AI Art Pragmata

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

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  Rapid PHP Editor

  rapid PHP Editor is a PHP Editor that incorporates many functions such as AutoComplete, Syntax checker, debugger and many other tools for fast PHP development. Rapid PHP Editor also contain other development tools for helping on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and many other languages. Is part of a family of products covering most aspects of modern web development integrating as well many other capabilities used by developers. Some features: (X)HTML to HTML5 CSS to CSS3 Code intelligence Powerful search and replace Support for several frameworks Code beautifier FTP Explorer (FTP/SFTP/FTPS) File explorer Database explorer Code snippets Validators and Debuggers FAST, real fast Many other tools available (many more to describe all here) == History == Rapid PHP Editor was built using the Delphi programming language.

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  Planner (programming language)

  Planner (often seen in publications as "PLANNER" although it is not an acronym) is a programming language designed by Carl Hewitt at MIT, and first published in 1969. First, subsets such as Micro-Planner and Pico-Planner were implemented, and then essentially the whole language was implemented as Popler by Julian Davies at the University of Edinburgh in the POP-2 programming language. Derivations such as QA4, Conniver, QLISP and Ether (see scientific community metaphor) were important tools in artificial intelligence research in the 1970s, which influenced commercial developments such as Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) and Automated Reasoning Tool (ART). == Procedural approach versus logical approach == The two major paradigms for constructing semantic software systems were procedural and logical. The procedural paradigm was epitomized by Lisp which featured recursive procedures that operated on list structures. The logical paradigm was epitomized by uniform proof procedure resolution-based derivation (proof) finders. According to the logical paradigm it was “cheating” to incorporate procedural knowledge. == Procedural embedding of knowledge == Planner was invented for the purposes of the procedural embedding of knowledge and was a rejection of the resolution uniform proof procedure paradigm, which Converted everything to clausal form. Converting all information to clausal form is problematic because it hides the underlying structure of the information. Then used resolution to attempt to obtain a proof by contradiction by adding the clausal form of the negation of the theorem to be proved. Using only resolution as the rule of inference is problematical because it hides the underlying structure of proofs. Also, using proof by contradiction is problematical because the axiomatizations of all practical domains of knowledge are inconsistent in practice. Planner was a kind of hybrid between the procedural and logical paradigms because it combined programmability with logical reasoning. Planner featured a procedural interpretation of logical sentences where an implication of the form (P implies Q) can be procedurally interpreted in the following ways using pattern-directed invocation: Forward chaining (antecedently): If assert P, assert Q If assert not Q, assert not P Backward chaining (consequently) If goal Q, goal P If goal not P, goal not Q In this respect, the development of Planner was influenced by natural deductive logical systems (especially the one by Frederic Fitch [1952]). == Micro-planner implementation == A subset called Micro-Planner was implemented by Gerry Sussman, Eugene Charniak and Terry Winograd and was used in Winograd's natural-language understanding program SHRDLU, Eugene Charniak's story understanding work, Thorne McCarty's work on legal reasoning, and some other projects. This generated a great deal of excitement in the field of AI. It also generated controversy because it proposed an alternative to the logic approach that had been one of the mainstay paradigms for AI. At SRI International, Jeff Rulifson, Jan Derksen, and Richard Waldinger developed QA4 which built on the constructs in Planner and introduced a context mechanism to provide modularity for expressions in the database. Earl Sacerdoti and Rene Reboh developed QLISP, an extension of QA4 embedded in INTERLISP, providing Planner-like reasoning embedded in a procedural language and developed in its rich programming environment. QLISP was used by Richard Waldinger and Karl Levitt for program verification, by Earl Sacerdoti for planning and execution monitoring, by Jean-Claude Latombe for computer-aided design, by Nachum Dershowitz for program synthesis, by Richard Fikes for deductive retrieval, and by Steven Coles for an early expert system that guided use of an econometric model. Computers were expensive. They had only a single slow processor and their memories were very small by comparison with today. So Planner adopted some efficiency expedients including the following: Backtracking was adopted to economize on the use of time and storage by working on and storing only one possibility at a time in exploring alternatives. A unique name assumption was adopted to save space and time by assuming that different names referred to different objects. For example, names like Peking (previous PRC capital name) and Beijing (current PRC capital transliteration) were assumed to refer to different objects. A closed-world assumption could be implemented by conditionally testing whether an attempt to prove a goal exhaustively failed. Later this capability was given the misleading name "negation as failure" because for a goal G it was possible to say: "if attempting to achieve G exhaustively fails then assert (Not G)." == The genesis of Prolog == Gerry Sussman, Eugene Charniak, Seymour Papert and Terry Winograd visited the University of Edinburgh in 1971, spreading the news about Micro-Planner and SHRDLU and casting doubt on the resolution uniform proof procedure approach that had been the mainstay of the Edinburgh Logicists. At the University of Edinburgh, Bruce Anderson implemented a subset of Micro-Planner called PICO-PLANNER, and Julian Davies (1973) implemented essentially all of Planner. According to Donald MacKenzie, Pat Hayes recalled the impact of a visit from Papert to Edinburgh, which had become the "heart of artificial intelligence's Logicland," according to Papert's MIT colleague, Carl Hewitt. Papert eloquently voiced his critique of the resolution approach dominant at Edinburgh "…and at least one person upped sticks and left because of Papert." The above developments generated tension among the Logicists at Edinburgh. These tensions were exacerbated when the UK Science Research Council commissioned Sir James Lighthill to write a report on the AI research situation in the UK. The resulting report [Lighthill 1973; McCarthy 1973] was highly critical although SHRDLU was favorably mentioned. Pat Hayes visited Stanford where he learned about Planner. When he returned to Edinburgh, he tried to influence his friend Bob Kowalski to take Planner into account in their joint work on automated theorem proving. "Resolution theorem-proving was demoted from a hot topic to a relic of the misguided past. Bob Kowalski doggedly stuck to his faith in the potential of resolution theorem proving. He carefully studied Planner.”. Kowalski [1988] states "I can recall trying to convince Hewitt that Planner was similar to SL-resolution." But Planner was invented for the purposes of the procedural embedding of knowledge and was a rejection of the resolution uniform proof procedure paradigm. Colmerauer and Roussel recalled their reaction to learning about Planner in the following way: "While attending an IJCAI convention in September ‘71 with Jean Trudel, we met Robert Kowalski again and heard a lecture by Terry Winograd on natural language processing. The fact that he did not use a unified formalism left us puzzled. It was at this time that we learned of the existence of Carl Hewitt’s programming language, Planner. The lack of formalization of this language, our ignorance of Lisp and, above all, the fact that we were absolutely devoted to logic meant that this work had little influence on our later research." In the fall of 1972, Philippe Roussel implemented a language called Prolog (an abbreviation for PROgrammation en LOGique – French for "programming in logic"). Prolog programs are generically of the following form (which is a special case of the backward-chaining in Planner): When goal Q, goal P1 and ... and goal Pn Prolog duplicated the following aspects of Micro-Planner: Pattern directed invocation of procedures from goals (i.e. backward chaining) An indexed data base of pattern-directed procedures and ground sentences. Giving up on the completeness paradigm that had characterized previous work on theorem proving and replacing it with the programming language procedural embedding of knowledge paradigm. Prolog also duplicated the following capabilities of Micro-Planner which were pragmatically useful for the computers of the era because they saved space and time: Backtracking control structure Unique Name Assumption by which different names are assumed to refer to distinct entities, e.g., Peking and Beijing are assumed to be different. Reification of Failure. The way that Planner established that something was provable was to successfully attempt it as a goal and the way that it establish that something was unprovable was to attempt it as a goal and explicitly fail. Of course the other possibility is that the attempt to prove the goal runs forever and never returns any value. Planner also had a (not expression) construct which succeeded if expression failed, which gave rise to the “Negation as Failure” terminology in Planner. Use of the Unique Name Assumption and Negation as Failure became more questionable when attention turned to Open Systems. The following capabiliti

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  LG ThinQ

  LG ThinQ (pronounced as "think-cue"; sometimes known as LG webOS) is a smart home and artificial intelligence brand launched by LG Electronics in 2017, featuring products that are equipped with voice control and artificial intelligence technology. The brand was originally launched for home appliances and consumer electronics, such as televisions, smart home devices, mobile devices, refrigerators, air conditioners and related services. The name was first used in 2011 for LG's THINQ-branded smart appliances, which were introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In December 2017, LG announced ThinQ as a unified brand for artificial intelligence-enabled home appliances, consumer electronics and services.In February 2018, LG announced the LG V30S ThinQ, which is the first phone to have the "ThinQ" branding. == History == The branding was first introduced in 2011 in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas as THINQ. The first ThinQ product was a smart refrigerator, with features such as smart savings options, food management system, washing machine, oven and robotic vacuum cleaner and different software in the LCD screen on the fridge. The unified branding was then officially launched as ThinQ at CES 2017 as an artificial intelligence-based brand for all their smart products. The company announced DeepThinQ, a deep-learning technology for connected products, and later opened an Artificial Intelligence Lab in Seoul to coordinate research involving voice, video, sensors and machine learning. In December 2017, LG announced ThinQ as a brand designation for home appliances, consumer electronics, and services incorporating artificial intelligence, applied to its 2018 product lineup. In 2018, LG extended the ThinQ brand to smartphones with the LG V30S ThinQ. The phone used ThinQ branding for AI camera features, including image recognition and shooting-mode recommendations. That year, LG also used ThinQ branding on televisions with smart-assistant features, as manufacturers increasingly added voice assistants to TV platforms. In 2022, LG first introduced ThinQ UP, a software-upgradable appliance concept that allows compatible appliances to receive new features through the ThinQ app. The program included appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, ovens and dishwashers, and was covered as part of a wider move toward upgradeable connected appliances. In 2024, LG introduced ThinQ ON, an AI-powered smart home hub designed to connect LG appliances and other smart home devices. It expanded ThinQ from an appliance-control platform into a broader smart home system. == Platform an app == LG ThinQ operates as a smart home platform and mobile app for connecting compatible LG appliances and consumer electronics. The app is used to control and monitor supported products, including kitchen appliances, laundry appliances, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners and televisions. Depending on the product and market, the ThinQ app can provide remote control, status monitoring, downloadable appliance cycles, diagnostic support, maintenance alerts and software-based feature updates. In 2024, LG introduced ThinQ ON as a hub for the ThinQ platform. The device supports Matter, Thread and Wi-Fi connectivity and includes a built-in voice assistant. The Verge described the product as part of LG's effort to expand ThinQ from an appliance-control platform into a broader smart home system competing with platforms such as Samsung SmartThings and Apple Home. == Features == LG ThinQ products use connected-device features, voice control to interact with users, and use sensor data and different features such as product recognition and learning engine technologies to enhance their abilities. Deep ThinQ (or LG ThinQ AI) was introduced as LG's own AI platform. It was reported that it could engage in two-way conversations with users and could educate itself according to users' behaviour patterns and habits. At the 2017 ThinQ launch, LG said the brand would cover products and services using artificial intelligence technologies from LG and partner companies. ThinQ features vary by product category. On appliances, the platform may support remote operation, product-status notifications, downloaded cycles and diagnostic functions. On televisions, ThinQ branding has been associated with voice-control and smart-assistant features. In 2018, LG ThinQ-branded TVs added support for Google Assistant and Alexa voice commands. As of August 30, 2018, LG's ThinQ products now communicate with each other for tasks such as going to an event or following a recipe. They have sensors for communicating with other ThinQ devices and appliances. == Products == LG ThinQ branding and connectivity features have been used across several LG product categories, including home appliances, televisions, air conditioners and mobile devices. Home appliances LG has applied ThinQ branding and app connectivity to home appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, cooking appliances, air purifiers and vacuum cleaners. Through the ThinQ app, compatible appliances can be monitored or controlled remotely. Some compatible appliances can also receive downloadable cycles, diagnostic support, maintenance alerts and software-based feature updates through ThinQ UP. Televisions and home entertainment LG has used ThinQ branding on smart televisions and other home entertainment products. In 2018, LG ThinQ-branded televisions added support for smart-assistant voice commands, including Google Assistant. Smartphones LG G6 (ThinQ branding was added to startup screen in an update) LG V30 (ThinQ branding was added to startup screen in an update) LG V30S ThinQ LG V35 ThinQ LG G7 ThinQ LG V40 ThinQ LG G8 ThinQ LG G8s ThinQ LG G8x ThinQ LG V50 ThinQ LG V60 ThinQ LG Velvet (Generally considered a ThinQ product in other countries)

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  Effective accelerationism

  Effective accelerationism (e/acc) is a 21st-century ideological movement that advocates for an explicitly pro-technology stance. Its proponents believe that unrestricted technological progress, especially driven by artificial intelligence, is a solution to universal human problems, such as poverty, war, and climate change. They perceive themselves as a counterweight to more cautious views on technological innovation and often label their opponents derogatorily as "doomers" or "decels" (short for decelerationists). The movement carries utopian undertones and advocates for faster AI progress to ensure human survival and propagate consciousness throughout the universe. Although effective accelerationism has been described as a fringe movement and as cult-like, it has gained mainstream visibility in 2023. A number of high-profile Silicon Valley figures, including investors Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, explicitly endorsed it by adding "e/acc" to their public social media profiles. == Etymology and central beliefs == Effective accelerationism, a portmanteau of "effective altruism" and "accelerationism", is a fundamentally techno-optimist movement. According to Guillaume Verdon, one of the movement's founders, its aim is for human civilization to "clim[b] the Kardashev gradient", meaning its purpose is for human civilization to rise to next levels on the Kardashev scale by maximizing energy usage. To achieve this goal, effective accelerationism wants to accelerate technological progress. It is strongly focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI), because it sees AGI as fundamental for climbing the Kardashev scale. The movement therefore advocates for unrestricted development and deployment of artificial intelligence. Regulation of artificial intelligence and government intervention in markets more generally is met with opposition. Many of its proponents have libertarian views and think that AGI will be most aligned if many AGIs compete against each other on the marketplace. The founders of the movement see it as rooted in Jeremy England's theory on the origin of life, which is focused on entropy and thermodynamics. According to them, the universe aims to increase entropy, and life is a way of increasing it. By spreading life throughout the universe and making life use up ever increasing amounts of energy, the universe's purpose would thus be fulfilled. == History == === Intellectual origins === While Nick Land is seen as the intellectual originator of contemporary accelerationism in general, the precise origins of effective accelerationism remain unclear. The earliest known reference to the movement can be traced back to a May 2022 newsletter published by four pseudonymous authors known by their X (formerly Twitter) usernames @BasedBeffJezos, @bayeslord, @zestular and @creatine_cycle. Effective accelerationism is an extension of the TESCREAL movement, being etymologically derived from Effective Altruism and heavily rooted in the older Silicon Valley subcultures of transhumanism and extropianism (which similarly emphasized the value of progress and resisted efforts to restrain the development of technology), alongside elements of singularitarianism, cosmism, and longtermism. It is also often considered to have emerged at least in part from the work of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (of which Nick Land was a leading member, alongside writers such as Mark Fisher and Sadie Plant). It is sometimes compared and contrasted with the work of philosopher Benjamin Bratton on planetary computation. === Disclosure of the identity of BasedBeffJezos === Forbes disclosed in December 2023 that the @BasedBeffJezos persona is maintained by Guillaume Verdon, a Canadian former Google quantum computing engineer and theoretical physicist. The revelation was supported by a voice analysis conducted by the National Center for Media Forensics of the University of Colorado Denver, which further confirmed the match between Jezos and Verdon. The magazine justified its decision to disclose Verdon's identity on the grounds of it being "in the public interest". On 29 December 2023 Guillaume Verdon was interviewed by Lex Fridman on the Lex Fridman Podcast and introduced as the "creator of the effective accelerationism movement". === Second Trump presidency === Following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, several prominent tech industry figures expressed support for positions aligned with effective accelerationism, particularly regarding deregulation and technological advancement. The potential appointment of Elon Musk to government roles focused on auditing federal programs drew support from venture capitalists who anticipated reduced regulatory oversight of the technology sector. Notable tech figures publicly connected these developments to the movement's principles. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, expressed support for "removing unnecessary red tape and over-regulation", while Mark Pincus, early Facebook investor and Zynga founder, explicitly referenced "effective accelerationism" in his post-election commentary. Venture capitalists viewed the incoming administration as an opportunity to ease regulations that had affected technology mergers and acquisitions during the previous years. == Relation to other movements == === Traditional accelerationism === Traditional accelerationism, as developed by the British philosopher Nick Land, sees the acceleration of technological change as a way to bring about a fundamental transformation of current culture, society, and the political economy. This is done through capitalism, which Land views as "an autonomous force that’s reconfiguring society" that can overcome its limits if intensified. Land's work has also been characterized as concerning "the supposedly inevitable 'disintegration of the human species' when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently." While both concern ideas like a technocapital singularity and AGI progress, effective accelerationism focuses on using AGI for the greatest ethical good for conscious life and civilization (whether human or machine), as well as expanding civilization and maximizing energy usage in order to align with the "will of the universe". Land focuses on capitalist self-optimization as the driver of modernity, progress, and the eroding of existing social orders. Land has expressed support for effective accelerationism, while Thomas Murphy referred to the movement as "Nick Land diluted for LinkedIn". === Effective altruism === Effective accelerationism diverges from the principles of effective altruism, which prioritizes using evidence and reasoning to identify the most effective ways to altruistically improve the world. This divergence comes primarily from one of the causes effective altruists focus on – AI existential risk. Effective altruists (particularly longtermists) argue that AI companies should be cautious and strive to develop safe AI systems, as they fear that any misaligned AGI could eventually lead to human extinction. Proponents of effective accelerationism generally consider existential risks from AGI to be negligible, and claim that even if they were not, decentralized free markets would much better mitigate this risk than centralized governmental regulation. === Degrowth === Effective accelerationism stands in stark contrast with the degrowth movement, sometimes described by it as "decelerationism" or "decels". The degrowth movement advocates for reducing economic activity and consumption to address ecological and social issues. Effective accelerationism on the contrary embraces technological progress, energy consumption and the dynamics of capitalism, rather than advocating for a reduction in economic activity. == Reception == The "Techno-Optimist Manifesto", a 2023 essay by Marc Andreessen, has been described by the Financial Times and the German Süddeutsche Zeitung as espousing the views of effective accelerationism. Mother Jones also characterized it as expressing effective accelerationism and reported that Andressen cited Land's work. David Swan of The Sydney Morning Herald has criticized effective accelerationism due to its opposition to government and industry self-regulation. He argues that "innovations like AI needs thoughtful regulations and guardrails ... to avoid the myriad mistakes Silicon Valley has already made." During the 2023 Reagan National Defense Forum, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo cautioned against embracing the "move fast and break things" mentality associated with "effective acceleration [sic]". She emphasized the need to exercise caution in dealing with AI, stating "that's too dangerous. You can't break things when you are talking about AI." In a similar vein, Ellen Huet argued on Bloomberg News that some of the ideas of the movement were "deeply unsettling", focusing especially on Guillaume Verdon's "post-humanism" and the view that "natural selection could lead AI to replace us as the dominant spe

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  Kuwahara filter

  The Kuwahara filter is a non-linear smoothing filter used in image processing for adaptive noise reduction. Most filters that are used for image smoothing are linear low-pass filters that effectively reduce noise but also blur out the edges. However the Kuwahara filter is able to apply smoothing on the image while preserving the edges. It is named after Michiyoshi Kuwahara, Ph.D., who worked at Kyoto and Osaka Sangyo Universities in Japan, developing early medical imaging of dynamic heart muscle in the 1970s and 80s. == The Kuwahara operator == Suppose that I ( x , y ) {\displaystyle I(x,y)} is a grey scale image and that we take a square window of size 2 a + 1 {\displaystyle 2a+1} centered around a point ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} in the image. This square can be divided into four smaller square regions Q i = 1 ⋯ 4 {\displaystyle Q_{i=1\cdots 4}} each of which will be Q i ( x , y ) = { [ x , x + a ] × [ y , y + a ] if i = 1 [ x − a , x ] × [ y , y + a ] if i = 2 [ x − a , x ] × [ y − a , y ] if i = 3 [ x , x + a ] × [ y − a , y ] if i = 4 {\displaystyle Q_{i}(x,y)={\begin{cases}\left[x,x+a\right]\times \left[y,y+a\right]&{\mbox{ if }}i=1\\\left[x-a,x\right]\times \left[y,y+a\right]&{\mbox{ if }}i=2\\\left[x-a,x\right]\times \left[y-a,y\right]&{\mbox{ if }}i=3\\\left[x,x+a\right]\times \left[y-a,y\right]&{\mbox{ if }}i=4\\\end{cases}}} where × {\displaystyle \times } is the cartesian product. Pixels located on the borders between two regions belong to both regions so there is a slight overlap between subregions. The arithmetic mean m i ( x , y ) {\displaystyle m_{i}(x,y)} and standard deviation σ i ( x , y ) {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}(x,y)} of the four regions centered around a pixel (x,y) are calculated and used to determine the value of the central pixel. The output of the Kuwahara filter Φ ( x , y ) {\displaystyle \Phi (x,y)} for any point ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} is then given by Φ ( x , y ) = m i ( x , y ) {\textstyle \Phi (x,y)=m_{i}(x,y)} where i = a r g min j ⁡ σ j ( x , y ) {\displaystyle i=\operatorname {arg\min } _{j}\sigma _{j}(x,y)} . This means that the central pixel will take the mean value of the area that is most homogenous. The location of the pixel in relation to an edge plays a great role in determining which region will have the greater standard deviation. If for example the pixel is located on a dark side of an edge it will most probably take the mean value of the dark region. On the other hand, should the pixel be on the lighter side of an edge it will most probably take a light value. On the event that the pixel is located on the edge it will take the value of the more smooth, least textured region. The fact that the filter takes into account the homogeneity of the regions ensures that it will preserve the edges while using the mean creates the blurring effect. Similarly to the median filter, the Kuwahara filter uses a sliding window approach to access every pixel in the image. The size of the window is chosen in advance and may vary depending on the desired level of blur in the final image. Bigger windows typically result in the creation of more abstract images whereas small windows produce images that retain their detail. Typically windows are chosen to be square with sides that have an odd number of pixels for symmetry. However, there are variations of the Kuwahara filter that use rectangular windows. Additionally, the subregions do not need to overlap or have the same size as long as they cover all of the window. == Color images == For color images, the filter should not be performed by applying the filter to each RGB channel separately, and then recombining the three filtered color channels to form the filtered RGB image. The main problem with that is that the quadrants will have different standard deviations for each of the channels. For example, the upper left quadrant may have the lowest standard deviation in the red channel, but the lower right quadrant may have the lowest standard deviation in the green channel. This situation would result in the color of the central pixel to be determined by different regions, which might result in color artifacts or blurrier edges. To overcome this problem, for color images a slightly modified Kuwahara filter must be used. The image is first converted into another color space, the HSV color space. The modified filter then operates on only the "brightness" channel, the Value coordinate in the HSV model. The variance of the "brightness" of each quadrant is calculated to determine the quadrant from which the final filtered color should be taken from. The filter will produce an output for each channel which will correspond to the mean of that channel from the quadrant that had the lowest standard deviation in "brightness". This ensures that only one region will determine the RGB values of the central pixel. ImageMagick uses a similar approach, but using the Rec. 709 Luma as the brightness metric. === Julia Implementation === == Applications == Originally the Kuwahara filter was proposed for use in processing RI-angiocardiographic images of the cardiovascular system. The fact that any edges are preserved when smoothing makes it especially useful for feature extraction and segmentation and explains why it is used in medical imaging. The Kuwahara filter however also finds many applications in artistic imaging and fine-art photography due to its ability to remove textures and sharpen the edges of photographs. The level of abstraction helps create a desirable painting-like effect in artistic photographs especially in the case of the colored image version of the filter. These applications have known great success and have encouraged similar research in the field of image processing for the arts. Although the vast majority of applications have been in the field of image processing there have been cases that use modifications of the Kuwahara filter for machine learning tasks such as clustering. The Kuwahara filter has been implemented in CVIPtools. The Kuwahara filter is present as a shader node in Blender. == Drawbacks and restrictions == The Kuwahara filter despite its capabilities in edge preservation has certain drawbacks. At a first glance it is noticeable that the Kuwahara filter does not take into account the case where two regions have equal standard deviations. This is not often the case in real images since it is rather hard to find two regions with exactly the same standard deviation due to the noise that is always present. In cases where two regions have similar standard deviations the value of the center pixel could be decided at random by the noise in these regions. Again this would not be a problem if the regions had the same mean. However, it is not unusual for regions of very different means to have the same standard deviation. This makes the Kuwahara filter susceptible to noise. Different ways have been proposed for dealing with this issue, one of which is to set the value of the center pixel to ( m 1 + m 2 ) / 2 {\textstyle (m_{1}+m_{2})/2} in cases where the standard deviation of two regions do not differ more than a certain value D {\displaystyle D} . The Kuwahara filter is also known to create block artifacts in the images especially in regions of the image that are highly textured. These blocks disrupt the smoothness of the image and are considered to have a negative effect in the aesthetics of the image. This phenomenon occurs due to the division of the window into square regions. A way to overcome this effect is to take windows that are not rectangular(i.e. circular windows) and separate them into more non-rectangular regions. There have also been approaches where the filter adapts its window depending on the input image. == Extensions of the Kuwahara filter == The success of the Kuwahara filter has spurred an increase the development of edge-enhancing smoothing filters. Several variations have been proposed for similar use most of which attempt to deal with the drawbacks of the original Kuwahara filter. The "Generalized Kuwahara filter" proposed by P. Bakker considers several windows that contain a fixed pixel. Each window is then assigned an estimate and a confidence value. The value of the fixed pixel then takes the value of the estimate of the window with the highest confidence. This filter is not characterized by the same ambiguity in the presence of noise and manages to eliminate the block artifacts. The "Mean of Least Variance"(MLV) filter, proposed by M.A. Schulze also produces edge-enhancing smoothing results in images. Similarly to the Kuwahara filter it assumes a window of size 2 d − 1 × 2 d − 1 {\displaystyle 2d-1\times 2d-1} but instead of searching amongst four subregions of size d × d {\displaystyle d\times d} for the one with minimum variance it searches amongst all possible d × d {\displaystyle d\times d} subregions. This means the central pixel of the window will be assigned the mean of the one subregion out of a poss

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  LG ThinQ

  LG ThinQ (pronounced as "think-cue"; sometimes known as LG webOS) is a smart home and artificial intelligence brand launched by LG Electronics in 2017, featuring products that are equipped with voice control and artificial intelligence technology. The brand was originally launched for home appliances and consumer electronics, such as televisions, smart home devices, mobile devices, refrigerators, air conditioners and related services. The name was first used in 2011 for LG's THINQ-branded smart appliances, which were introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In December 2017, LG announced ThinQ as a unified brand for artificial intelligence-enabled home appliances, consumer electronics and services.In February 2018, LG announced the LG V30S ThinQ, which is the first phone to have the "ThinQ" branding. == History == The branding was first introduced in 2011 in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas as THINQ. The first ThinQ product was a smart refrigerator, with features such as smart savings options, food management system, washing machine, oven and robotic vacuum cleaner and different software in the LCD screen on the fridge. The unified branding was then officially launched as ThinQ at CES 2017 as an artificial intelligence-based brand for all their smart products. The company announced DeepThinQ, a deep-learning technology for connected products, and later opened an Artificial Intelligence Lab in Seoul to coordinate research involving voice, video, sensors and machine learning. In December 2017, LG announced ThinQ as a brand designation for home appliances, consumer electronics, and services incorporating artificial intelligence, applied to its 2018 product lineup. In 2018, LG extended the ThinQ brand to smartphones with the LG V30S ThinQ. The phone used ThinQ branding for AI camera features, including image recognition and shooting-mode recommendations. That year, LG also used ThinQ branding on televisions with smart-assistant features, as manufacturers increasingly added voice assistants to TV platforms. In 2022, LG first introduced ThinQ UP, a software-upgradable appliance concept that allows compatible appliances to receive new features through the ThinQ app. The program included appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, ovens and dishwashers, and was covered as part of a wider move toward upgradeable connected appliances. In 2024, LG introduced ThinQ ON, an AI-powered smart home hub designed to connect LG appliances and other smart home devices. It expanded ThinQ from an appliance-control platform into a broader smart home system. == Platform an app == LG ThinQ operates as a smart home platform and mobile app for connecting compatible LG appliances and consumer electronics. The app is used to control and monitor supported products, including kitchen appliances, laundry appliances, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners and televisions. Depending on the product and market, the ThinQ app can provide remote control, status monitoring, downloadable appliance cycles, diagnostic support, maintenance alerts and software-based feature updates. In 2024, LG introduced ThinQ ON as a hub for the ThinQ platform. The device supports Matter, Thread and Wi-Fi connectivity and includes a built-in voice assistant. The Verge described the product as part of LG's effort to expand ThinQ from an appliance-control platform into a broader smart home system competing with platforms such as Samsung SmartThings and Apple Home. == Features == LG ThinQ products use connected-device features, voice control to interact with users, and use sensor data and different features such as product recognition and learning engine technologies to enhance their abilities. Deep ThinQ (or LG ThinQ AI) was introduced as LG's own AI platform. It was reported that it could engage in two-way conversations with users and could educate itself according to users' behaviour patterns and habits. At the 2017 ThinQ launch, LG said the brand would cover products and services using artificial intelligence technologies from LG and partner companies. ThinQ features vary by product category. On appliances, the platform may support remote operation, product-status notifications, downloaded cycles and diagnostic functions. On televisions, ThinQ branding has been associated with voice-control and smart-assistant features. In 2018, LG ThinQ-branded TVs added support for Google Assistant and Alexa voice commands. As of August 30, 2018, LG's ThinQ products now communicate with each other for tasks such as going to an event or following a recipe. They have sensors for communicating with other ThinQ devices and appliances. == Products == LG ThinQ branding and connectivity features have been used across several LG product categories, including home appliances, televisions, air conditioners and mobile devices. Home appliances LG has applied ThinQ branding and app connectivity to home appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, cooking appliances, air purifiers and vacuum cleaners. Through the ThinQ app, compatible appliances can be monitored or controlled remotely. Some compatible appliances can also receive downloadable cycles, diagnostic support, maintenance alerts and software-based feature updates through ThinQ UP. Televisions and home entertainment LG has used ThinQ branding on smart televisions and other home entertainment products. In 2018, LG ThinQ-branded televisions added support for smart-assistant voice commands, including Google Assistant. Smartphones LG G6 (ThinQ branding was added to startup screen in an update) LG V30 (ThinQ branding was added to startup screen in an update) LG V30S ThinQ LG V35 ThinQ LG G7 ThinQ LG V40 ThinQ LG G8 ThinQ LG G8s ThinQ LG G8x ThinQ LG V50 ThinQ LG V60 ThinQ LG Velvet (Generally considered a ThinQ product in other countries)

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  User modeling

  User modeling is the subdivision of human–computer interaction which describes the process of building up and modifying a conceptual understanding of the user. The main goal of user modeling is customization and adaptation of systems to the user's specific needs. The system needs to "say the 'right' thing at the 'right' time in the 'right' way". To do so it needs an internal representation of the user. Another common purpose is modeling specific kinds of users, including modeling of their skills and declarative knowledge, for use in automatic software-tests. User-models can thus serve as a cheaper alternative to user testing but should not replace user testing. == Background == A user model is the collection and categorization of personal data associated with a specific user. A user model is a (data) structure that is used to capture certain characteristics about an individual user, and a user profile is the actual representation in a given user model. The process of obtaining the user profile is called user modeling. Therefore, it is the basis for any adaptive changes to the system's behavior. Which data is included in the model depends on the purpose of the application. It can include personal information such as users' names and ages, their interests, their skills and knowledge, their goals and plans, their preferences and their dislikes or data about their behavior and their interactions with the system. There are different design patterns for user models, though often a mixture of them is used. Static user models Static user models are the most basic kinds of user models. Once the main data is gathered they are normally not changed again, they are static. Shifts in users' preferences are not registered and no learning algorithms are used to alter the model. Dynamic user models Dynamic user models allow a more up to date representation of users. Changes in their interests, their learning progress or interactions with the system are noticed and influence the user models. The models can thus be updated and take the current needs and goals of the users into account. Stereotype based user models Stereotype based user models are based on demographic statistics. Based on the gathered information users are classified into common stereotypes. The system then adapts to this stereotype. The application therefore can make assumptions about a user even though there might be no data about that specific area, because demographic studies have shown that other users in this stereotype have the same characteristics. Thus, stereotype based user models mainly rely on statistics and do not take into account that personal attributes might not match the stereotype. However, they allow predictions about a user even if there is rather little information about him or her. Highly adaptive user models Highly adaptive user models try to represent one particular user and therefore allow a very high adaptivity of the system. In contrast to stereotype based user models they do not rely on demographic statistics but aim to find a specific solution for each user. Although users can take great benefit from this high adaptivity, this kind of model needs to gather a lot of information first. == Data gathering == Information about users can be gathered in several ways. There are three main methods: Asking for specific facts while (first) interacting with the system Mostly this kind of data gathering is linked with the registration process. While registering users are asked for specific facts, their likes and dislikes and their needs. Often the given answers can be altered afterwards. Learning users' preferences by observing and interpreting their interactions with the system In this case users are not asked directly for their personal data and preferences, but this information is derived from their behavior while interacting with the system. The ways they choose to accomplish a tasks, the combination of things they takes interest in, these observations allow inferences about a specific user. The application dynamically learns from observing these interactions. Different machine learning algorithms may be used to accomplish this task. A hybrid approach which asks for explicit feedback and alters the user model by adaptive learning This approach is a mixture of the ones above. Users have to answer specific questions and give explicit feedback. Furthermore, their interactions with the system are observed and the derived information are used to automatically adjust the user models. Though the first method is a good way to quickly collect main data it lacks the ability to automatically adapt to shifts in users' interests. It depends on the users' readiness to give information and it is unlikely that they are going to edit their answers once the registration process is finished. Therefore, there is a high likelihood that the user models are not up to date. However, this first method allows the users to have full control over the collected data about them. It is their decision which information they are willing to provide. This possibility is missing in the second method. Adaptive changes in a system that learns users' preferences and needs only by interpreting their behavior might appear a bit opaque to the users, because they cannot fully understand and reconstruct why the system behaves the way it does. Moreover, the system is forced to collect a certain amount of data before it is able to predict the users' needs with the required accuracy. Therefore, it takes a certain learning time before a user can benefit from adaptive changes. However, afterwards these automatically adjusted user models allow a quite accurate adaptivity of the system. The hybrid approach tries to combine the advantages of both methods. Through collecting data by directly asking its users it gathers a first stock of information which can be used for adaptive changes. By learning from the users' interactions it can adjust the user models and reach more accuracy. Yet, the designer of the system has to decide, which of these information should have which amount of influence and what to do with learned data that contradicts some of the information given by a user. == System adaptation == Once a system has gathered information about a user it can evaluate that data by preset analytical algorithm and then start to adapt to the user's needs. These adaptations may concern every aspect of the system's behavior and depend on the system's purpose. Information and functions can be presented according to the user's interests, knowledge or goals by displaying only relevant features, hiding information the user does not need, making proposals what to do next and so on. One has to distinguish between adaptive and adaptable systems. In an adaptable system the user can manually change the system's appearance, behavior or functionality by actively selecting the corresponding options. Afterwards the system will stick to these choices. In an adaptive system a dynamic adaption to the user is automatically performed by the system itself, based on the built user model. Thus, an adaptive system needs ways to interpret information about the user in order to make these adaptations. One way to accomplish this task is implementing rule-based filtering. In this case a set of IF... THEN... rules is established that covers the knowledge base of the system. The IF-conditions can check for specific user-information and if they match the THEN-branch is performed which is responsible for the adaptive changes. Another approach is based on collaborative filtering. In this case information about a user is compared to that of other users of the same systems. Thus, if characteristics of the current user match those of another, the system can make assumptions about the current user by presuming that he or she is likely to have similar characteristics in areas where the model of the current user is lacking data. Based on these assumption the system then can perform adaptive changes. == Usages == Adaptive hypermedia: In an adaptive hypermedia system the displayed content and the offered hyperlinks are chosen on basis of users' specific characteristics, taking their goals, interests, knowledge and abilities into account. Thus, an adaptive hypermedia system aims to reduce the "lost in hyperspace" syndrome by presenting only relevant information. Adaptive educational hypermedia: Being a subdivision of adaptive hypermedia the main focus of adaptive educational hypermedia lies on education, displaying content and hyperlinks corresponding to the user's knowledge on the field of study. Intelligent tutoring system: Unlike adaptive educational hypermedia systems intelligent tutoring systems are stand-alone systems. Their aim is to help students in a specific field of study. To do so, they build up a user model where they store information about abilities, knowledge and needs of the user. The system can now adapt to this user by presenting approp

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  John M. Jumper

  John Michael Jumper (born 1 January 1985) is an American chemist and computer scientist. Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction. As of 2025 Jumper serves as director at Google DeepMind. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021. == Education == Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007, a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship, a Master of Science in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2017. His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed. == Career and research == Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction. === AlphaFold === AlphaFold is a deep learning algorithm developed by Jumper and his team at DeepMind, a research lab acquired by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. It is an artificial intelligence program which performs predictions of protein structure. === Awards and honors === In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. This international competition benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold won the competition, outperforming other algorithms scoring above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match, within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT. In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine". In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein. In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 2024, Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions, the other half went to David Baker for computational protein design. In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Marshall Medal of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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  InstallCore

  InstallCore (stylized as installCore) was an installation and content distribution platform created by ironSource, considered potentially unwanted programs (PUP) by a number of anti-malware vendors. It included a software development kit (SDK) for Windows and Mac OS X. The program allowed those using it for distribution to include monetization by advertisements or charging for installation, and made its installations invisible to the user and its anti-virus software. The platform and its programs have been rated potentially unwanted programs (PUP) or potentially unwanted applications (PUA) by anti-malware product vendors since 2014, and by Windows Defender Antivirus since 2015. The platform was primarily designed for efficient web-based deployment of various types of application software. As of August 2012, InstallCore was managing 100 million installations every month, offering services for paid, unpaid, and free software by using the SDK version. == History == The InstallCore team introduced the first version of the SDK at the beginning of 2011. The SDK was a fork of the FoxTab installer and had only basic Installation features. InstallCore was discontinued as part of a company flotation in late 2020. == Criticism and malware classification == InstallCore and its software packages have been classified as potentially unwanted programs (PUP) or potentially unwanted applications (PUA), by anti-malware product vendors and Windows Defender Antivirus from 2014–2015 onwards, with many stating that it installs adware and other additional PUPs. Malwarebytes identified the program as "a family of bundlers that installs more than one application on the user's computer". It has been described as "crossing the line into full-blown malware" and a "nasty Trojan".

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  Lumpers and splitters

  Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any academic discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example, schools of literature, biological taxa, and so on. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways. == Origin of the terms == The earliest known use of these terms was thought to be by Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1857: "It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers". But according to research done by the deputy director at NCSE, Glenn Branch, the credit is due to naturalist Edward Newman who wrote in 1845, "The time has arrived for discarding imaginary species, and the duty of doing this is as imperative as the admission of new ones when such are really discovered. The talents described under the respective names of 'hair-splitting' and 'lumping' are unquestionably yielding their power to the mightier power of Truth." They were then introduced more widely by George G. Simpson in his 1945 work The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals. As he put it: splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera ... and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. ... Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat. A later use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper "On lumpers and splitters ..." by the medical geneticist Victor McKusick. Reference to lumpers and splitters in the humanities appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement. It followed from Hexter's detailed review of Hill's book Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, in which Hill developed Max Weber's argument that the rise of capitalism was facilitated by Calvinist Puritanism. Hexter objected to Hill's "mining" of sources to find evidence that supported his theories. Hexter argued that Hill plucked quotations from sources in a way that distorted their meaning. Hexter explained this as a mental habit that he called "lumping". According to him, "lumpers" rejected differences and chose to emphasise similarities. Any evidence that did not fit their arguments was ignored as aberrant. Splitters, by contrast, emphasised differences, and resisted simple schemes. While lumpers consistently tried to create coherent patterns, splitters preferred incoherent complexity. == Usage in various fields == === Biology === The categorisation and naming of a particular species should be regarded as a hypothesis about the evolutionary relationships and distinguishability of that group of organisms. As further information comes to hand, the hypothesis may be confirmed or refuted. Sometimes, especially in the past when communication was more difficult, taxonomists working in isolation have given two distinct names to individual organisms later identified as the same species. When two named species are agreed to be of the same species, the older species name is almost always retained dropping the newer species name honouring a convention known as "priority of nomenclature". This form of lumping is technically called synonymisation. Dividing a taxon into multiple, often new, taxa is called splitting. Taxonomists are often referred to as "lumpers" or "splitters" by their colleagues, depending on their personal approach to recognizing differences or commonalities between organisms. For example, the number of genera used in Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group I (PPG I) has proved controversial. PPG I uses 18 lycophyte and 319 fern genera. The earlier system put forward by Smith et al. (2006) had suggested a range of 274 to 312 genera for ferns alone. By contrast, the system of Christenhusz & Chase (2014) used 5 lycophyte and about 212 fern genera. The number of fern genera was further reduced to 207 in a subsequent publication. Defending PPG I, Schuettpelz et al. (2018) argue that the larger number of genera is a result of "the gradual accumulation of new collections and new data" and hence "a greater appreciation of fern diversity and ... an improved ability to distinguish taxa". They also argue that the number of species per genus in the PPG I system is already higher than in other groups of organisms (about 33 species per genus for ferns as opposed to about 22 species per genus for angiosperms) and that reducing the number of genera as Christenhusz and Chase propose yields the excessive number of about 50 species per genus for ferns. In response, Christenhusz and Chase (2018) argue that the excessive splitting of genera destabilises the usage of names and will lead to greater instability in future, and that the highly split genera have few if any characters that can be used to recognise them, making identification difficult, even to generic level. They further argue that comparing numbers of species per genus in different groups is "fundamentally meaningless". === History === In history, lumpers are those who tend to create broad definitions that cover large periods of time and many disciplines, whereas splitters want to assign names to tight groups of inter-relationships. Lumping tends to create a more and more unwieldy definition, with members having less and less mutually in common. This can lead to definitions which are little more than conventionalities, or groups which join fundamentally different examples. Splitting often leads to "distinctions without difference", ornate and fussy categories, and failure to see underlying similarities. For example, in the arts, "Romantic" can refer specifically to a period of German poetry roughly from 1780 to 1810, but would exclude the later work of Goethe, among other writers. In music it can mean every composer from Hummel through Rachmaninoff, plus many that came after. === Software modelling === Software engineering often proceeds by building models (sometimes known as model-driven architecture). A lumper is keen to generalise, and produces models with a small number of broadly defined objects. A splitter is reluctant to generalise, and produces models with a large number of narrowly defined objects. Conversion between the two styles is not necessarily symmetrical. For example, if error messages in two narrowly defined classes behave in the same way, the classes can be easily combined. But if some messages in a broad class behave differently, every object in the class must be examined before the class can be split. This illustrates the principle that "splits can be lumped more easily than lumps can be split". === Language classification === There is no agreement among historical linguists about what amount of evidence is needed for two languages to be safely classified in the same language family. For this reason, many proposed language families have had lumper–splitter controversies, including Altaic, Pama–Nyungan, Nilo-Saharan, and most of the larger families of the Americas. At a completely different level, the splitting of a mutually intelligible dialect continuum into different languages, or lumping them into one, is also an issue that continually comes up, though the consensus in contemporary linguistics is that there is no completely objective way to settle the question. Splitters regard the comparative method (meaning not comparison in general, but only reconstruction of a common ancestor or protolanguage) as the only valid proof of kinship, and consider genetic relatedness to be the question of interest. American linguists of recent decades tend to be splitters. Lumpers are more willing to admit techniques like mass lexical comparison or lexicostatistics, and mass typological comparison, and to tolerate the uncertainty of whether relationships found by these methods are the result of linguistic divergence (descent from common ancestor) or language convergence (borrowing). Much long-range comparison work has been from Russian linguists belonging to the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics, most notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Sergei Starostin. In the United States, Greenberg and Ruhlen's work has been met with little acceptance from linguists. Earlier American linguists like Morris Swadesh and Edward Sapir also pursued large-scale classifications like Sapir's 1929 scheme for the Americas, accompanied by controversy similar to that today. === Religious studies === Paul F. Bradshaw suggests that the same principles of lumping and splitting apply to the study of early Christian liturgy. Lumpers, who tend to predominate in this field, try to find a single line of successive texts from the apostolic age to the

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  Capsule neural network

  A capsule neural network (CapsNet) is a machine learning system that is a type of artificial neural network (ANN) that can be used to better model hierarchical relationships. The approach is an attempt to more closely mimic biological neural organization. The idea is to add structures called "capsules" to a convolutional neural network (CNN), and to reuse output from several of those capsules to form more stable (with respect to various perturbations) representations for higher capsules. The output is a vector consisting of the probability of an observation, and a pose for that observation. This vector is similar to what is done for example when doing classification with localization in CNNs. Among other benefits, capsnets address the "Picasso problem" in image recognition: images that have all the right parts but that are not in the correct spatial relationship (e.g., in a "face", the positions of the mouth and one eye are switched). For image recognition, capsnets exploit the fact that while viewpoint changes have nonlinear effects at the pixel level, they have linear effects at the part/object level. This can be compared to inverting the rendering of an object of multiple parts. == History == In 2000, Geoffrey Hinton et al. described an imaging system that combined segmentation and recognition into a single inference process using parse trees. So-called credibility networks described the joint distribution over the latent variables and over the possible parse trees. That system proved useful on the MNIST handwritten digit database. A dynamic routing mechanism for capsule networks was introduced by Hinton and his team in 2017. The approach was claimed to reduce error rates on MNIST and to reduce training set sizes. Results were claimed to be considerably better than a CNN on highly overlapped digits. In Hinton's original idea one minicolumn would represent and detect one multidimensional entity. == Transformations == An invariant is an object property that does not change as a result of some transformation. For example, the area of a circle does not change if the circle is shifted to the left. Informally, an equivariant is a property that changes predictably under transformation. For example, the center of a circle moves by the same amount as the circle when shifted. A nonequivariant is a property whose value does not change predictably under a transformation. For example, transforming a circle into an ellipse means that its perimeter can no longer be computed as π times the diameter. In computer vision, the class of an object is expected to be an invariant over many transformations. I.e., a cat is still a cat if it is shifted, turned upside down or shrunken in size. However, many other properties are instead equivariant. The volume of a cat changes when it is scaled. Equivariant properties such as a spatial relationship are captured in a pose, data that describes an object's translation, rotation, scale and reflection. Translation is a change in location in one or more dimensions. Rotation is a change in orientation. Scale is a change in size. Reflection is a mirror image. Unsupervised capsnets learn a global linear manifold between an object and its pose as a matrix of weights. In other words, capsnets can identify an object independent of its pose, rather than having to learn to recognize the object while including its spatial relationships as part of the object. In capsnets, the pose can incorporate properties other than spatial relationships, e.g., color (cats can be of various colors). Multiplying the object by the manifold poses the object (for an object, in space). == Pooling == Capsnets reject the pooling layer strategy of conventional CNNs that reduces the amount of detail to be processed at the next higher layer. Pooling allows a degree of translational invariance (it can recognize the same object in a somewhat different location) and allows a larger number of feature types to be represented. Capsnet proponents argue that pooling: violates biological shape perception in that it has no intrinsic coordinate frame; provides invariance (discarding positional information) instead of equivariance (disentangling that information); ignores the linear manifold that underlies many variations among images; routes statically instead of communicating a potential "find" to the feature that can appreciate it; damages nearby feature detectors, by deleting the information they rely upon. == Capsules == A capsule is a set of neurons that individually activate for various properties of a type of object, such as position, size and hue. Formally, a capsule is a set of neurons that collectively produce an activity vector with one element for each neuron to hold that neuron's instantiation value (e.g., hue). Graphics programs use instantiation value to draw an object. Capsnets attempt to derive these from their input. The probability of the entity's presence in a specific input is the vector's length, while the vector's orientation quantifies the capsule's properties. Artificial neurons traditionally output a scalar, real-valued activation that loosely represents the probability of an observation. Capsnets replace scalar-output feature detectors with vector-output capsules and max-pooling with routing-by-agreement. Because capsules are independent, when multiple capsules agree, the probability of correct detection is much higher. A minimal cluster of two capsules considering a six-dimensional entity would agree within 10% by chance only once in a million trials. As the number of dimensions increase, the likelihood of a chance agreement across a larger cluster with higher dimensions decreases exponentially. Capsules in higher layers take outputs from capsules at lower layers, and accept those whose outputs cluster. A cluster causes the higher capsule to output a high probability of observation that an entity is present and also output a high-dimensional (20-50+) pose. Higher-level capsules ignore outliers, concentrating on clusters. This is similar to the Hough transform, the RHT and RANSAC from classic digital image processing. == Routing by agreement == The outputs from one capsule (child) are routed to capsules in the next layer (parent) according to the child's ability to predict the parents' outputs. Over the course of a few iterations, each parents' outputs may converge with the predictions of some children and diverge from those of others, meaning that that parent is present or absent from the scene. For each possible parent, each child computes a prediction vector by multiplying its output by a weight matrix (trained by backpropagation). Next the output of the parent is computed as the scalar product of a prediction with a coefficient representing the probability that this child belongs to that parent. A child whose predictions are relatively close to the resulting output successively increases the coefficient between that parent and child and decreases it for parents that it matches less well. This increases the contribution that that child makes to that parent, thus increasing the scalar product of the capsule's prediction with the parent's output. After a few iterations, the coefficients strongly connect a parent to its most likely children, indicating that the presence of the children imply the presence of the parent in the scene. The more children whose predictions are close to a parent's output, the more quickly the coefficients grow, driving convergence. The pose of the parent (reflected in its output) progressively becomes compatible with that of its children. The coefficients' initial logits are the log prior probabilities that a child belongs to a parent. The priors can be trained discriminatively along with the weights. The priors depend on the location and type of the child and parent capsules, but not on the current input. At each iteration, the coefficients are adjusted via a "routing" softmax so that they continue to sum to 1 (to express the probability that a given capsule is the parent of a given child.) Softmax amplifies larger values and diminishes smaller values beyond their proportion of the total. Similarly, the probability that a feature is present in the input is exaggerated by a nonlinear "squashing" function that reduces values (smaller ones drastically and larger ones such that they are less than 1). This dynamic routing mechanism provides the necessary deprecation of alternatives ("explaining away") that is needed for segmenting overlapped objects. This learned routing of signals has no clear biological equivalent. Some operations can be found in cortical layers, but they do not seem to relate this technique. === Math/code === The pose vector u i {\textstyle \mathbf {u} _{i}} is rotated and translated by a matrix W i j {\textstyle \mathbf {W} _{ij}} into a vector u ^ j | i {\textstyle \mathbf {\hat {u}} _{j|i}} that predicts the output of the parent capsule. u ^ j | i = W i j u i {\displaystyle \mathbf {

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  Learning rule

  An artificial neural network's learning rule or learning process is a method, mathematical logic or algorithm which improves the network's performance and/or training time. Usually, this rule is applied repeatedly over the network. It is done by updating the weight and bias levels of a network when it is simulated in a specific data environment. A learning rule may accept existing conditions (weights and biases) of the network, and will compare the expected result and actual result of the network to give new and improved values for the weights and biases. Depending on the complexity of the model being simulated, the learning rule of the network can be as simple as an XOR gate or mean squared error, or as complex as the result of a system of differential equations. The learning rule is one of the factors which decides how fast or how accurately the neural network can be developed. Depending on the process to develop the network, there are three main paradigms of machine learning: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. == Background == A lot of the learning methods in machine learning work similar to each other, and are based on each other, which makes it difficult to classify them in clear categories. But they can be broadly understood in 4 categories of learning methods, though these categories don't have clear boundaries and they tend to belong to multiple categories of learning methods - Hebbian - Neocognitron, Brain-state-in-a-box Gradient Descent - ADALINE, Hopfield Network, Recurrent Neural Network Competitive - Learning Vector Quantisation, Self-Organising Feature Map, Adaptive Resonance Theory Stochastic - Boltzmann Machine, Cauchy Machine Though these learning rules might appear to be based on similar ideas, they do have subtle differences, as they are a generalisation or application over the previous rule, and hence it makes sense to study them separately based on their origins and intents. === Hebbian Learning === Developed by Donald Hebb in 1949 to describe biological neuron firing. In the mid-1950s it was also applied to computer simulations of neural networks. Δ w i = η x i y {\displaystyle \Delta w_{i}=\eta x_{i}y} Where η {\displaystyle \eta } represents the learning rate, x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} represents the input of neuron i, and y is the output of the neuron. It has been shown that Hebb's rule in its basic form is unstable. Oja's Rule, BCM Theory are other learning rules built on top of or alongside Hebb's Rule in the study of biological neurons. ==== Perceptron Learning Rule (PLR) ==== The perceptron learning rule originates from the Hebbian assumption, and was used by Frank Rosenblatt in his perceptron in 1958. The net is passed to the activation (transfer) function and the function's output is used for adjusting the weights. The learning signal is the difference between the desired response and the actual response of a neuron. The step function is often used as an activation function, and the outputs are generally restricted to -1, 0, or 1. The weights are updated with w new = w old + η ( t − o ) x i {\displaystyle w_{\text{new}}=w_{\text{old}}+\eta (t-o)x_{i}} where "t" is the target value and "o" is the output of the perceptron, and η {\displaystyle \eta } is called the learning rate. The algorithm converges to the correct classification if: the training data is linearly separable η {\displaystyle \eta } is sufficiently small (though smaller η {\displaystyle \eta } generally means a longer learning time and more epochs) It should also be noted that a single layer perceptron with this learning rule is incapable of working on linearly non-separable inputs, and hence the XOR problem cannot be solved using this rule alone === Backpropagation === Seppo Linnainmaa in 1970 is said to have developed the Backpropagation Algorithm but the origins of the algorithm go back to the 1960s with many contributors. It is a generalisation of the least mean squares algorithm in the linear perceptron and the Delta Learning Rule. It implements gradient descent search through the space possible network weights, iteratively reducing the error, between the target values and the network outputs. ==== Widrow-Hoff Learning (Delta Learning Rule) ==== Similar to the perceptron learning rule but with different origin. It was developed for use in the ADALINE network, which differs from the Perceptron mainly in terms of the training. The weights are adjusted according to the weighted sum of the inputs (the net), whereas in perceptron the sign of the weighted sum was useful for determining the output as the threshold was set to 0, -1, or +1. This makes ADALINE different from the normal perceptron. Delta rule (DR) is similar to the Perceptron Learning Rule (PLR), with some differences: Error (δ) in DR is not restricted to having values of 0, 1, or -1 (as in PLR), but may have any value DR can be derived for any differentiable output/activation function f, whereas in PLR only works for threshold output function Sometimes only when the Widrow-Hoff is applied to binary targets specifically, it is referred to as Delta Rule, but the terms seem to be used often interchangeably. The delta rule is considered to a special case of the back-propagation algorithm. Delta rule also closely resembles the Rescorla-Wagner model under which Pavlovian conditioning occurs. === Competitive Learning === Competitive learning is considered a variant of Hebbian learning, but it is special enough to be discussed separately. Competitive learning works by increasing the specialization of each node in the network. It is well suited to finding clusters within data. Models and algorithms based on the principle of competitive learning include vector quantization and self-organizing maps (Kohonen maps).

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  Minimum resolvable contrast

  Minimum resolvable contrast (MRC) is a subjective measure of a visible spectrum sensor’s or camera's sensitivity and ability to resolve data. A snapshot image of a series of three bar targets of selected spatial frequencies and various contrast coatings captured by the unit under test (UUT) is used to determine the MRC of the UUT, i.e., the visible spectrum camera or sensor. A trained observer selects the smallest target resolvable at each contrast level. Typically, specialized computer software collects the inputted data of the observer and provides a graph of contrast vs. spatial frequency at a given luminance level. A first order polynomial is fitted to the data and an MRC curve of spatial frequency versus contrast is generated.

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  Pinakes

  The Pinakes (Ancient Greek: Πίνακες 'tables', plural of πίναξ pinax) is a lost bibliographic work composed by Callimachus (310/305–240 BCE) that is popularly considered to be the first library catalog in the West; its contents were based upon the holdings of the Library of Alexandria during Callimachus's tenure there during the third century BCE. == History == The Library of Alexandria had been founded by Ptolemy I Soter about 306 BCE. The first recorded librarian was Zenodotus of Ephesus. During Zenodotus' tenure, Callimachus, who was never the head librarian, compiled many catalogues/lists, each called Pinakes. His most famous one listed authors and their works; thus he became the first known bibliographer and the scholar who organized the library by authors and subjects about 245 BCE. His work was 120 volumes long. Apollonius of Rhodes was the successor to Zenodotus. Eratosthenes of Cyrene succeeded Apollonius in 235 BCE and compiled his tetagmenos epi teis megaleis bibliothekeis, the 'scheme of the great bookshelves'. In 195 BCE Aristophanes of Byzantium, Eratosthenes' successor, was the librarian and updated the Pinakes, although it is also possible that his work was not a supplement of Callimachus' Pinakes themselves, but an independent polemic against, or commentary upon, their contents. == Description == The collection at the Library of Alexandria contained nearly 500,000 papyrus scrolls, which were grouped together by subject matter and stored in bins. Each bin carried a label with painted tablets hung above the stored papyri. Pinakes was named after these tablets and are a set of index lists. The bins gave bibliographical information for every roll. A typical entry started with a title and also provided the author's name, birthplace, father's name, any teachers trained under, and educational background. It contained a brief biography of the author and a list of the author's publications. The entry had the first line of the work, a summary of its contents, the name of the author, and information about the origin of the roll, as well as any doubts about the genuineness of the ascription. Callimachus' system divided works into six genres of poetry and five sections of prose: rhetoric, law, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science, and miscellanies. Each category was alphabetized by author. Callimachus composed two other works that were referred as pinakes and were probably somewhat similar in format to the Pinakes (of which they "may or may not be subsections"), but were concerned with individual topics. These are listed by the Suda as: A Chronological Pinax and Description of Didaskaloi from the Beginning and Pinax of the Vocabulary and Treatises of Democritus. == Later bibliographic pinakes == The term pinax was used for bibliographic catalogs beyond Callimachus. For example, Ptolemy-el-Garib's catalog of Aristotle's writings comes to us with the title Pinax (catalog) of Aristotle's writings. == Legacy == The Pinakes proved indispensable to librarians for centuries, and they became a model for organizing knowledge throughout the Mediterranean. Their later influence can be traced to medieval times, even to the Arabic counterpart of the tenth century: Ibn al-Nadim's Al-Fihrist ("Index"). Local variations for cataloging and library classification continued through the late 19th century, when Anthony Panizzi and Melvil Dewey paved the way for more shared and standardized approaches.

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  Fifth Generation Computer Systems

  The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS; Japanese: 第五世代コンピュータ, romanized: daigosedai konpyūta) was a 10-year initiative launched in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to develop computers based on massively parallel computing and logic programming. The project aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and to establish a platform for future advancements in artificial intelligence. Although FGCS was noted as ahead of its time, and its ambitious goals contributed significantly to the development of concurrent logic programming, it ultimately ended in commercial failure. The term "fifth generation" was chosen to emphasize the system's advanced nature. In the history of computing hardware, there had been four prior "generations" of computers: the first generation utilized vacuum tubes; the second, transistors and diodes; the third, integrated circuits; and the fourth, microprocessors. While earlier generations focused on increasing the number of logic elements within a single CPU, it was widely believed at the time that the fifth generation would achieve enhanced performance through the use of massive numbers of CPUs. == Background == In the late 1960s until the early 1970s, there was much talk about "generations" of computer hardware, then usually organized into three generations First generation: Thermionic vacuum tubes. Mid-1940s. IBM pioneered the arrangement of vacuum tubes in pluggable modules. The IBM 650 was a first-generation computer. Second generation: Transistors. 1956. The era of miniaturization begins. Transistors are much smaller than vacuum tubes, draw less power, and generate less heat. Discrete transistors are soldered to circuit boards, with interconnections accomplished by stencil-screened conductive patterns on the reverse side. The IBM 7090 was a second-generation computer. Third generation: Integrated circuits (silicon chips containing multiple transistors). 1964. A pioneering example is the ACPX module used in the IBM 360/91, which, by stacking layers of silicon over a ceramic substrate, accommodated over 20 transistors per chip; the chips could be packed together onto a circuit board to achieve unprecedented logic densities. The IBM 360/91 was a hybrid second and third-generation computer. Omitted from this taxonomy is the "zeroth-generation" computer based on metal gears (such as the IBM 407) or mechanical relays (such as the Mark I), and the post-third-generation computers based on Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits. There was also a parallel set of generations for software: First generation: Machine language. Second generation: Low-level programming languages such as Assembly language. Third generation: Structured high-level programming languages such as C, COBOL and FORTRAN. Fourth generation: "Non-procedural" high-level programming languages (such as object-oriented languages). Throughout these multiple generations up to the 1970s, Japan built computers following U.S. and British leads. In the mid-1970s, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry stopped following western leads and started looking into the future of computing on a small scale. They asked the Japan Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) to indicate a number of future directions, and in 1979 offered a three-year contract to carry out more in-depth studies along with industry and academia. It was during this period that the term "fifth-generation computer" started to be used. Prior to the 1970s, MITI guidance had successes such as an improved steel industry, the creation of the oil supertanker, the automotive industry, consumer electronics, and computer memory. MITI decided that the future was going to be information technology. However, the Japanese language, particularly in its written form, presented and still presents obstacles for computers. As a result of these hurdles, MITI held a conference to seek assistance from experts. The primary fields for investigation from this initial project were: Inference computer technologies for knowledge processing Computer technologies to process large-scale data bases and knowledge bases High-performance workstations Distributed functional computer technologies Super-computers for scientific calculation == Project launch == The aim was to build parallel computers for artificial intelligence applications using concurrent logic programming. The project imagined an "epoch-making" computer with supercomputer-like performance running on top of large databases (as opposed to a traditional filesystem) using a logic programming language to define and access the data using massively parallel computing/processing. They envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inference Per Second. At the time typical workstation machines were capable of about 100k LIPS. They proposed to build this machine over a ten-year period, 3 years for initial R&D, 4 years for building various subsystems, and a final 3 years to complete a working prototype system. In 1982 the government decided to go ahead with the project, and established the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) through joint investment with various Japanese computer companies. After the project ended, MITI would consider an investment in a new "sixth generation" project. Ehud Shapiro captured the rationale and motivations driving this project: "As part of Japan's effort to become a leader in the computer industry, the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology has launched a revolutionary ten-year plan for the development of large computer systems which will be applicable to knowledge information processing systems. These Fifth Generation computers will be built around the concepts of logic programming. In order to refute the accusation that Japan exploits knowledge from abroad without contributing any of its own, this project will stimulate original research and will make its results available to the international research community." === Logic programming === The target defined by the FGCS project was to develop "Knowledge Information Processing systems" (roughly meaning, applied Artificial Intelligence). The chosen tool to implement this goal was logic programming. Logic programming approach as was characterized by Maarten Van Emden – one of its founders – as: The use of logic to express information in a computer. The use of logic to present problems to a computer. The use of logical inference to solve these problems. More technically, it can be summed up in two equations: Program = Set of axioms. Computation = Proof of a statement from axioms. The Axioms typically used are universal axioms of a restricted form, called Horn-clauses or definite-clauses. The statement proved in a computation is an existential statement. The proof is constructive, and provides values for the existentially quantified variables: these values constitute the output of the computation. Logic programming was thought of as something that unified various gradients of computer science (software engineering, databases, computer architecture and artificial intelligence). It seemed that logic programming was a key missing connection between knowledge engineering and parallel computer architectures. == Results == After having influenced the consumer electronics field during the 1970s and the automotive world during the 1980s, the Japanese had developed a strong reputation. The launch of the FGCS project spread the belief that parallel computing was the future of all performance gains, producing a wave of apprehension in the computer field. Soon parallel projects were set up in the US as the Strategic Computing Initiative and the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), in the UK as Alvey, and in Europe as the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT), as well as the European Computer‐Industry Research Centre (ECRC) in Munich, a collaboration between ICL in Britain, Bull in France, and Siemens in Germany. The project ran from 1982 to 1994, spending a little less than ¥57 billion (about US$320 million) total. After the FGCS Project, MITI stopped funding large-scale computer research projects, and the research momentum developed by the FGCS Project dissipated. However MITI/ICOT embarked on a neural-net project which some called the Sixth Generation Project in the 1990s, with a similar level of funding. Per-year spending was less than 1% of the entire R&D expenditure of the electronics and communications equipment industry. For example, the project's highest expenditure year was 7.2 million yen in 1991, but IBM alone spent 1.5 billion dollars (370 billion yen) in 1982, while the industry spent 2150 billion yen in 1990. === Concurrent logic programming === In 1982, during a visit to the ICOT, Ehud Shapiro invented Concurrent Prolog, a novel programming language t

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