documents and forms used within Polish administration systems to assure the uniformity of IT standards, Central Repository of Electronic Document Models – a database for valid document models and electronic forms. == History and background == The ePUAP project was carried out in the years 2005–2008. Currently, a continuation project ePUAP2 is being carried out with the following objectives: to increase the number of online services available to the public including the registry services, to widen the scale of usage of public electronic services, to integrate subsequent systems of public administration and business on ePUAP portal, to define new processes of customer and business services. === ePUAP2 === ePUAP2 is a public and administrative project that extends the set of functional services developed during the first edition of the project and is another step in the process of transforming Poland into a modern and citizen-friendly country. The implementation period for the project covers the years 2009–2013. Project financing The cost of the project “Construction of electronic Platform of Public Administration Services” – 32 million PLN was covered in 75% by the funds from the European Regional Development Fund (under the Sector Operational Programme "Supporting Competitiveness of Enterprises for the years 2004–2006"), while the remaining 25% of the cost was covered by a Polish national co-financing. Funds for the ePUAP2 project were gained from the 7th priority axis of the Innovative Economy Operational Programme and amounts to 140 million PLN (85% of eligible expenses were covered by the European Regional Development Fund, 15% were covered by a national co-financing). The trustee of ePUAP is the Polish Ministry of the Interior and Administration. == Legal regulations == According to the Polish law from 1 May 2008, public authorities are required to accept documents in electronic form (bringing applications and proposals and other activities in electronic form). ePUAP enables public institutions to meet this requirement by providing a service infrastructure to set up am electronic inbox. The ePUAP inbox meets legal requirements, in particular: issuing an official confirmation of receipt in accordance with the regulation of the Prime Minister of 29 September 2005 on the organizational and technical conditions for the delivery of electronic documents to public entities; cooperation with hardware security modules (HSM), meeting the technical requirements set out in the law; handling documents electronically in accordance with the minimum requirements set out in the Regulation of the Polish Council of Ministers of 11 October 2005 on minimum requirements for ICT systems. == Incidents == === Crashes === The ePUAP system very often happens smaller or larger failures. Because it is used to sign the application profiles trusted also in other electronic systems such as public administration. Electronic Services Platform created by ZUS, the system fault ePUAP it very difficult to settle official matters most electronically. === "Infoafera" === According to TVN and the release of TVP News from 10 April 2014, the creation of ePUAP is also associated with the so-called "Infoafera." On 10 April 2014, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland confirmed the information that the American technology company HP confessed to its participation in the Polish info-tour and corruption of Polish officials. By March 2014, the construction of ePUAP and its maintenance cost PLN 98.4 million. PLN 67.8 million has been used for this project. Challenged expenses only on the portal itself is approx. PLN 20 million.

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  • LightGBM

    LightGBM

    LightGBM, short for Light Gradient-Boosting Machine, is a free and open-source distributed gradient-boosting framework for machine learning, originally developed by Microsoft. It is based on decision tree algorithms and used for ranking, classification and other machine learning tasks. The development focus is on performance and scalability. == Overview == The LightGBM framework supports different algorithms including GBT, GBDT, GBRT, GBM, MART and RF. LightGBM has many of XGBoost's advantages, including sparse optimization, parallel training, multiple loss functions, regularization, bagging, and early stopping. A major difference between the two lies in the construction of trees. LightGBM does not grow a tree level-wise — row by row — as most other implementations do. Instead it grows trees leaf-wise. It will choose the leaf with max delta loss to grow. Besides, LightGBM does not use the widely used sorted-based decision tree learning algorithm, which searches the best split point on sorted feature values, as XGBoost or other implementations do. Instead, LightGBM implements a highly optimized histogram-based decision tree learning algorithm, which yields great advantages on both efficiency and memory consumption. The LightGBM algorithm utilizes two novel techniques called Gradient-Based One-Side Sampling (GOSS) and Exclusive Feature Bundling (EFB) which allow the algorithm to run faster while maintaining a high level of accuracy. LightGBM works on Linux, Windows, and macOS and supports C++, Python, R, and C#. The source code is licensed under MIT License and available on GitHub. == Gradient-based one-side sampling == When using gradient descent, one thinks about the space of possible configurations of the model as a valley, in which the lowest part of the valley is the model which most closely fits the data. In this metaphor, one walks in different directions to learn how much lower the valley becomes. Typically, in gradient descent, one uses the whole set of data to calculate the valley's slopes. However, this commonly used method assumes that every data point is equally informative. By contrast, Gradient-Based One-Side Sampling (GOSS), a method first developed for gradient-boosted decision trees, does not rely on the assumption that all data are equally informative. Instead, it treats data points with smaller gradients (shallower slopes) as less informative by randomly dropping them. This is intended to filter out data which may have been influenced by noise, allowing the model to more accurately model the underlying relationships in the data. == Exclusive feature bundling == Exclusive feature bundling (EFB) is a near-lossless method to reduce the number of effective features. In a sparse feature space many features are nearly exclusive, implying they rarely take nonzero values simultaneously. One-hot encoded features are a perfect example of exclusive features. EFB bundles these features, reducing dimensionality to improve efficiency while maintaining a high level of accuracy. The bundle of exclusive features into a single feature is called an exclusive feature bundle.

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  • Shakey the robot

    Shakey the robot

    Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down into basic chunks by itself. Due to its nature, the project combined research in robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because of this, it was the first project that melded logical reasoning and physical action. Shakey was developed at the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International). Some of the most notable results of the project include the A search algorithm, the Hough transform, and the visibility graph method. == History == Shakey was developed from approximately 1966 through 1972 with Charles Rosen, Nils Nilsson and Peter Hart as project managers. Other major contributors included Alfred Brain, Sven Wahlstrom, Bertram Raphael, Richard Duda, Richard Fikes, Thomas Garvey, Helen Chan Wolf and Michael Wilber. The project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) based on a SRI proposal submitted in April 1964 for research in "Intelligent Automata", later "Intelligent Automata to Reconnaissance". It was originally designed to have two retractable arms. Now retired from active duty, Shakey is currently on view in a glass display case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The project inspired numerous other robotics projects, most notably the Centibots. == Software == The robot's programming was primarily done in LISP. The Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver (STRIPS) planner it used was conceived as the main planning component for the software it utilized. As the first robot that was a logical, goal-based agent, Shakey experienced a limited world. A version of Shakey's world could contain a number of rooms connected by corridors, with doors and light switches available for the robot to interact with. Shakey had a short list of available actions within its planner. These actions involved traveling from one location to another, turning the light switches on and off, opening and closing the doors, climbing up and down from rigid objects, and pushing movable objects around. The STRIPS automated planner could devise a plan to enact all the available actions, even though Shakey himself did not have the capability to execute all the actions within the plan personally. An example mission for Shakey might be something like, an operator types the command "push the block off the platform" at a computer console. Shakey looks around, identifies a platform with a block on it, and locates a ramp in order to reach the platform. Shakey then pushes the ramp over to the platform, rolls up the ramp onto the platform, and pushes the block off the platform. == Hardware == Physically, the robot was particularly tall, and had an antenna for a radio link, sonar range finders, a television camera, on-board processors, and collision detection sensors ("bump detectors"). The robot's tall stature and tendency to shake resulted in its name: We worked for a month trying to find a good name for it, ranging from Greek names to whatnot, and then one of us said, 'Hey, it shakes like hell and moves around, let’s just call it Shakey.' == Research results == The development of Shakey provided far-reaching impact on the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as computer science in general. Some of the more notable results include the development of the A search algorithm, which is widely used in pathfinding and graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path between points; the Hough transform, which is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing; and the visibility graph method for finding Euclidean shortest paths among obstacles in the plane. == Media and awards == In 1969 the SRI published "SHAKEY: Experimentation in Robot Learning and Planning", a 24-minute video. The project then received media attention. This included an article in the New York Times on April 10, 1969. In 1970, Life referred to Shakey as the "first electronic person"; and in November 1970 National Geographic Magazine covered Shakey and the future of computers. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's AI Video Competition's awards are named "Shakeys" because of the significant impact of the 1969 video. Shakey was inducted into Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame in 2004 alongside such notables as ASIMO and C-3PO. Shakey has been honored with an IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing. Shakey was showcased in the BBC's Towards Tomorrow: Robot (1967) documentary.

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