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  • Online OS

    Online OS

    The Online Operating System was a fully multi-lingual and free to use web desktop written in JavaScript using Ajax. It was a Windows-based desktop environment with open-source applications and system utilities developed upon the reBOX web application framework by iCUBE Network Solutions, an Austrian company located in Vienna. == About the project == OOS.cc, which is short for Online Operating System, was a web application platform that mimicked the look and feel of classic desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or KDE. It consisted of various open source applications built upon the so-called reBOX web application framework. As applications could be executed in an integrated and parallel way, the OOS could have been considered a web desktop or webtop. It provided basic services such as a GUI, a virtual file system, access control management and possibilities to develop and deploy applications online. As the Online Operating System was executed within a web browser, it was no real operating system but rather a portal to various web applications, offering a high usability and flexibility. The project was partly funded by grants from the Internetprivatstiftung Austria (IPA). As at 01.08.2008 almost 20.000 users have joined the oos.cc community, using the offered featured and applications. == History == The development of the web desktop was started by iCUBE Network Solutions in 2005, followed by the first beta releases in 2006. Hence, together with YouOS and eyeOS, it can be considered to be one of the first publicly available systems of its kind. The first full version including core-level multi-language support, the file system and a basic set of applications was released to the public in March 2007 on the occasion of a national exhibition (ITnT Austria Archived 2007-06-30 at the Wayback Machine) and has left beta state half a year later in October 2007. The first release considered stable (1.0.0) was published in July 2007. The project itself and the contained applications have received several national innovation awards (see,) and have gained attention mainly due to the comprehensive approach taken (see,). OOS.cc started as a national project. The full platform including all offered applications are currently available in three languages (German, English as well as Spanish) and is receiving increasing coverage around the world (for examples see, or). The current version is 1.3.01 from 01.08.2008. == Technical overview == The project is fully written in JavaScript, exclusively using DHTML techniques to run in any web browser without any additional software installation needed. The system implements a modern kind of web application model, excessively using Ajax for communicating between client components and the Java server backend in an exclusively asynchronous manner. Aim is to offer users the unique interaction behavior following the desktop metaphor, which is the main idea of any web desktop. Also typical for this sort of web application is the broadly use of Javascript-on-demand techniques, cutting the complete project source into pieces and loading them instantly when needed. Based on this technical basis, reBOX was the framework library all applications in oos.cc were built of. It is a fully flexible and extensible API, including a GUI widget set, communication mechanisms and server services offering general and framework specific services. The Online Operating System itself consisted of a basic framework, which was able to launch any JavaScript application using the reBOX library. The user interface was based on the behavior of the Windows desktop with a start menu, a task bar and a desktop background. All applications were running in this environment. At server side, there were Java based web services that ran to serve the client processes and to provide data from the relational database in the backend. oos.cc also provided an integrated development environment called Developer Suite, which allowed the community to build own applications for the desktop environment based on reBOX (see development section below). == License == All applications available in oos.cc were open source under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). The reBOX development toolkit is free to use developing any applications for the webtop. == Features == As mentioned above, all applications published on oos.cc are open source based on the EUPL, and can be "installed" or "deinstalled" to what-ever preferences the user has. Besides global services like the multi-language support or the global theme support, as well as some minor tools and games, oos.cc offered four major services that could be used completely free of charge. Integrated and fully flexible file storage (1 GB per user) HTTP as well as FTP file transfer from and to local file system User-based file-shares within the oos-community WebDAV access Document Management (including Version Control and File Locking mechanisms) Image publishing, organization and post-processing A free sub domain (user.oos.cc) for web- or image publishing, directly integrated in the desktop Groupware applications, including free mail, fetchmail and contact management An integrated development environment where oos-applications can be created directly from within the system (see development section below) Next releases were planned to focus on an extensive security and privacy suite, dealing with challenges like anonymous communication (browsing as well as temporary mail-addresses) as well as offering encrypted password and file storage and connectivity services. Since its initial stable release, OOS.cc could have been accessed using https to ensure secure communication. == Limitations and drawbacks == Limited number of applications: no commercial applications can be hosted. Only reviewed applications are being published No processing of popular office formats (.doc, .odt, etc.) Limited language support: Only English, German and Spanish Dependence on foreign infrastructure: No possibility to extend storage, no additional/guaranteed bandwidth, etc. == Development == One of the key focuses of the team was right from the beginning to offer a very flexible and comprehensive API, that can be used to develop not only custom applications within oos.cc, but also stand-alone web-applications or to integrate single components in existing web-sites. By decoupling the development from web-related "problems" using the reBOX API web-applications can be development in a similar fashion to any Java program: Elements can be positioned and can interact like in high-level object oriented programming languages, without taking care of divs, browser specific behavior or communication handling. The framework also offers multi-language and theme support for existing as well as newly created applications, allowing changing almost every aspect of the look and feel of the used components according to the preferences of its users. For taking advantage of this approach, one of the applications offered in the OOS was an integrated Development Suite, allowing directly writing and executing code and hence creating new programs within the boundaries of the web computer. All applications on oos.cc were released as open source, thus all existing programs were offered to be imported, reviewed or changed and then locally deployed. Following this idea, every user was free to submit changed or newly created applications to be included in the globally offered application set. The last release offered features like auto-completion and an outline-window.

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  • Expectation propagation

    Expectation propagation

    Expectation propagation (EP) is a technique in Bayesian machine learning. EP finds approximations to a probability distribution. It uses an iterative approach that uses the factorization structure of the target distribution. It differs from other Bayesian approximation approaches such as variational Bayesian methods. More specifically, suppose we wish to approximate an intractable probability distribution p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} with a tractable distribution q ( x ) {\displaystyle q(\mathbf {x} )} . Expectation propagation achieves this approximation by minimizing the Kullback–Leibler divergence K L ( p | | q ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (p||q)} . Variational Bayesian methods minimize K L ( q | | p ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (q||p)} instead. If q ( x ) {\displaystyle q(\mathbf {x} )} is a Gaussian N ( x | μ , Σ ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {N}}(\mathbf {x} |\mu ,\Sigma )} , then K L ( p | | q ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (p||q)} is minimized with μ {\displaystyle \mu } and Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } being equal to the mean of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} and the covariance of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} , respectively; this is called moment matching. == Applications == Expectation propagation via moment matching plays a vital role in approximation for indicator functions that appear when deriving the message passing equations for TrueSkill.

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  • Progress in artificial intelligence

    Progress in artificial intelligence

    Progress in artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the advances, milestones, and breakthroughs that have been achieved in the field of artificial intelligence over time. AI is a branch of computer science that aims to create machines and systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI applications have been used in a wide range of fields including medical diagnosis, finance, robotics, law, video games, agriculture, and scientific discovery. The society as a whole is looking for artificial intelligence to be on a key factor in the upcming years because of its potential. However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting-edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore." "Many thousands of AI applications are deeply embedded in the infrastructure of every industry." In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AI technology became widely used as elements of larger systems, but the field was rarely credited for these successes at the time. Kaplan and Haenlein structure artificial intelligence along three evolutionary stages: Artificial narrow intelligence – AI capable only of specific tasks; Artificial general intelligence – AI with ability in several areas, and able to autonomously solve problems they were never even designed for; Artificial superintelligence – AI capable of general tasks, including scientific creativity, social skills, and general wisdom. To allow comparison with human performance, artificial intelligence can be evaluated on constrained and well-defined problems. Such tests have been termed subject-matter expert Turing tests. Also, smaller problems provide more achievable goals and there are an ever-increasing number of positive results. In 2023, humans still substantially outperformed both GPT-4 and other models tested on the ConceptARC benchmark. Those models scored 60% on most, and 77% on one category, while humans scored 91% on all and 97% on one category. However, later research in 2025 showed that human-generated output grids were only accurate 73% of the time, while AI models available that year managed to score above 77%. == History == Increasing, promoting or constraining AI progress has often be done via controlling or increasing the amount of compute. == Current performance in specific areas == There are many useful abilities that can be described as showing some form of intelligence. This gives better insight into the comparative success of artificial intelligence in different areas. AI, like electricity or the steam engine, is a general-purpose technology. There is no consensus on how to characterize which tasks AI tends to excel at. Some versions of Moravec's paradox observe that humans are more likely to outperform machines in areas such as physical dexterity that have been the direct target of natural selection. While projects such as AlphaZero have succeeded in generating their own knowledge from scratch, many other machine learning projects require large training datasets. Researcher Andrew Ng has suggested, as a "highly imperfect rule of thumb", that "almost anything a typical human can do with less than one second of mental thought, we can probably now or in the near future automate using AI." Games provide a high-profile benchmark for assessing rates of progress; many games have a large professional player base and a well-established competitive rating system. AlphaGo brought the era of classical board-game benchmarks to a close when Artificial Intelligence proved their competitive edge over humans in 2016. Deep Mind's AlphaGo AI software program defeated the world's best professional Go Player Lee Sedol. Games of imperfect knowledge provide new challenges to AI in the area of game theory; the most prominent milestone in this area was brought to a close by Libratus' poker victory in 2017. E-sports continue to provide additional benchmarks; Facebook AI, Deepmind, and others have engaged with the popular StarCraft franchise of videogames. Broad classes of outcome for an AI test may be given as: optimal: it is not possible to perform better (note: some of these entries were solved by humans) super-human: performs better than all humans high-human: performs better than most humans par-human: performs similarly to most humans sub-human: performs worse than most humans === Optimal === Tic-tac-toe Connect Four: 1988 Checkers (aka 8x8 draughts): Weakly solved (2007) Rubik's Cube: Mostly solved (2010) Heads-up limit hold'em poker: Statistically optimal in the sense that "a human lifetime of play is not sufficient to establish with statistical significance that the strategy is not an exact solution" (2015) === Super-human === Othello (aka reversi): c. 1997 Scrabble: 2006 Backgammon: c. 1995–2002 Chess: Supercomputer (c. 1997); Personal computer (c. 2006); Mobile phone (c. 2009); Computer defeats human + computer (c. 2017) Jeopardy!: Question answering, although the machine did not use speech recognition (2011) Arimaa: 2015 Shogi: c. 2017 Go: 2017 Heads-up no-limit hold'em poker: 2017 Six-player no-limit hold'em poker: 2019 Gran Turismo Sport: 2022 === High-human === Crosswords: c. 2012 Freeciv: 2016 Dota 2: 2018 Bridge card-playing: According to a 2009 review, "the best programs are attaining expert status as (bridge) card players", excluding bidding. StarCraft II: 2019 Mahjong: 2019 Stratego: 2022 No-Press Diplomacy: 2022 Hanabi: 2022 Natural language processing === Par-human === Optical character recognition for ISO 1073-1:1976 and similar special characters. Classification of images Handwriting recognition Facial recognition Visual question answering SQuAD 2.0 English reading-comprehension benchmark (2019) SuperGLUE English-language understanding benchmark (2020) Some school science exams (2019) Some tasks based on Raven's Progressive Matrices Many Atari 2600 games (2015) === Sub-human === Optical character recognition for printed text (nearing par-human for Latin-script typewritten text) Object recognition Various robotics tasks that may require advances in robot hardware as well as AI, including: Stable bipedal locomotion: Bipedal robots can walk, but are less stable than human walkers (as of 2017) Humanoid soccer Speech recognition: "nearly equal to human performance" (2017) Explainability. Current medical systems can diagnose certain medical conditions well, but cannot explain to users why they made the diagnosis. Many tests of fluid intelligence (2020) Bongard visual cognition problems, such as the Bongard-LOGO benchmark (2020) Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) benchmark (as of 2020) Stock market prediction: Financial data collection and processing using Machine Learning algorithms Angry Birds video game, as of 2020 Various tasks that are difficult to solve without contextual knowledge, including: Translation Word-sense disambiguation == Proposed tests of artificial intelligence == In his famous Turing test, Alan Turing picked language, the defining feature of human beings, for its basis. The Turing test is now considered too exploitable to be a meaningful benchmark. The Feigenbaum test, proposed by the inventor of expert systems, tests a machine's knowledge and expertise about a specific subject. A paper by Jim Gray of Microsoft in 2003 suggested extending the Turing test to speech understanding, speaking and recognizing objects and behavior. Proposed "universal intelligence" tests aim to compare how well machines, humans, and even non-human animals perform on problem sets that are generic as possible. At an extreme, the test suite can contain every possible problem, weighted by Kolmogorov complexity; however, these problem sets tend to be dominated by impoverished pattern-matching exercises where a tuned AI can easily exceed human performance levels. == Exams == According to OpenAI, in 2023 GPT-4 achieved high scores on several standardized and professional examinations, including around the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam, the 89th percentile on the mathematics section of the SAT, the 93rd percentile on SAT Reading and Writing, the 54th percentile on the analytical writing section of the GRE, the 88th percentile on GRE quantitative reasoning, and the 99th percentile on GRE verbal reasoning. OpenAI also reported that GPT-4 scored in the 99th to 100th percentile on the 2020 USA Biology Olympiad semifinal exam and earned top scores on several AP exams. Independent researchers found in 2023 that ChatGPT based on GPT-3.5 performed "at or near the passing threshold" on all three parts of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), suggesting that large language models could reach passing-level performance on some medical knowledge assessments even without domain-specific fine-tuning. GPT-3.5 was also reported to attain a low but passing grade on examinations for four law school courses at the University of Minnes

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  • Automated machine learning

    Automated machine learning

    Automated machine learning (AutoML) is the process of automating the tasks of applying machine learning to real-world problems. It is the combination of automation and ML. AutoML potentially includes every stage from beginning with a raw dataset to building a machine learning model ready for deployment. AutoML was proposed as an artificial intelligence-based solution to the growing challenge of applying machine learning. The high degree of automation in AutoML aims to allow non-experts to make use of machine learning models and techniques without requiring them to become experts in machine learning. Automating the process of applying machine learning end-to-end additionally offers the advantages of producing simpler solutions, faster creation of those solutions, and models that often outperform hand-designed models. Common techniques used in AutoML include hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning and neural architecture search. == Comparison to the standard approach == In a typical machine learning application, practitioners have a set of input data points to be used for training. The raw data may not be in a form that all algorithms can be applied to. To make the data amenable for machine learning, an expert may have to apply appropriate data pre-processing, feature engineering, feature extraction, and feature selection methods. After these steps, practitioners must then perform algorithm selection and hyperparameter optimization to maximize the predictive performance of their model. If deep learning is used, the architecture of the neural network must also be chosen manually by the machine learning expert. Each of these steps may be challenging, resulting in significant hurdles to using machine learning. AutoML aims to simplify these steps for non-experts, and to make it easier for them to use machine learning techniques correctly and effectively. AutoML plays an important role within the broader approach of automating data science, which also includes challenging tasks such as data engineering, data exploration and model interpretation and prediction. == Targets of automation == Automated machine learning can target various stages of the machine learning process. Steps to automate are: Data preparation and ingestion (from raw data and miscellaneous formats) Column type detection; e.g., Boolean, discrete numerical, continuous numerical, or text Column intent detection; e.g., target/label, stratification field, numerical feature, categorical text feature, or free text feature Task detection; e.g., binary classification, regression, clustering, or ranking Feature engineering Feature selection Feature extraction Meta-learning and transfer learning Detection and handling of skewed data and/or missing values Model selection - choosing which machine learning algorithm to use, often including multiple competing software implementations Ensembling - a form of consensus where using multiple models often gives better results than any single model Hyperparameter optimization of the learning algorithm and featurization Neural architecture search Pipeline selection under time, memory, and complexity constraints Selection of evaluation metrics and validation procedures Problem checking Leakage detection Misconfiguration detection Analysis of obtained results Creating user interfaces and visualizations == Challenges and Limitations == There are a number of key challenges being tackled around automated machine learning. A big issue surrounding the field is referred to as "development as a cottage industry". This phrase refers to the issue in machine learning where development relies on manual decisions and biases of experts. This is contrasted to the goal of machine learning which is to create systems that can learn and improve from their own usage and analysis of the data. Basically, it's the struggle between how much experts should get involved in the learning of the systems versus how much freedom they should be giving the machines. However, experts and developers must help create and guide these machines to prepare them for their own learning. To create this system, it requires labor intensive work with knowledge of machine learning algorithms and system design. Additionally, other challenges include meta-learning and computational resource allocation.

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  • Expectation propagation

    Expectation propagation

    Expectation propagation (EP) is a technique in Bayesian machine learning. EP finds approximations to a probability distribution. It uses an iterative approach that uses the factorization structure of the target distribution. It differs from other Bayesian approximation approaches such as variational Bayesian methods. More specifically, suppose we wish to approximate an intractable probability distribution p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} with a tractable distribution q ( x ) {\displaystyle q(\mathbf {x} )} . Expectation propagation achieves this approximation by minimizing the Kullback–Leibler divergence K L ( p | | q ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (p||q)} . Variational Bayesian methods minimize K L ( q | | p ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (q||p)} instead. If q ( x ) {\displaystyle q(\mathbf {x} )} is a Gaussian N ( x | μ , Σ ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {N}}(\mathbf {x} |\mu ,\Sigma )} , then K L ( p | | q ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (p||q)} is minimized with μ {\displaystyle \mu } and Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } being equal to the mean of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} and the covariance of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} , respectively; this is called moment matching. == Applications == Expectation propagation via moment matching plays a vital role in approximation for indicator functions that appear when deriving the message passing equations for TrueSkill.

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  • Evaluation of binary classifiers

    Evaluation of binary classifiers

    Evaluation of a binary classifier typically assigns a numerical value, or values, to a classifier that represent its accuracy. An example is error rate, which measures how frequently the classifier makes a mistake. There are many metrics that can be used; different fields have different preferences. For example, in medicine sensitivity and specificity are often used, while in computer science precision and recall are preferred. An important distinction is between metrics that are independent of the prevalence or skew (how often each class occurs in the population), and metrics that depend on the prevalence – both types are useful, but they have very different properties. Often, evaluation is used to compare two methods of classification, so that one can be adopted and the other discarded. Such comparisons are more directly achieved by a form of evaluation that results in a single unitary metric rather than a pair of metrics. == Contingency table == Given a data set, a classification (the output of a classifier on that set) gives two numbers: the number of positives and the number of negatives, which add up to the total size of the set. To evaluate a classifier, one compares its output to another reference classification – ideally a perfect classification, but in practice the output of another gold standard test – and cross tabulates the data into a 2×2 contingency table, comparing the two classifications. One then evaluates the classifier relative to the gold standard by computing summary statistics of these 4 numbers. Generally these statistics will be scale invariant (scaling all the numbers by the same factor does not change the output), to make them independent of population size, which is achieved by using ratios of homogeneous functions, most simply homogeneous linear or homogeneous quadratic functions. Say we test some people for the presence of a disease. Some of these people have the disease, and our test correctly says they are positive. They are called true positives (TP). Some have the disease, but the test incorrectly claims they don't. They are called false negatives (FN). Some don't have the disease, and the test says they don't – true negatives (TN). Finally, there might be healthy people who have a positive test result – false positives (FP). These can be arranged into a 2×2 contingency table (confusion matrix), conventionally with the test result on the vertical axis and the actual condition on the horizontal axis. These numbers can then be totaled, yielding both a grand total and marginal totals. Totaling the entire table, the number of true positives, false negatives, true negatives, and false positives add up to 100% of the set. Totaling the columns (adding vertically) the number of true positives and false positives add up to 100% of the test positives, and likewise for negatives. Totaling the rows (adding horizontally), the number of true positives and false negatives add up to 100% of the condition positives (conversely for negatives). The basic marginal ratio statistics are obtained by dividing the 2×2=4 values in the table by the marginal totals (either rows or columns), yielding 2 auxiliary 2×2 tables, for a total of 8 ratios. These ratios come in 4 complementary pairs, each pair summing to 1, and so each of these derived 2×2 tables can be summarized as a pair of 2 numbers, together with their complements. Further statistics can be obtained by taking ratios of these ratios, ratios of ratios, or more complicated functions. The contingency table and the most common derived ratios are summarized below; see sequel for details. Note that the rows correspond to the condition actually being positive or negative (or classified as such by the gold standard), as indicated by the color-coding, and the associated statistics are prevalence-independent, while the columns correspond to the test being positive or negative, and the associated statistics are prevalence-dependent. There are analogous likelihood ratios for prediction values, but these are less commonly used, and not depicted above. == Pairs of metrics == Often accuracy is evaluated with a pair of metrics composed in a standard pattern. === Sensitivity and specificity === The fundamental prevalence-independent statistics are sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity or True Positive Rate (TPR), also known as recall, is the proportion of people that tested positive and are positive (True Positive, TP) of all the people that actually are positive (Condition Positive, CP = TP + FN). It can be seen as the probability that the test is positive given that the patient is sick. With higher sensitivity, fewer actual cases of disease go undetected (or, in the case of the factory quality control, fewer faulty products go to the market). Specificity (SPC) or True Negative Rate (TNR) is the proportion of people that tested negative and are negative (True Negative, TN) of all the people that actually are negative (Condition Negative, CN = TN + FP). As with sensitivity, it can be looked at as the probability that the test result is negative given that the patient is not sick. With higher specificity, fewer healthy people are labeled as sick (or, in the factory case, fewer good products are discarded). The relationship between sensitivity and specificity, as well as the performance of the classifier, can be visualized and studied using the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. In theory, sensitivity and specificity are independent in the sense that it is possible to achieve 100% in both (such as in the red/blue ball example given above). In more practical, less contrived instances, however, there is usually a trade-off, such that they are inversely proportional to one another to some extent. This is because we rarely measure the actual thing we would like to classify; rather, we generally measure an indicator of the thing we would like to classify, referred to as a surrogate marker. The reason why 100% is achievable in the ball example is because redness and blueness is determined by directly detecting redness and blueness. However, indicators are sometimes compromised, such as when non-indicators mimic indicators or when indicators are time-dependent, only becoming evident after a certain lag time. The following example of a pregnancy test will make use of such an indicator. Modern pregnancy tests do not use the pregnancy itself to determine pregnancy status; rather, human chorionic gonadotropin is used, or hCG, present in the urine of gravid females, as a surrogate marker to indicate that a woman is pregnant. Because hCG can also be produced by a tumor, the specificity of modern pregnancy tests cannot be 100% (because false positives are possible). Also, because hCG is present in the urine in such small concentrations after fertilization and early embryogenesis, the sensitivity of modern pregnancy tests cannot be 100% (because false negatives are possible). === Positive and negative predictive values === In addition to sensitivity and specificity, the performance of a binary classification test can be measured with positive predictive value (PPV), also known as precision, and negative predictive value (NPV). The positive prediction value answers the question "If the test result is positive, how well does that predict an actual presence of disease?". It is calculated as TP/(TP + FP); that is, it is the proportion of true positives out of all positive results. The negative prediction value is the same, but for negatives, naturally. ==== Impact of prevalence on predictive values ==== Prevalence has a significant impact on prediction values. As an example, suppose there is a test for a disease with 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity. If 2000 people are tested and the prevalence (in the sample) is 50%, 1000 of them are sick and 1000 of them are healthy. Thus about 990 true positives and 990 true negatives are likely, with 10 false positives and 10 false negatives. The positive and negative prediction values would be 99%, so there can be high confidence in the result. However, if the prevalence is only 5%, so of the 2000 people only 100 are really sick, then the prediction values change significantly. The likely result is 99 true positives, 1 false negative, 1881 true negatives and 19 false positives. Of the 19+99 people tested positive, only 99 really have the disease – that means, intuitively, that given that a patient's test result is positive, there is only 84% chance that they really have the disease. On the other hand, given that the patient's test result is negative, there is only 1 chance in 1882, or 0.05% probability, that the patient has the disease despite the test result. === Precision and recall === Precision and recall can be interpreted as (estimated) conditional probabilities: Precision is given by P ( C = P | C ^ = P ) {\displaystyle P(C=P|{\hat {C}}=P)} while recall is given by P ( C ^ = P | C = P ) {\displaystyle P({\hat {C}}=P|C=P)} , where C ^ {\

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  • Representation collapse

    Representation collapse

    Representation collapse is a phenomenon in machine learning and representation learning where a model maps different inputs to the same or very similar embeddings, which means it loses important information about how the data is spread out. It is frequently encountered in self-supervised learning, especially within contrastive and non-contrastive frameworks, when training objectives or model architectures do not maintain variance across representations. Collapse results in degenerate solutions characterized by uninformative learned features, significantly impairing downstream task performance. Various techniques have been proposed to mitigate representation collapse, including the use of negative samples, architectural asymmetry, stop-gradient operations, variance regularization, and redundancy reduction objectives, as seen in methods such as SimCLR, BYOL, and VICReg. Comprehending and averting representation collapse is regarded as a fundamental challenge in the advancement of stable and efficient self-supervised learning systems.

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  • Decision list

    Decision list

    Decision lists are a representation for Boolean functions which can be easily learned from examples. Single term decision lists are more expressive than disjunctions and conjunctions; however, 1-term decision lists are less expressive than the general disjunctive normal form and the conjunctive normal form. The language specified by a k-length decision list includes as a subset the language specified by a k-depth decision tree. Learning decision lists can be used for attribute efficient learning, a type of machine learning. == Definition == A decision list (DL) of length r is of the form: if f1 then output b1 else if f2 then output b2 ... else if fr then output br where fi is the ith formula and bi is the ith boolean for i ∈ { 1... r } {\displaystyle i\in \{1...r\}} . The last if-then-else is the default case, which means formula fr is always equal to true. A k-DL is a decision list where all of formulas have at most k terms. Sometimes "decision list" is used to refer to a 1-DL, where all of the formulas are either a variable or its negation.

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  • WHATWG

    WHATWG

    The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) was founded by representatives from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, leading web browser vendors in 2004. WHATWG is responsible for maintaining multiple web-related technical standards, including the specifications for the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and the Document Object Model (DOM). The central organizational membership and control of WHATWG – its "Steering Group" – consists of Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft. WHATWG editors of the specifications ensure correct implementation, in consultation with participants, but ultimately in accordance with Steering Group member objectives. == History == The WHATWG was formed in response to the slow development of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web standards and W3C's decision to abandon HTML in favor of XML-based technologies. The WHATWG mailing list was announced on 4 June 2004, two days after the initiatives of a joint Opera–Mozilla position paper had been voted down by the W3C members at the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. On 10 April 2007, the Mozilla Foundation, Apple, and Opera Software proposed that the new HTML working group of the W3C adopt the WHATWG's HTML5 as the starting point of its work and name its future deliverable as "HTML5" (though the WHATWG specification was later renamed HTML Living Standard). On 9 May 2007, the new HTML working group of the W3C resolved to do that. An Internet Explorer platform architect from Microsoft was invited but did not join, citing the lack of a patent policy to ensure all specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis. Since then, the W3C and the WHATWG had been developing HTML independently, at times causing specifications to diverge. In 2017, the WHATWG established an intellectual property rights agreement that includes a patent policy. This spurred a renewed attempt to allow the W3C and the WHATWG to work together on specifications. In 2019, the W3C and WHATWG agreed to a memorandum of understanding where development of HTML and DOM specifications would be done principally in the WHATWG. The editor has significant control over the specification, but the community can influence the decisions of the editor. In one case, editor Ian Hickson proposed replacing the

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  • Labeled data

    Labeled data

    Labeled data is a group of samples that have been tagged with one or more labels. Labeling typically takes a set of unlabeled data and augments each piece of it with informative tags called judgments. For example, a data label might indicate whether a photo contains a horse or a cow, which words were uttered in an audio recording, what type of action is being performed in a video, what the topic of a news article is, what the overall sentiment of a tweet is, or whether a dot in an X-ray is a tumor. Labels can be obtained by having humans make judgments about a given piece of unlabeled data. Labeled data is significantly more expensive to obtain than the raw unlabeled data. The quality of labeled data directly influences the performance of supervised machine learning models in operation, as these models learn from the provided labels. == Crowdsourced labeled data == In 2006, Fei-Fei Li, the co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, initiated research to improve the artificial intelligence models and algorithms for image recognition by significantly enlarging the training data. The researchers downloaded millions of images from the World Wide Web and a team of undergraduates started to apply labels for objects to each image. In 2007, Li outsourced the data labeling work on Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for digital piece work. The 3.2 million images that were labeled by more than 49,000 workers formed the basis for ImageNet, one of the largest hand-labeled database for outline of object recognition. == Automated data labelling == After obtaining a labeled dataset, machine learning models can be applied to the data so that new unlabeled data can be presented to the model and a likely label can be guessed or predicted for that piece of unlabeled data. == Challenges == === Data-driven bias === Algorithmic decision-making is subject to programmer-driven bias as well as data-driven bias. Training data that relies on bias labeled data will result in prejudices and omissions in a predictive model, despite the machine learning algorithm being legitimate. The labeled data used to train a specific machine learning algorithm needs to be a statistically representative sample to not bias the results. For example, in facial recognition systems underrepresented groups are subsequently often misclassified if the labeled data available to train has not been representative of the population,. In 2018, a study by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru demonstrated that two facial analysis datasets that have been used to train facial recognition algorithms, IJB-A and Adience, are composed of 79.6% and 86.2% lighter skinned humans respectively. === Human error and inconsistency === Human annotators are prone to errors and biases when labeling data. This can lead to inconsistent labels and affect the quality of the data set. The inconsistency can affect the machine learning model's ability to generalize well. === Domain expertise === Certain fields, such as legal document analysis or medical imaging, require annotators with specialized domain knowledge. Without the expertise, the annotations or labeled data may be inaccurate, negatively impacting the machine learning model's performance in a real-world scenario.

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  • Adversarial machine learning

    Adversarial machine learning

    Adversarial machine learning is the study of the attacks on machine learning algorithms, and of the defenses against such attacks. Machine learning techniques are mostly designed to work on specific problem sets, under the assumption that the training and test data are generated from the same statistical distribution (IID). However, this assumption is often violated in practical high-stake applications, where users may intentionally supply fabricated data that violates the statistical assumption. Most common attacks in adversarial machine learning include evasion attacks, data poisoning attacks, Byzantine attacks and model extraction. == History == At the MIT Spam Conference in January 2004, John Graham-Cumming showed that a machine-learning spam filter could be used to defeat another machine-learning spam filter by automatically learning which words to add to a spam email to get the email classified as not spam. In 2004, Nilesh Dalvi and others noted that linear classifiers used in spam filters could be defeated by simple "evasion attacks" as spammers inserted "good words" into their spam emails. (Around 2007, some spammers added random noise to fuzz words within "image spam" in order to defeat OCR-based filters.) In 2006, Marco Barreno and others published "Can Machine Learning Be Secure?", outlining a broad taxonomy of attacks. As late as 2013 many researchers continued to hope that non-linear classifiers (such as support vector machines and neural networks) might be robust to adversaries, until Battista Biggio and others demonstrated the first gradient-based attacks on such machine-learning models (2012–2013). In 2012, deep neural networks began to dominate computer vision problems; starting in 2014, Christian Szegedy and others demonstrated that deep neural networks could be fooled by adversaries, again using a gradient-based attack to craft adversarial perturbations. Further work would show that adversarial attacks are harder to produce in uncontrolled environments, due to the different environmental constraints that cancel out the effect of noise. For example, any small rotation or slight illumination on an adversarial image can destroy the adversariality. In addition, researchers such as Google Brain's Nick Frosst point out that it is much easier to make self-driving cars miss stop signs by physically removing the sign itself, rather than creating adversarial examples. Frosst also believes that the adversarial machine learning community incorrectly assumes models trained on a certain data distribution will also perform well on a completely different data distribution. He suggests that a new approach to machine learning should be explored, and is currently working on a unique neural network that has characteristics more similar to human perception than state-of-the-art approaches. While adversarial machine learning continues to be heavily rooted in academia, large tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM have begun curating documentation and open source code bases to allow others to concretely assess the robustness of machine learning models and minimize the risk of adversarial attacks. === Examples === Examples include attacks in spam filtering, where spam messages are obfuscated through the misspelling of "bad" words or the insertion of "good" words; attacks in computer security, such as obfuscating malware code within network packets or modifying the characteristics of a network flow to mislead intrusion detection; attacks in biometric recognition where fake biometric traits may be exploited to impersonate a legitimate user; or to compromise users' template galleries that adapt to updated traits over time. Researchers showed that by changing only one-pixel it was possible to fool deep learning algorithms. Others 3-D printed a toy turtle with a texture engineered to make Google's object detection AI classify it as a rifle regardless of the angle from which the turtle was viewed. Creating the turtle required only low-cost commercially available 3-D printing technology. A machine-tweaked image of a dog was shown to look like a cat to both computers and humans. A 2019 study reported that humans can guess how machines will classify adversarial images. Researchers discovered methods for perturbing the appearance of a stop sign such that an autonomous vehicle classified it as a merge or speed limit sign. A data poisoning filter called Nightshade was released in 2023 by researchers at the University of Chicago. It was created for use by visual artists to put on their artwork to corrupt the data set of text-to-image models, which usually scrape their data from the internet without the consent of the image creator. McAfee attacked Tesla's former Mobileye system, fooling it into driving 50 mph over the speed limit, simply by adding a two-inch strip of black tape to a speed limit sign. Adversarial patterns on glasses or clothing designed to deceive facial-recognition systems or license-plate readers, have led to a niche industry of "stealth streetwear". An adversarial attack on a neural network can allow an attacker to inject algorithms into the target system. Researchers can also create adversarial audio inputs to disguise commands to intelligent assistants in benign-seeming audio; a parallel literature explores human perception of such stimuli. Clustering algorithms are used in security applications. Malware and computer virus analysis aims to identify malware families, and to generate specific detection signatures. In the context of malware detection, researchers have proposed methods for adversarial malware generation that automatically craft binaries to evade learning-based detectors while preserving malicious functionality. Optimization-based attacks such as GAMMA use genetic algorithms to inject benign content (for example, padding or new PE sections) into Windows executables, framing evasion as a constrained optimization problem that balances misclassification success with the size of the injected payload and showing transferability to commercial antivirus products. Complementary work uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn feature-space perturbations that cause malware to be classified as benign; Mal-LSGAN, for instance, replaces the standard GAN loss with a least-squares objective and modified activation functions to improve training stability and produce adversarial malware examples that substantially reduce true positive rates across multiple detectors. == Challenges in applying machine learning to security == Researchers have observed that the constraints under which machine-learning techniques function in the security domain are different from those of common benchmark domains. Security data may change over time, include mislabeled samples, or reflect adversarial behavior, which complicates evaluation and reproducibility. === Data collection issues === Security datasets vary across formats, including binaries, network traces, and log files. Studies have reported that the process of converting these sources into features can introduce bias or inconsistencies. In addition, time-based leakage can occur when related malware samples are not properly separated across training and testing splits, which may lead to overly optimistic results. === Labeling and ground truth challenges === Malware labels are often unstable because different antivirus engines may classify the same sample in conflicting ways. Ceschin et al. note that families may be renamed or reorganized over time, causing further discrepancies in ground truth and reducing the reliability of benchmarks. === Concept drift === Because malware creators continuously adapt their techniques, the statistical properties of malicious samples also change. This form of concept drift has been widely documented and may reduce model performance unless systems are updated regularly or incorporate mechanisms for incremental learning. === Feature robustness === Researchers differentiate between features that can be easily manipulated and those that are more resistant to modification. For example, simple static attributes, such as header fields, may be altered by attackers, while structural features, such as control-flow graphs, are generally more stable but computationally expensive to extract. === Class imbalance === In realistic deployment environments, the proportion of malicious samples can be extremely low, ranging from 0.01% to 2% of total data. This unbalanced distribution causes models to develop a bias towards the majority class, achieving high accuracy but failing to identify malicious samples. Prior approaches to this problem have included both data-level solutions and sequence-specific models. Methods like n-gram and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks can model sequential data, but their performance has been shown to decline significantly when malware samples are realistically proportioned in the training set, demonstrating the limitations in

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  • Supermind AI

    Supermind AI

    Supermind is a state-funded Chinese artificial intelligence platform that tracks scientists and researchers internationally. The platform is the flagship project of Shenzhen's International Science and Technology Information Center. It mines data from science and technology databases such as Springer, Wiley, Clarivate and Elsevier. It is intended to detect technological breakthroughs and to identify possible sources of talent as part of China's efforts to advance technologically. The platform also uses government data security and security intelligence organizations such as Peng Cheng Laboratory, the China National GeneBank, BGI Group and the Key Laboratory of New Technologies of Security Intelligence. According to Hong Kong-based Asia Times, the platform, "While not an overt espionage tool...may be used to identify key personnel who could be bribed, deceived or manipulated into divulging classified information". The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) flagged the project as an incident, meaning it may be of interest to policymakers and other stakeholders. US technology group American Edge Project criticized the project as a global risk of China's security services using the platform to place agents in jobs with access to important information, recruit technical personnel, and identify targets for hacking operations.

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  • Automated attendant

    Automated attendant

    In telephony, an automated attendant (also auto attendant, auto-attendant, autoattendant, automatic phone menus, AA, or virtual receptionist) allows callers to be automatically transferred to an extension without the intervention of an operator/receptionist. Many AAs will also offer a simple menu system ("for sales, press 1, for service, press 2," etc.). An auto attendant may also allow a caller to reach a live operator by dialing a number, usually "0". Typically the auto attendant is included in a business's phone system such as a PBX, but some services allow businesses to use an AA without such a system. Modern AA services (which now overlap with more complicated interactive voice response or IVR systems) can route calls to mobile phones, VoIP virtual phones, other AAs/IVRs, or other locations using traditional land-line phones or voice message machines. == Feature description == Telephone callers will recognize an automated attendant system as one that greets calls incoming to an organization with a recorded greeting of the form, "Thank you for calling .... If you know your party's extension, you may dial it any time during this message." Callers who have a touch-tone (DTMF) phone can dial an extension number or, in most cases, wait for operator ("attendant") assistance. Since the telephone network does not transmit the DC signals from rotary dial telephones (except for audible clicks), callers who have rotary dial phones have to wait for assistance. On a purely technical level it could be argued that an automated attendant is a very simple kind of IVR however, in the telecom industry the terms IVR and auto attendant are generally considered distinct. An automated attendant serves a very specific purpose (replace live operator and route calls), whereas an IVR can perform all sorts of functions (telephone banking, account inquiries, etc.). An AA will often include a directory which will allow a caller to dial by name in order to find a user on a system. There is no standard format to these directories, and they can use combinations of first name, last name, or both. The following lists common routing steps that are components of an automated attendant: Transfer to extension Transfer to voicemail Play message (i.e., "our address is ...") Go to a sub-menu Repeat choices In addition, an automated attendant would be expected to have values for the following: '0' – where to go when the caller dials '0' Timeout – what to do if the caller does nothing (usually go to the same place as '0') Default mailbox – where to send calls if '0' is not answered (or is not pointing to a live person) == Background == PBXs (private branch exchanges) or PABXs (private automatic branch exchanges) are telephone systems that serve an organization that has many telephone extensions but fewer telephone lines (sometimes called "trunks") that connect that organization to the rest of the global telecommunications network. While persons within an enterprise served by a PBX can call each other by dialing their extension numbers, incoming calls, i.e., calls originating from a telephone not served by the PBX but intended for a party served by the PBX, required assistance from a switchboard operator (also called a "switchboard attendant") or a telephone service called DID ("direct inward dialing"). Direct inward dialing has advantages such as rapid connection to the destination party and disadvantages including cost, lack of identification of the called organization and use of ten-digit telephone numbers. Automated attendants provide, among many other things, a way for an external caller to be directed to an extension or department served by a PBX system without using direct inward dialing or without switchboard attendant assistance. == History == Automated attendants are not part of voicemail systems. Voice messaging (or voicemail or VM) technology has existed since the late 1970s; in the early 1980s companies provided voice-prompting systems that allowed callers to reach (route the call) to an intended party, not necessarily to leave a message. Automated attendant systems are also referred to as automated menu systems and much early work in this field was done by Michael J. Freeman, Ph.D. == Time-based routing == Many auto attendants will have options to allow for time-of-day routing, as well as weekend and holiday routing. The specifics of these features will depend entirely on the particular automated attendant, but typically there would be a normal greeting and routing steps that would take place during normal business hours, and a different greeting and routing for non-business hours.

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  • Machine learning

    Machine learning

    Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without being explicitly programmed. Advances in the field of deep learning have allowed neural networks, a class of statistical algorithms, to surpass many previous machine learning approaches in performance. Statistics and mathematical optimisation methods compose the foundations of machine learning. Data mining is a related field of study, focusing on exploratory data analysis (EDA) through unsupervised learning. From a theoretical viewpoint, probably approximately correct learning provides a mathematical and statistical framework for describing machine learning. Most traditional machine learning and deep learning algorithms can be described as empirical risk minimisation under this framework. == History == The term machine learning was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. The synonym self-teaching computers was also used during this time period. The earliest machine learning program was introduced in the 1950s, when Samuel invented a computer program that calculated the chance of winning in checkers for each side, but the history of machine learning is rooted in decades of efforts to study human cognitive processes. In 1949, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb published the book The Organization of Behavior, in which he introduced a theoretical neural structure formed by certain interactions among nerve cells. The Hebbian theory of neuron interaction set the groundwork for how many machine learning algorithms work, with connected artificial neurons changing the strength of their connections based on data. Other researchers who have studied human cognitive systems contributed to the modern machine learning technologies as well, including Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, who proposed the first mathematical model of neural networks including algorithms that mirror human thought processes. By the early 1960s, an experimental "learning machine" with punched tape memory, called Cybertron, had been developed by Raytheon Company to analyse sonar signals, electrocardiograms, and speech patterns using rudimentary reinforcement learning. It was repetitively "trained" by a human operator/teacher to recognise patterns and equipped with a "goof" button to cause it to reevaluate incorrect decisions. A representative book on research into machine learning during the 1960s was Nils Nilsson's book "Learning Machines", dealing mostly with machine learning for pattern classification. Interest related to pattern recognition continued into the 1970s, as described by Duda and Hart in 1973. In 1981, a report was given on using teaching strategies so that an artificial neural network learns to recognise 40 characters (26 letters, 10 digits, and 4 special symbols) from a computer terminal. Tom M. Mitchell provided a widely quoted, more formal definition of the algorithms studied in the machine learning field: "A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E." This definition of the tasks in which machine learning is concerned is fundamentally operational rather than defining the field in cognitive terms. This follows Alan Turing's proposal in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which the question, "Can machines think?", is replaced by asking whether machines can convincingly imitate a human in its responses to human-posed questions. In 2014 Ian Goodfellow and others introduced generative adversarial networks (GANs) which could produce realistic synthetic data. By 2016 AlphaGo had won against top human players in Go using reinforcement learning techniques. == Relationships to other fields == === Artificial intelligence === As a scientific endeavour, machine learning grew out of the quest for artificial intelligence (AI). In the early days of AI as an academic discipline, some researchers were interested in having machines learn from data. They attempted to approach the problem with various symbolic methods, as well as what were then termed "neural networks"; these were mostly perceptrons and other models that were later found to be reinventions of the generalised linear models of statistics. Probabilistic reasoning was also employed, especially in automated medical diagnosis. However, an increasing emphasis on the logical, knowledge-based approach caused a rift between AI and machine learning. Probabilistic systems were plagued by theoretical and practical problems of data acquisition and representation. By 1980, expert systems had come to dominate AI, and statistics was out of favour. Work on symbolic/knowledge-based learning continued within AI, leading to inductive logic programming (ILP), but the more statistical line of research was now outside the field of AI proper, in pattern recognition and information retrieval. Neural network research was abandoned by AI and computer science around the same time. This subfield, termed "connectionism", was continued by researchers from other disciplines, including John Hopfield, David Rumelhart, and Geoffrey Hinton. Their main success came in the mid-1980s with the reinvention of backpropagation. Machine learning (ML), reorganised and recognised as its own field, started to flourish in the 1990s. The field changed its goal from achieving artificial intelligence to tackling solvable problems of a practical nature. It shifted focus away from the symbolic approaches it had inherited from AI, and toward methods and models borrowed from statistics, fuzzy logic, and probability theory. === Data compression === === Data mining === Machine learning and data mining often employ the same methods and overlap significantly, but while machine learning focuses on prediction based on known properties learned from the training data, data mining focuses on the discovery of previously unknown properties in the data (this is the analysis step of knowledge discovery in databases). Data mining uses many machine learning methods, but with different goals; on the other hand, machine learning also employs data mining methods as "unsupervised learning" or as a preprocessing step to improve learner accuracy. Much of the confusion between these two research communities comes from the basic assumptions they work with: in machine learning, performance is usually evaluated with respect to the ability to reproduce known knowledge, while in knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) the key task is the discovery of previously unknown knowledge. Evaluated with respect to known knowledge, an uninformed (unsupervised) method will easily be outperformed by other supervised methods, while in a typical KDD task, supervised methods cannot be used due to the unavailability of training data. Machine learning also has intimate ties to optimization: Many learning problems are formulated as minimisation of some loss function on a training set of examples. Loss functions express the discrepancy between the predictions of the model being trained and the actual problem instances (for example, in classification, one wants to assign a label to instances, and models are trained to correctly predict the preassigned labels of a set of examples). === Generalization === Characterizing the generalisation of various learning algorithms is an active topic of current research, especially for deep learning algorithms. === Statistics === Machine learning and statistics are closely related fields in terms of methods, but distinct in their principal goal: statistics draws population inferences from a sample, while machine learning finds generalisable predictive patterns. Conventional statistical analyses require the a priori selection of a model most suitable for the study data set. In addition, only significant or theoretically relevant variables based on previous experience are included for analysis. In contrast, machine learning is not built on a pre-structured model; rather, the data shape the model by detecting underlying patterns. The more variables (input) used to train the model, the more accurate the ultimate model will be. Leo Breiman distinguished two statistical modelling paradigms: the data model and the algorithmic model, wherein "algorithmic model" means more or less the machine learning algorithms like Random forest. Some statisticians have adopted methods from machine learning, producing the field of statistical learning. === Statistical physics === Analytical and computational techniques derived from deep-rooted physics of disordered systems can be extended to large-scale problems, including machine learning, e.g., to analyse the weight space of deep neural networks. Statistical physics is thus

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  • Cognitive robotics

    Cognitive robotics

    Cognitive robotics or cognitive technology is a subfield of robotics concerned with endowing a robot with intelligent behavior by providing it with a processing architecture that will allow it to learn and reason about how to behave in response to complex goals in a complex world. Cognitive robotics may be considered the engineering branch of embodied cognitive science and embodied embedded cognition, consisting of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, optical character recognition, image processing, process mining, analytics, software development and system integration. == Core issues == While traditional cognitive modeling approaches have assumed symbolic coding schemes as a means for depicting the world, translating the world into these kinds of symbolic representations has proven to be problematic if not untenable. Perception and action and the notion of symbolic representation are therefore core issues to be addressed in cognitive robotics. == Starting point == Cognitive robotics views human or animal cognition as a starting point for the development of robotic information processing, as opposed to more traditional artificial intelligence techniques. Target robotic cognitive capabilities include perception processing, attention allocation, anticipation, planning, complex motor coordination, reasoning about other agents and perhaps even about their own mental states. Robotic cognition embodies the behavior of intelligent agents in the physical world (or a virtual world, in the case of simulated cognitive robotics). Ultimately, the robot must be able to act in the real world. == Learning techniques == === Motor Babble === A preliminary robot learning technique called motor babbling involves correlating pseudo-random complex motor movements by the robot with resulting visual and/or auditory feedback such that the robot may begin to expect a pattern of sensory feedback given a pattern of motor output. Desired sensory feedback may then be used to inform a motor control signal. This is thought to be analogous to how a baby learns to reach for objects or learns to produce speech sounds. For simpler robot systems, where, for instance, inverse kinematics may feasibly be used to transform anticipated feedback (desired motor result) into motor output, this step may be skipped. === Imitation === Once a robot can coordinate its motors to produce a desired result, the technique of learning by imitation may be used. The robot monitors the performance of another agent and then the robot tries to imitate that agent. It is often a challenge to transform imitation information from a complex scene into a desired motor result for the robot. Note that imitation is a high-level form of cognitive behavior and imitation is not necessarily required in a basic model of embodied animal cognition. === Knowledge acquisition === A more complex learning approach is "autonomous knowledge acquisition": the robot is left to explore the environment on its own. A system of goals and beliefs is typically assumed. A somewhat more directed mode of exploration can be achieved by "curiosity" algorithms, such as Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity or Category-Based Intrinsic Motivation. These algorithms generally involve breaking sensory input into a finite number of categories and assigning some sort of prediction system (such as an artificial neural network) to each. The prediction system keeps track of the error in its predictions over time. Reduction in prediction error is considered learning. The robot then preferentially explores categories in which it is learning (or reducing prediction error) the fastest. == Other architectures == Some researchers in cognitive robotics have tried using architectures such as (ACT-R and Soar (cognitive architecture)) as a basis of their cognitive robotics programs. These highly modular symbol-processing architectures have been used to simulate operator performance and human performance when modeling simplistic and symbolized laboratory data. The idea is to extend these architectures to handle real-world sensory input as that input continuously unfolds through time. What is needed is a way to somehow translate the world into a set of symbols and their relationships. == Questions == Some of the fundamental questions to be answered in cognitive robotics are: How much human programming should or can be involved to support the learning processes? How can one quantify progress? Some of the adopted ways are reward and punishment. But what kind of reward and what kind of punishment? In humans, when teaching a child, for example, the reward would be candy or some encouragement, and the punishment can take many forms. But what is an effective way with robots?

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