AI Chatbot Options

AI Chatbot Options — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Color picker

    Color picker

    A color picker (also color chooser or color tool) is a graphical user interface widget, usually found within graphics software or online, used to select colors and, in some cases, to create color schemes (the color picker might be more sophisticated than the palette included with the program). Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or macOS have a system color picker, which can be used by third-party programs (e.g., Adobe Photoshop). == History == The concept of color pickers dates back to the early days of computer graphics and digital design. Early versions were rudimentary, often featuring basic color palettes and limited functionality. One of the first drawing programs to include a color picker was SketchPad (also referred to as LisaSketch), designed by Bill Atkinson in 1983 to showcase LisaGraf's capabilities. It used a black and white pattern system, using dithering to create the illusion of color depth. With the increased popularity of personal computers with color graphics, there soon came software similar to SketchPad that supported more than two colors, like Broderbund's Dazzle Draw for the Apple II or Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint. However, the color pickers present in those programs relied on indexed colors. Color pickers, resembling ones used in modern software with support for direct, 24-bit color, appeared soon after the release of the Macintosh II, with the release of programs like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. As the increase of color depth allowed the choice of significantly more colors, the shape and form of color pickers started to diverge. For example, Adobe Photoshop used a hue-saturation color wheel with a slider for brightness in version 0.63, later on switching to a rectangular design accompanied by a hue slider. Corel Painter pioneered the triangular saturation and brightness picker with a hue ring around it, aiming to better represent the continuity of the hue spectrum and the relationship between saturation and brightness. == Purpose == A color picker is used to select and adjust color values. In graphic design and image editing, users typically choose colors via an interface with a visual representation of a color—organized with quasi-perceptually-relevant hue, saturation and lightness dimensions (HSL) – instead of keying in alphanumeric text values. Because color appearance depends on comparison of neighboring colors (see color vision), many interfaces attempt to clarify the relationships between colors. == Interface == Color tools can vary in their interface. Some may use sliders, buttons, text boxes for color values, or direct manipulation. Often a two-dimensional square is used to create a range of color values (such as lightness and saturation) that can be clicked on or selected in some other manner. Drag and drop, color droppers, and various other forms of interfaces are commonly used as well. Usually, color values are also displayed numerically, so they can be precisely remembered and keyed-in later, such as three values of 0-255 representing red, green, and blue, respectively. === Eyedropper === The eyedropper is a tool present in most color pickers and graphics software that allows a user to read a color at a specific point in an image, or position on a display. This enables the color to be transferred to other applications particularly quickly. Modern implementations of eyedropper tools are also available as browser extensions, allowing users to pick colors directly from web pages, such as in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. == Working == A color picker has two main parts, first a color slider and second a color canvas. The color slider has a linear or radial gradient of the seven rainbow colors i.e. Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. It allows one to choose any of the seven primary colors. The color value chosen from the color slider instantly reflects in the color canvas. The color canvas is a mixture of two linear color gradients. First a linear gradient of the current chosen color and second a linear gradient of the black color. This mixture of color gradients lets one choose a lighter and darker version of the current chosen color from the color slider.

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  • European Conference on Artificial Intelligence

    European Conference on Artificial Intelligence

    The European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) is the leading conference in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Europe, and is commonly listed together with IJCAI and AAAI as one of the three major general AI conferences worldwide. The conference series has been held without interruption since 1974, originally under the name AISB. The conference was originally held biennially, but has been organized annually since ECAI 2022. The conferences are held under the auspices of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and organized by one of the member societies. The journal AI Communications, sponsored by the same society, regularly publishes special issues in which conference attendees report on the conference. Publication of a paper in ECAI is considered by some journals to be archival: the paper should be considered equivalent to a journal publication and that the contents of ECAI papers cannot be reformulated as separate journal submissions unless a significant amount of new material is added. == List of ECAI conferences == ECAI-1992 took place in Vienna, Austria. ECAI-1996 took place in Budapest, Hungary. ECAI-1998 tool place in Brighton, United Kingdom. ECAI-2000 took place in Berlin, Germany. ECAI-2004 took place in Valencia, Spain. ECAI-2006 took place in Riva del Garda, Italy. ECAI-2008 took place in Patras, Greece. ECAI-2010 took place in Lisbon, Portugal. ECAI-2012 took place in Montpellier, France. ECAI-2014 took place in Prague, Czech Republic. ECAI-2016 took place in The Hague, Netherlands. ECAI-2018 took place in Stockholm, Sweden. ECAI-2020 took place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. ECAI-2022 took place in Vienna, Austria. ECAI-2023 took place in Kraków, Poland. ECAI-2024 took place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. ECAI-2025 took place in Bologna, Italy.

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  • The Fractal Prince

    The Fractal Prince

    The Fractal Prince is the second science fiction novel by Hannu Rajaniemi and the second novel to feature the post-human gentleman thief Jean le Flambeur. It was published in Britain by Gollancz in September 2012, and by Tor in the same year in the US. The novel is the second in the trilogy, following The Quantum Thief (2010) and preceding The Causal Angel (2014). == Plot summary == After the events of The Quantum Thief, Jean le Flambeur and Mieli are on their way to Earth. Jean is trying to open the Schrödinger's Box he retrieved from the memory palace on the Oubliette. After making little progress, he is prodded by the ship Perhonen to talk to Mieli, who turns out to be possessed by the pellegrini again. This time, Jean identifies Mieli's employer as a Sobornost Founder, Joséphine Pellegrini, and gets her to reveal how he got captured, thereby picking up the clues to make plans for his next heist. No sooner is that done than an attack comes from the Hunter. The ship and crew barely survived that, and Jean realizes that he has to find a better way to open the Box - fast. Mieli has been very quiet after they left Mars. She has given up almost everything to the pellegrini, even her identity, as she has promised to let the pellegrini make gogols of her in exchange for rescuing the thief. Yet, having to work with the thief is testing her, especially when the thief eventually does something even more unforgivable than stealing Sydän's jewel from her. In the city of Sirr, on an Earth ravaged by wildcode, Tawaddud and Dunyazad are sisters and members of the powerful Gomelez family. Tawaddud is the black sheep of the family, having run away from her husband and consorted with a notorious jinn, a disembodied intelligence from the wildcode desert. Now Cassar Gomelez, her father, hopes to get her to curry favor with a gogol merchant, Abu Nuwas, so that he has enough votes in the Council for the upcoming decision to renegotiate the Cry of Wrath Accords with the Sobornost. Soon, Tawaddud is embroiled in an investigation with a Sobornost envoy into the murder that triggered the need for her father to forge a new alliance in the first place, and forced to confront old secrets that will change Sirr forever. Somewhere else, in a bookshop and on a beach, a young boy is at play. His mother has told him not to talk to strangers, but there has never been anyone here before. Until now. Should he talk to them? == Influences == In the acknowledgments, Rajaniemi cites the influence of "Andy Clark, Douglas Hofstadter, Maurice Leblanc, Jan Potocki and [...] The Arabian Nights." === Self-loops === In the novel, the idea that the mind is a self-loop may have been influenced by the theories of the Professor of Philosophy, Andy Clark, and the book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. === Frame stories === The novel uses frame stories rather extensively, a feature also of The Arabian Nights and Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Several characters in Sirr are the namesakes of characters in these two earlier works as well. The events in The Quantum Thief are also retold at least once by Jean le Flambeur in the course of the events in this novel. == Reception == The novel has received generally positive reviews. However, criticisms of the novel still revolve around Rajaniemi's uncompromising "show, don't tell" style. For example, Amy Goldschlager, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, suggested that "[a] bit more explication of the physics involved (“surfing the deficit angle”?) would really be helpful, more helpful than the description of the Schrödinger’s Cat problem given earlier in the book".

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  • Someday (short story)

    Someday (short story)

    "Someday" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the August 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections Earth Is Room Enough (1957), The Complete Robot (1982), Robot Visions (1990), and The Complete Stories, Volume 1 (1990). == Plot summary == The story is set in a future where computers play a central role in organizing society. Humans are employed as computer operators, but they leave most of the thinking to machines. Indeed, whilst binary programming is taught at school, reading and writing have become obsolete. The story concerns a pair of boys who dismantle and upgrade an old Bard, a child's computer whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale repertoire. The story ends with the boys excitedly leaving the room after deciding to go to the library to learn "squiggles" (writing) as a means of passing secret messages to one another. As they leave, one of the boys accidentally kicks the Bard's on switch. The Bard begins reciting a new story about a poor mistreated and often ignored robot called the Bard, whose sole purpose is to tell stories, which ends with the words: "the little computer knew then that computers would always grow wiser and more powerful until someday—someday—someday—…"

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  • The Triple Revolution

    The Triple Revolution

    "The Triple Revolution" was an open memorandum sent to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and other government figures on March 22, 1964. It concerned three megatrends of the time: increasing use of automation, the nuclear arms race, and advancements in human rights. Drafted under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, it was signed by an array of noted social activists, professors, and technologists who identified themselves as the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. The chief initiator of the proposal was W. H. "Ping" Ferry, at that time a vice-president of CSDI, basing it in large part on the ideas of the futurist Robert Theobald. == Overview == The statement identified three revolutions underway in the world: the cybernation revolution of increasing automation; the weaponry revolution of mutually assured destruction; and the human rights revolution. It discussed primarily the cybernation revolution. The committee claimed that machines would usher in "a system of almost unlimited productive capacity" while continually reducing the number of manual laborers needed, and increasing the skill needed to work, thereby producing increasing levels of unemployment. It proposed that the government should ease this transformation through large-scale public works, low-cost housing, public transit, electrical power development, income redistribution, union representation for the unemployed, and government restraint on technology deployment. == Legacy == Martin Luther King Jr.'s final Sunday sermon, delivered six days before his April 1968 assassination, explicitly references the thesis of "The Triple Revolution": There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away." In Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, Philip José Farmer's story "Riders of the Purple Wage" uses the Triple Revolution document as the premise of a future society, in which the "purple wage" of the title is a guaranteed income dole on which most of the population lives. At the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, Farmer delivered a lengthy Guest of Honor speech in which he called for the founding of a grassroots activist organization called REAP which would work for implementation of the Ad Hoc Committee's recommendations. Looking back on the proposal in his 2008 book, Daniel Bell wrote: "the cybernetic revolution quickly proved to be illusory. There were no spectacular jumps in productivity. ... Cybernation had proved to be one more instance of the penchant for overdramatizing a momentary innovation and blowing it up far out of proportion to its actuality. ... The image of a completely automated production economy—with an endless capacity to turn out goods—was simply a social-science fiction of the early 1960s. Paradoxically, the vision of Utopia was suddenly replaced by the spectre of Doomsday. In place of the early-sixties theme of endless plenty, the picture by the end of the decade was one of a fragile planet of limited resources whose finite stocks were being rapidly depleted, and whose wastes from soaring industrial production were polluting the air and waters." In his 2015 book Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford claims The Triple Revolution's predictions of steady decline in future employment were not wrong, but rather premature. He cites "Seven Deadly Trends" that began in the 1970s-1980s and by the mid-2010s appeared set to continue: Stagnation in real wages Decline in labor's share of national income in many countries (breakdown of Bowley's law), while corporate profits increased Declining labor force participation Diminishing job creation, lengthening jobless recoveries, and soaring long-term unemployment Rising inequality Declining incomes, and underemployment for recent college graduates Polarization and part-time jobs (middle-class jobs are disappearing, to be replaced by a small number of high-paying jobs and large number of low-paying jobs) According to Ford, the 1960s were part of what in retrospect seems like a golden age for labor in the United States, when productivity and wages rose together in near lockstep, and unemployment was low. But after about 1980, wages began stagnating while productivity continued to rise. Labor's share of the economic output began to decline. Ford describes the role that automation and information technology play in these trends, and how new technologies including narrow AI threaten to destroy jobs faster than displaced workers can be retrained for new jobs, before automation takes the new jobs as well. This includes many job categories, such as in transportation, that were never threatened by automation before. According to a 2013 study, about 47% of US jobs are susceptible to automation. == Signatories ==

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  • Semantic Scholar

    Semantic Scholar

    Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval. Semantic Scholar began as a database for the topics of computer science, geoscience, and neuroscience. In 2017, the system began including biomedical literature in its corpus. As of September 2022, it includes over 200 million publications from all fields of science. == Technology == Semantic Scholar provides a one-sentence summary of scientific literature. One of its aims was to address the challenge of reading numerous titles and lengthy abstracts on mobile devices. It also seeks to ensure that the three million scientific papers published yearly reach readers, since it is estimated that only half of this literature is ever read. Artificial intelligence is used to capture the essence of a paper, generating it through an "abstractive" technique. The project uses a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and machine vision to add a layer of semantic analysis to the traditional methods of citation analysis, and to extract relevant figures, tables, entities, and venues from papers. Another key AI-powered feature is Research Feeds, an adaptive research recommender that uses AI to quickly learn what papers users care about reading and recommends the latest research to help scholars stay up to date. It uses a paper embedding model trained using contrastive learning to find papers similar to those in each Library folder. Semantic Scholar also offers Semantic Reader, an augmented reader with the potential to revolutionize scientific reading by making it more accessible and richly contextual. Semantic Reader provides in-line citation cards that allow users to see citations with TLDR (short for Too Long, Didn't Read) automatically generated short summaries as they read and skimming highlights that capture key points of a paper so users can digest faster. In contrast with Google Scholar and PubMed, Semantic Scholar is designed to highlight the most important and influential elements of a paper. The AI technology is designed to identify hidden connections and links between research topics. Like the previously cited search engines, Semantic Scholar also exploits graph structures, which include the Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph, Springer Nature's SciGraph, and the Semantic Scholar Corpus (originally a 45 million papers corpus in computer science, neuroscience and biomedicine). == Article identifier == Each paper hosted by Semantic Scholar is assigned a unique identifier called the Semantic Scholar Corpus ID (abbreviated S2CID). The following entry is an example: Liu, Ying; Gayle, Albert A; Wilder-Smith, Annelies; Rocklöv, Joacim (March 2020). "The reproductive number of COVID-19 is higher compared to SARS coronavirus". Journal of Travel Medicine. 27 (2). doi:10.1093/jtm/taaa021. PMID 32052846. S2CID 211099356. == Indexing == Semantic Scholar is free to use and unlike similar search engines (e.g., Google Scholar) does not search for material that is behind a paywall. One study compared the index scope of Semantic Scholar to Google Scholar, and found that for the papers cited by secondary studies in computer science, the two indices had comparable coverage, each only missing a handful of the papers. == Number of users and publications == As of January 2018, following a 2017 project that added biomedical papers and topic summaries, the Semantic Scholar corpus included more than 40 million papers from computer science and biomedicine. In March 2018, Doug Raymond, who developed machine learning initiatives for the Amazon Alexa platform, was hired to lead the Semantic Scholar project. As of August 2019, the number of included papers metadata (not the actual PDFs) had grown to more than 173 million after the addition of the Microsoft Academic Graph records. In 2020, a partnership between Semantic Scholar and the University of Chicago Press Journals made all articles published under the University of Chicago Press available in the Semantic Scholar corpus. At the end of 2020, Semantic Scholar had indexed 190 million papers. In 2020, Semantic Scholar reached seven million users per month.

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  • Death of Elaine Herzberg

    Death of Elaine Herzberg

    The death of Elaine Herzberg (August 2, 1968 – March 18, 2018) was the first recorded case of a pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car, after a collision that occurred late in the evening of March 18, 2018. Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across a four-lane road in Tempe, Arizona, United States, when she was struck by an Uber test vehicle, which was operating in self-drive mode with a human safety backup driver sitting in the driving seat. Herzberg was taken to the local hospital where she died of her injuries. Following the fatal incident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a series of recommendations and sharply criticized Uber. The company suspended testing of self-driving vehicles in Arizona, where such testing had been approved since August 2016. Uber chose not to renew its permit for testing self-driving vehicles in California when it expired at the end of March 2018. Uber resumed testing in December 2018, starting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation. While Herzberg was the first pedestrian killed by a self-driving car, driver Gao Yaning died in a Tesla semi-autonomous car two years earlier. A reporter for The Washington Post compared Herzberg's fate with that of Bridget Driscoll who, in the United Kingdom in 1896, was the first pedestrian to be killed by an automobile. The Arizona incident has magnified the importance of collision avoidance systems for self-driving vehicles. == Collision summary == Herzberg was crossing Mill Avenue (North) from west to east, approximately 360 feet (110 m) south of the intersection with Curry Road, outside the designated pedestrian crosswalk, close to the Red Mountain Freeway. She was pushing a bicycle laden with shopping bags, and had crossed at least two lanes of traffic when she was struck at approximately 9:58 pm MST (UTC−07:00) by a prototype Uber self-driving car based on a Volvo XC90, which was traveling north on Mill. The vehicle had been operating in autonomous mode since 9:39 pm, nineteen minutes before it struck and killed Herzberg. The car's human safety backup driver, Rafaela Vasquez, did not intervene in time to prevent the collision. Vehicle telemetry obtained after the crash showed that the human operator responded by moving the steering wheel less than a second before impact, and she engaged the brakes less than a second after impact. == Cause investigation == The county district attorney's office recused itself from the investigation, due to a prior joint partnership with Uber promoting their services as an alternative to driving under the influence of alcohol. Accounts differ on the speed limit at the place of the incident. According to Tempe police the car was traveling in a 35 mph (56 km/h) zone, but this is contradicted by a posted speed limit of 45 mph (72 km/h). The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent a team of federal investigators to gather data from vehicle instruments, and to examine vehicle condition along with the actions taken by the safety driver. Their preliminary findings were substantiated by multiple event data recorders and proved the vehicle was traveling 43 miles per hour (69 km/h) when Herzberg was first detected 6 seconds (378 feet (115 m)) before impact; during 4.7 seconds the self driving system did not infer that emergency braking was needed. A vehicle traveling 43 mph (69 km/h) can generally stop within 89 feet (27 m) once the brakes are applied. The machine needed to be 1.3 seconds (82 feet (25 m)) away prior to discerning that emergency braking was required, whereas at least that much distance was required to stop. The system failed to behave properly. A total stopping distance of 76 feet itself would imply a safe speed under 25 mph (40 km/h). Human intervention was still legally required. Computer perception–reaction time would have been a speed limiting factor had the technology been superior to humans in ambiguous situations; however, the nascent computerized braking technology was disabled the day of the crash, and the machine's apparent 4.7-second perception–reaction (alarm) time allowed the car to travel 250 feet (76 m). Video released by the police on March 21 showed the safety driver was not watching the road moments before the vehicle struck Herzberg. === Environment === In widely disseminated remarks that would shape the narrative about the crash, which were later seen as prejudicial and subsequently contradicted by her own department, Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir was quoted stating that the collision was "unavoidable" based on the initial police investigation, which included a review of the video captured by an onboard camera. Moir faulted Herzberg for crossing the road in an unsafe manner: "It is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated, managed crosswalks are available." According to Uber, safety drivers were trained to keep their hands very close to the wheel all the time while driving the vehicle so they were ready to quickly take control if necessary. The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them. His [sic] first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision. [...] it's very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway. Tempe police released video on March 21, 2018, showing footage recorded by two onboard cameras: one forward-looking, and one capturing the safety driver's actions. The forward-facing video shows that the self-driving car was traveling in the far right lane when it struck Herzberg. The driver-facing video shows the safety driver was looking down prior to the collision. The Uber operator is responsible for intervening and taking manual control when necessary as well as for monitoring diagnostic messages, which are displayed on a screen in the center console. In an interview conducted after the crash with NTSB, the driver stated she was monitoring the center stack at the time of the collision. After the Uber video was released, journalist Carolyn Said noted the police explanation of Herzberg's path meant she had already crossed two lanes of traffic before she was struck by the autonomous vehicle. The Marquee Theatre and Tempe Town Lake are west of Mill Avenue, and pedestrians commonly cross mid-street without detouring north to the crosswalk at Curry. According to reporting by the Phoenix New Times, Mill Avenue contains what appears to be a brick-paved path in the median between the northbound and southbound lanes; however, posted signs prohibit pedestrians from crossing in that location. When the second of the Mill Avenue bridges over the town lake was added in 1994 for northbound traffic, the X-shaped crossover in the median was installed to accommodate the potential closing of one of the two road bridges. The purpose of this brick-paved structure is purely to divert cars from one side to the other if a bridge is closed to traffic, and although it may look like a crosswalk for pedestrians, it is in fact a temporary roadway with vertical curbs and warning signs. === Software issues === Michael Ramsey, a self-driving car expert with Gartner, characterized the video as showing "a complete failure of the system to recognize an obviously seen person who is visible for quite some distance in the frame. Uber has some serious explaining to do about why this person wasn't seen and why the system didn't engage." The NTSB preliminary report, however, noted that the software did order the car to brake 1.3 seconds before the collision. A video shot from the vehicle's dashboard camera showed the safety driver looking down, away from the road. It also appeared that the driver's hands were not hovering above the steering wheel, which is what drivers are instructed to do so they can quickly retake control of the car. Uber had moved from two employees in every car to one. The paired employees had been splitting duties: one ready to take over if the autonomous system failed, and another to keep an eye on what the computers were detecting. The second person was responsible for keeping track of system performance as well as labeling data on a laptop computer. Mr. Kallman, the Uber spokesman, said the second person was in the car for purely data related tasks, not safety. When Uber moved to a single operator, some employees expressed safety concerns to managers, according to the two people familiar with Uber's operations. They were worried that going solo would make it harder to remain alert during hours of monotonous driving. The recorded telemetry showed the system had detected Herzberg six seconds before the crash, and classified her first as an unknown object, then as a

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  • Digital fashion

    Digital fashion

    Digital fashion is a field of fashion design that relies on 3D software or artificial intelligence to produce hyper-realistic, data-intensive digital 3D garment simulations that are digital-only products or digital models for physical products. Digital garments can be worn and presented in virtual environments, social media, online gaming, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) platforms. The field aims to contribute to the development of a more sustainable future for the fashion industry. It has been praised as a possible answer to ethical and creative concerns of traditional fashion by promoting innovation, reducing waste, and encouraging conscious consumption. However, empirical research has questioned whether digital fashion communities embody the radical and anti-consumerist values they claim. A 2025 study presented by YeSeung Lee at the FACTUM international conference on fashion communication analysed 88,141 posts across nine platforms over eight months using Pulsar. It found that only 4.8% of author biographies indicated any sociopolitical focus, and that discourse predominantly relied on generic slogans and trending buzzwords, primarily reinforcing existing fashion hierarchies and consumerist frameworks rather than challenging them. Digital fashion is also the interplay between digital technology and couture. Human AI is an intersection of technology and human representation, in which human value is emphasized and enhanced by technology and the possibilities of discovering design. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been deeply integrated both into the fashion industry, as well as within the experience of clients and prospects. Such interplay has happened at three main levels. ICTs are used to design and produce fashion products, while the industry organization also leverages digital technologies. ICTs impact marketing, distribution and sales. ICTs are extensively used in communication activities with all relevant stakeholders and contribute to co-create the fashion world. The fashion industry in general has paved the way for digital fashion to be introduced with more technology being in the industry, like virtual dressing rooms and the gamification of the fashion industry. Digital fashion is also seen on many different online fashion retail websites. This evolution in the fashion industry has called for more education and research of digital fashion. == Design, production, and organization == Among the many applications available to fashion designers to model the fusion of creativity with digital avenues, the Digital Textile Printing can be mentioned here. === Digital textile printing === Digital textile printing has brought together the worlds of fashion, technology, art, chemistry, and printing to produce a new process for printing textiles on clothing. Digital printing is a process in which prints are directly applied to fabrics with a printer, reducing 95% of the use of water, 75% of the use of energy and minimizing textile waste. The main advantage of digital printing is the ability to do very small runs of each design (even less than 1 yard). Digital Textile printing also offers other benefits, such as fast printing speeds that help the time and space needed to print different patterns on garments of choice. == Marketing, distribution, and sales == While all digital channels can be used in order to market and sell fashion completely online (eCommerce), they usually are implemented in connection with offline channels (so-called "omni-channel"). Here, virtual and augmented reality play a crucial role. The fashion industry has faced its own problems including pollution and fabric waste, which has resulted in a shift to more sustainable methods like digital fashion. The industry is also constantly being intertwined with digital media and has allowed for the use of digital tools within the business itself and with consumers. Two of the ways digital fashion is utilized with consumers is through virtual dressing rooms and virtual cosmetic counters. Prospects and clients can use ICTs - own computers, tablets and smartphones - to virtually simulate fitting rooms and cosmetics counters and see how they look in specific outfits and makeup. Customers can give any look and decide on what suits them and buy products. Oftentimes, beauty retailers will feature virtual fitting rooms to allow users to experience the look of their product before committing to a purchase. Some examples are color contact retailers Freshlook, which allows users to simulate contact lens wear in their color contacts studio before purchase. Colorful Eyes also offers a virtual color contact lens try-on room. === Virtual dressing room === A virtual dressing room (also often referred to as virtual fitting room and virtual changing room although they do perform different functions) is the online equivalent of the near-ubiquitous in-store changing room – that is, it enables shoppers to try on clothes to check one or more of size, fit or style, but virtually rather than physically. Fashion retailer Topshop installed a Kinect-powered virtual fitting room at its Moscow store. Created by AR Door, the Augmented Fitting Room system overlays 3D augmented reality clothes on the customer. Simple gestures and on-screen buttons let users "try on" different outfits. However, the high variability of virtual fit platforms to predict consumer clothes sizes called into question the accuracy of these systems in their current form. AI-powered Wardrobe and Outfit Planning Beyond virtual fitting rooms, the integration of artificial intelligence has enabled the rise of digital wardrobe management. These platforms use computer vision and machine learning to catalog a user’s physical or digital garments, providing automated outfit recommendations based on weather, occasion, and personal style trends. Fashion-tech startups utilize AI-driven garment simulation to help users plan outfits virtually, bridging the gap between digital-only fashion and physical wardrobe utility. This "smart closet" approach aims to reduce "wardrobe fatigue" and decrease unnecessary consumption by maximizing the use of existing items through digital visualization. === Communication and experience co-creation === Fashion is also a matter of socially negotiating what is "in" or "out", fashionable or not. In other words, fashion items do not only play on the economic market of physical goods but also - and sometimes even more importantly - on the semiotic market of the production of social tastes and customs. Thanks to social media, and to all services offered by the so-called web2.0, laypeople can contribute to co-create the fashion world, shaping tastes, customs, and fashion-related values. Social media, in general, has catapulted the impact fashion has on our everyday lives and values. Fashion has taken a central role in mass production and is constantly evolving due to the ever-lasting digital transformation. Social media has also helped evolve to a point where not only can brands reach consumers, but consumers can reach brands as well. TikTok for example started a trend in 2020 with #GucciModelChallenge. This creates a space where the brand is gaining awareness from their consumers in the ever-changing digital age. === Gamification === Gaming has played an important role in fostering digital aspects of the fashion world, first beginning with dress-up games that used avatars and allowed players to select garments. Nevertheless, it seems it will now move on to the real world and start using avatars of real people. Garments from luxurious brands have been copied and adapted into the aesthetics of games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Sims. As to the former, during COVID-19 lock-downs players recreated outfits from a variety of fashion brands, including Chanel, Gucci and Versace. It became a platform for users to showcase their costume designs. In April 2019, Moschino collaborated with simulation game The Sims in a capsule collection that featured signature Jeremy Scott garments. The collection was made available to shop and the campaign was set against the backdrop of a Sims-like atmosphere. Furthermore, in May 2019, Nike partnered up with Fortnite to include their iconic Jordan sneakers. In similar fashion, in May 2020, Marc Jacobs designed 6 of the brand's favorite looks for Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons in a partnership with Instagram user @AnimalCrossingFashionArchive. They were made available to download. Similarly, the other luxury brands mentioned, Louis Vuitton partnered with game League of Legends to create skins for characters within the game. Digital fashion in different video games allows users to express themselves beyond their avatars and combine the self-expression of fashion into the digital gaming realm. == Digital fashion education and research == Nowadays, the fashion industry needs experts in digital fashion, equipped with the above-ske

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  • Straight-Through Quality

    Straight-Through Quality

    Straight-Through Quality (STQ) are approaches and outputs of test automation that have quality and deliver business benefit. STQ takes its name from the business concept of straight-through processing (STP). Also acting as a tool and enabler for STP. Traditional techniques for testing and delivery have often required a great deal of manual support and intervention. These approaches are subject to human error, cost of delay and lack of reuse. These also have the negative side-effect of being unable to deliver 'fail-fast' approaches, which have proven popular with Agile practitioners. Previous traditional approaches have been typically expensive where whole silo'ed departments are created within commercial companies to deliver Quality and Deployment alone. Thus STQ as an approach hopes to resolve this problem. == Examples == Tangible examples of STQ approaches in the software industry are present and often known as continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). These combined can ensure that software delivery is integrated, automatically tested and ready for automatic delivery at any time. Together CI/CD can enable STQ which can be used as Business output terminology for business users who do not understand the technical complexities of CI/CD.

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  • Digital organism

    Digital organism

    A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolution. The study of digital organisms is closely related to the area of artificial life. == History == Digital organisms can be traced back to the game Darwin, developed in 1961 at Bell Labs, in which computer programs had to compete with each other by trying to stop others from executing . A similar implementation that followed this was the game Core War. In Core War, it turned out that one of the winning strategies was to replicate as fast as possible, which deprived the opponent of all computational resources. Programs in the Core War game were also able to mutate themselves and each other by overwriting instructions in the simulated "memory" in which the game took place. This allowed competing programs to embed damaging instructions in each other that caused errors (terminating the process that read it), "enslaved processes" (making an enemy program work for you), or even change strategies mid-game and heal themselves. Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory took the idea from Core War one step further in his core world system by introducing a genetic algorithm that automatically wrote programs. However, Rasmussen did not observe the evolution of complex and stable programs. It turned out that the programming language in which core world programs were written was very brittle, and more often than not mutations would completely destroy the functionality of a program. The first to solve the issue of program brittleness was Thomas S. Ray with his Tierra system, which was similar to core world. Ray made some key changes to the programming language such that mutations were much less likely to destroy a program. With these modifications, he observed for the first time computer programs that did indeed evolve in a meaningful and complex way. Later, Chris Adami, Titus Brown, and Charles Ofria started developing their Avida system, which was inspired by Tierra but again had some crucial differences. In Tierra, all programs lived in the same address space and could potentially execute or otherwise interfere with each other's code. In Avida, on the other hand, each program lives in its own address space. Because of this modification, experiments with Avida became much cleaner and easier to interpret than those with Tierra. With Avida, digital organism research has begun to be accepted as a valid contribution to evolutionary biology by a growing number of evolutionary biologists. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University has used Avida extensively in his work. Lenski, Adami, and their colleagues have published in journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). In 1996, Andy Pargellis created a Tierra-like system called Amoeba that evolved self-replication from a randomly seeded initial condition. More recently REvoSim - a software package based around binary digital organisms - has allowed evolutionary simulations of large populations that can be run for geological timescales.

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  • Orange (software)

    Orange (software)

    Orange is an open-source data visualization, machine learning and data mining toolkit. It features a visual programming front-end for exploratory qualitative data analysis and interactive data visualization. == Description == Orange is a component-based visual programming software package for data visualization, machine learning, data mining, and data analysis. Orange components are called widgets. They range from simple data visualization, subset selection, and preprocessing to empirical evaluation of learning algorithms and predictive modeling. Visual programming is implemented through an interface in which workflows are created by linking predefined or user-designed widgets, while advanced users can use Orange as a Python library for data manipulation and widget alteration. == Software == Orange is an open-source software package released under GPL and hosted on GitHub. Versions up to 3.0 include core components in C++ with wrappers in Python. From version 3.0 onwards, Orange uses common Python open-source libraries for scientific computing, such as numpy, scipy and scikit-learn, while its graphical user interface operates within the cross-platform Qt framework. The default installation includes a number of machine learning, preprocessing and data visualization algorithms in 6 widget sets (data, transform, visualize, model, evaluate and unsupervised). Additional functionalities are available as add-ons (text-mining, image analytics, bioinformatics, etc.). Orange is supported on macOS, Windows and Linux and can also be installed from the Python Package Index repository (pip install Orange3). == Features == Orange consists of a canvas interface onto which the user places widgets and creates a data analysis workflow. Widgets offer basic functionalities such as reading the data, showing a data table, selecting features, training predictors, comparing learning algorithms, visualizing data elements, etc. The user can interactively explore visualizations or feed the selected subset into other widgets. Canvas: graphical front-end for data analysis Widgets: Data: widgets for data input, data filtering, sampling, imputation, feature manipulation and feature selection Visualize: widgets for common visualization (box plot, histograms, scatter plot) and multivariate visualization (mosaic display, sieve diagram). Classify: a set of supervised machine learning algorithms for classification Regression: a set of supervised machine learning algorithms for regression Evaluate: cross-validation, sampling-based procedures, reliability estimation and scoring of prediction methods Unsupervised: unsupervised learning algorithms for clustering (k-means, hierarchical clustering) and data projection techniques (multidimensional scaling, principal component analysis, correspondence analysis). == Add-ons == Orange users can extend their core set of components with components in the add-ons. Supported add-ons include: Associate: components for mining frequent itemsets and association rule learning. Bioinformatics: components for gene expression analysis, enrichment, and access to expression databases (e.g., Gene Expression Omnibus) and pathway libraries. Data fusion: components for fusing different data sets, collective matrix factorization, and exploration of latent factors. Educational: components for teaching machine learning concepts, such as k-means clustering, polynomial regression, stochastic gradient descent, ... Explain: provides an extension with components for the model explanation, including Shapley value analysis Geo: components for working with geospatial data. Image analytics: components for working with images and ImageNet embeddings Network: components for graph and network analysis. Text mining: components for natural language processing and text mining. Time series: widget components for time series analysis and modeling. Single-cell: support for single-cell gene expression analysis, including components for loading single-cell data, filtering and batch effect removal, marker genes discovery, scoring of cells and genes, and cell type prediction. Spectroscopy: components for analyzing and visualization of (hyper)spectral datasets. Survival analysis: add-on for data analysis dealing with survival data. It includes widgets for standard survival analysis techniques, such as the Kaplan-Meier plot, the Cox regression model, and several derivative widgets. World Happiness: support for downloading socioeconomic data from a database, including OECD and World Development Indicators. Provides access to thousands of country indicators from various economic databases. Fairness: add-on for evaluation and creation of fair machine learning models without discrimination. Widgets range from computing fairness metrics like statistical parity to post-, pre-, in-processing methods to build fair models. == Objectives == The program provides a platform for experiment selection, recommendation systems, and predictive modelling and is used in biomedicine, bioinformatics, genomic research, and teaching. In science, it is used as a platform for testing new machine learning algorithms and for implementing new techniques in genetics and bioinformatics. In education, it was used for teaching machine learning and data mining methods to students of biology, biomedicine, and informatics. == Extensions == Various projects build on Orange either by extending the core components with add-ons or using only the Orange Canvas to exploit the implemented visual programming features and GUI. OASYS — ORange SYnchrotron Suite scOrange — single cell biostatistics Quasar — data analysis in natural sciences == History == In 1996, the University of Ljubljana and Jožef Stefan Institute started development of ML, a machine learning framework in C++, and Python bindings were developed for this framework in 1997, which, together with emerging Python modules, formed a joint framework called Orange. Over the following years, most contemporary major algorithms for data mining and machine learning were implemented in C++ (Orange's core) or Python modules. In 2002, first prototypes to create a flexible graphical user interface were designed using Pmw Python megawidgets. In 2003, the graphical user interface was redesigned and re-developed for Qt framework using PyQt Python bindings. The visual programming framework was defined, and the development of widgets (graphical components of the data analysis pipeline) began. In 2005, extensions for data analysis in bioinformatics was created. In 2008, Mac OS X DMG and Fink-based installation packages were developed. In 2009, over 100 widgets were created and maintained. In 2009, Orange 2.0 beta was released, offering installation packages on the website based on the daily compiling cycle. In 2012, a new object hierarchy was imposed, replacing the old module-based structure. In 2013, a significant redesign of the graphical user interface included a new toolbox and depiction of workflows. In 2015, Orange 3.0 was released. Orange stores the data in NumPy arrays; machine learning algorithms mostly use scikit-learn. In 2015, a text analysis add-on for Orange3 was released. In 2016, Orange released version 3.3. Development scheduled a monthly cycle for stable releases. In 2016, Orange began development and release of an Image Analytics add-on, with server-side deep neural networks for image embedding In 2017, a Spectroscopy add-on for the analysis of spectral data was introduced. In 2017, Geo, an add-on for dealing with geo-location data and visualisation of geo maps was introduced In 2018, Orange began development and release of an add-on for single-cell data analysis. In 2019, Orange separated its graphical interface for development as a separate project, orange-canvas-core In 2020, Orange introduced the Explain add-on with widgets for explaining classification models and regression models, highlighting the strength and contributions specific features make towards predicting a specific class. In 2022, World Happiness, an add-on for the Orange3 data mining suite, was introduced, providing widgets for accessing socioeconomic data from various databases such as World Happiness Report, World Development Indicators, OECD. In 2022, Orange extended the Explain add-on with an Individual Conditional Expectation plot and the Permutation Feature Importance technique. In 2023, Orange introduced the Fairness add-on, including widgets to calculate bias metrics, as well as widgets for pre-, post-, and in-processing methods, allowing the creation of models less susceptible to systematic error due to the vagaries of the data set.

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  • Fuzzy differential inclusion

    Fuzzy differential inclusion

    Fuzzy differential inclusion is the extension of differential inclusion to fuzzy sets introduced by Lotfi A. Zadeh. x ′ ( t ) ∈ [ f ( t , x ( t ) ) ] α {\displaystyle x'(t)\in [f(t,x(t))]^{\alpha }} with x ( 0 ) ∈ [ x 0 ] α {\displaystyle x(0)\in [x_{0}]^{\alpha }} Suppose f ( t , x ( t ) ) {\displaystyle f(t,x(t))} is a fuzzy valued continuous function on Euclidean space. Then it is the collection of all normal, upper semi-continuous, convex, compactly supported fuzzy subsets of R n {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} . == Second order differential == The second order differential is x ″ ( t ) ∈ [ k x ] α {\displaystyle x''(t)\in [kx]^{\alpha }} where k ∈ [ K ] α {\displaystyle k\in [K]^{\alpha }} , K {\displaystyle K} is trapezoidal fuzzy number ( − 1 , − 1 / 2 , 0 , 1 / 2 ) {\displaystyle (-1,-1/2,0,1/2)} , and x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} is a trianglular fuzzy number (-1,0,1). == Applications == Fuzzy differential inclusion (FDI) has applications in Cybernetics Artificial intelligence, Neural network, Medical imaging Robotics Atmospheric dispersion modeling Weather forecasting Cyclone Pattern recognition Population biology

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  • DocuWare

    DocuWare

    DocuWare is cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. DocuWare software provides document management, repository, and workflow automation functions (also referred to as enterprise content management (ECM) or content services). The company is headquartered in Germany and the United States. DocuWare is also the name of the flagship product offered by the company. == Company history == On October 27, 1988, DOCUNET GmbH was founded in Germering, Germany (near Munich) by President Jürgen Biffar. Since 1990, Biffar has been managing the company with his colleague, Thomas Schneck. DOCUNET AG has since been renamed and is now known as DocuWare. Since 1999, DocuWare has outsourced parts of its development to Sofia, Bulgaria. As of 2016, Nemetschek OOD had 42 employees working on the DocuWare product. DocuWare GmbH holds a 20 percent stake in Nemetschek OOD. In April 2012, an investment agreement was signed between the company and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital LP, a Morgan Stanley Investment Management private equity fund. Its aim was promoting and accelerating the global growth of DocuWare. The legal form, AG (Public Holding Company) changed to GmbH (limited liability corporation). The company acquired U.S.-based Westbrook Technologies Inc., developer of Fortis ECM software in August 2013. In 2014, Westbrook Technologies Inc. was merged into DocuWare Corporation. At the beginning of 2016, DocuWare appointed Dr. Michael Berger as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Dr. Berger joined the company in 2008 as Vice President Research & Development. On January 1, 2019, Jürgen Biffar and Thomas Schneck stepped back from their operational roles after 30 years, and Dr. Michael Berger and Max Ertl started their new roles as co-presidents. On August 6, 2019, DocuWare was acquired by Ricoh. DocuWare continues to operate as a standalone subsidiary of Ricoh. In 2020, the company received approval to move its U.S. headquarters from New Windsor to Beacon, New York. === Subsidiaries === DocuWare Corporation (Beacon, NY), founded January 1, 2001 DocuWare Ltd (Nottinghamshire), founded April 1, 2005 DocuWare SARL (Paris), founded September 1, 2008 DocuWare S.L. (Barcelona), founded July 1, 2009

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  • Distributed artificial intelligence

    Distributed artificial intelligence

    Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) (also called Decentralized Artificial Intelligence) is a melding of artificial intelligence with distributed computing. From artificial intelligence comes the theory and technology for constructing or analyzing an intelligent system. But where artificial intelligence uses psychology as a source of ideas, inspiration, and metaphor, DAI uses sociology, economics, and management science for inspiration. Where the focus of artificial intelligence is on the individual, the focus of DAI is on the group. Distributed computing provides the computational substrate on which this group focus can occur. Using techniques from artificial intelligence, communication theory, control theory, and interaction theory, it produces a cooperative solution to problems by a decentralized group of computational entities (agents). DAI is closely related to and a predecessor of the field of multi-agent systems. They are distinguished generally by multi-agent systems being open, where the entities might arise from different interests and have individual goals, and distributed artificial-intelligence systems, where the entities have common goals. There are numerous applications and tools. == Definition == Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is an approach to solving complex learning, planning, and decision-making problems. It is embarrassingly parallel, thus able to exploit large scale computation and spatial distribution of computing resources. These properties allow it to solve problems that require the processing of very large data sets. DAI systems consist of autonomous learning processing nodes (agents), that are distributed, often at a very large scale. DAI nodes can act independently, and partial solutions are integrated by communication between nodes, often asynchronously. By virtue of their scale, DAI systems are robust and elastic, and by necessity, loosely coupled. Furthermore, DAI systems are built to be adaptive to changes in the problem definition or underlying data sets due to the scale and difficulty in redeployment. DAI systems do not require all the relevant data to be aggregated in a single location, in contrast to monolithic or centralized Artificial Intelligence systems, which have tightly coupled and geographically close processing nodes. Therefore, DAI systems often operate on sub-samples or hashed impressions of very large datasets. In addition, the source dataset may change or be updated during the course of the execution of a DAI system. == Development == In 1975 distributed artificial intelligence emerged as a subfield of artificial intelligence that dealt with interactions of intelligent agents. As a scientific discipline, it progressed through a series of workshops in the USA (International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence, held in 13 editions from 1978 - 1994), Europe (Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World https://link.springer.com/conference/maamaw), and Asia (Multi-Agent and Cooperative Computation Workshop (MACC) https://sites.google.com/view/sig-macc/macc-workshop?authuser=0). Distributed artificial intelligence systems were conceived as a group of intelligent entities, called agents, that interacted by cooperation, by coexistence, or by competition. DAI is categorized into multi-agent systems and distributed problem solving. In multi-agent systems the main focus is how agents coordinate their knowledge and activities. For distributed problem solving the major focus is how the problem is decomposed and the solutions are synthesized. == Goals == The objectives of Distributed Artificial Intelligence are to solve the reasoning, planning, learning and perception problems of artificial intelligence, especially if they require large data, by distributing the problem to autonomous processing nodes (agents). To reach the objective, DAI requires: A distributed system with robust and elastic computation on unreliable and failing resources that are loosely coupled Coordination of the actions and communication of the nodes Subsamples of large data sets and online machine learning There are many reasons for wanting to distribute intelligence or cope with multi-agent systems. Mainstream problems in DAI research include the following: Parallel problem solving: mainly deals with how classic artificial intelligence concepts can be modified, so that multiprocessor systems and clusters of computers can be used to speed up calculation. Distributed problem solving (DPS): the concept of agent, autonomous entities that can communicate with each other, was developed to serve as an abstraction for developing DPS systems. See below for further details. Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS): a branch of DAI that builds the foundation for simulations that need to analyze not only phenomena at macro level but also at micro level, as it is in many social simulation scenarios. == Approaches == Two types of DAI has emerged: In Multi-agent systems agents coordinate their knowledge and activities and reason about the processes of coordination. Agents are physical or virtual entities that can act, perceive their environment, and communicate with other agents. An agent is autonomous and has skills to achieve goals. The agents change the state of their environment by their actions. There are a number of different coordination techniques. In distributed problem solving the work is divided among nodes and the knowledge is shared. The main concerns are task decomposition and synthesis of the knowledge and solutions. DAI can apply a bottom-up approach to AI, similar to the subsumption architecture as well as the traditional top-down approach of AI. In addition, DAI can also be a vehicle for emergence. === Challenges === The challenges in Distributed AI are: How to carry out communication and interaction of agents and which communication language or protocols should be used. How to ensure the coherency of agents. How to synthesise the results among 'intelligent agents' group by formulation, description, decomposition and allocation. == Applications and tools == Areas where DAI have been applied are: Electronic commerce, e.g. for trading strategies the DAI system learns financial trading rules from subsamples of very large samples of financial data Networks, e.g. in telecommunications the DAI system controls the cooperative resources in a WLAN network Routing, e.g. model vehicle flow in transport networks Scheduling, e.g. flow shop scheduling where the resource management entity ensures local optimization and cooperation for global and local consistency Search engines, e.g. in LLM federated search like Ithy where document retrieval and analysis are distributed to DAI agents before aggregation Multi-Agent systems, e.g. artificial life, the study of simulated life Electric power systems, e.g. Condition Monitoring Multi-Agent System (COMMAS) applied to transformer condition monitoring, and IntelliTEAM II Automatic Restoration System DAI integration in tools has included: ECStar is a distributed rule-based learning system. == Agents == === Systems: Agents and multi-agents === Notion of Agents: Agents can be described as distinct entities with standard boundaries and interfaces designed for problem solving. Notion of Multi-Agents: Multi-Agent system is defined as a network of agents which are loosely coupled working as a single entity like society for problem solving that an individual agent cannot solve. === Software agents === The key concept used in DPS and MABS is the abstraction called software agents. An agent is a virtual (or physical) autonomous entity that has an understanding of its environment and acts upon it. An agent is usually able to communicate with other agents in the same system to achieve a common goal, that one agent alone could not achieve. This communication system uses an agent communication language. A first classification that is useful is to divide agents into: reactive agent – A reactive agent is not much more than an automaton that receives input, processes it and produces an output. deliberative agent – A deliberative agent in contrast should have an internal view of its environment and is able to follow its own plans. hybrid agent – A hybrid agent is a mixture of reactive and deliberative, that follows its own plans, but also sometimes directly reacts to external events without deliberation. Well-recognized agent architectures that describe how an agent is internally structured are: ASMO (emergence of distributed modules) BDI (Believe Desire Intention, a general architecture that describes how plans are made) InterRAP (A three-layer architecture, with a reactive, a deliberative and a social layer) PECS (Physics, Emotion, Cognition, Social, describes how those four parts influences the agents behavior). Soar (a rule-based approach)

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  • Land of Memories

    Land of Memories

    Land of Memories (Chinese: 机忆之地) is a Chinese science-fiction novel by Shen Yang (沈阳), a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Journalism and Communication. The story revolves around a former neuroscientist trying to recover her memories from the metaverse after suffering amnesia due to an accident. It contains almost 6,000 Chinese characters and was shortened from an AI-generated draft that was 43,000 characters long. The process involved 66 prompts spanning almost three hours. The novel was among 18 submissions that won the level-two prize at the Fifth Jiangsu Youth Science Education and Science Fiction Competition (第五届江苏省青年科普科幻作品大赛). The contest was restricted to participants between the age of 14 and 45 but did not forbid entries generated by AI. One of its organizers reached out to Shen after finding out that the professor had been experimenting with writing science fiction using AI. The judges were not told about the novel's origin in advance. Three of them, out of the six, approved the work. One judge, who had worked with AI models before, recognized that the novel was written by AI and criticized the work for lacking emotional appeal. The organizer who had contacted Shen said the novel's introduction was not bad but the story did not develop well. It would not meet the usual standards for publication. However, he still plans to allow AI-generated submissions in 2024. Fu Ruchu, editorial department director of the People's Literature Publishing House, said the novel was not easily identifiable as AI-generated and applauded its logical consistency. She warned that artificial intelligence could endanger the jobs of fiction writers and cause permanent damage to literary language.

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