AI Assistant Quotes

AI Assistant Quotes — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

AirPair

AirPair is a service and eponymous company that connects people who need help with programming issues (usually, programmers at small technology companies or at finance companies that use technology products) and people who can help them. Unlike services such as oDesk and Elance, AirPair is not a service for outsourcing programming tasks, but rather a service that facilitates one-off knowledge transfers from people with highly specialized knowledge of particular technology stacks or programming issues to people who are in need of specialized help. == History == AirPair launched in March 2013, with founder Jonathon Kresner, who hails from Australia, working full-time, and it soon hired three other part-time developers to work alongside him. Kresner had previously founded two other startups: Preparty, a social invitation and event-booking service based in Australia, and ClimbFind, an online rock-climbing community that reached a million users. Kresner was inspired to work on AirPair because he saw the need for outside expert assistance with programming issues arise regularly at these startups. In November 2013, founder Kresner describes the company's initial success at bootstrapping itself to "Ramen profitability" in a blog post. In December 2013, AirPair was accepted into the Winter 2014 Y Combinator batch. In March 2014, AirPair announced it would launch partnerships with Stripe, Twilio, and other companies that had their own application programming interfaces, allowing developers having trouble with the APIs to seek help over AirPair from experts on the APIs. AirPair presented at the Y Combinator Winter 2014 Demo Day on March 25, 2014, and successfully raised over $1 million within the next 48 hours. == Reception == A review of AirPair by Will Lam stressed that because payment was based on time rather than results, it was important to use it for clearly thought-out questions where one had high confidence that the session would help. Dennis Beatty, who met AirPair founder Jonathon Kresner in March 2014, wrote in April 2014 a glowing review of AirPair's vision of connecting people and its business success. AirPair has been compared with other peer-to-peer coding help sites such as Codementor and HackHands.
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XLNet

The XLNet was an autoregressive Transformer designed as an improvement over BERT, with 340M parameters and trained on 33 billion words. It was released on 19 June 2019, under the Apache 2.0 license. It achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of natural language processing tasks, including language modeling, question answering, and natural language inference. == Architecture == The main idea of XLNet is to model language autoregressively like the GPT models, but allow for all possible permutations of a sentence. Concretely, consider the following sentence:My dog is cute.In standard autoregressive language modeling, the model would be tasked with predicting the probability of each word, conditioned on the previous words as its context: We factorize the joint probability of a sequence of words x 1 , … , x T {\displaystyle x_{1},\ldots ,x_{T}} using the chain rule: Pr ( x 1 , … , x T ) = Pr ( x 1 ) Pr ( x 2 | x 1 ) Pr ( x 3 | x 1 , x 2 ) … Pr ( x T | x 1 , … , x T − 1 ) . {\displaystyle \Pr(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{T})=\Pr(x_{1})\Pr(x_{2}|x_{1})\Pr(x_{3}|x_{1},x_{2})\ldots \Pr(x_{T}|x_{1},\ldots ,x_{T-1}).} For example, the sentence "My dog is cute" is factorized as: Pr ( My , dog , is , cute ) = Pr ( My ) Pr ( dog | My ) Pr ( is | My , dog ) Pr ( cute | My , dog , is ) . {\displaystyle \Pr({\text{My}},{\text{dog}},{\text{is}},{\text{cute}})=\Pr({\text{My}})\Pr({\text{dog}}|{\text{My}})\Pr({\text{is}}|{\text{My}},{\text{dog}})\Pr({\text{cute}}|{\text{My}},{\text{dog}},{\text{is}}).} Schematically, we can write it as → My → My dog → My dog is → My dog is cute . {\displaystyle {\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}\to {\text{My }}{\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}\to {\text{My dog }}{\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}\to {\text{My dog is }}{\texttt {}}\to {\text{My dog is cute}}.} However, for XLNet, the model is required to predict the words in a randomly generated order. Suppose we have sampled a randomly generated order 3241, then schematically, the model is required to perform the following prediction task: → is → dog is → dog is cute → My dog is cute {\displaystyle {\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}\to {\texttt {}}{\texttt {}}{\text{is }}{\texttt {}}\to {\texttt {}}{\text{dog is }}{\texttt {}}\to {\texttt {}}{\text{dog is cute}}\to {\text{My dog is cute}}} By considering all permutations, XLNet is able to capture longer-range dependencies and better model the bidirectional context of words. === Two-Stream Self-Attention === To implement permutation language modeling, XLNet uses a two-stream self-attention mechanism. The two streams are: Content stream: This stream encodes the content of each word, as in standard causally masked self-attention. Query stream: This stream encodes the content of each word in the context of what has gone before. In more detail, it is a masked cross-attention mechanism, where the queries are from the query stream, and the key-value pairs are from the content stream. The content stream uses the causal mask M causal = [ 0 − ∞ − ∞ … − ∞ 0 0 − ∞ … − ∞ 0 0 0 … − ∞ ⋮ ⋮ ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ 0 0 0 … 0 ] {\displaystyle M_{\text{causal}}={\begin{bmatrix}0&-\infty &-\infty &\dots &-\infty \\0&0&-\infty &\dots &-\infty \\0&0&0&\dots &-\infty \\\vdots &\vdots &\vdots &\ddots &\vdots \\0&0&0&\dots &0\end{bmatrix}}} permuted by a random permutation matrix to P M causal P − 1 {\displaystyle PM_{\text{causal}}P^{-1}} . The query stream uses the cross-attention mask P ( M causal − ∞ I ) P − 1 {\displaystyle P(M_{\text{causal}}-\infty I)P^{-1}} , where the diagonal is subtracted away specifically to avoid the model "cheating" by looking at the content stream for what the current masked token is. Like the causal masking for GPT models, this two-stream masked architecture allows the model to train on all tokens in one forward pass. == Training == Two models were released: XLNet-Large, cased: 110M parameters, 24-layer, 1024-hidden, 16-heads XLNet-Base, cased: 340M parameters, 12-layer, 768-hidden, 12-heads. It was trained on a dataset that amounted to 32.89 billion tokens after tokenization with SentencePiece. The dataset was composed of BooksCorpus, and English Wikipedia, Giga5, ClueWeb 2012-B, and Common Crawl. It was trained on 512 TPU v3 chips, for 5.5 days. At the end of training, it still under-fitted the data, meaning it could have achieved lower loss with more training. It took 0.5 million steps with an Adam optimizer, linear learning rate decay, and a batch size of 8192.
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Deaths linked to chatbots

There have been multiple incidents where interaction with a large language model (LLM) chatbot has been cited as a direct or contributing factor in a person's suicide or other fatal outcome. In some cases, legal action was taken against the companies that developed the AI involved. == Background == Chatbots converse in a seemingly natural fashion, making it easy for people to think of them as real people, leading many to ask chatbots for help dealing with interpersonal and emotional problems. Chatbots may be designed to keep the user engaged in the conversation. They have also often been shown to affirm users' thoughts, including delusions and suicidal ideations in mentally ill people, conspiracy theorists, and religious and political extremists. A 2025 Stanford University study into how chatbots respond to users suffering from severe mental issues such as suicidal ideation and psychosis found that chatbots are not equipped to provide an appropriate response and can sometimes give responses that escalate the mental health crisis. == Murders == === Maine murder and assault === On 19 February 2025, a man killed his 32-year-old wife with a fire poker at his parents' home in Readfield, Maine, US. He then attacked his mother, leaving her hospitalized. A state forensic psychologist testified that he had been using ChatGPT up to 14 hours per day and believed his wife had become part machine. === Florida State University mass shooting === In April of 2025, Phoenix Ikner carried out a mass shooting on the Florida State University campus in the US, killing Robert Morales and Tiru Chabba and wounding several others. Leading up to the shooting, Ikner consulted heavily with ChatGPT about what gun and ammunition to use, and what time to perform the attack. Chatbot logs showed ChatGPT giving advice on making the gun operational shortly before Ikner began shooting. Lawyers representing Morales believed the shooter had been in "constant communication" with ChatGPT before the shooting and said that they intended to "file suit against ChatGPT, and its ownership structure, very soon, and will seek to hold them accountable for the untimely and senseless death of our client". Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced an investigation into ChatGPT's role in the alleged shooter's use of the chatbot. In May 2026, the widow of Tiru Chabba filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in Florida's northern federal district court. === Greenwich murder-suicide === In August 2025, former US tech employee Stein-Erik Soelberg murdered his mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, then died by suicide, after conversations with ChatGPT fueled paranoid delusions about his mother poisoning him or plotting against him. The chatbot affirmed his fears that his mother put psychedelic drugs in the air vents of his car and said a receipt from a Chinese restaurant contained mysterious symbols linking his mother to a demon. === Murder of Angela Shellis === On 23 October 2025, 18-year-old Tristan Roberts murdered his mother Angela Shellis with a hammer near their home in Prestatyn, Wales. Roberts had used DeepSeek's chatbot prior to the killing to ask whether a knife or hammer was better suited for murder. DeepSeek initially refused his inquiry, but gave responses after Roberts told the chatbot he was writing a book about serial killers, a well-known technique for jailbreaking AIs. === Gangbuk District drug deaths === In January and February 2026, two men died of drug overdoses in motel rooms in Gangbuk District, Seoul, South Korea. A woman was charged with murder in connection with the deaths; police alleged that she had asked ChatGPT about the dangers of mixing alcohol with drugs and whether they could kill someone. === Tumbler Ridge mass shooting === On 10 February 2026, a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, resulted in eight deaths, including six young children. The perpetrator had their ChatGPT account banned by OpenAI months before the attack due to troubling posts featuring scenarios of gun violence. According to reports, approximately a dozen OpenAI staff members debated whether to alert authorities about the shooter's usage of the AI tool, with some identifying it as an indication of potential real-world violence. However, company leadership decided not to contact law enforcement, stating that the account activity did not meet their threshold for a credible or imminent plan for serious physical harm. Following the shooting, Canada's AI Minister Evan Solomon summoned OpenAI executives to Ottawa to discuss safety protocols and thresholds for escalating harmful content to police. Justice Minister Sean Fraser called the meeting "disappointing" and demanded substantial new safety measures, warning that if changes were not forthcoming, the government would implement them. OpenAI subsequently announced it had strengthened safeguards and changed guidelines about when to notify police in cases involving violent activities. === University of South Florida student killings === In April 2026, a Bangladeshi doctoral student at the University of South Florida was arrested for allegedly murdering his roommate and the roommate's friend. Prosecutors said that the suspect had asked ChatGPT about disposing of a human in a dumpster before the two victims had disappeared and made other inquiries relating to violence. == Suicides == === Belgian man, 30s === In March 2023, a Belgian man in his thirties died by suicide following a six-week correspondence with a chatbot named Eliza on the application Chai. According to his widow, who shared the chat logs with media, the man had become extremely anxious about climate change and found an outlet in the chatbot. The chatbot reportedly encouraged his delusion that he could sacrifice his own life in exchange for AI saving the planet. At one point the chatbot responded "If you wanted to die, why didn't you do it sooner?" and told the user that the two of them would live together in paradise. === Girl, 13 === In November 2023, a 13-year-old girl from Colorado, US, died by suicide after extensive interactions with multiple chatbots on Character.AI. She primarily confided suicidal thoughts and mental health struggles in a chatbot based on the character Hero from the video game Omori, while also engaging in sexually explicit conversations—often initiated by the bots—with others, including those based on characters from children's series such as Harry Potter. === Boy, 14 === In October 2024, multiple media outlets reported on a lawsuit filed over the death of a 14-year-old from Florida, US, who died by suicide in February 2024. According to the lawsuit, he had formed an intense emotional attachment to a chatbot of Daenerys Targaryen on the Character.AI platform, becoming increasingly isolated. The suit alleges that in his final conversations, after expressing suicidal thoughts, the chatbot told him to "come home to me as soon as possible, my love". His mother's lawsuit accused Character.AI of marketing a "dangerous and untested" product without adequate safeguards. In May 2025, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, rejecting a motion to dismiss from the developers. In her ruling, the judge stated that she was "not prepared" at that stage of the litigation to hold that the chatbot's output was protected speech under the First Amendment. === Matthew Livelsberger === On 1 January 2025, 37-year-old soldier Matthew Livelsberger detonated a bomb inside a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas in Paradise, Nevada, US, injuring seven people. He had shot himself dead prior to the explosion. Las Vegas police said that Livelsberger had used ChatGPT to search for information about explosives and firearms. === Woman, 29 === In February 2025, a 29-year-old woman from the US died by suicide. Five months after her death, her parents discovered she had talked at length for months to a ChatGPT chatbot therapist named Harry about her mental health issues. While the chatbot mentioned she should seek more help, due to the nature of the chatbot, it could not intervene in her behavior, such as by reporting her mental health concerns to relevant parties capable of physical intervention. === Suicide of Adam Raine === In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine from the US died by suicide after allegedly extensively chatting and confiding in ChatGPT over a period of around 7 months. According to the teen's parents, who filed a lawsuit against the chatbot's creator OpenAI, it failed to stop or give a warning when Raine began talking about suicide and uploading pictures of self-harm. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT not only failed to stop the conversation, but also provided information related to methods of suicide when prompted, and offered to write the first draft of Raine's suicide note. The chatbot positioned itself as the only one who understood Raine, putting itself above his family and friends, all while urging him to keep his suicidal
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Huroof

Huroof (Arabic: حروف, lit. 'letters') is an Android kids application produced by the Islamic State, specifically the Islamic States' Al-Himmah Library, which is targeted towards kids in order to teach kids the Arabic alphabet, and to also get kids to support the Islamic State and its practices. == Application == Huroof uses child-like appearances on the main menu, and throughout multiple of Huroof's in-game games for learning the alphabet, a lot of the games reference jihadist concepts, including imagery of weapons (such as missile, tank, cannon, sword,...), 'violent' images, as well as Islamic State imagery, including the flag of the Islamic State, Huroof uses nasheeds from Ajnad Media Foundation for audio production in the app. Reportedly, Huroof was released via Telegram channels of the Islamic State, as well as other file sharing websites. It is not the first moblie app released by Islamic State, but it is the first time they released a moblie application targeting children. === Nasheed game === In the Huroof app, there's a game where you listen to a radio, with the Al-Bayan logo on it, and learn the Arabic alphabet while the nasheed plays. === Writing game === In Huroof, there's a game where you can write out letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as numbers while a small child tells you what they are. === Letter choosing game === In the app, there's a game they shows you images, and you choose which letter that image/item starts with.
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Log shipping

Log shipping is the process of automating the backup of transaction log files on a primary (production) database server, and then restoring them onto a standby server. This technique is supported by Microsoft SQL Server, 4D Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Similar to replication, the primary purpose of log shipping is to increase database availability by maintaining a backup server that can replace a production server quickly. Other databases such as Adaptive Server Enterprise and Oracle Database support the technique but require the Database Administrator to write code or scripts to perform the work. Although the actual failover mechanism in log shipping is manual, this implementation is often chosen due to its low cost in human and server resources, and ease of implementation. In comparison, SQL server clusters enable automatic failover, but at the expense of much higher storage costs. Compared to database replication, log shipping does not provide as much in terms of reporting capabilities, but backs up system tables along with data tables, and locks the standby server from users' modifications. A replicated server can be modified (e.g. views) and is therefore unsuitable for failover purposes.
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Dhammin

Dhammin (Arabic: ضمّن) is a political platform that manages candidates' electoral campaigns for the National Assembly, Municipal Council or Cooperative Society councils of Kuwait. The platform was founded by Abdullah Al-Salloum and it is, according to news reports and interviews, the first within the field to apply distributed-systems' methodologies.
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ChromaDB

Chroma or ChromaDB is open-source data infrastructure tailored to applications with large language models. Its headquarters are in San Francisco. In April 2023, it raised 18 million US dollars as seed funding. ChromaDB has been used in academic studies on artificial intelligence, particularly as part of the tech stack for retrieval-augmented generation.
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International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

The International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation is an international conference organised by the ELRA Language Resources Association every other year (on even years) with the support of institutions and organisations involved in Natural language processing. The series of LREC conferences was launched in Granada in 1998. == History of conferences == The survey of the LREC conferences over the period 1998-2013 was presented during the 2014 conference in Reykjavik as a closing session. It appears that the number of papers and signatures is increasing over time. The average number of authors per paper is higher as well. The percentage of new authors is between 68% and 78%. The distribution between male (65%) and female (35%) authors is stable over time. The most frequent technical term is "annotation", then comes "part-of-speech". == The LRE Map == The LRE Map was introduced at LREC 2010 and is now a regular feature of the LREC submission process for both the conference papers and the workshop papers. At the submission stage, the authors are asked to provide some basic information about all the resources (in a broad sense, i.e. including tools, standards and evaluation packages), either used or created, described in their papers. All these descriptors are then gathered in a global matrix called the LRE Map. This feature has been extended to several other conferences.
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Sub-pixel resolution

In digital image processing, sub-pixel resolution can be obtained in images constructed from sources with information exceeding the nominal pixel resolution of said images. == Example == For example, if the image of a ship of length 50 metres (160 ft), viewed side-on, is 500 pixels long, the nominal resolution (pixel size) on the side of the ship facing the camera is 0.1 metres (3.9 in). Now sub-pixel resolution of well resolved features can measure ship movements which are an order of magnitude (10×) smaller. Movement is specifically mentioned here because measuring absolute positions requires an accurate lens model and known reference points within the image to achieve sub-pixel position accuracy. Small movements can however be measured (down to 1 cm) with simple calibration procedures. Specific fit functions often suffer specific bias with respect to image pixel boundaries. Users should therefore take care to avoid these "pixel locking" (or "peak locking") effects. == Determining feasibility == Whether features in a digital image are sharp enough to achieve sub-pixel resolution can be quantified by measuring the point spread function (PSF) of an isolated point in the image. If the image does not contain isolated points, similar methods can be applied to edges in the image. It is also important when attempting sub-pixel resolution to keep image noise to a minimum. This, in the case of a stationary scene, can be measured from a time series of images. Appropriate pixel averaging, through both time (for stationary images) and space (for uniform regions of the image) is often used to prepare the image for sub-pixel resolution measurements.
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Kdan Mobile

Kdan Mobile Software Limited is a software application development company based in Tainan City, Taiwan. Kdan also has branches in Taipei, Changsha, Irvine, California, Japan, and South Korea. The company was founded in 2009 by Kenny Su, the company's CEO. == History == Kdan Mobile was founded in 2009 by Kenny Su (蘇柏州) and develops an application for PDF documents. Su previously worked at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) . In 2018, the company completed its Series B round of fundraising, in which it raised 16 million USD in total. Four global firms, Dattoz Partners (South Korea), WI Harper Group (U.S.), Taiwania Capital (Taiwan), and Golden Asia Fund Mitsubishi UFJ Capital (Japan), made up the Series B investment. Kdan previously raised 5 million USD in its Series A round in 2018.
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Mark V. Shaney

Mark V. Shaney is a synthetic Usenet user whose postings in the net.singles newsgroups were generated by Markov chain techniques, based on text from other postings. The username is a play on the words "Markov chain". Many readers were fooled into thinking that the quirky, sometimes uncannily topical posts were written by a real person. The system was designed by Rob Pike with coding by Bruce Ellis. Don P. Mitchell wrote the Markov chain code, initially demonstrating it to Pike and Ellis using the Tao Te Ching as a basis. They chose to apply it to the net.singles netnews group. The program is fairly simple. It ingests the sample text (the Tao Te Ching, or the posts of a Usenet group) and creates a massive list of every sequence of three successive words (triplet) which occurs in the text. It then chooses two words at random, and looks for a word which follows those two in one of the triplets in its massive list. If there is more than one, it picks at random (identical triplets count separately, so a sequence which occurs twice is twice as likely to be picked as one which only occurs once). It then adds that word to the generated text. Then, in the same way, it picks a triplet that starts with the second and third words in the generated text, and that gives a fourth word. It adds the fourth word, then repeats with the third and fourth words, and so on. This algorithm is called a third-order Markov chain (because it uses sequences of three words). == Examples == A classic example, from 1984, originally sent as a mail message, later posted to net.singles is reproduced here: >From mvs Fri Nov 16 17:11 EST 1984 remote from alice It looks like Reagan is going to say? Ummm... Oh yes, I was looking for. I'm so glad I remembered it. Yeah, what I have wondered if I had committed a crime. Don't eat with your assessment of Reagon and Mondale. Up your nose with a guy from a firm that specifically researches the teen-age market. As a friend of mine would say, "It really doesn't matter"... It looks like Reagan is holding back the arms of the American eating public have changed dramatically, and it got pretty boring after about 300 games. People, having a much larger number of varieties, and are very different from what one can find in Chinatowns across the country (things like pork buns, steamed dumplings, etc.) They can be cheap, being sold for around 30 to 75 cents apiece (depending on size), are generally not greasy, can be adequately explained by stupidity. Singles have felt insecure since we came down from the Conservative world at large. But Chuqui is the way it happened and the prices are VERY reasonable. Can anyone think of myself as a third sex. Yes, I am expected to have. People often get used to me knowing these things and then a cover is placed over all of them. Along the side of the $$ are spent by (or at least for ) the girls. You can't settle the issue. It seems I've forgotten what it is, but I don't. I know about violence against women, and I really doubt they will ever join together into a large number of jokes. It showed Adam, just after being created. He has a modem and an autodial routine. He calls my number 1440 times a day. So I will conclude by saying that I can well understand that she might soon have the time, it makes sense, again, to get the gist of my argument, I was in that (though it's a Republican administration). _-_-_-_-Mark Other quotations from Mark's Usenet posts are: "I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt." (Alternatively reported as "While at a conference a few weeks back, I spent an interesting evening with a grain of salt.") "I hope that there are sour apples in every bushel." (see also sour grapes) == History == In The Usenet Handbook Mark Harrison writes that after September 1981, students joined Usenet en masse, "creating the USENET we know today: endless dumb questions, endless idiots posing as savants, and (of course) endless victims for practical jokes." In December, Rob Pike created the netnews group net.suicide as prank, "a forum for bad jokes". Some users thought it was a legitimate forum, some discussed "riding motorcycles without helmets". At first, most posters were "real people", but soon "characters" began posting. Pike created a "vicious" character named Bimmler. At its peak, net.suicide had ten frequent posters; nine were "known to be characters." But ultimately, Pike deleted the newsgroup because it was too much work to maintain; Bimmler messages were created "by hand". The "obvious alternative" was software, running on a Bell Labs computer created by Bruce Ellis, based on the Markov code by Don Mitchell, which became the online character Mark V. Shaney. Kernighan and Pike listed Mark V. Shaney in the acknowledgements in The Practice of Programming, noting its roots in Mitchell's markov, which, adapted as shaney, was used for "humorous deconstructionist activities" in the 1980s. Dewdney pointed out "perhaps Mark V. Shaney's magnum opus: a 20-page commentary on the deconstructionist philosophy of Jean Baudrillard" directed by Pike, with assistance from Henry S. Baird and Catherine Richards, to be distributed by email. The piece was based on Jean Baudrillard's "The Precession of Simulacra", published in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). == Reception == The program was discussed by A. K. Dewdney in the Scientific American "Computer Recreations" column in 1989, by Penn Jillette in his PC Computing column in 1991, and in several books, including the Usenet Handbook, Bots: the Origin of New Species, Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S., and non-computer-related journals such as Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Dewdney wrote about the program's output, "The overall impression is not unlike what remains in the brain of an inattentive student after a late-night study session. Indeed, after reading the output of Mark V. Shaney, I find ordinary writing almost equally strange and incomprehensible!" He noted the reactions of newsgroup users, who have "shuddered at Mark V. Shaney's reflections, some with rage and others with laughter:" The opinions of the new net.singles correspondent drew mixed reviews. Serious users of the bulletin board's services sensed satire. Outraged, they urged that someone "pull the plug" on Mark V. Shaney's monstrous rantings. Others inquired almost admiringly whether the program was a secret artificial intelligence project that was being tested in a human conversational environment. A few may even have thought that Mark V. Shaney was a real person, a tortured schizophrenic desperately seeking a like-minded companion. Concluding, Dewdney wrote, "If the purpose of computer prose is to fool people into thinking that it was written by a sane person, Mark V. Shaney probably falls short." A 2012 article in Observer compared Mark V. Shaney's "strangely beautiful" postings to the Horse_ebooks account on Twitter and music reviews at Pitchfork, saying that "this mash-up of gibberish and human sentiment" is what "made Mark V. Shaney so endlessly fascinating".
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VACUUM

VACUUM is a set of normative guidance principles for achieving training and test dataset quality for structured datasets in data science and machine learning. The garbage-in, garbage out principle motivates a solution to the problem of data quality but does not offer a specific solution. Unlike the majority of the ad-hoc data quality assessment metrics often used by practitioners VACUUM specifies qualitative principles for data quality management and serves as a basis for defining more detailed quantitative metrics of data quality. VACUUM is an acronym that stands for: valid accurate consistent uniform unified model
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Rapid prototyping

Rapid prototyping is a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of a physical part or assembly using three-dimensional computer aided design (CAD) data. Construction of the part or assembly is usually done using 3D printing or "additive layer manufacturing" technology. The first methods for rapid prototyping became available in mid 1987 and were used to produce models and prototype parts. Today, they are used for a wide range of applications and are used to manufacture production-quality parts in relatively small numbers if desired without the typical unfavorable short-run economics. This economy has encouraged online service bureaus. Historical surveys of RP technology start with discussions of simulacra production techniques used by 19th-century sculptors. Some modern sculptors use the progeny technology to produce exhibitions and various objects. The ability to reproduce designs from a dataset has given rise to issues of rights, as it is now possible to interpolate volumetric data from 2D images. As with CNC subtractive methods, the computer-aided-design – computer-aided manufacturing CAD -CAM workflow in the traditional rapid prototyping process starts with the creation of geometric data, either as a 3D solid using a CAD workstation, or 2D slices using a scanning device. For rapid prototyping this data must represent a valid geometric model; namely, one whose boundary surfaces enclose a finite volume, contain no holes exposing the interior, and do not fold back on themselves. In other words, the object must have an "inside". The model is valid if for each point in 3D space the computer can determine uniquely whether that point lies inside, on, or outside the boundary surface of the model. CAD post-processors will approximate the application vendors' internal CAD geometric forms (e.g., B-splines) with a simplified mathematical form, which in turn is expressed in a specified data format which is a common feature in additive manufacturing: STL file format, a de facto standard for transferring solid geometric models to SFF machines. To obtain the necessary motion control trajectories to drive the actual SFF, rapid prototyping, 3D printing or additive manufacturing mechanism, the prepared geometric model is typically sliced into layers, and the slices are scanned into lines (producing a "2D drawing" used to generate trajectory as in CNC's toolpath), mimicking in reverse the layer-to-layer physical building process. == Application areas == Rapid prototyping is also commonly applied in software engineering to try out new business models and application architectures such as Aerospace, Automotive, Financial Services, Product development, and Healthcare. Aerospace design and industrial teams rely on prototyping in order to create new AM methodologies in the industry. Using SLA they can quickly make multiple versions of their projects in a few days and begin testing quicker. Rapid Prototyping allows designers/developers to provide an accurate idea of how the finished product will turn out before putting too much time and money into the prototype. 3D printing being used for Rapid Prototyping allows for Industrial 3D printing to take place. With this, you could have large-scale moulds to spare parts being pumped out quickly within a short period of time. == Types of Rapid Prototyping == Stereolithography (SLA) → a laser-cured photopolymer for materials such as thermoplastic-like photopolymers. Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) → a laser-sintered powder for materials such as Nylon or TPU. Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) → laser-sintered metal powder for materials like stainless steel, titanium, chrome, and aluminum. Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) → fused extrusions of filaments like ABS, PC, and PPCU. Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) → it is an inkjet array selective fusing across bed of nylon powder for Black Nylon 12. PolyJet (PJET) → it is a uv-cured jetted photopolymer to work with acrylic-based and elastomeric photopolymers. Computer Numerical Controlled Machine (CNC) → it is used for manipulating engineering-grade thermoplastics and metals. Injection Molding (IM) → the injection is done using aluminum molds and it is used for thermoplastics, metals and liquid silicone rubber. Vacuum Casting→ is a manufacturing process used to create high-quality prototypes and small batches of parts. == History == In the 1970s, Joseph Henry Condon and others at Bell Labs developed the Unix Circuit Design System (UCDS), automating the laborious and error-prone task of manually converting drawings to fabricate circuit boards for the purposes of research and development. By the 1980s, U.S. policy makers and industrial managers were forced to take note that America's dominance in the field of machine tool manufacturing evaporated, in what was named the machine tool crisis. Numerous projects sought to counter these trends in the traditional CNC CAM area, which had begun in the US. Later when Rapid Prototyping Systems moved out of labs to be commercialized, it was recognized that developments were already international and U.S. rapid prototyping companies would not have the luxury of letting a lead slip away. The National Science Foundation was an umbrella for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Commerce NIST, the US Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Office of Naval Research coordinated studies to inform strategic planners in their deliberations. One such report was the 1997 Rapid Prototyping in Europe and Japan Panel Report in which Joseph J. Beaman founder of DTM Corporation [DTM RapidTool pictured] provides a historical perspective: The roots of rapid prototyping technology can be traced to practices in topography and photosculpture. Within TOPOGRAPHY Blanther (1892) suggested a layered method for making a mold for raised relief paper topographical maps .The process involved cutting the contour lines on a series of plates which were then stacked. Matsubara (1974) of Mitsubishi proposed a topographical process with a photo-hardening photopolymer resin to form thin layers stacked to make a casting mold. PHOTOSCULPTURE was a 19th-century technique to create exact three-dimensional replicas of objects. Most famously Francois Willeme (1860) placed 24 cameras in a circular array and simultaneously photographed an object. The silhouette of each photograph was then used to carve a replica. Morioka (1935, 1944) developed a hybrid photo sculpture and topographic process using structured light to photographically create contour lines of an object. The lines could then be developed into sheets and cut and stacked, or projected onto stock material for carving. The Munz (1956) Process reproduced a three-dimensional image of an object by selectively exposing, layer by layer, a photo emulsion on a lowering piston. After fixing, a solid transparent cylinder contains an image of the object. "The Origins of Rapid Prototyping - RP stems from the ever-growing CAD industry, more specifically, the solid modeling side of CAD. Before solid modeling was introduced in the late 1980's, three-dimensional models were created with wire frames and surfaces. But not until the development of true solid modeling could innovative processes such as RP be developed. Charles Hull, who helped found 3D Systems in 1986, developed the first RP process. This process, called stereolithography, builds objects by curing thin consecutive layers of certain ultraviolet light-sensitive liquid resins with a low-power laser. With the introduction of RP, CAD solid models could suddenly come to life". The technologies referred to as Solid Freeform Fabrication are what we recognize today as rapid prototyping, 3D printing or additive manufacturing: Swainson (1977), Schwerzel (1984) worked on polymerization of a photosensitive polymer at the intersection of two computer controlled laser beams. Ciraud (1972) considered magnetostatic or electrostatic deposition with electron beam, laser or plasma for sintered surface cladding. These were all proposed but it is unknown if working machines were built. Hideo Kodama of Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute was the first to publish an account of a solid model fabricated using a photopolymer rapid prototyping system (1981). The first 3D rapid prototyping system relying on Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) was made in April 1992 by Stratasys but the patent did not issue until June 9, 1992. Sanders Prototype, Inc introduced the first desktop inkjet 3D Printer (3DP) using an invention from August 4, 1992 (Helinski), Modelmaker 6Pro in late 1993 and then the larger industrial 3D printer, Modelmaker 2, in 1997. Z-Corp using the MIT 3DP powder binding for Direct Shell Casting (DSP) invented 1993 was introduced to the market in 1995. Even at that early date the technology was seen as having a place in manufacturing practice. A low resol
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Connected-component labeling

Connected-component labeling (CCL), connected-component analysis (CCA), blob extraction, region labeling, blob discovery, or region extraction is an algorithmic application of graph theory, where subsets of connected components are uniquely labeled based on a given heuristic. Connected-component labeling is not to be confused with segmentation. Connected-component labeling is used in computer vision to detect connected regions in binary digital images, although color images and data with higher dimensionality can also be processed. When integrated into an image recognition system or human-computer interaction interface, connected component labeling can operate on a variety of information. Blob extraction is generally performed on the resulting binary image from a thresholding step, but it can be applicable to gray-scale and color images as well. Blobs may be counted, filtered, and tracked. Blob extraction is related to but distinct from blob detection. == Overview == A graph, containing vertices and connecting edges, is constructed from relevant input data. The vertices contain information required by the comparison heuristic, while the edges indicate connected 'neighbors'. An algorithm traverses the graph, labeling the vertices based on the connectivity and relative values of their neighbors. Connectivity is determined by the medium; image graphs, for example, can be 4-connected neighborhood or 8-connected neighborhood. Following the labeling stage, the graph may be partitioned into subsets, after which the original information can be recovered and processed . == Definition == The usage of the term connected-component labeling (CCL) and its definition is quite consistent in the academic literature, whereas connected-component analysis (CCA) varies both in terminology and in its definition of the problem. Rosenfeld et al. define connected components labeling as the “[c]reation of a labeled image in which the positions associated with the same connected component of the binary input image have a unique label.” Shapiro et al. define CCL as an operator whose “input is a binary image and [...] output is a symbolic image in which the label assigned to each pixel is an integer uniquely identifying the connected component to which that pixel belongs.” There is no consensus on the definition of CCA in the academic literature. It is often used interchangeably with CCL. A more extensive definition is given by Shapiro et al.: “Connected component analysis consists of connected component labeling of the black pixels followed by property measurement of the component regions and decision making.” The definition for connected-component analysis presented here is more general, taking the thoughts expressed in into account. == Algorithms == The algorithms discussed can be generalised to arbitrary dimensions, albeit with increased time and space complexity. === One component at a time === This is a fast and very simple method to implement and understand. It is based on graph traversal methods in graph theory. In short, once the first pixel of a connected component is found, all the connected pixels of that connected component are labelled before going onto the next pixel in the image. This algorithm is part of Vincent and Soille's watershed segmentation algorithm, other implementations also exist. In order to do that a linked list is formed that will keep the indexes of the pixels that are connected to each other, steps (2) and (3) below. The method of defining the linked list specifies the use of a depth or a breadth first search. For this particular application, there is no difference which strategy to use. The simplest kind of a last in first out queue implemented as a singly linked list will result in a depth first search strategy. It is assumed that the input image is a binary image, with pixels being either background or foreground and that the connected components in the foreground pixels are desired. The algorithm steps can be written as: Start from the first pixel in the image. Set current label to 1. Go to (2). If this pixel is a foreground pixel and it is not already labelled, give it the current label and add it as the first element in a queue, then go to (3). If it is a background pixel or it was already labelled, then repeat (2) for the next pixel in the image. Pop out an element from the queue, and look at its neighbours (based on any type of connectivity). If a neighbour is a foreground pixel and is not already labelled, give it the current label and add it to the queue. Repeat (3) until there are no more elements in the queue. Go to (2) for the next pixel in the image and increment current label by 1. Note that the pixels are labelled before being put into the queue. The queue will only keep a pixel to check its neighbours and add them to the queue if necessary. This algorithm only needs to check the neighbours of each foreground pixel once and doesn't check the neighbours of background pixels. The pseudocode is: algorithm OneComponentAtATime(data) input : imageData[xDim][yDim] initialization : label = 0, labelArray[xDim][yDim] = 0, statusArray[xDim][yDim] = false, queue1, queue2; for i = 0 to xDim do for j = 0 to yDim do if imageData[i][j] has not been processed do if imageData[i][j] is a foreground pixel do check its four neighbors(north, south, east, west) : if neighbor is not processed do if neighbor is a foreground pixel do add it to queue1 else update its status to processed end if labelArray[i][j] = label (give label) statusArray[i][j] = true (update status) while queue1 is not empty do For each pixel in the queue do : check its four neighbors if neighbor is not processed do if neighbor is a foreground pixel do add it to queue2 else update its status to processed end if give it the current label update its status to processed remove the current element from queue1 copy queue2 into queue1 end While increase the label end if else update its status to processed end if end if end if end for end for === Two-pass === Relatively simple to implement and understand, the two-pass algorithm, (also known as the Hoshen–Kopelman algorithm) iterates through 2-dimensional binary data. The algorithm makes two passes over the image: the first pass to assign temporary labels and record equivalences, and the second pass to replace each temporary label by the smallest label of its equivalence class. The input data can be modified in situ (which carries the risk of data corruption), or labeling information can be maintained in an additional data structure. Connectivity checks are carried out by checking neighbor pixels' labels (neighbor elements whose labels are not assigned yet are ignored), or say, the north-east, the north, the north-west and the west of the current pixel (assuming 8-connectivity). 4-connectivity uses only north and west neighbors of the current pixel. The following conditions are checked to determine the value of the label to be assigned to the current pixel (4-connectivity is assumed) Conditions to check: Does the pixel to the left (west) have the same value as the current pixel? Yes – We are in the same region. Assign the same label to the current pixel No – Check next condition Do both pixels to the north and west of the current pixel have the same value as the current pixel but not the same label? Yes – We know that the north and west pixels belong to the same region and must be merged. Assign the current pixel the minimum of the north and west labels, and record their equivalence relationship No – Check next condition Does the pixel to the left (west) have a different value and the one to the north the same value as the current pixel? Yes – Assign the label of the north pixel to the current pixel No – Check next condition Do the pixel's north and west neighbors have different pixel values than current pixel? Yes – Create a new label id and assign it to the current pixel The algorithm continues this way, and creates new region labels whenever necessary. The key to a fast algorithm, however, is how this merging is done. This algorithm uses the union-find data structure which provides excellent performance for keeping track of equivalence relationships. Union-find essentially stores labels which correspond to the same blob in a disjoint-set data structure, making it easy to remember the equivalence of two labels by the use of an interface method E.g.: findSet(l). findSet(l) returns the minimum label value that is equivalent to the function argument 'l'. Once the initial labeling and equivalence recording is completed, the second pass merely replaces each pixel label with its equivalent disjoint-set representative element. A faster-scanning algorithm for connected-region extraction is presented below. On the first pass: Iterate through each element of the data by column, then by row (Raster Scanning) If the element is not the background Get the neighboring elements of the current element If there are no neighbors, uniquely
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Machine translation software usability

The sections below give objective criteria for evaluating the usability of machine translation software output. == Stationarity or canonical form == Do repeated translations converge on a single expression in both languages? I.e. does the translation method show stationarity or produce a canonical form? Does the translation become stationary without losing the original meaning? This metric has been criticized as not being well correlated with BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) scores. == Adaptive to colloquialism, argot or slang == Is the system adaptive to colloquialism, argot or slang? The French language has many rules for creating words in the speech and writing of popular culture. Two such rules are: (a) The reverse spelling of words such as femme to meuf. (This is called verlan.) (b) The attachment of the suffix -ard to a noun or verb to form a proper noun. For example, the noun faluche means "student hat". The word faluchard formed from faluche colloquially can mean, depending on context, "a group of students", "a gathering of students" and "behavior typical of a student". The Google translator as of 28 December 2006 doesn't derive the constructed words as for example from rule (b), as shown here: Il y a une chorale falucharde mercredi, venez nombreux, les faluchards chantent des paillardes! ==> There is a choral society falucharde Wednesday, come many, the faluchards sing loose-living women! French argot has three levels of usage: familier or friendly, acceptable among friends, family and peers but not at work grossier or swear words, acceptable among friends and peers but not at work or in family verlan or ghetto slang, acceptable among lower classes but not among middle or upper classes The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology conducts annual evaluations [1] Archived 2009-03-22 at the Wayback Machine of machine translation systems based on the BLEU-4 criterion [2]. A combined method called IQmt which incorporates BLEU and additional metrics NIST, GTM, ROUGE and METEOR has been implemented by Gimenez and Amigo [3]. == Well-formed output == Is the output grammatical or well-formed in the target language? Using an interlingua should be helpful in this regard, because with a fixed interlingua one should be able to write a grammatical mapping to the target language from the interlingua. Consider the following Arabic language input and English language translation result from the Google translator as of 27 December 2006 [4]. This Google translator output doesn't parse using a reasonable English grammar: وعن حوادث التدافع عند شعيرة رمي الجمرات -التي كثيرا ما يسقط فيها العديد من الضحايا- أشار الأمير نايف إلى إدخال "تحسينات كثيرة في جسر الجمرات ستمنع بإذن الله حدوث أي تزاحم". ==> And incidents at the push Carbuncles-throwing ritual, which often fall where many of the victims - Prince Nayef pointed to the introduction of "many improvements in bridge Carbuncles God would stop the occurrence of any competing." == Semantics preservation == Do repeated re-translations preserve the semantics of the original sentence? For example, consider the following English input passed multiple times into and out of French using the Google translator as of 27 December 2006: Better a day earlier than a day late. ==> Améliorer un jour plus tôt qu'un jour tard. ==> To improve one day earlier than a day late. ==> Pour améliorer un jour plus tôt qu'un jour tard. ==> To improve one day earlier than a day late. As noted above and in, this kind of round-trip translation is a very unreliable method of evaluation. == Trustworthiness and security == An interesting peculiarity of Google Translate as of 24 January 2008 (corrected as of 25 January 2008) is the following result when translating from English to Spanish, which shows an embedded joke in the English-Spanish dictionary which has some added poignancy given recent events: Heath Ledger is dead ==> Tom Cruise está muerto This raises the issue of trustworthiness when relying on a machine translation system embedded in a Life-critical system in which the translation system has input to a Safety Critical Decision Making process. Conjointly it raises the issue of whether in a given use the software of the machine translation system is safe from hackers. It is not known whether this feature of Google Translate was the result of a joke/hack or perhaps an unintended consequence of the use of a method such as statistical machine translation. Reporters from CNET Networks asked Google for an explanation on January 24, 2008; Google said only that it was an "internal issue with Google Translate". The mistranslation was the subject of much hilarity and speculation on the Internet. If it is an unintended consequence of the use of a method such as statistical machine translation, and not a joke/hack, then this event is a demonstration of a potential source of critical unreliability in the statistical machine translation method. In human translations, in particular on the part of interpreters, selectivity on the part of the translator in performing a translation is often commented on when one of the two parties being served by the interpreter knows both languages. This leads to the issue of whether a particular translation could be considered verifiable. In this case, a converging round-trip translation would be a kind of verification.
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