AI Coding Interview Questions

AI Coding Interview Questions — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

Starlight Information Visualization System

Starlight is a software product originally developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and now by Future Point Systems. It is an advanced visual analysis environment. In addition to using information visualization to show the importance of individual pieces of data by showing how they relate to one another, it also contains a small suite of tools useful for collaboration and data sharing, as well as data conversion, processing, augmentation and loading. The software, originally developed for the intelligence community, allows users to load data from XML files, databases, RSS feeds, web services, HTML files, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, Adobe PDF, TXT files, etc. and analyze it with a variety of visualizations and tools. The system integrates structured, unstructured, geospatial, and multimedia data, offering comparisons of information at multiple levels of abstraction, simultaneously and in near real-time. In addition Starlight allows users to build their own named entity-extractors using a combination of algorithms, targeted normalization lists and regular expressions in the Starlight Data Engineer (SDE). As an example, Starlight might be used to look for correlations in a database containing records about chemical spills. An analyst could begin by grouping records according to the cause of the spill to reveal general trends. Sorting the data a second time, they could apply different colors based on related details such as the company responsible, age of equipment or geographic location. Maps and photographs could be integrated into the display, making it even easier to recognize connections among multiple variables. Starlight has been deployed to both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and used on a number of large-scale projects. PNNL began developing Starlight in the mid-1990s, with funding from the Land Information Warfare Agency, a part of the Army Intelligence and Security Command and continued developed at the laboratory with funding from the NSA and the CIA. Starlight integrates visual representations of reports, radio transcripts, radar signals, maps and other information. The software system was recently honored with an R&D 100 Award for technical innovation. In 2006 Future Point Systems, a Silicon Valley startup, acquired rights to jointly develop and distribute the Starlight product in cooperation with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The software is now also used outside of the military/intelligence communities in a number of commercial environments.
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Dynamic topic model

Within statistics, Dynamic topic models' are generative models that can be used to analyze the evolution of (unobserved) topics of a collection of documents over time. This family of models was proposed by David Blei and John Lafferty and is an extension to Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that can handle sequential documents. In LDA, both the order the words appear in a document and the order the documents appear in the corpus are oblivious to the model. Whereas words are still assumed to be exchangeable, in a dynamic topic model the order of the documents plays a fundamental role. More precisely, the documents are grouped by time slice (e.g.: years) and it is assumed that the documents of each group come from a set of topics that evolved from the set of the previous slice. == Topics == Similarly to LDA and pLSA, in a dynamic topic model, each document is viewed as a mixture of unobserved topics. Furthermore, each topic defines a multinomial distribution over a set of terms. Thus, for each word of each document, a topic is drawn from the mixture and a term is subsequently drawn from the multinomial distribution corresponding to that topic. The topics, however, evolve over time. For instance, the two most likely terms of a topic at time t could be "network" and "Zipf" (in descending order) while the most likely ones at time t+1 could be "Zipf" and "percolation" (in descending order). == Model == Define α t {\displaystyle \alpha _{t}} as the per-document topic distribution at time t. β t , k {\displaystyle \beta _{t,k}} as the word distribution of topic k at time t. η t , d {\displaystyle \eta _{t,d}} as the topic distribution for document d in time t, z t , d , n {\displaystyle z_{t,d,n}} as the topic for the nth word in document d in time t, and w t , d , n {\displaystyle w_{t,d,n}} as the specific word. In this model, the multinomial distributions α t + 1 {\displaystyle \alpha _{t+1}} and β t + 1 , k {\displaystyle \beta _{t+1,k}} are generated from α t {\displaystyle \alpha _{t}} and β t , k {\displaystyle \beta _{t,k}} , respectively. Even though multinomial distributions are usually written in terms of the mean parameters, representing them in terms of the natural parameters is better in the context of dynamic topic models. The former representation has some disadvantages due to the fact that the parameters are constrained to be non-negative and sum to one. When defining the evolution of these distributions, one would need to assure that such constraints were satisfied. Since both distributions are in the exponential family, one solution to this problem is to represent them in terms of the natural parameters, that can assume any real value and can be individually changed. Using the natural parameterization, the dynamics of the topic model are given by β t , k | β t − 1 , k ∼ N ( β t − 1 , k , σ 2 I ) {\displaystyle \beta _{t,k}|\beta _{t-1,k}\sim N(\beta _{t-1,k},\sigma ^{2}I)} and α t | α t − 1 ∼ N ( α t − 1 , δ 2 I ) {\displaystyle \alpha _{t}|\alpha _{t-1}\sim N(\alpha _{t-1},\delta ^{2}I)} . The generative process at time slice 't' is therefore: Draw topics β t , k | β t − 1 , k ∼ N ( β t − 1 , k , σ 2 I ) ∀ k {\displaystyle \beta _{t,k}|\beta _{t-1,k}\sim N(\beta _{t-1,k},\sigma ^{2}I)\forall k} Draw mixture model α t | α t − 1 ∼ N ( α t − 1 , δ 2 I ) {\displaystyle \alpha _{t}|\alpha _{t-1}\sim N(\alpha _{t-1},\delta ^{2}I)} For each document: Draw η t , d ∼ N ( α t , a 2 I ) {\displaystyle \eta _{t,d}\sim N(\alpha _{t},a^{2}I)} For each word: Draw topic Z t , d , n ∼ Mult ( π ( η t , d ) ) {\displaystyle Z_{t,d,n}\sim {\textrm {Mult}}(\pi (\eta _{t,d}))} Draw word W t , d , n ∼ Mult ( π ( β t , Z t , d , n ) ) {\displaystyle W_{t,d,n}\sim {\textrm {Mult}}(\pi (\beta _{t,Z_{t,d,n}}))} where π ( x ) {\displaystyle \pi (x)} is a mapping from the natural parameterization x to the mean parameterization, namely π ( x i ) = exp ⁡ ( x i ) ∑ i exp ⁡ ( x i ) {\displaystyle \pi (x_{i})={\frac {\exp(x_{i})}{\sum _{i}\exp(x_{i})}}} . == Inference == In the dynamic topic model, only W t , d , n {\displaystyle W_{t,d,n}} is observable. Learning the other parameters constitutes an inference problem. Blei and Lafferty argue that applying Gibbs sampling to do inference in this model is more difficult than in static models, due to the nonconjugacy of the Gaussian and multinomial distributions. They propose the use of variational methods, in particular, the Variational Kalman Filtering and the Variational Wavelet Regression. == Applications == In the original paper, a dynamic topic model is applied to the corpus of Science articles published between 1881 and 1999 aiming to show that this method can be used to analyze the trends of word usage inside topics. The authors also show that the model trained with past documents is able to fit documents of an incoming year better than LDA. A continuous dynamic topic model was developed by Wang et al. and applied to predict the timestamp of documents. Going beyond text documents, dynamic topic models were used to study musical influence, by learning musical topics and how they evolve in recent history.
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Regina Barzilay

Regina Barzilay (Hebrew: רגינה ברזילי; born 1970) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology. == Early life and education == Barzilay was born in Chișinău, Moldova and emigrated to Israel with her parents at the age of 20. She received bachelor's and master's degrees from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1993 and 1998, respectively. She obtained a PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 2003 for research supervised by Kathleen McKeown. == Career and research == After her PhD, she spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. She was appointed as Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2016. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, which prompted her to conduct research in oncology. Barzilay won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. For her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, she led the development of Newsblaster, which recognized stories from different news sources as being about the same basic subject, and then paraphrased elements from the stories to create a summary. In computational linguistics, Barzilay created algorithms that learned annotations from common languages (i.e. English) to analyze less understood languages. Prompted by her experience with breast cancer, Barzilay is applying machine learning to oncology. She is collaborating with physicians and students to devise deep learning models that utilize images, text, and structured data to identify trends that affect early diagnosis, treatment, and disease prevention. Frontline Documentary Following her battle with breast cancer in 2014, and her researching into applying artificial intelligence to improve early detection methods, she collaborated with Dr. Connie Lehman at Massachusetts General Hospital. While there Barzilay developed an AI-based system capable of predicting the likelihood of breast cancer up to five years in advance. The system leverages deep learning techniques to analyze mammograms and diagnostic notes, surpassing traditional pattern recognition by human radiologists. This breakthrough, while still in development, has the potential to significantly enhance early diagnosis and treatment outcomes. [1] Barzilay's work in this area was featured in the FRONTLINE documentary In the Age of AI, which explores the broader impact of artificial intelligence on society. === MIT Jameel Clinic === In 2018, Barzilay was appointed faculty lead for AI at the new MIT Jameel Clinic, a research center in the field of AI health sciences, including disease detection, drug discovery, and the development of medical devices. In 2020, she was part of the team—with fellow MIT Jameel Clinic faculty lead Professor James J. Collins—that announced the discovery through deep learning of halicin, the first new antibiotic compound for 30 years, which kills over 35 powerful bacteria, including antimicrobial-resistant tuberculosis, the superbug C. difficile, and two of the World Health Organization's top-three most deadly bacteria. In 2020, Collins, Barzilay and the MIT Jameel Clinic were also awarded funding through The Audacious Project to expand on the discovery of halicin in using AI to respond to the antibiotic resistance crisis through the development of new classes of antibiotics. == Awards and recognition == In 2017, Barzilay won the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the "Genius Grant", for "developing machine learning methods that enable computers to process and analyze vast amounts of human language data." She is also a recipient of various awards including the NSF Career Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship and several Best Paper Awards at NAACL and ACL. Her teaching has also been recognized by MIT as she won the Jamieson Teaching Award in 2016. She was nominated an AAAI Fellow in 2018 by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. In 2020, she became the first recipient of the $1 million AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.
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Joseph Keshet

Joseph (Yossi) Keshet (Hebrew: יוסף (יוסי) קשת; born: 28 February 1973) is an Israeli professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty of the Technion, where he is the director of the Speech, Language, and Deep Learning Lab. His research focuses on human speech processing and machine learning. == Early life and education == Keshet was born in Tel-Aviv. He graduated from the Amal School and began his academic studies at the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems at Tel-Aviv University in 1991 and received his B.Sc. (Cum Laude) in 1994. Keshet served in the IDF Unit 8200 from 1995 to 2002 as the head of the speech processing research section in the R&D Center. During his service, he received a national award from the Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (Maf’at). Keshet was award his M.Sc. from the same department after he completed his Israel Defense Force service in 2002. His Dissertation was titled: Stop consonant spotting in continuous speech and was supervised by Dan Chazan from IBM Research Labs, Haifa. He continued his Ph.D. studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until 2008. Prof. Yoram Singer supervised his thesis on Large Margin Algorithms for Discriminative Continuous Speech. == Career == Keshet was a Research Associate (postdoc) at IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland in 2007, and joined the TTI-Chicago and Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL in 2009 as Research Assistant Professor. In 2013, he returned to Israel and joined the Computer Science department at Bar-Ilan University as a senior lecturer and head of the Speech, Language, and Deep Learning Lab. In 2020, Keshet became a Founding Venture Partner at the Disruptive AI Venture Capital. In the same year, he also joined Amazon in Tel-Aviv as an Amazon Scholar. In 2022, Keshet joined the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion. == Research == Keshet's research work focuses on both machine learning and computational study of human speech and language. His work on speech and language concentrates on speech processing, speech recognition, acoustic phonetics, and pathological speech. In machine learning, Keshet is focused on deep learning and structured tasks. According to Google Scholar (September 2020), Keshet is one of the 15 most cited researchers in the field of spoken language processing. The algorithms that were developed in the Speech, Language, and Deep Learning Lab can analyze different pathological conditions in the throat and vocal cords based on the subject's voice. Other algorithms showed that the voice can be used to estimate physical and emotional state of the speaker. Another research led by Keshet suggested that it is possible to fool structured AI systems (like Google Voice). == Membership in professional societies == Keshet is the founder and chair of the Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing Special Interest Group (SIGML) of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), from 2011. He is a senior member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society since 2018 and a member of ISCA since 2002. == Publications == Prof. Keshet has authored more than 70 scientific publications and edited one book. === Book === Joseph Keshet and Samy Bengio, Eds., Automatic Speech and Speaker Recognition: Large Margin and Kernel Methods, John Wiley & Sons, March 2009. === Selected articles === Jacob T. Cohen, Alma Cohen, Limor Benyamini, Yossi Adi, Joseph Keshet, Predicting glottal closure insufficiency using fundamental frequency contour analysis, Head & Neck, Journal of the Sciences and Specialities of the Head and Neck, Volume 41, Issue 7, pp. 2324–2331, July 2019. Yehoshua Dissen, Jacob Goldberger, and Joseph Keshet, Formant Estimation and Tracking: A Deep Learning Approach, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145 (2), February 2019. Joseph Keshet, Automatic speech recognition: A primer for speech-language pathology researchers, International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Vol. 20 No. 6, pp. 599–609, 2018. Yossi Adi, Carsten Baum, Moustapha Cisse, Benny Pinkas, Joseph Keshet, Turning Your Weakness Into a Strength: Watermarking Deep Neural Networks by Backdooring, Usenix, 2018. Tzeviya Fuchs, Joseph Keshet, Spoken Term Detection Automatically Adjusted for a Given Threshold, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, Dec 2017, Volume 11, Issue 8, pp. 1–8. Moustapha Cisse, Yossi Adi, Natalia Neverova, Joseph Keshet, Houdini: Fooling Deep Structured Visual and Speech Recognition Models with Adversarial Examples, Neural Information and Processing Systems (NIPS), 2017. Joseph Keshet, Subhransu Maji, Tamir Hazan, and Tommi Jaakkola, Perturbation Models and PAC-Bayesian Generalization Bounds, in Perturbations, Optimization, and Statistics, Tamir Hazan, George Papandreou, and Daniel Tarlow, Eds., The MIT Press, 2016. Matthew Goldrick, Joseph Keshet, Erin Gustafson, Jordana Heller, and Jeremy Needle, Automatic Analysis of Slips of the Tongue: Insights into the Cognitive Architecture of Speech Production, Cognition, 149, 31–39, 2016. Joseph Keshet, Optimizing the Measure of Performance in Structured Prediction, in Advanced Structured Prediction, Sebastian Nowozin, Peter V. Gehler, Jeremy January, and Christoph H. Lampert, Eds., The MIT Press, 2014. Morgan Sonderegger and Joseph Keshet, Automatic Measurement of Voice Onset Time using Discriminative Structured Prediction, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 132, Issue 6, pp. 3965−3979, 2012. David McAllester, Tamir Hazan and Joseph Keshet, Direct Loss Minimization for Structured Prediction, The 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010. Joseph Keshet, David Grangier and Samy Bengio, Discriminative Keyword Spotting, Speech Communication, Volume 51, Issue 4, pp. 317–329, April 2009. == Personal life == Keshet is married to Lital. They have three children.
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Transparency in the software supply chain

Transparency in the software supply chain is a condition in which participants involved in the development, procurement, operation, auditing, or regulation of software can determine which components, dependencies, build stages, identifiers, and relationships within the supply chain make up the delivered product. The disclosure of information about software components, their interrelationships, origins, and development methods—for the purposes of risk management, vulnerability detection, and compliance—takes place throughout the software lifecycle. Transparency is one of the key security attributes of the software supply chain, as a deeper understanding of the chain enables participants to identify vulnerabilities and mitigate threats. Problems in the software supply chain can cause billions in losses and create operational challenges for government and commercial entities, as demonstrated by incidents involving SolarWinds, Bybit, 3CX, Jaguar Land Rover, GitHub, and NotPetya. Modern software is often assembled from third-party libraries and open-source components. According to research by the Linux Foundation and Synopsys, 96% of the commercial codebases analyzed contained open-source software, and 70–90% of a typical codebase may consist of open-source components. Without transparency, any software component can become a threat. As a result, companies may spend billions of dollars building robust external defenses, but this will not protect against vulnerabilities in legitimate software inside the perimeter. At the same time, supply chain attacks also erode trust between customers and their IT providers, as malicious code is often embedded in official updates with certificates and digital signatures. One of the primary ways to ensure transparency is through a software bill of materials, which documents the components used to create the software and the relationships within the supply chain. == Concept == The software supply chain is the collection of systems, devices, people, artifacts, and processes involved in the creation of the final software product. Attacks on the software supply chain differ from conventional attacks in that they follow a four-stage pattern: compromise, modification, distribution, and subsequent exploitation of the compromised or modified component. A defining feature of a supply chain attack is the introduction or manipulation of a change at an upstream stage, which is subsequently exploited at a downstream stage. Transparency refers to the availability of knowledge about the chain, while validity concerns the integrity of operations and artifacts and the authentication of participants, and separation involves reducing unnecessary trust relationships and the radius of impact through compartmentalization. In this framework, transparency primarily helps during the pre-compromise and detection phases, as a clearer understanding of participants, operations, and artifacts makes it easier to identify weak links before attackers exploit them. Current major attack vectors include dependencies and containers, build infrastructure, and human participants, such as maintainers or developers. == History == Software supply-chain transparency developed from earlier efforts to document software components, long before the term came into widespread use in the cybersecurity field. Early component-documentation formats included SPDX, first published in 2011, and CycloneDX, first published in 2017. Initially, these formats were created to support license compliance, package identification, and tool compatibility. Their development helped shape a broader concept of software supply chain transparency, encompassing component documentation, disclosure practices, risk management, security analysis, and regulatory compliance. In 2018, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration launched a multistakeholder process on promoting software component transparency. This process helped move work on SBOMs from a specialized technical practice into the realm of policy and procurement to identify components used in software products. The 2020 compromise of the SolarWinds Orion platform made software supply chain security a central issue in government cybersecurity policy. An analysis of the “Sunburst” campaign prepared by the Atlantic Council noted that the vulnerability of the software supply chain had become a realized risk for national-security agencies. In May 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14028, which directed federal agencies to improve cybersecurity and increase transparency in the software supply chain, including requirements related to SBOMs. Reuters reported that the executive order required software developers selling their products to the federal government to provide greater visibility into their software and make security data available. In July 2021, the NTIA published the document “The Minimum Elements for a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)”, defining the basic data fields and practices for creating SBOMs. Between 2021 and 2025, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency updated its guidance on “Framing Software Component Transparency”, expanding the set of SBOM attributes, metadata requirements, and operational recommendations for the creation, exchange, and use of SBOMs. Major incidents that occurred following the SolarWinds attack have underscored the importance of transparency in vulnerability management and supply chain security. The Log4Shell vulnerability in the Log4j library, disclosed in December 2021, demonstrated how difficult it can be for organizations to identify a vulnerable component deeply embedded within applications and services. In 2024, an attempt to plant a backdoor in XZ Utils showed how attackers could exploit trust in open-source maintenance processes to introduce malicious code into widely used infrastructure software. By the mid-2020s, software supply chain transparency had become part of international cybersecurity coordination and regulation. On September 3, 2025, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the National Cybersecurity Office, in collaboration with cybersecurity agencies from 15 countries, released the document “A Shared Vision of Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for Cybersecurity.” In the European Union, the Cyber Resilience Act required manufacturers of products with digital elements to create, maintain, and retain SBOMs as part of the technical documentation for software placed on the EU market. == Transparency mechanisms == The primary mechanism for ensuring transparency is the software bill of materials (SBOM). An SBOM is a structured list of components, libraries, and tools used to build and distribute a software product, and it records dependencies in a way that helps organizations understand and assess their software supply chains. It can also be described as a formal record of components and their interdependencies, which gives users insight into their actual exposure to risks and threats. Five key areas of SBOM application in software supply chain security have been identified: vulnerability management, ensuring transparency, component evaluation, risk assessment, and ensuring supply chain integrity. In software supply chains, an SBOM documents all components, both open-source and proprietary. Under Executive Order 14028, U.S. federal agencies require software suppliers to provide SBOMs for government-procured software. The list of minimum required SBOM elements defined by NTIA includes three main categories: required data fields for describing each component (name, version, identifiers), automation support (machine-readable format, generation tools), and recommendations for creating SBOMs during development and purchasing. The post-2021 push for SBOMs was intended to provide visibility into the components used within software and to expose parts of an application that would otherwise remain hidden. This information can be used to prioritize patches, manage vulnerabilities, and support compliance work. Transparency also supports software traceability, which is becoming a standard feature of developer platforms. Traceability has become important because organizations are increasingly required to demonstrate how software was created, rather than simply listing its components. Higher levels of assurance require signed, tamper-proof traceability and more isolated, verifiable build environments. A related mechanism is build reproducibility. Reproducible builds are defined as build processes that make the compilation process deterministic, ensuring that the same source code always produces the same binary file. These builds are considered a foundational element for distributed verification, transparency-log maintenance, supply-chain workflow integration, and the creation of keyless signatures based on verifiable logs. Although reproducibility does not replace inventory or attestation, it gives external par
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Is an Conversational AI Platform Worth It in 2026?

Looking for the best conversational AI platform? An conversational AI platform is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it can save you hours every week by automating repetitive work. Most options offer a generous free tier, with paid plans unlocking higher limits, faster processing, and team features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right conversational AI platform slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.
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François Chollet

François Chollet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʃoˈlɛ]; born 20 October 1989) is a French software engineer, artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and former Senior Staff Engineer at Google. Chollet is the creator of the Keras deep-learning library released in 2015. His research focuses on computer vision, the application of machine learning to formal reasoning, abstraction, and how to achieve greater generality in artificial intelligence (AGI). == Education and career == In 2012, Chollet graduated with a Diplôme d'Ingénieur (Master of Engineering) from ENSTA Paris, a school of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. In 2015, Chollet started working at Google shortly after releasing Keras. In 2019, he published the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) benchmark, which measures the ability of AI systems to solve novel reasoning problems. In 2024, Chollet launched ARC Prize, a US$1 million competition to solve the ARC-AGI benchmark. He left Google in November 2024 after more than 9 years with the company to found with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop a new startup focused on developing AGI with program synthesis. In early 2025, Chollet announced the expansion of ARC Prize into a full-fledged non-profit foundation, to further the mission of guiding and accelerating research progress towards artificial general intelligence. == Books and publications == Chollet's research papers in artificial intelligence have been published at major conferences in the field, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Chollet is the author of Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions, which is among the top ten most cited papers in CVPR proceedings at more than 18,000 citations. Chollet is the author of the book Deep Learning with Python, which sold over 100,000 copies, and the co-author with Tomasz Kalinowski of Deep Learning With R. == Awards == On December 1, 2021, Chollet won the Global Swiss AI Award for breakthroughs in AI. In September 2024, Chollet was named by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people in AI.
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SYSTRAN

SYSTRAN, founded by Dr. Peter Toma in 1968, is one of the oldest machine translation companies. SYSTRAN has done extensive work for the United States Department of Defense and the European Commission. SYSTRAN provided the technology for Yahoo! Babel Fish until May 30, 2012, among others. It was used by Google's language tools until 2007. SYSTRAN is used by the Dashboard Translation widget in macOS. Commercial versions of SYSTRAN can run on Microsoft Windows (including Windows Mobile), Linux, and Solaris. Historically, SYSTRAN systems used rule-based machine translation (RbMT) technology. With the release of SYSTRAN Server 7 in 2010, SYSTRAN implemented a hybrid rule-based/statistical machine translation (SMT) technology which was the first of its kind in the marketplace. As of 2008, the company had 59 employees of whom 26 are computational experts and 15 computational linguists. The number of employees decreased from 70 in 2006 to 59 in 2008. In January 2024, ChapsVision acquired Systran. == History == With its origin in the Georgetown machine translation effort, SYSTRAN was one of the few machine translation systems to survive the major decrease of funding after the ALPAC Report of the mid-1960s. The company was established in La Jolla in California to work on translation of Russian to English text for the United States Air Force during the Cold War. Large numbers of Russian scientific and technical documents were translated using SYSTRAN under the auspices of the USAF Foreign Technology Division (later the National Air and Space Intelligence Center) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The quality of the translations, although only approximate, was usually adequate for understanding content. The company headquarters is in Paris, while its U.S. headquarters is in San Diego, CA. During the dot-com boom, the international language industry started a new era, and SYSTRAN entered into agreements with a number of translation integrators, the most successful of these being WorldLingo. In 2016, the Harvard NLP group and SYSTRAN founded OpenNMT, an open source ecosystem for neural machine translation and neural sequence learning. This has enabled machine translation software with learning capabilities, dramatically increasing MT translation quality. The project has since been used in several research and industry applications, and its open source ecosystem is currently maintained by SYSTRAN and Ubiqus. == Business situation == Most of SYSTRAN's revenue comes from a few customers. 57.1% comes from the 10 main customers and the three largest customers account for 10.9%, 8.9%, and 8.9% of its revenues, respectively. Revenues had been declining in the early 2000s: 10.2 million euros in 2004, 10.1 million euros in 2005, 9.3 million euros in 2006, 8.8 million euros in 2007, and 7.6 million euros in 2008, before seeing a rebound in 2009 with 8.6 million euros. == Languages == The following is a list of the languages in which SYSTRAN translate from and to English: Russian into English in 1968 and English into Russian in 1973 for the Apollo–Soyuz project.
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Competition in artificial intelligence

Competition in artificial intelligence refers to the rivalry among companies, research institutions, and governments to develop and deploy the most capable artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The competition spans multiple domains, including large language models (LLMs), autonomous vehicles, robotics, computer vision systems, natural language processing (NLP), and AI-optimized hardware. == Background == Competition in AI is driven by potential economic, strategic, and scientific advantages. Breakthroughs in AI can enhance productivity, enable new products and services, and provide geopolitical leverage. The field has experienced rapid progress since the mid-2010s, particularly in machine learning and artificial neural networks, leading to intense rivalry among leading actors. == Corporate competition == Major technology companies are among the most visible competitors in AI. In the United States, firms such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Nvidia compete in building advanced LLMs, generative AI platforms, and AI-optimized graphics processing units (GPUs). In China, companies such as Baidu, Alibaba Group, Tencent, and startups such DeepSeek have become leaders in AI deployment, often with state backing. The "[war for talent]" in AI research has become a defining feature of corporate competition. Leading firms often recruit top AI researchers from rivals, sometimes offering multi-million-dollar compensation packages. == National competition == Governments see leadership in AI as a strategic priority. The United States has funded AI research for military, economic, and societal applications, while China has set a target to lead the world in AI by 2030 through its "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan". Other nations, including the UK, India, Israel, Russia, South Korea, and members of the European Union, have launched national AI strategies. In February 2026 Anthropic said Chinese companies - DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax - were conducting "distillation attacks" in an attempt to copy their model's capabilities, and warned that business wars were closely tied to geopolitical ones: "foreign labs that illicitly distill American models can remove safeguards, feeding model capabilities into their own military, intelligence, and surveillance systems." == Sectors of competition == === Large language models and chatbots competition === Competition to produce the most capable generative text models, with benchmarks such as MMLU and ARC used to evaluate performance has been on scale since the emergence of AI. These systems leverage deep learning, especially transformer architectures, to understand and generate human-like language. Companies and research groups globally compete to develop chatbots that are more capable, reliable, and context-aware. Among the most well-known chatbots is ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI. Since its public release in 2022, ChatGPT has rapidly gained widespread attention for its ability to engage in coherent and versatile conversations, assist with creative writing, and solve complex problems. In response, technology firms introduced competing chatbots aiming to challenge or surpass ChatGPT's capabilities. Notably, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, launched an advanced chatbot integrated with their R1 language model, emphasizing strong natural language understanding and multilingual support. Similarly, Grok, developed by xAI (company), integrates conversational AI into vehicles and digital assistants, combining natural language processing with real-time data for personalized user interaction. These chatbots not only compete in language tasks but also demonstrate strategic reasoning capabilities by playing complex games such as chess and Go. This form of competition is reminiscent of historic AI milestones set by programs such as Deep Blue and AlphaGo. The OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been tested in playing chess at various levels, while DeepSeek’s chatbot showcased its prowess in online chess tournaments in early 2024, winning several matches against human and AI opponents. Grok, leveraging Tesla's vast data infrastructure, has demonstrated real-time strategic decision-making in simulation environments that include chess-like games. The competition pushes rapid innovation, with firms racing to improve chatbot conversational depth, reduce biases, increase factual accuracy, and integrate multimodal inputs like images and videos. At the same time, the competition raises questions about AI safety, ethical use, and the societal impacts of increasingly human-like chatbots. === Autonomous vehicles === Companies such as Waymo, Tesla, and Baidu are racing to deploy safe and reliable self-driving car technology. === AI chips === Rivalry between Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Huawei in designing processors optimized for AI workloads. === Military applications === Development of AI-enabled drones, surveillance systems, and decision-support tools, with associated ethical debates. == Events == In 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, prompting competitors such as Google DeepMind to accelerate the release of their own models, including Gemini. In 2024, Chinese AI company DeepSeek launched the R1 model, leading OpenAI to release an open-source system, GPT-OSS, as a strategic countermeasure. In 2022, Tesla and Waymo both expanded autonomous taxi services in U.S. cities, competing for regulatory approval and public trust. The U.S. Department of Defense's Project Maven and China's AI-enabled surveillance programs have been cited as examples of military AI rivalry. In 2025, Microsoft hired several senior engineers from Google DeepMind, highlighting the ongoing "talent poaching" competition in the AI sector. == Risks and concerns == Critics warn that unrestrained competition in AI can undermine safety, ethics, and governance. Concerns include the proliferation of biased or unsafe models, escalation in autonomous weapons, and reduced cooperation on safety standards.
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Margin (machine learning)

In machine learning, the margin of a single data point is defined to be the distance from the data point to a decision boundary. Note that there are many distances and decision boundaries that may be appropriate for certain datasets and goals. A margin classifier is a classification model that utilizes the margin of each example to learn such classification. There are theoretical justifications (based on the VC dimension) as to why maximizing the margin (under some suitable constraints) may be beneficial for machine learning and statistical inference algorithms. For a given dataset, there may be many hyperplanes that could classify it. One reasonable choice as the best hyperplane is the one that represents the largest separation, or margin, between the classes. Hence, one should choose the hyperplane such that the distance from it to the nearest data point on each side is maximized. If such a hyperplane exists, it is known as the maximum-margin hyperplane, and the linear classifier it defines is known as a maximum margin classifier (or, equivalently, the perceptron of optimal stability).
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Julia Hirschberg

Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She received her first PhD in history from the University of Michigan and the second from the University of Pennsylvania in computer science doing research in Natural Language Processing. She worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Labs from 1985 to 2002 and from 2002 at Columbia University where she is currently the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science. == Biography == Julia Linn Bell Hirschberg received her first Ph.D. degree in history (16th-century Mexico) from University of Michigan in 1976. She served on the History faculty of Smith College from 1974 to 1982. She subsequently shifted to Computer Science studies, receiving her M.S. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1985. Upon graduation from University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Hirschberg joined AT&T Bell Labs as a Member of Technical staff in the Linguistics Research Department, where she worked on improving prosody assignment for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) in the Bell Labs TTS system. She was promoted to Department Head in 1994 when she created a new Human Computer Interface Research Lab. She and her department remained at Bell Labs until 1996 when they moved to AT&T Labs Research as part of a corporate reorganization. In 2002, she joined the Columbia University faculty as a professor in the Department of Computer Science. She served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012 to 2018. She still leads classes at Columbia in speech and natural language research and supervises PhD students and a large number of research project students. == Research == Hirschberg's research has included prosody, discourse structure, conversational implicature, text-to-speech synthesis, speech summarization, spoken dialogue systems, emotional speech, deceptive speech, charismatic speech, entrainment, empathetic speech and code-switching. Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research. She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in TTS systems. With Janet Pierrehumbert, she developed a theoretical model of intonational meaning. She was a leader in the development of the ToBI conventions for intonational description, which have been extended to numerous languages and which today are the most widely used standard for intonational annotation. Hirschberg has been a pioneer together with Gregory Ward in much experimental work on intonational sources of language meaning and how these interact with pragmatic phenomena, particularly on the meaning of accent (intonational prominent) items and the meaning of intonational contours. She also has innovated in numerous other areas involving prosody and meaning, including the role of grammatical function and surface position in pitch accent location, the use of prosody in disambiguating cue phrases (discourse markers) with Diane Litman, the role of prosody in disambiguation in English, Italian, and Spanish with Cinzia Avesani and Pilar Prieto, and the automatic identification of speech recognition errors using prosodic information, At AT&T Labs she worked with Fernando Pereira, Steve Whittaker, and others on speech search and developing new interfaces for speech navigation. At Columbia, she and her students have continued and extended research on spoken dialogue systems (automatically detecting speech recognition errors and inappropriate system queries, modeling turn-taking behavior, dialogue entrainment, modeling and generating clarification dialogues); on the automatic classification of trust, charisma, deception and emotion from speech; on speech summarization; prosody translation, hedging behavior in text and speech, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech search in low resource languages. She also holds several patents in TTS and in speech search. Corpora she and collaborators have collected include the Boston Directions Corpus, the Columbia SRI Colorado Deception Corpus, and the Columbia Games Corpus. She has served on numerous technical boards and editorial committees. She has served as a member of the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Board of Directors and as co-chair of CRA-W. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. == Awards == Hirschberg's notable honors and awards include: Elected as a member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence Academy of Sciences and recipient of the NAAI Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award, 2025 Elected as a Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2024. 2020 ISCA Special Service Medal Honorary Doctorate (eredoctoraat) from Tilburg University, Netherlands, 2018. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. IEEE Fellow, 2017 National Academy of Engineering, 2017 ACM Fellow in 2015 Elected member, American Philosophical Society, 2014. Honorary member, Association for Laboratory Phonology, 2014. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Founding) Fellow, 2011. International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement, 2011. IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, 2011. Honorary Doctorate (Hedersdoktorer), KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, 2007. AAAI Fellow, 1994. == Publications == A social history of Puebla de Los Ángeles, 1531-60, 1976 Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases, 1991 Prosody and conversation, 1998 Most recent publications and other information, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/speech/.
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Is an AI Photo Editor Worth It in 2026?

Shopping for the best AI photo editor? An AI photo editor is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI photo editor slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.
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Avid DS

Avid DS (which was called Avid DS Nitris until early 2008) is a high-end offline and finishing system comprising a non-linear editing system and visual effects software. It was developed by Softimage (this company was owned by Microsoft at the time of DS v1.0's launch before being acquired from Microsoft by Avid Technology, Inc. shortly thereafter) in Montreal. DS was discontinued on September 30, 2013 with support ending on the same date the following year. == Software == DS was called ‘Digital Studio’ in development. It was envisioned to be a complete platform for video/audio work. The first previews of the system were on the SGI platform, but this version was never released. The system was rewritten on Windows NT with different video hardware platforms (Matrox DigiSuite or Play Trinity running on a NetPower system) before the final system was released on Intergraph/StudioZ hardware in January 1998. After its acquisition by Avid, DS was always positioned as a high end video finishing tool. However, many users found it to be uniquely soup-to-nuts in its capabilities. From version 1.0 of the product, it competed with products like Autodesk Smoke, Quantel and Avid Symphony. The toolset in DS offered video timeline editing, an object-oriented vector-based paint tool, 2D layer compositing, sample based audio and starting with version 3.01 of the product, a 3D environment. Originally, a subset of the Softimage|XSI 3D software was planned to become part of the DS toolset, both were built on the same software foundation, but over time the code bases divided between the applications and the integration never happened. While the first version of the DS still lacked a few key features (no 3D, poor keying, no real-time effects), it had some significant features compared to the competing products at the time. It offered a large number of built in effects. Avid OMF import was available, positioning Softimage DS as a strong finishing tool for then typical off-line Avid systems. Lastly the integration of the toolset of Softimage DS was beyond what other product offered. A Softimage DS user could quickly go from editing, to paint, to compositing with a few mouse clicks all inside the same interface. Some of the lacking features were quickly resolved, within months of version 1.0 a new chroma keyer was released. Early versions of the software (up thru 4.0) added additional key features. Development continued with one of the first uncompressed HD editing systems (version 4.01) and an attempt to make the system more friendly to Media Composer editors in version 6. In later versions (v7.5 on beyond) DS was criticized for slow development of compositing tools, mainly lack of a new 3D environment and better tracking tools. Many DS users felt that Avid had not been giving DS the attention that it deserved. On July 7, 2013, Avid sent out an email marking the end of life of the DS product. "To Our Avid DS customers, We are writing to inform you that Avid will be realigning our business strategy to focus on a core suite of products to best leverage our developmental and creative resources. As part of this transition, we will be ceasing future development of Avid DS with a final sale date of September 30th, 2013" == Hardware == Up until version 10.5, DS was sold as a turn-key system; the software was not available without purchasing CPU, I/O and storage hardware from Avid. Beginning with 10.5, customers were able to configure their own systems using widely available components, based on recommended system requirements. In turn-key systems, there were many hardware refreshes over time. StudioZ single stream: Intergraph TDZ-425 with 30 minutes of uncompressed SCSI storage. CPUs at the time were Pentium II/300 MHz. StudioZ dual stream: Intergraph TDZ-2000 GT1 with one hour of fibre channel storage. CPUs on first systems were Pentium II/400 MHz, but last shipping systems had Pentium III/1 GHz. DS was one of the first applications to show that real-time effects could be processed with just the CPUs of the system, not requiring special video cards with real-time effect hardware. Equinox: Developed by Avid, it was one of the first uncompressed HD video cards available. Systems were available on CPUs from Pentium III/1 GHz to Pentium 4/2.8 GHz. Storage was typically SCSI, but fibre channel was also supported. Nitris DNA: Developed by Avid, the Nitris hardware was probably the largest hardware update to the system since it was released. 10-bit HD and SD support was standard. Real-time down and cross convert. This was the only hardware for DS that had on-board effect processing. This allowed a system at the time to play back dual-stream uncompressed HD effects in real-time at 16-bit precision. This was also the first hardware from Avid to support the DNxHD codec. Starting with Pentium 4, Intel Core Xeons were supported. SCSI storage was primarily used. AJA Video Systems: First available as a 4:4:4 option to be used in conjunction with Nitris hardware. Final-generation DS systems used the AJA Video Systems Kona 3 (Xena 2K) card as the only I/O for the system. The last systems shipped with two Intel Core Xeon 6-core processors. SAS is the recommended storage for these systems. == History ==
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Paola Velardi

Paola Velardi (born in Rome, April 26, 1955) is a full professor of computer science at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Her research encompasses Artificial Intelligence and specifically, natural language processing, machine learning business intelligence and semantic web. Velardi is one of the hundred female scientists included in the database "100esperte.it" (translated from Italian with "100 female experts"). This online, open database champions the recognition of top-rated female scientists in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) areas. Among her prestigious appointments and honors, her inclusion stands out —alongside 45 other international female scientists from the past, present, and future— in the Women in Science pavilion of UNESCO’s Virtual Science Museum. == Research == Paola Velardi's research activity has focused, since the early 1980s, on Artificial Intelligence, with a particular emphasis on natural language processing (NLP), Machine learning, and data mining. Her scientific contributions have evolved over time, following the sector's primary paradigms: Semantic Web and Ontologies: She is known for her pioneering work on semantic disambiguation and automated ontology learning, collaborating on the development of systems such as OntoLearn. Social Computing and Predictive Analysis: She has conducted research on extracting information from social media for epidemiological monitoring (syndromic surveillance) and for the identification of opinion leaders. In the educational field, she has developed machine learning models to predict the risk of student dropout. AI for Health and Elder Monitoring: She has coordinated projects to support frailty in the elderly, developing systems based on ambient intelligence and wearables to detect clinical and behavioral anomalies. She has also contributed to models for analyzing behavioral changes through dynamic clustering. Generative AI and Finance: More recently, her research has expanded into the use of generative AI and deep learning for finance, including benchmark studies on price trend prediction based on Limit Order Books (LOB) and the development of diffusion models for realistic market simulation (the TRADES project). According to Google Scholar bibliometrics updated until December 2025, Velardi's scientific publications have been cited more than 8100 times. Her h-index was 42. She has published more than 200 papers in international journals and conference proceedings. Some of her publications have been published in top rated journals such as Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Knowledge-Based Systems, IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering , IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering , Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and Journal of Web Semantics. == Education and previous employments == Velardi graduated in electronic engineering from Sapienza University in 1978. From 1978 to 1983, she worked for the Ugo Bordoni Foundation, a research institution focusing on ICT and working under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. In 1983, she was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. During this period she became passionate about Artificial Intelligence, which will remain her area of research throughout her career. From 1984 to 1986, she came back to her natal city and worked as a researcher for IBM. From 1986 to 1996 she was an associate professor in the engineering faculty of Polytechnic University of the Marches (Ancona, Italy). Starting in November 1996, she taught in and did research for the Department of Computer Science at the Sapienza University. Velardi was the head of Bachelor and Master Programs in Computer Science at Sapienza University from 2010 to 2013 and from 2015 to 2016. == Current employment == Since November 2001, Velardi has been a full professor in the department of computer science ("Dipartimento di Informatica" in Italian) at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Since 2013, she has been the coordinator of the Distance Learning Degree in Computer Science at Sapienza University. As of today, Velardi is a Senior Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) of the CNR. == Recognition == Velardi is one of the hundred female scientists included in the database "100esperte.it" (translated from Italian with "100 female experts"). This database lists top Italian female STEM scientists. Six out of one hundred scientists in the 100esperte's database are computer scientists like Velardi. Velardi is in the list of the top Italian scientists. A top scientist appearing in the Top-Italian-Scientists database is a scientist whose h-index is greater than 30. In March 2017, she was given an IBM Faculty Award for her research on social recommender systems. In December 2018, Velardi was included in the list of the 50 most influential Italian women in science and technology by Inspiring Fifty, a non-profit that aims to increase diversity in STEM by making female role models in tech more visible. In September 2019 she was the local co-organizer and Program Chair of the 6th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing. In November 2019 Velardi received the Standout Woman Award International at the seat of the Italian Parliament in Montecitorio. == Causes == Velardi aims at debunking the myth of computer science as a man-oriented and "inflexible" discipline. She is the founder of the project "NERD? Non e' roba per donne?" (translated from Italian: "NERD? Is it not stuff for women?"). This project was launched by Velardi in 2012 in the Department of Computer Science at Sapienza University. Since 2013 the project has been carried out in partnership with IBM Italy, which later created a spin-off of the project. The goal of the project is two-fold: (1) conveying computer science as creative, interdisciplinary and problem-solving-oriented science, and (2) encouraging young female students in studying computer science by, for instance, developing apps for smartphones. She has been the program chair of the 19th ACM celebration of Women in Computing. She is the creator and coordinator of the G4GRETA, an educational project that involves students of the third and fourth grades of Rome and Lazio. The project combines the development of IT skills with the themes of environmental sustainability and soft skills (teambuilding, pitching, social networking, etc.) Velardi is also involved in scientific dissemination. In 2020 and 2021 she cooperated with RaiCultura, the cultural division of RAI, the national broadcasting company.
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Candace Sidner

Candace Lee (Candy) Sidner is an American computer scientist whose research has applied artificial intelligence and natural language processing to problems in personal information management, intelligent user interfaces, and human–robot interaction. She is a research professor of computer science at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. == Education and career == Sidner majored in mathematics at Kalamazoo College, graduating in 1971. She earned a master's degree in computer science at the University of Pittsburgh in 1975, and completed a Ph.D. in computer science in 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation, Towards A Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse, was supervised by Jonathan Allen. She worked as a researcher for Bolt Beranek and Newman from 1979 to 1989, and continued to work in industry for the Digital Equipment Corporation (1989 to 1993), the Lotus Development Corporation (1993 to 2000), Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (2000 to 2007), and BAE Systems (2007 to 2010). She took her present position as a research professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2009. She served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1989. == Recognition == Sidner was named a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1991. In 2013, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, "for seminal contributions to discourse focus and collaborative dialog".
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