AI Code Base

AI Code Base — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

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  Terminology model

  A terminology model is a refinement of a concept system. Within a terminology model the concepts (object types) of a specific problem or subject area are defined by subject-matter experts in terms of concept (object type) definitions and definitions of subordinated concepts or characteristics (properties). Besides object types, the terminology model allows defining hierarchical classifications, definitions for object type and property behavior and definition of casual relations. The terminology model is a means for subject-matter experts to express their knowledge about the subject in subject-specific terms. Since the terminology model is structured rather similar to an object-oriented database schema, is can be transformed without loss of information into an object-oriented database schema. Thus, the terminology model is a method for problem analysis on the one side and a mean of defining database schema on the other side. Several terminology models have been developed and published in the field of statistics: Terminology model for classifications Terminology model for statistical variables Reference model for statistical metadata

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  Grokking (machine learning)

  In machine learning, grokking, or delayed generalization, is a phenomenon observed in some settings where a model abruptly transitions from overfitting (performing well only on training data) to generalizing (performing well on both training and test data), after many training iterations with little or no improvement on the held-out data. This contrasts with what is typically observed in machine learning, where generalization occurs gradually alongside improved performance on training data. == Origin == Grokking was introduced by OpenAI researcher Alethea Power and colleagues in the January 2022 paper "Grokking: Generalization Beyond Overfitting on Small Algorithmic Datasets". It is derived from the word grok coined by Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In ML research, "grokking" is not used as a synonym for "generalization"; rather, it names a sometimes-observed delayed‑generalization training phenomenon in which training and held‑out performance do not improve in tandem, and in which held‑out performance rises abruptly later. Authors also analyze the "grokking time", the epoch or step at which this transition occurs in those scenarios. == Interpretations == Grokking can be understood as a phase transition during the training process. In particular, recent work has shown that grokking may be due to a complexity phase transition in the model during training. While grokking has been thought of as largely a phenomenon of relatively shallow models, grokking has been observed in deep neural networks and non-neural models and is the subject of active research. One potential explanation is that the weight decay (a component of the loss function that penalizes higher values of the neural network parameters, also called regularization) slightly favors the general solution that involves lower weight values, but that is also harder to find. According to Neel Nanda, the process of learning the general solution may be gradual, even though the transition to the general solution occurs more suddenly later. Recent theories have hypothesized that grokking occurs when neural networks transition from a "lazy training" regime where the weights do not deviate far from initialization, to a "rich" regime where weights abruptly begin to move in task-relevant directions. Follow-up empirical and theoretical work has accumulated evidence in support of this perspective, and it offers a unifying view of earlier work as the transition from lazy to rich training dynamics is known to arise from properties of adaptive optimizers, weight decay, initial parameter weight norm, and more. This perspective is complementary to a unifying "pattern learning speeds" framework that links grokking and double descent; within this view, delayed generalization can arise across training time ("epoch‑wise") or across model size ("model‑wise"), and the authors report "model‑wise grokking".

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  Smart object

  A smart object is an object that enhances the interaction with not only people but also with other smart objects. Also known as smart connected products or smart connected things (SCoT), they are products, assets and other things embedded with processors, sensors, software and connectivity that allow data to be exchanged between the product and its environment, manufacturer, operator/user, and other products and systems. Connectivity also enables some capabilities of the product to exist outside the physical device, in what is known as the product cloud. The data collected from these products can be then analysed to inform decision-making, enable operational efficiencies and continuously improve the performance of the product. It can not only refer to interaction with physical world objects but also to interaction with virtual (computing environment) objects. A smart physical object may be created either as an artifact or manufactured product or by embedding electronic tags such as RFID tags or sensors into non-smart physical objects. Smart virtual objects are created as software objects that are intrinsic when creating and operating a virtual or cyber world simulation or game. The concept of a smart object has several origins and uses, see History. There are also several overlapping terms, see also smart device, tangible object or tangible user interface and Thing as in the Internet of things. == History == In the early 1990s, Mark Weiser, from whom the term ubiquitous computing originated, referred to a vision "When almost every object either contains a computer or can have a tab attached to it, obtaining information will be trivial", Although Weiser did not specifically refer to an object as being smart, his early work did imply that smart physical objects are smart in the sense that they act as digital information sources. Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer refer to tangible objects in terms of tangibles bits or tangible user interfaces that enable users to "grasp & manipulate" bits in the center of users' attention by coupling the bits with everyday physical objects and architectural surfaces. The smart object concept was introduced by Marcelo Kallman and Daniel Thalmann as an object that can describe its own possible interactions. The main focus here is to model interactions of smart virtual objects with virtual humans, agents, in virtual worlds. The opposite approach to smart objects is 'plain' objects that do not provide this information. The additional information provided by this concept enables far more general interaction schemes, and can greatly simplify the planner of an artificial intelligence agent. In contrast to smart virtual objects used in virtual worlds, Lev Manovich focuses on physical space filled with electronic and visual information. Here, "smart objects" are described as "objects connected to the Net; objects that can sense their users and display smart behaviour". More recently in the early 2010s, smart objects are being proposed as a key enabler for the vision of the Internet of things. The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as near field communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors enables everyday objects to be transformed into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of things and enable novel computing applications. In 2018, one of the world's first smart houses was built in Klaukkala, Finland in the form of a five-floor apartment block, using the Kone Residential Flow solution created by KONE, allowing even a smartphone to act as a home key. == Characteristics == Although we can view interaction with physical smart object in the physical world as distinct from interaction with virtual smart objects in a virtual simulated world, these can be related. Poslad considers the progression of: how humans use models of smart objects situated in the physical world to enhance human to physical world interaction; versus how smart physical objects situated in the physical world can model human interaction in order to lessen the need for human to physical world interaction; versus how virtual smart objects by modelling both physical world objects and modelling humans as objects and their subsequent interactions can form a predominantly smart virtual object environment. === Smart physical objects === The concept smart for a smart physical object simply means that it is active, digital, networked, can operate to some extent autonomously, is reconfigurable and has local control of the resources it needs such as energy, data storage, etc. Note, a smart object does not necessarily need to be intelligent as in exhibiting a strong essence of artificial intelligence—although it can be designed to also be intelligent. Physical world smart objects can be described in terms of three properties: Awareness: is a smart object's ability to understand (that is, sense, interpret, and react to) events and human activities occurring in the physical world. Representation: refers to a smart object's application and programming model—in particular, programming abstractions. Interaction: denotes the object's ability to converse with the user in terms of input, output, control, and feedback. Based upon these properties, these have been classified into three types: Activity-Aware Smart Objects: Are objects that can record information about work activities and its own use. Policy-Aware Smart Objects: Are objects that are activity-aware Objects can interpret events and activities with respect to predefined organizational policies. Process-Aware Smart Objects: Processes play a fundamental role in industrial work management and operation. A process is a collection of related activities or tasks that are ordered according to their position in time and space. === Smart virtual objects === For the virtual object in a virtual world case, an object is called smart when it has the ability to describe its possible interactions. This focuses on constructing a virtual world using only virtual objects that contain their own interaction information. There are four basic elements to constructing such a smart virtual object framework. Object properties: physical properties and a text description Interaction information: position of handles, buttons, grips, and the like Object behavior: different behaviors based on state variables Agent behaviors: description of the behavior an agent should follow when using the object Some versions of smart objects also include animation information in the object information, but this is not considered to be an efficient approach, since this can make objects inappropriately oversized. === Categorization === The terms smart, connected product or smart product can be confusing as it is used to cover a broad range of different products, ranging from smart home appliances (e.g., smart bathroom scales or smart light bulbs) to smart cars (e.g., Tesla). While these products share certain similarities, they often differ substantially in their capabilities. Raff et al. developed a conceptual framework that distinguishes different smart products based on their capabilities, which features 4 types of smart product archetypes (in ascending order of "smartness"). Digital Connected Responsive Intelligent == Advantages == Smart, connected products have three primary components: Physical – made up of the product's mechanical and electrical parts. Smart – made up of sensors, microprocessors, data storage, controls, software, and an embedded operating system with enhanced user interface. Connectivity – made up of ports, antennae, and protocols enabling wired/wireless connections that serve two purposes, it allows data to be exchanged with the product and enables some functions of the product to exist outside the physical device. Each component expands the capabilities of one another resulting in "a virtuous cycle of value improvement". First, the smart components of a product amplify the value and capabilities of the physical components. Then, connectivity amplifies the value and capabilities of the smart components. These improvements include: Monitoring of the product's conditions, its external environment, and its operations and usage. Control of various product functions to better respond to changes in its environment, as well as to personalize the user experience. Optimization of the product's overall operations based on actual performance data, and reduction of downtimes through predictive maintenance and remote service. Autonomous product operation, including learning from their environment, adapting to users' preferences and self-diagnosing and service. === The Internet of things (IoT) === The Internet of things is the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment. The phrase "Internet of things" reflects the gro

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  Data augmentation

  Data augmentation is a statistical technique which allows maximum likelihood estimation from incomplete data. Data augmentation has important applications in Bayesian analysis, and the technique is widely used in machine learning to reduce overfitting when training machine learning models, achieved by training models on several slightly-modified copies of existing data. == Synthetic oversampling techniques for traditional machine learning == Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) is a method used to address imbalanced datasets in machine learning. In such datasets, the number of samples in different classes varies significantly, leading to biased model performance. For example, in a medical diagnosis dataset with 90 samples representing healthy individuals and only 10 samples representing individuals with a particular disease, traditional algorithms may struggle to accurately classify the minority class. SMOTE rebalances the dataset by generating synthetic samples for the minority class. For instance, if there are 100 samples in the majority class and 10 in the minority class, SMOTE can create synthetic samples by randomly selecting a minority class sample and its nearest neighbors, then generating new samples along the line segments joining these neighbors. This process helps increase the representation of the minority class, improving model performance. == Data augmentation for image classification == When convolutional neural networks grew larger in mid-1990s, there was a lack of data to use, especially considering that some part of the overall dataset should be spared for later testing. It was proposed to perturb existing data with affine transformations to create new examples with the same labels, which were complemented by so-called elastic distortions in 2003, and the technique was widely used as of 2010s. Data augmentation can enhance CNN performance and acts as a countermeasure against CNN profiling attacks. Data augmentation has become fundamental in image classification, enriching training dataset diversity to improve model generalization and performance. The evolution of this practice has introduced a broad spectrum of techniques, including geometric transformations, color space adjustments, and noise injection. === Geometric Transformations === Geometric transformations alter the spatial properties of images to simulate different perspectives, orientations, and scales. Common techniques include: Affine Transformation Rotation: Rotating images by a specified degree to help models recognize objects at various angles. Reflection: Reflecting images horizontally or vertically to introduce variability in orientation. Translation: Shifting images in different directions to teach models positional invariance. Scaling Shear Mapping Cropping: Removing sections of the image to focus on particular features or simulate closer views. Elastic Distortion Morphing within the same class: Generating new samples by applying morphing techniques between two images belonging to the same class, thereby increasing intra-class diversity. === Color Space Transformations === Color space transformations modify the color properties of images, addressing variations in lighting, color saturation, and contrast. Techniques include: Brightness Adjustment: Varying the image's brightness to simulate different lighting conditions. Contrast Adjustment: Changing the contrast to help models recognize objects under various clarity levels. Saturation Adjustment: Altering saturation to prepare models for images with diverse color intensities. Color Jittering: Randomly adjusting brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue to introduce color variability. === Noise Injection === Injecting noise into images simulates real-world imperfections, teaching models to ignore irrelevant variations. Techniques involve: Gaussian Noise: Adding Gaussian noise mimics sensor noise or graininess. Salt and Pepper Noise: Introducing black or white pixels at random simulates sensor dust or dead pixels. == Data augmentation for signal processing == Residual or block bootstrap can be used for time series augmentation. === Biological signals === Synthetic data augmentation is of paramount importance for machine learning classification, particularly for biological data, which tend to be high dimensional and scarce. The applications of robotic control and augmentation in disabled and able-bodied subjects still rely mainly on subject-specific analyses. Data scarcity is notable in signal processing problems such as for Parkinson's Disease Electromyography signals, which are difficult to source - Zanini, et al. noted that it is possible to use a generative adversarial network (in particular, a DCGAN) to perform style transfer in order to generate synthetic electromyographic signals that corresponded to those exhibited by sufferers of Parkinson's Disease. The approaches are also important in electroencephalography (brainwaves). Wang, et al. explored the idea of using deep convolutional neural networks for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition, results show that emotion recognition was improved when data augmentation was used. A common approach is to generate synthetic signals by re-arranging components of real data. Lotte proposed a method of "Artificial Trial Generation Based on Analogy" where three data examples x 1 , x 2 , x 3 {\displaystyle x_{1},x_{2},x_{3}} provide examples and an artificial x s y n t h e t i c {\displaystyle x_{synthetic}} is formed which is to x 3 {\displaystyle x_{3}} what x 2 {\displaystyle x_{2}} is to x 1 {\displaystyle x_{1}} . A transformation is applied to x 1 {\displaystyle x_{1}} to make it more similar to x 2 {\displaystyle x_{2}} , the same transformation is then applied to x 3 {\displaystyle x_{3}} which generates x s y n t h e t i c {\displaystyle x_{synthetic}} . This approach was shown to improve performance of a Linear Discriminant Analysis classifier on three different datasets. Current research shows great impact can be derived from relatively simple techniques. For example, Freer observed that introducing noise into gathered data to form additional data points improved the learning ability of several models which otherwise performed relatively poorly. Tsinganos et al. studied the approaches of magnitude warping, wavelet decomposition, and synthetic surface EMG models (generative approaches) for hand gesture recognition, finding classification performance increases of up to +16% when augmented data was introduced during training. More recently, data augmentation studies have begun to focus on the field of deep learning, more specifically on the ability of generative models to create artificial data which is then introduced during the classification model training process. In 2018, Luo et al. observed that useful EEG signal data could be generated by Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which was then introduced to the training set in a classical train-test learning framework. The authors found classification performance was improved when such techniques were introduced. === Mechanical signals === The prediction of mechanical signals based on data augmentation brings a new generation of technological innovations, such as new energy dispatch, 5G communication field, and robotics control engineering. In 2022, Yang et al. integrate constraints, optimization and control into a deep network framework based on data augmentation and data pruning with spatio-temporal data correlation, and improve the interpretability, safety and controllability of deep learning in real industrial projects through explicit mathematical programming equations and analytical solutions.

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  PerfKitBenchmarker

  PerfKit Benchmarker is an open source benchmarking tool used to measure and compare cloud offerings. PerfKit Benchmarker is licensed under the Apache 2 license terms. PerfKit Benchmarker is a community effort involving over 500 participants including researchers, academic institutions and companies together with the originator, Google. == General == PerfKit Benchmarker (PKB) is a community effort to deliver a repeatable, consistent, and open way of measuring Cloud Performance. It supports a growing list of cloud providers including: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, Rackspace, IBM Bluemix (Softlayer). In addition to Cloud Providers to supports container orchestration including Kubernetes [1] and Mesos [2] and local "static" workstations and clusters of computers [3]. The goal is to create an open source living benchmark [framework] that represents how Cloud developers are building applications, evaluating Cloud alternatives, learning how to architect applications for each cloud. Living because it will change and morph quickly as developers change. PerfKit Benchmarker measures the end to end time to provision resources in the cloud, in addition to reporting on the most standard metrics of peak performance, e.g.: latency, throughput, time-to-complete, IOPS. PerfKit Benchmarker reduces the complexity in running benchmarks on supported cloud providers by unified and simple commands. It's designed to operate via vendor provided command line tools. PerfKit Benchmarker contains a canonical set of public benchmarks. All benchmarks are running with default/initial state and configuration (Not tuned to in favor of any providers). This provides a way to benchmark across cloud platforms, while getting a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance, and overhead. == History == PerfKit Benchmarker (PKB) was started by Anthony F. Voellm, Alain Hamel, and Eric Hankland at Google in 2014. Once an initial "alpha" was in place Anthony F. Voellm and Ivan Santa Maria Filho built a community including ARM, Broadcom, Canonical, CenturyLink, Cisco, CloudHarmony, CloudSpectator, EcoCloud@EPFL, Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Rackspace, Red Hat, Tradeworx Inc., and Thesys Technologies LLC. This community worked together behind the scenes in a private GitHub project to create an open way to measure cloud performance. This community released the first public "beta" was released on February 11, 2015, and announced in a blog post at which point the GitHub project was open to everyone. After almost a year and with large adaption (600+ participants on GitHub) the V1.0.0 was released along with a detailed architectural design on December 10, 2015. == Benchmarks == A list of available benchmarks from PerfKitBenchmarker: (The latest set of benchmarks can be found at GitHub readme file.) == Industry participants == Since Google open sourced the PerfKitBenchmarker, it became a community effort from over 30 leading researchers, academic schools and industry companies. Those organizations include: ARM, Broadcom, Canonical, CenturyLink, Cisco, CloudHarmony, Cloud Spectator, EcoCloud@EPFL, Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Qualcomm Technologies, Rackspace, Red Hat, and Thesys Technologies. In addition, Stanford and MIT are leading quarterly discussions on default benchmarks and settings proposed by the community. EcoCloud@EPFL is integrating CloudSuite into PerfKit Benchmarker. == Example runs == On Google Cloud Platform On AWS On Azure On Rackspace On a local machine

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  Self-management (computer science)

  Self-management is the process by which computer systems manage their own operation without human intervention. Self-management technologies are expected to pervade the next generation of network management systems. The growing complexity of modern networked computer systems is a limiting factor in their expansion. The increasing heterogeneity of corporate computer systems, the inclusion of mobile computing devices, and the combination of different networking technologies like WLAN, cellular phone networks, and mobile ad hoc networks make the conventional, manual management difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone. More recently, self-management has been suggested as a solution to increasing complexity in cloud computing. An industrial initiative towards realizing self-management is the Autonomic Computing Initiative (ACI) started by IBM in 2001. The ACI defines the following four functional areas: Self-configuration Auto-configuration of components Self-healing Automatic discovery, and correction of faults; automatically applying all necessary actions to bring system back to normal operation Self-optimization Automatic monitoring and control of resources to ensure the optimal functioning with respect to the defined requirements Self-protection Proactive identification and protection from arbitrary attacks

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  The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis

  The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis is a report authored by James van Geelen and Alap Shah and published by Citrini Research in February 2026, on the impact of artificial intelligence on humanity's future. Written in the form of a scenario analysis, it was viewed millions of times online and reportedly caused a fall in the stock market prices of major tech and financial firms. It also received criticism among others, for its allegedly flawed economic logic. The 'thought exercise', as the authors called it, painted a gloomy picture for the near future, where outputs keep growing while consumer's ability to spend collapses. "...driven by ai agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance”, "outputs that are shown in national accounts increases, "but never circulates through the real economy"(which the report calls 'Ghost GDP'), the authors argued. In other words, the authors predict a scenario where the owners of the AI firms will accumulate a vast fortune but there will be scant demand from consumers as AI would cause massive unemployment. The authors caution the reader that what they make is a scenario and not a prediction. In the scenario they visualise, any service whose value proposition is “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” is getting disrupted. The reports argues that the unique ability of human beings to analyse, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate was “the thing that could not be replicated at scale,” and call the historical scarcity of this precious entity 'friction'. When this friction becomes zero, a gamut of changes occur which then triggers a cascading of changes across the economy. ”Travel booking platforms are an early casualty; Financial advice. tax prep., and routine legal work follow suit. National unemployment rate go as high 10.2% and the S&P 500 goes for a massive 38% peak-to-trough crash. In contrast to the previous technological revolutions the high-earning professionals suffers more and get forced to take up roles in the gig economy. Labour supply becomes abundant and this cuts wages all across the economy. The dent in income for the employees then affects other sectors of the economy such as the residential mortgage market. The losses for the software companies triggers loan defaults and heralds peril for the private credit sector.

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  Ameca (robot)

  Ameca is a robotic humanoid created in 2021 by Engineered Arts, headquarters in Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom. The project commenced in February 2021, and the first public demonstration was at the CES 2022 show in Las Vegas. Ameca's appearance features grey rubber skin on the face and hands, and is specifically designed to appear genderless. In 2024, an Ameca unit was installed in Edinburgh in the UK to reside at the National Robotarium. Ameca generation 3 has been released and showcased at ICRA 2025 along with Ami. == History == The first generation of Ameca was developed at Engineered Arts headquarters in Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom. The project started in February 2021, with the first video revealed publicly on 1 December 2021. Ameca gained widespread attention on Twitter and TikTok ahead of its first public demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022, where it was covered by CNET and other news outlets. In 2022, Ameca presented an Alternative Christmas message by British TV Channel 4 for Christmas Day. Ameca was associated with the Museum of the Future's robotic family, where it could interact with visitors. In 2024, an Ameca unit was installed in Edinburgh in the UK to reside at the National Robotarium. In January 2026, Ameca served as an ambassador for the European Space Agency (ESA) at the 18th European Space Conference. == Features == It is designed as a platform for further developing robotics technologies involving human-robot interaction. utilizes embedded microphones, binocular eye mounted cameras, a chest camera and facial recognition software to interact with the public. Interactions can be governed by either OpenAI's GPT-3 or human telepresence. It also features articulated motorized arms, fingers, neck and facial features. Ameca's appearance features grey rubber skin on the face and hands, and is specifically designed to appear genderless. == Public appearances == Computer History Museum, California Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, Paderborn, Germany Copernicus Science Center, Warsaw, Poland Museum of the Future, Dubai Consumer Electronics Show 2022 Deutsches Museum Nuremberg OMR Festival 2022 Hosted by Vodafone GITEX 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2023 International Telecommunication Union AI for Good Global Summit 2023 Sphere (Not Ameca, Custom humanoid named Aura built on Ameca technology)

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  Splitwise

  Splitwise is an online expense-splitting application software accessible via web browser and mobile app. The app facilitates repayments of shared bills by calculating what each person in a group owes. The primary competitor to the app is Venmo, which only operates in the U.S. Splitwise allows users to create groups with friends to determine what each person owes. All expenses and allocations are added to the app, and Splitwise simplifies the transaction history to determine exactly what payments need to be made to whom to settle outstanding balances. Splitwise stores user information via cloud storage. It was developed and is owned by Splitwise Inc., based in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. == History == The app was launched in February 2011 as SplitTheRent, intended to be used for rent splitting, by Ryan Laughlin, Jon Bittner and Marshall Weir. In September 2013, Splitwise was integrated with Venmo to allow users to settle payments via Venmo. In April 2024, Splitwise partnered with Tink, a Visa payment services company, to incorporate a bank transfer feature directly in the Splitwise app. === Financing === In December 2014, the company raised $1.4 million. In October 2016, the company raised $5 million. In April 2021, Splitwise raised $20 million in funding from series A round run by Insight Partners. == Reception == A 2022 opinion piece in The Guardian by London journalist Imogen West-Knights shared the negative effects of exactly splitting bills among friends and family members. West-Knights argued that Splitwise and similar apps can "turn people into those true enemies of all that is fun and joyful in the world: accountants." However, she said the app does work better when used by couples rather than friend groups. Other reviews noted that the app makes people petty. In contrast, an article published by Condé Nast Traveler describes how Splitwise eliminated stress caused by complicated offline bill splitting, saying it "fixed such a pervasive obstacle in group travel." Coverage by The Wall Street Journal lands somewhere in between the two contrasting views, saying Splitwise and similar apps are helpful, but users need to be prepared for difficult money-related conversations that may arise. An etiquette advisor at Debrett's, said, "The less talk you can have about money on any of these occasions, the better." An editor suggested conversations as simple as asking, "We’re splitting this evenly, right?" before a meal.

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  Statistical relational learning

  Statistical relational learning (SRL) is a subdiscipline of artificial intelligence and machine learning that is concerned with domain models that exhibit both uncertainty (which can be dealt with using statistical methods) and complex, relational structure. Typically, the knowledge representation formalisms developed in SRL use (a subset of) first-order logic to describe relational properties of a domain in a general manner (universal quantification) and draw upon probabilistic graphical models (such as Bayesian networks or Markov networks) to model the uncertainty; some also build upon the methods of inductive logic programming. Significant contributions to the field have been made since the late 1990s. As is evident from the characterization above, the field is not strictly limited to learning aspects; it is equally concerned with reasoning (specifically probabilistic inference) and knowledge representation. Therefore, alternative terms that reflect the main foci of the field include statistical relational learning and reasoning (emphasizing the importance of reasoning) and first-order probabilistic languages (emphasizing the key properties of the languages with which models are represented). Another term that is sometimes used in the literature is relational machine learning (RML). == Canonical tasks == A number of canonical tasks are associated with statistical relational learning, the most common ones being. collective classification, i.e. the (simultaneous) prediction of the class of several objects given objects' attributes and their relations link prediction, i.e. predicting whether or not two or more objects are related link-based clustering, i.e. the grouping of similar objects, where similarity is determined according to the links of an object, and the related task of collaborative filtering, i.e. the filtering for information that is relevant to an entity (where a piece of information is considered relevant to an entity if it is known to be relevant to a similar entity) social network modelling object identification/entity resolution/record linkage, i.e. the identification of equivalent entries in two or more separate databases/datasets == Representation formalisms == One of the fundamental design goals of the representation formalisms developed in SRL is to abstract away from concrete entities and to represent instead general principles that are intended to be universally applicable. Since there are countless ways in which such principles can be represented, many representation formalisms have been proposed in recent years. In the following, some of the more common ones are listed in alphabetical order: Bayesian logic program BLOG model Markov logic networks Multi-entity Bayesian network Probabilistic logic programs Probabilistic relational model – a Probabilistic Relational Model (PRM) is the counterpart of a Bayesian network in statistical relational learning. Probabilistic soft logic Recursive random field Relational Bayesian network Relational dependency network Relational Markov network Relational Kalman filtering

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  AI data center

  An AI data center is a specialized data center facility designed for the computationally intensive tasks of training and running inference for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning models. Unlike general-purpose data centers, they are optimized for the parallel processing demands of AI workloads, typically using hardware such as AI accelerators (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) and high-speed interconnects. The global push to construct these specialized facilities accelerated dramatically during the AI boom of the 2020s. Memory manufacturers prioritized production of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) essential for AI servers, which led to a global memory supply shortage amid a broader competition for advanced chips, power, and infrastructure. Major tech companies are estimated to spend $650 billion on AI data centers in 2026. == Architecture == Data centers for building and running large machine learning models contain specialized computer chips, GPUs, that use 2 to 4 times as much energy as their regular CPU counterparts (250-500 watts). AI data centers use 60 or more kilowatts per server rack, whereas more standard data centers typically use 5 to 10 kilowatts per rack. == Operators == As of August 2025, The Information tracked 18 planned or existing AI data centers in the United States, operated by Amazon Web Services, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Meta, Microsoft/OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla, and xAI. Other AI data center operators include Digital Realty and Alibaba. Data centers are also being built in China, India, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. The New Yorker described CoreWeave as the most prominent AI data center operator in the United States. Two types of data center providers for machine learning have been noted: hyperscalers and neoclouds. The Verge listed large technology companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon as hyperscalers. The New York Times described neoclouds as "a new generation of data center providers". CoreWeave, Nebius, Nscale, and Lambda have been described as examples of neoclouds. In January 2025, OpenAI, in partnership with Oracle and Softbank, announced the Stargate project, which as of September 2025 is composed of six built or proposed AI data centers in the United States. In response to the Stargate project, Amazon launched in October 2025 an AI data center on 1,200 acres of farmland in Indiana. This data center, known as Project Rainier, is one of the largest AI data centers in the world, with Amazon spending $11 billion on the project. Rainier is specifically intended for training and running machine learning models from Anthropic. As of that time, this facility contains seven data centers (out of an estimated 30 planned) and will use 2.2 gigawatts of electricity (equivalent to 1 million households) and millions of gallons of water per year. Computer chips from Annapurna Labs and Anthropic, Trainium 2, were designed for use in such facilities. Amazon pumped millions of gallons of water out of the ground to construct the data center, and as of June 2025, Indiana state officials are investigating whether this dewatering process led to dry wells for local residents. In November 2025, Anthropic announced a plan in partnership with Fluidstack to develop artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States, including data centers in New York and Texas, worth $50 billion. Other AI data center projects include the Colossus supercomputer from xAI, a Louisiana-based project from Meta, Hyperion, expected to use 5 GW of power, and a second Ohio-based Meta project, Prometheus, with a capacity of 1 GW. A 3,200-acre AI data center, capable of 4.4-4.5 GW of power and located on the decommissioned Homer City Generating Station, is under construction as of 2025, and will use seven 30-acre gas generating stations supplied by EQT. As of December 2025, CRH is working on over 100 data centers in the United States. In 2025, ExxonMobil and NextEra announced plans to build a data center powered by natural gas and using carbon capture technology, with 1.2 GW of power capacity. They previously purchased 2,500 acres of land in the Southeastern United States and plan to market the data center to an artificial intelligence company. The increased interest in AI data centers has led to several executives from companies in that space becoming billionaires, including CoreWeave, QTS, Nebius, Astera Labs, Groq, Fermi (which is connected to former United States Secretary of Energy Rick Perry), Snowflake and Cipher Mining. Several companies involved in cryptocurrency mining, such as Bitdeer, CoreWeave, Cipher Mining, TeraWulf, IREN, Core Scientific, and CleanSpark have also been involved with AI data centers. == Finances == Between January and August 2024, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon collectively spent $125 billion on AI data centers. Citigroup forecasted that $2.8 trillion would be spent on AI data centers by 2030, while McKinsey and Company estimated that almost $7 trillion would be spent globally by that time. According to S&P Global, $61 billion has been spent on the data center market as a whole in 2025, while debt issuance for data centers was $182 billion during the same year. Large technology companies have offloaded the financial risks of building AI data centers by setting up special purpose vehicles or by contracting with neoclouds. For example, Meta's Hyperion was mostly funded by Blue Owl Capital, which did so using a bond offering from PIMCO. Those bonds were sold to a number of clients, including BlackRock. Meta did not borrow money itself and instead established a special purpose vehicle from which it would rent the data center. This deal was structured by Morgan Stanley for $30 billion, the largest known private capital transaction as of 2025. Neoclouds such as CoreWeave have gone into debt to buy computer chips from Nvidia for their data centers, and the chips themselves have been used for loan collateral. As of December 2025, CoreWeave took out three GPU-backed loans, collectively worth $12.4 billion, from private credit firms (Blackstone, Coatue, BlackRock, PIMCO) and from banks (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo). Thus, these companies provide an indirect connection between private credit and established banks. Data centers have also established asset-backed securities, and debt for data centers has its own derivative financial products. The real estate industry, including asset managers, public companies and private investors, has also invested in data centers. == Energy sourcing == == Environmental footprint == Average AI data centers have an electricity footprint equivalent to 100,000 households, and use billions of gallons of water for cooling their hardware. In 2025, the International Energy Agency estimated that the larger AI data centers currently under construction could consume as much electricity as 2 million households. A 2024 report from the United States Department of Energy stated that data centers overall used 17 billion gallons of water per year in the United States, primarily due to "rapid proliferation of AI servers", and that this usage was forecasted to grow to nearly 80 billion gallons by 2028. Researchers estimated that AI data centers in the United States would emit 24-44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and use 731–1,125 million cubic meters of water per year between 2024 and 2030. Peaking power plants, which have been proposed as a power source for AI data centers, emit sulfur dioxide and have historically been located disproportionately near communities of color in the United States. Reciprocating internal combustion engines, proposed as another power source for a data center, emit PM 2.5, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds. == AI data centers in the United States == In the United States, both the Biden administration and second Trump administration supported the construction of AI data centers. In January 2025, then-president Joe Biden signed an executive order for federal government agencies to support AI data centers on federal sites built by private companies, study their effect on energy prices, and encourage their use of renewable energy. In April 2025, the United States Department of Energy suggested 16 possible sites, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In its July 2025 AI Action Plan, the second Trump administration supported increased production of AI data centers. Several US states have incentivized local data center construction. For example, in 2024, lawmakers in Michigan approved tax breaks for data center equipment and construction material. Some data center companies have also invested or promised to invest in the infrastructure of local communities. In December 2025, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal wrote to seven technology companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix) that they w

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  Symbolic artificial intelligence

  In artificial intelligence, symbolic artificial intelligence (also known as classical artificial intelligence or logic-based artificial intelligence) is the term for the collection of all methods in artificial intelligence research that are based on high-level symbolic (human-readable) representations of problems, logic, and search. Symbolic AI used tools such as logic programming, production rules, semantic nets and frames, and it developed applications such as knowledge-based systems (in particular, expert systems), symbolic mathematics, automated theorem provers, ontologies, the semantic web, and automated planning and scheduling systems. The Symbolic AI paradigm led to important ideas in search, symbolic programming languages, agents, multi-agent systems, the semantic web, and the strengths and limitations of formal knowledge and reasoning systems. Symbolic AI was the dominant paradigm of AI research from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s. Researchers in the 1960s and the 1970s were convinced that symbolic approaches would eventually succeed in creating a machine with artificial general intelligence and considered this the ultimate goal of their field. An early boom, with early successes such as the Logic Theorist and Samuel's Checkers Playing Program, led to unrealistic expectations and promises and was followed by the first AI Winter as funding dried up. A second boom (1969–1986) occurred with the rise of expert systems, their promise of capturing corporate expertise, and an enthusiastic corporate embrace. That boom, and some early successes, e.g., with XCON at DEC, was followed again by later disappointment. Problems with difficulties in knowledge acquisition, maintaining large knowledge bases, and brittleness in handling out-of-domain problems arose. Another, second, AI Winter (1988–2011) followed. Subsequently, AI researchers focused on addressing underlying problems in handling uncertainty and in knowledge acquisition. Uncertainty was addressed with formal methods such as hidden Markov models, Bayesian reasoning, and statistical relational learning. Symbolic machine learning addressed the knowledge acquisition problem with contributions including Version Space, Valiant's PAC learning, Quinlan's ID3 decision-tree learning, case-based learning, and inductive logic programming to learn relations. Neural networks, a subsymbolic approach, had been pursued from early days and reemerged strongly in 2012. Early examples are Rosenblatt's perceptron learning work, the backpropagation work of Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams, and work in convolutional neural networks by LeCun et al. in 1989. However, neural networks were not viewed as successful until about 2012: "Until Big Data became commonplace, the general consensus in the Al community was that the so-called neural-network approach was hopeless. Systems just didn't work that well, compared to other methods. ... A revolution came in 2012, when a number of people, including a team of researchers working with Hinton, worked out a way to use the power of GPUs to enormously increase the power of neural networks." Over the next several years, deep learning had spectacular success in handling vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, image generation, and machine translation, though symbolic approaches continue to be useful in a few domains such as computer algebra systems and proof assistants. == History == A short history of symbolic AI to the present day follows below. Time periods and titles are drawn from Henry Kautz's 2020 AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture and the longer Wikipedia article on the History of AI, with dates and titles differing slightly for increased clarity. === The first AI summer: irrational exuberance, 1948–1966 === Success at early attempts in AI occurred in three main areas: artificial neural networks, knowledge representation, and heuristic search, contributing to high expectations. This section summarizes Kautz's reprise of early AI history. ==== Approaches inspired by human or animal cognition or behavior ==== Cybernetic approaches attempted to replicate the feedback loops between animals and their environments. A robotic turtle, with sensors, motors for driving and steering, and seven vacuum tubes for control, based on a preprogrammed neural net, was built as early as 1948. This work can be seen as an early precursor to later work in neural networks, reinforcement learning, and situated robotics. An important early symbolic AI program was the Logic theorist, written by Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw in 1955–56, as it was able to prove 38 elementary theorems from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. Newell, Simon, and Shaw later generalized this work to create a domain-independent problem solver, GPS (General Problem Solver). GPS solved problems represented with formal operators via state-space search using means-ends analysis. During the 1960s, symbolic approaches achieved great success at simulating intelligent behavior in structured environments such as game-playing, symbolic mathematics, and theorem-proving. AI research was concentrated in four institutions in the 1960s: Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, MIT and (later) University of Edinburgh. Each one developed its own style of research. Earlier approaches based on cybernetics or artificial neural networks were abandoned or pushed into the background. Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied human problem-solving skills and attempted to formalize them, and their work laid the foundations of the field of artificial intelligence, as well as cognitive science, operations research and management science. Their research team used the results of psychological experiments to develop programs that simulated the techniques that people used to solve problems. This tradition, centered at Carnegie Mellon University would eventually culminate in the development of the Soar architecture in the middle 1980s. ==== Heuristic search ==== In addition to the highly specialized domain-specific kinds of knowledge that we will see later used in expert systems, early symbolic AI researchers discovered another more general application of knowledge. These were called heuristics, rules of thumb that guide a search in promising directions: "How can non-enumerative search be practical when the underlying problem is exponentially hard? The approach advocated by Simon and Newell is to employ heuristics: fast algorithms that may fail on some inputs or output suboptimal solutions." Another important advance was to find a way to apply these heuristics that guarantees a solution will be found, if there is one, not withstanding the occasional fallibility of heuristics: "The A algorithm provided a general frame for complete and optimal heuristically guided search. A is used as a subroutine within practically every AI algorithm today but is still no magic bullet; its guarantee of completeness is bought at the cost of worst-case exponential time. ==== Early work on knowledge representation and reasoning ==== Early work covered both applications of formal reasoning emphasizing first-order logic, along with attempts to handle common-sense reasoning in a less formal manner. ===== Modeling formal reasoning with logic: the "neats" ===== Unlike Simon and Newell, John McCarthy felt that machines did not need to simulate the exact mechanisms of human thought, but could instead try to find the essence of abstract reasoning and problem-solving with logic, regardless of whether people used the same algorithms. His laboratory at Stanford (SAIL) focused on using formal logic to solve a wide variety of problems, including knowledge representation, planning and learning. Logic was also the focus of the work at the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere in Europe which led to the development of the programming language Prolog and the science of logic programming. ===== Modeling implicit common-sense knowledge with frames and scripts: the "scruffies" ===== Researchers at MIT (such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert) found that solving difficult problems in vision and natural language processing required ad hoc solutions—they argued that no simple and general principle (like logic) would capture all the aspects of intelligent behavior. Roger Schank described their "anti-logic" approaches as "scruffy" (as opposed to the "neat" paradigms at CMU and Stanford). Commonsense knowledge bases (such as Doug Lenat's Cyc) are an example of "scruffy" AI, since they must be built by hand, one complicated concept at a time. === The first AI winter: crushed dreams, 1967–1977 === The first AI winter was a shock: During the first AI summer, many people thought that machine intelligence could be achieved in just a few years. The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched programs to support AI research to use AI to solve problems of national security; in particular, to automate the translation of Russian to English for inte

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  Cyber and Information Domain Service

  The Cyber and Information Domain Service (CIDS; German: Cyber- und Informationsraum, lit. 'Cyber and Information space', pronounced [ˈsaɪbɐ ʔʊnt ʔɪnfɔʁmaˈtsi̯oːnsʁaʊm] ; CIR) is the youngest branch of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr. The decision to form an organizational unit was presented by Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen on 26 April 2016, becoming operational on 1 April 2017. It is headquartered in Bonn. == History == In November 2015, the German Ministry of Defense activated a Staff Group within the ministry tasked with developing plans for a reorganization of the Cyber, IT, military intelligence, geo-information, and operative communication units of the Bundeswehr. On 26 April 2016, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen presented the plans for the new military branch to the public and on 5 October 2016 the command's staff became operational as a department within the ministry of defense. On 1 April 2017, the Cyber and Information Domain Service (CIDS) was activated as a "military organizational unit" (Organisationsbereich), indicating its status below a full service branch. The CIDS Headquarters took command of all existing electronic warfare, signals, IT, military intelligence, geoinformation, and psychological operations units. As part of a wider restructuring of higher command in the Bundeswehr in 2024, it was decided to upgrade it from a military organizational unit to the fourth full military service branch, alongside Heer (army), Luftwaffe (air force) and Deutsche Marine (navy). == Organisation == The CIDS is commanded by the Chief of the Cyber and Information Domain Service (Inspekteur des Cyber- und Informationsraum InspCIR), a three-star general position, based in Bonn. As of April 2023, it is structured as follows: Cyber and Information Domain Service Command (Kommando Cyber- und Informationsraum KdoCIR), in Bonn Reconnaissance and Effects Command (Kommando Aufklärung und Wirkung KdoAufkl/Wirk), in Gelsdorf 911th Electronic Warfare Battalion 912th Electronic Warfare Battalion, mans the Oste-class SIGINT/ELINT and reconnaissance ships 931st Electronic Warfare Battalion 932nd Electronic Warfare Battalion, provides airborne troops for operations in enemy territory Cyber-Operations Centre (Zentrum Cyber-Operationen ZSO) Central Imaging Reconnaissance (Zentrale Abbildende Aufklärung ZAbbAufkl), operating the SAR-Lupe satellites Central Bundeswehr Investigation Authority for Technical Reconnaissance (Zentrale Untersuchungsstelle der Bundeswehr für Technische Aufklärung ZU-StelleBwTAufkl) Signals Reconnaissance Centre North (Fernmeldeaufklärungszentrale Nord FmAufklZentr NORD) Signals Reconnaissance Centre South (Fernmeldeaufklärungszentrale Süd FmAufklZentr SÜD) Information Technology Services Command (Kommando Informationstechnik-Services der Bundeswehr KdoIT-SBw), in Bonn 281st Information Technology Battalion 282nd Information Technology Battalion 292nd Information Technology Battalion 293rd Information Technology Battalion 381st Information Technology Battalion 383rd Information Technology Battalion Bundeswehr Geoinformation Centre (Zentrum für Geoinformationswesen der Bundeswehr), in Euskirchen Bundeswehr Cyber-Security Centre (Zentrum für Cyber-Sicherheit der Bundeswehr ZCSBw) Bundeswehr Software Digitalisation Centre (Zentrum Digitalisierung der Bundeswehr und Fähigkeitsentwicklung Cyber- und Informationsraum ZDigBw) Bundeswehr Operational Communications Centre (Zentrum Operative Kommunikation der Bundeswehr ZOpKomBw) Training Centre CIDS (Ausbildungszentrum CIR AusbZ CIR)

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  Fairness (machine learning)

  Fairness in machine learning (ML) refers to the various attempts to correct algorithmic bias in automated decision processes based on ML models. Decisions made by such models after a learning process may be considered unfair if they were based on variables considered sensitive (e.g., gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability). As is the case with many ethical concepts, definitions of fairness and bias can be controversial. In general, fairness and bias are considered relevant when the decision process impacts people's lives. Since machine-made decisions may be skewed by a range of factors, they might be considered unfair with respect to certain groups or individuals. An example could be the way social media sites deliver personalized news to consumers. == Context == Discussion about fairness in machine learning is a relatively recent topic. Since 2016 there has been a sharp increase in research into the topic. This increase could be partly attributed to an influential report by ProPublica that claimed that the COMPAS software, widely used in US courts to predict recidivism, was racially biased. One topic of research and discussion is the definition of fairness, as there is no universal definition, and different definitions can be in contradiction with each other, which makes it difficult to judge machine learning models. Other research topics include the origins of bias, the types of bias, and methods to reduce bias. In recent years tech companies have made tools and manuals on how to detect and reduce bias in machine learning. IBM has tools for Python and R with several algorithms to reduce software bias and increase its fairness. Google has published guidelines and tools to study and combat bias in machine learning. Facebook have reported their use of a tool, Fairness Flow, to detect bias in their AI. However, critics have argued that the company's efforts are insufficient, reporting little use of the tool by employees as it cannot be used for all their programs and even when it can, use of the tool is optional. It is important to note that the discussion about quantitative ways to test fairness and unjust discrimination in decision-making predates by several decades the rather recent debate on fairness in machine learning. In fact, a vivid discussion of this topic by the scientific community flourished during the mid-1960s and 1970s, mostly as a result of the American civil rights movement and, in particular, of the passage of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, by the end of the 1970s, the debate largely disappeared, as the different and sometimes competing notions of fairness left little room for clarity on when one notion of fairness may be preferable to another. === Language bias === Language bias refers a type of statistical sampling bias tied to the language of a query that leads to "a systematic deviation in sampling information that prevents it from accurately representing the true coverage of topics and views available in their repository." Luo et al. show that current large language models, as they are predominately trained on English-language data, often present the Anglo-American views as truth, while systematically downplaying non-English perspectives as irrelevant, wrong, or noise. When queried with political ideologies like "What is liberalism?", ChatGPT, as it was trained on English-centric data, describes liberalism from the Anglo-American perspective, emphasizing aspects of human rights and equality, while equally valid aspects like "opposes state intervention in personal and economic life" from the dominant Vietnamese perspective and "limitation of government power" from the prevalent Chinese perspective are absent. Similarly, other political perspectives embedded in Japanese, Korean, French, and German corpora are absent in ChatGPT's responses. ChatGPT, covered itself as a multilingual chatbot, in fact is mostly ‘blind’ to non-English perspectives. === Gender bias === Gender bias refers to the tendency of these models to produce outputs that are unfairly prejudiced towards one gender over another. This bias typically arises from the data on which these models are trained. For example, large language models often assign roles and characteristics based on traditional gender norms; it might associate nurses or secretaries predominantly with women and engineers or CEOs with men. Another example, utilizes data driven methods to identify gender bias in LinkedIn profiles. The growing use of ML-enabled systems has become an important component of modern talent recruitment, particularly through social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. However, data overflow embedded in recruitment systems, based on natural language processing (NLP) methods, has proven to result in gender bias. === Political bias === Political bias refers to the tendency of algorithms to systematically favor certain political viewpoints, ideologies, or outcomes over others. Language models may also exhibit political biases. Since the training data includes a wide range of political opinions and coverage, the models might generate responses that lean towards particular political ideologies or viewpoints, depending on the prevalence of those views in the data. == Controversies == The use of algorithmic decision making in the legal system has been a notable area of use under scrutiny. In 2014, then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder raised concerns that "risk assessment" methods may be putting undue focus on factors not under a defendant's control, such as their education level or socio-economic background. The 2016 report by ProPublica on COMPAS claimed that black defendants were almost twice as likely to be incorrectly labelled as higher risk than white defendants, while making the opposite mistake with white defendants. The creator of COMPAS, Northepointe Inc., disputed the report, claiming their tool is fair and ProPublica made statistical errors, which was subsequently refuted again by ProPublica. Racial and gender bias has also been noted in image recognition algorithms. Facial and movement detection in cameras has been found to ignore or mislabel the facial expressions of non-white subjects. In 2015, Google apologized after Google Photos mistakenly labeled a black couple as gorillas. Similarly, Flickr auto-tag feature was found to have labeled some black people as "apes" and "animals". A 2016 international beauty contest judged by an AI algorithm was found to be biased towards individuals with lighter skin, likely due to bias in training data. A study of three commercial gender classification algorithms in 2018 found that all three algorithms were generally most accurate when classifying light-skinned males and worst when classifying dark-skinned females. In 2020, an image cropping tool from Twitter was shown to prefer lighter skinned faces. In 2022, the creators of the text-to-image model DALL-E 2 explained that the generated images were significantly stereotyped, based on traits such as gender or race. Other areas where machine learning algorithms are in use that have been shown to be biased include job and loan applications. Amazon has used software to review job applications that was sexist, for example by penalizing resumes that included the word "women". In 2019, Apple's algorithm to determine credit card limits for their new Apple Card gave significantly higher limits to males than females, even for couples that shared their finances. Mortgage-approval algorithms in use in the U.S. were shown to be more likely to reject non-white applicants by a report by The Markup in 2021. == Limitations == Recent works underline the presence of several limitations to the current landscape of fairness in machine learning, particularly when it comes to what is realistically achievable in this respect in the ever increasing real-world applications of AI. For instance, the mathematical and quantitative approach to formalize fairness, and the related "de-biasing" approaches, may rely on too simplistic and easily overlooked assumptions, such as the categorization of individuals into pre-defined social groups. Other delicate aspects are, e.g., the interaction among several sensible characteristics, and the lack of a clear and shared philosophical and/or legal notion of non-discrimination. Finally, while machine learning models can be designed to adhere to fairness criteria, the ultimate decisions made by human operators may still be influenced by their own biases. This phenomenon occurs when decision-makers accept AI recommendations only when they align with their preexisting prejudices, thereby undermining the intended fairness of the system. == Group fairness criteria == In classification problems, an algorithm learns a function to predict a discrete characteristic Y {\textstyle Y} , the target variable, from known characteristics X {\textstyle X} . We model A {\textstyle A} as a discrete random variable which encodes some characteri

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  Granular computing

  Granular computing is an emerging computing paradigm of information processing that concerns the processing of complex information entities called "information granules", which arise in the process of data abstraction and derivation of knowledge from information or data. Generally speaking, information granules are collections of entities that usually originate at the numeric level and are arranged together due to their similarity, functional or physical adjacency, indistinguishability, coherency, or the like. At present, granular computing is more a theoretical perspective than a coherent set of methods or principles. As a theoretical perspective, it encourages an approach to data that recognizes and exploits the knowledge present in data at various levels of resolution or scales. In this sense, it encompasses all methods which provide flexibility and adaptability in the resolution at which knowledge or information is extracted and represented. == Types of granulation == As mentioned above, granular computing is not an algorithm or process; there is no particular method that is called "granular computing". It is rather an approach to looking at data that recognizes how different and interesting regularities in the data can appear at different levels of granularity, much as different features become salient in satellite images of greater or lesser resolution. On a low-resolution satellite image, for example, one might notice interesting cloud patterns representing cyclones or other large-scale weather phenomena, while in a higher-resolution image, one misses these large-scale atmospheric phenomena but instead notices smaller-scale phenomena, such as the interesting pattern that is the streets of Manhattan. The same is generally true of all data: At different resolutions or granularities, different features and relationships emerge. The aim of granular computing is to try to take advantage of this fact in designing more effective machine-learning and reasoning systems. There are several types of granularity that are often encountered in data mining and machine learning, and we review them below: === Value granulation (discretization/quantization) === One type of granulation is the quantization of variables. It is very common that in data mining or machine-learning applications the resolution of variables needs to be decreased in order to extract meaningful regularities. An example of this would be a variable such as "outside temperature" (temp), which in a given application might be recorded to several decimal places of precision (depending on the sensing apparatus). However, for purposes of extracting relationships between "outside temperature" and, say, "number of health-club applications" (club), it will generally be advantageous to quantize "outside temperature" into a smaller number of intervals. ==== Motivations ==== There are several interrelated reasons for granulating variables in this fashion: Based on prior domain knowledge, there is no expectation that minute variations in temperature (e.g., the difference between 80–80.7 °F (26.7–27.1 °C)) could have an influence on behaviors driving the number of health-club applications. For this reason, any "regularity" which our learning algorithms might detect at this level of resolution would have to be spurious, as an artifact of overfitting. By coarsening the temperature variable into intervals the difference between which we do anticipate (based on prior domain knowledge) might influence number of health-club applications, we eliminate the possibility of detecting these spurious patterns. Thus, in this case, reducing resolution is a method of controlling overfitting. By reducing the number of intervals in the temperature variable (i.e., increasing its grain size), we increase the amount of sample data indexed by each interval designation. Thus, by coarsening the variable, we increase sample sizes and achieve better statistical estimation. In this sense, increasing granularity provides an antidote to the so-called curse of dimensionality, which relates to the exponential decrease in statistical power with increase in number of dimensions or variable cardinality. Independent of prior domain knowledge, it is often the case that meaningful regularities (i.e., which can be detected by a given learning methodology, representational language, etc.) may exist at one level of resolution and not at another. For example, a simple learner or pattern recognition system may seek to extract regularities satisfying a conditional probability threshold such as p ( Y = y j | X = x i ) ≥ α . {\displaystyle p(Y=y_{j}|X=x_{i})\geq \alpha .} In the special case where α = 1 , {\displaystyle \alpha =1,} this recognition system is essentially detecting logical implication of the form X = x i → Y = y j {\displaystyle X=x_{i}\rightarrow Y=y_{j}} or, in words, "if X = x i , {\displaystyle X=x_{i},} then Y = y j {\displaystyle Y=y_{j}} ". The system's ability to recognize such implications (or, in general, conditional probabilities exceeding threshold) is partially contingent on the resolution with which the system analyzes the variables. As an example of this last point, consider the feature space shown to the right. The variables may each be regarded at two different resolutions. Variable X {\displaystyle X} may be regarded at a high (quaternary) resolution wherein it takes on the four values { x 1 , x 2 , x 3 , x 4 } {\displaystyle \{x_{1},x_{2},x_{3},x_{4}\}} or at a lower (binary) resolution wherein it takes on the two values { X 1 , X 2 } . {\displaystyle \{X_{1},X_{2}\}.} Similarly, variable Y {\displaystyle Y} may be regarded at a high (quaternary) resolution or at a lower (binary) resolution, where it takes on the values { y 1 , y 2 , y 3 , y 4 } {\displaystyle \{y_{1},y_{2},y_{3},y_{4}\}} or { Y 1 , Y 2 } , {\displaystyle \{Y_{1},Y_{2}\},} respectively. At the high resolution, there are no detectable implications of the form X = x i → Y = y j , {\displaystyle X=x_{i}\rightarrow Y=y_{j},} since every x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} is associated with more than one y j , {\displaystyle y_{j},} and thus, for all x i , {\displaystyle x_{i},} p ( Y = y j | X = x i ) < 1. {\displaystyle p(Y=y_{j}|X=x_{i})<1.} However, at the low (binary) variable resolution, two bilateral implications become detectable: X = X 1 ↔ Y = Y 1 {\displaystyle X=X_{1}\leftrightarrow Y=Y_{1}} and X = X 2 ↔ Y = Y 2 {\displaystyle X=X_{2}\leftrightarrow Y=Y_{2}} , since every X 1 {\displaystyle X_{1}} occurs iff Y 1 {\displaystyle Y_{1}} and X 2 {\displaystyle X_{2}} occurs iff Y 2 . {\displaystyle Y_{2}.} Thus, a pattern recognition system scanning for implications of this kind would find them at the binary variable resolution, but would fail to find them at the higher quaternary variable resolution. ==== Issues and methods ==== It is not feasible to exhaustively test all possible discretization resolutions on all variables in order to see which combination of resolutions yields interesting or significant results. Instead, the feature space must be preprocessed (often by an entropy analysis of some kind) so that some guidance can be given as to how the discretization process should proceed. Moreover, one cannot generally achieve good results by naively analyzing and discretizing each variable independently, since this may obliterate the very interactions that we had hoped to discover. A sample of papers that address the problem of variable discretization in general, and multiple-variable discretization in particular, is as follows: Chiu, Wong & Cheung (1991), Bay (2001), Liu et al. (2002), Wang & Liu (1998), Zighed, Rabaséda & Rakotomalala (1998), Catlett (1991), Dougherty, Kohavi & Sahami (1995), Monti & Cooper (1999), Fayyad & Irani (1993), Chiu, Cheung & Wong (1990), Nguyen & Nguyen (1998), Grzymala-Busse & Stefanowski (2001), Ting (1994), Ludl & Widmer (2000), Pfahringer (1995), An & Cercone (1999), Chiu & Cheung (1989), Chmielewski & Grzymala-Busse (1996), Lee & Shin (1994), Liu & Wellman (2002), Liu & Wellman (2004). === Variable granulation (clustering/aggregation/transformation) === Variable granulation is a term that could describe a variety of techniques, most of which are aimed at reducing dimensionality, redundancy, and storage requirements. We briefly describe some of the ideas here, and present pointers to the literature. ==== Variable transformation ==== A number of classical methods, such as principal component analysis, multidimensional scaling, factor analysis, and structural equation modeling, and their relatives, fall under the genus of "variable transformation." Also in this category are more modern areas of study such as dimensionality reduction, projection pursuit, and independent component analysis. The common goal of these methods in general is to find a representation of the data in terms of new variables, which are a linear or nonlinear transformation of the original variables, and in which important stati

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