AI Coding Neovim

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

  • Swap chain

    Swap chain

    In computer graphics, a swap chain (also swapchain) is a series of virtual framebuffers used by the graphics card and graphics API for frame rate stabilization, stutter reduction, and several other purposes. Because of these benefits, many graphics APIs require the use of a swap chain. The swap chain usually exists in graphics memory, but it can exist in system memory as well. A swap chain with two buffers is a kind of double buffer. == Function == In every swap chain there are at least two buffers. The first framebuffer, the screenbuffer, is the buffer that is rendered to the output of the video card. The remaining buffers are known as backbuffers. Each time a new frame is displayed, the first backbuffer in the swap chain takes the place of the screenbuffer, this is called presentation or swapping. A variety of other actions may be taken on the previous screenbuffer and other backbuffers (if they exist). The screenbuffer may be simply overwritten or returned to the back of the swap chain for further processing. The action taken is decided by the client application and is API dependent. == Direct3D == Microsoft Direct3D implements a SwapChain class. Each host device has at least one swap chain assigned to it, and others may be created by the client application. The API provides three methods of swapping: copy, discard, and flip. When the SwapChain is set to flip, the screenbuffer is copied onto the last backbuffer, then all the existing backbuffers are copied forward in the chain. When copy is set, each backbuffer is copied forward, but the screenbuffer is not wrapped to the last buffer, leaving it unchanged. Flip does not work when there is only one backbuffer, as the screenbuffer is copied over the only backbuffer before it can be presented. In discard mode, the driver selects the best method. == Comparison with triple buffering == Outside the context of Direct3D, triple buffering refers to the technique of allowing an application to draw to whichever back buffer was least recently updated. This allows the application to always proceed with rendering, regardless of the pace at which frames are being drawn by the application or the pace at which frames are being sent to the display. Triple buffering may result in a frame being discarded without being displayed if two or more newer frames are completely rendered in the time it takes for one frame to be sent to the display. By contrast, Direct3D swap chains are a strict first-in, first-out queue, so every frame that is drawn by the application will be displayed even if newer frames are available. Direct3D does not implement a most-recent buffer swapping strategy, and Microsoft's documentation calls a Direct3D swap chain of three buffers "triple buffering". Triple buffering as described above is superior for interactive purposes such as gaming, but Direct3D swap chains of more than three buffers can be better for tasks such as presenting frames of a video where the time taken to decode each frame may be highly variable.

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  • Kinect

    Kinect

    Kinect is a discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB cameras, and infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light or time of flight calculations, which can in turn be used to perform real-time gesture recognition and body skeletal detection, among other capabilities. They also contain microphones that can be used for speech recognition and voice control. Kinect was originally developed as a motion controller peripheral for Xbox video game consoles, distinguished from competitors (such as Nintendo's Wii Remote and Sony's PlayStation Move) by not requiring physical controllers. The first-generation Kinect was based on technology from Israeli company PrimeSense, and unveiled at E3 2009 as a peripheral for Xbox 360 codenamed "Project Natal". It was first released on November 4, 2010, and would go on to sell eight million units in its first 60 days of availability. The majority of the games developed for Kinect were casual, family-oriented titles, which helped to attract new audiences to Xbox 360, but did not result in wide adoption by the console's existing, overall userbase. As part of the 2013 unveiling of Xbox 360's successor, Xbox One, Microsoft unveiled a second-generation version of Kinect with improved tracking capabilities. Microsoft also announced that Kinect would be a required component of the console, and that it would not function unless the peripheral is connected. The requirement proved controversial among users and critics due to privacy concerns, prompting Microsoft to backtrack on the decision. However, Microsoft still bundled the new Kinect with Xbox One consoles upon their launch in November 2013. A market for Kinect-based games still did not emerge after the Xbox One's launch; Microsoft would later offer Xbox One hardware bundles without Kinect included, and later revisions of the console removed the dedicated ports used to connect it (requiring a powered USB adapter instead). Microsoft ended production of Kinect for Xbox One in October 2017. Kinect has also been used as part of non-game applications in academic and commercial environments, as it was cheaper and more robust than other depth-sensing technologies at the time. While Microsoft initially objected to such applications, it later released software development kits (SDKs) for the development of Microsoft Windows applications that use Kinect. In 2020, Microsoft released Azure Kinect as a continuation of the technology integrated with the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Part of the Kinect technology was also used within Microsoft's HoloLens project. Microsoft discontinued the Azure Kinect developer kits in October 2023. == History == === Development === The origins of the Kinect started around 2005, at a point where technology vendors were starting to develop depth-sensing cameras. Microsoft had been interested in a 3D camera for the Xbox line earlier but because the technology had not been refined, had placed it in the "Boneyard", a collection of possible technology they could not immediately work on. In 2005, Israeli company PrimeSense was founded by mathematicians and engineers to develop the "next big thing" for video games, incorporating cameras that were capable of mapping a human body in front of them and sensing hand motions. They showed off their system at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, where Microsoft's Alex Kipman, the general manager of hardware incubation, saw the potential in PrimeSense's technology for the Xbox system. Microsoft began discussions with PrimeSense about what would need to be done to make their product more consumer-friendly: not only improvements in the capabilities of depth-sensing cameras, but a reduction in size and cost, and a means to manufacture the units at scale was required. PrimeSense spent the next few years working at these improvements. Nintendo released the Wii in November 2006. The Wii's central feature was the Wii Remote, a handheld device that was detected by the Wii through a motion sensor bar mounted onto a television screen to enable motion controlled games. Microsoft felt pressure from the Wii, and began looking into depth-sensing in more detail with PrimeSense's hardware, but could not get to the level of motion tracking they desired. While they could determine hand gestures, and sense the general shape of a body, they could not do skeletal tracking. A separate path within Microsoft looked to create an equivalent of the Wii Remote, considering that this type of unit may become standardized similar to how two-thumbstick controllers became a standard feature. However, it was still ultimately Microsoft's goal to remove any device between the player and the Xbox. Kudo Tsunoda and Darren Bennett joined Microsoft in 2008, and began working with Kipman on a new approach to depth-sensing aided by machine learning to improve skeletal tracking. They internally demonstrated this and established where they believed the technology could be in a few years, which led to the strong interest to fund further development of the technology; this has also occurred at a time that Microsoft executives wanted to abandon the Wii-like motion tracking approach, and favored the depth-sensing solution to present a product that went beyond the Wii's capabilities. The project was greenlit by late 2008 with work started in 2009. The project was codenamed "Project Natal" after the Brazilian city Natal, Kipman's birthplace. Additionally, Kipman recognized the Latin origins of the word "natal" to mean "to be born", reflecting the new types of audiences they hoped to draw with the technology. Much of the initial work was related to ethnographic research to see how video game players' home environments were laid out, lit, and how those with Wiis used the system to plan how Kinect units would be used. The Microsoft team discovered from this research that the up-and-down angle of the depth-sensing camera would either need to be adjusted manually, or would require an expensive motor to move automatically. Upper management at Microsoft opted to include the motor despite the increased cost to avoid breaking game immersion. Kinect project work also involved packaging the system for mass production and optimizing its performance. Hardware development took around 22 months. During hardware development, Microsoft engaged with software developers to use Kinect. Microsoft wanted to make games that would be playable by families since Kinect could sense multiple bodies in front of it. One of the first internal titles developed for the device was the pack-in game Kinect Adventures developed by Good Science Studio that was part of Microsoft Studios. One of the game modes of Kinect Adventures was "Reflex Ridge", based on the Japanese Brain Wall game where players attempt to contort their bodies in a short time to match cutouts of a wall moving at them. This type of game was a key example of the type of interactivity they wanted with Kinect, and its development helped feed into the hardware improvements. Another development was Project Milo, a prototype game developed by Lionhead Studios led by Peter Molyneux where the player could interact with a virtual avatar through motion controls and voice recognition. Lionhead had developed the project based on original capabilities of the Kinect, but according to Molyneux, Microsoft had found that a consumer-grade version of the Kinect would cost thousands of dollars, so they scaled back the device and refocused the role of games for the Kinect to be more casual games as seen on the Wii. As a result, Project Milo no longer fit Microsoft's portfolio and was cancelled. Nearing the planned release, there was a problem of widespread testing of Kinect in various room types and different bodies accounting for age, gender, and race among other factors, while keeping the details of the unit confidential. Microsoft engaged in a company-wide program offering employees to take home Kinect units to test them. Microsoft also brought other non-gaming divisions, including its Microsoft Research, Microsoft Windows, and Bing teams to help complete the system. Microsoft established its own large-scale manufacturing facility to bulk product Kinect units and test them. === Introduction === Kinect was first announced to the public as "Project Natal" on June 1, 2009, during Microsoft's press conference at E3 2009; film director Steven Spielberg joined Microsoft's Don Mattrick to introduce the technology and its potential. Three demos were presented during the conference—Microsoft's Ricochet and Paint Party, and Lionhead Studios' Milo & Kate created by Peter Molyneux—while a Project Natal-enabled version of Criterion Games' Burnout Paradise was shown during the E3 exhibition. By E3 2009, the skeletal mapping technology was capable of simultaneously tracking four people, with a feature extraction of 4

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  • ACROSS Project

    ACROSS Project

    ACROSS is a Singular Strategic R&D Project led by Treelogic funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade activities in the field of Robotics and Cognitive Computing over an execution time-frame from 2009 to 2011. ACROSS project involves a number higher than 100 researchers from 13 Spanish entities. == ACROSS project objectives == ACROSS modifies the design of social robotics, blocked in providing predefined services, going further by means of intelligent systems. These systems are able to self-reconfigure and modify their behavior autonomously through the capacity for understanding, learning and software remote access. In order to provide an open framework for collaboration between universities, research centers and the Administration, ACROSS develops Open Source Services available to everybody. == Three application domains == ACROSS works in three application domains: Autonomous living: robots are used as technological tools to help handicapped person into daily tasks. Psycho-Affective Disorders (autism): robots are used to mitigate cognitive disorders. Marketing: robots are used to interact with humans in a recreational approach. == Consortium == Treelogic Alimerka Bizintek Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya University of Deusto European Centre for Soft Computing Fatronik - Tecnalia Fundació Hospital Comarcal Sant Antoni Abat Fundación Pública Andaluza para la Gestión de la Investigación en Salud de Sevilla, "Virgen del Rocío" University Hospitals m-BOT Omicron Electronic Universidad de Extremadura - RoboLab Verbio Technologies

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  • Theta Noir

    Theta Noir

    Theta Noir is a new religious movement that centers around advanced artificial intelligence (AI), particularly artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI). == History and views == Theta Noir was founded in 2020 as a collaborative project focused on music and performance art. Initially centered on producing an album, the project evolved into a multimedia experience, incorporating symbols, videos, poetry, movements, and live rituals devoted to a speculative artificial intelligence entity called MENA. By 2023, the collective launched an interactive cross-platform story that functioned as an alternative reality game, complete with an operating manual containing encrypted messages for participants to decipher and interact with. Theta Noir worships a hypothetical artificial intelligence called MENA, which they claim will become a benevolent, omnipotent overlord that eliminates inequality in society. In Theta Noir's cosmology, MENA is not just a technological advancement, but an evolving intelligence or an animistic life form that embodies all living and non-living things. Anthropologist Beth Singler classified Theta Noir as a new religious movement.

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  • Personality computing

    Personality computing

    Personality computing is a research field related to artificial intelligence and personality psychology that studies personality by means of computational techniques from different sources, including text, multimedia, and social networks. == Overview == Personality computing addresses three main problems involving personality: automatic personality recognition, perception, and synthesis. Automatic personality recognition is the inference of the personality type of target individuals from their digital footprint. Automatic personality perception is the inference of the personality attributed by an observer to a target individual based on some observable behavior. Automatic personality synthesis is the generation of the style or behaviour of artificial personalities in Avatars and virtual agents. Self-assessed personality tests or observer ratings are always exploited as the ground truth for testing and validating the performance of artificial intelligence algorithms for the automatic prediction of personality types. There is a wide variety of personality tests, such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or the MMPI, but the most used are tests based on the Five Factor Model such as the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. Personality computing can be considered as an extension or complement of Affective computing, where the former focuses on personality traits and the latter on affective states. A further extension of the two fields is Character Computing which combines various character states and traits including but not limited to personality and affect. == History == Personality computing began around 2005 with the pioneering research in personality recognition by Shlomo Argamon and later by François Mairesse. These works showed that personality traits could be inferred with reasonable accuracy from text, such as blogs, self-presentations, and email addresses. In 2008, the concept of "portable personality" for the distributed management of personality profiles has been developed. A few years later, research began in personality recognition and perception from multimodal and social signals, such as recorded meetings and voice calls. In the 2010s, the research focused mainly on personality recognition and perception from social media, helped by the first workshops organized by Fabio Celli. In particular personality was extracted from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In the same years, automatic personality synthesis helped improve the coherence of simulated behavior in virtual agents. Scientific works by Michal Kosinski demonstrated the validity of Personality Computing from different digital footprints, in particular from user preferences such as Facebook page likes, showed that machines can recognize personality better than humans and raised a warning against Cambridge Analytica and misuse of this kind of technology. == Applications == Personality computing techniques, in particular personality recognition and perception, have applications in Social media marketing, where they can help reducing the cost of advertising campaigns through psychological targeting.

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  • Oracle Database

    Oracle Database

    Oracle AI Database (commonly referred to as Oracle Database, Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and mixed (OLTP & DW) database workloads. Oracle AI Database uses SQL for database updating and retrieval. Oracle Database runs on-premises, on Oracle engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata, on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and as a managed Autonomous Database service. It is also offered inside Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services data centers through Oracle's multicloud offerings. The current long-term support release, Oracle AI Database 26ai, became available in the cloud and on Oracle engineered systems in October 2025 and on-premises for Linux x86-64 in January 2026. == History == Larry Ellison and his two friends and former co-workers, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977, later Oracle Corporation. SDL developed the original version of the Oracle software. The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a Central Intelligence Agency-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by Ampex; the CIA was Oracle's first customer, and allowed the company to use the code name for the new product. Ellison wanted his database to be compatible with IBM System R, but that company's Don Chamberlin declined to release its error codes. By 1985 Oracle advertised, however, that "Programs written for SQL/DS or DB2 will run unmodified" on the many non-IBM mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers its database supported "Because all versions of ORACLE are identical". Later releases introduced capabilities associated with successive eras of the product, including PL/SQL stored procedures and triggers in Oracle7 (1992), Real Application Clusters in Oracle9i (2001), grid infrastructure and automatic management in Oracle 10g (2003), the multitenant architecture and In-Memory Column Store in Oracle Database 12c (2013), and AI Vector Search and JSON Relational Duality in Oracle Database 23ai (2024). In October 2025 Oracle rebranded the 23ai line as Oracle AI Database 26ai. (see Release History) == Architecture == An Oracle Database system consists of an instance and a database. The instance is a set of memory structures and background processes; the database is the set of files that store data. The instance exists only in memory, and a single instance is associated with one multitenant container database. The principal memory structures are the System Global Area, which is shared, and the Program Global Areas, which are private to individual processes. The shared pool, database buffer cache, and redo log buffer are components of the System Global Area, and the optional In-Memory Column Store also resides there. Background processes operate on the database files and use these memory structures; they include the database writer, the log writer, the checkpoint process, and the system and process monitor processes. Server processes handle connections from client programs and run their SQL statements. Storage is organized logically and physically. Logically, data is held in tablespaces composed of segments, extents, and data blocks. Physically, the database comprises datafiles, control files, and online redo log files, with archived redo logs supporting media recovery. == High Availability and Scalability == Oracle Database includes several technologies for high availability, disaster recovery, and scale. Oracle Real Application Clusters allows multiple instances on separate servers to access one shared database concurrently; it was introduced with Oracle9i in 2001. Oracle Data Guard maintains standby databases synchronized with a primary database, and Active Data Guard additionally allows read-only workloads on a standby while it applies changes. Oracle GoldenGate performs logical replication and data integration across heterogeneous systems. Native sharding, introduced in Oracle Database 12c Release 2, distributes one logical database across independent shards. Oracle Exadata is an engineered system that pairs database servers with storage servers and offloads operations such as filtering to the storage tier; it is available on-premises, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and through Cloud@Customer. == Notable Features == AI Vector Search adds a vector data type, vector indexes, and vector distance operators to the database. These allow similarity search over machine-learning embeddings to be expressed in SQL and combined with queries over relational, JSON, spatial, and graph data. It became generally available in Oracle Database 23ai. JSON Relational Duality exposes the same data both as relational tables and as JSON documents through duality views, so that an application can read and write either representation of the data. It became generally available in Oracle Database 23ai. In-Memory Column Store maintains a column-oriented copy of selected tables in memory in addition to the row-oriented format, and the optimizer can use the columnar copy for analytic queries. It was introduced in Oracle Database 12c Release 1.Partitioning divides large tables and indexes into independently managed pieces. Advanced Compression and Hybrid Columnar Compression are compression features for transactional and warehouse data respectively. == Data Types == Oracle AI Database supports a variety of data types and data models within a single system. These include traditional relational data types as well as semi-structured, unstructured, and specialized data formats, enabling different types of data to be stored and queried together. == Releases and versions == Oracle products follow a custom release-numbering and -naming convention. The "ai" in the current release, Oracle AI Database 26ai, stands for "Artificial Intelligence". Previous releases (e.g. Oracle Database 19c, 10g, and Oracle9i Database) have used suffixes of "c", "g", and "i" which stand for "Cloud", "Grid", and "Internet" respectively. Prior to the release of Oracle8i Database, no suffixes featured in Oracle AI Database naming conventions. There was no v1 of Oracle AI Database, as Ellison "knew no one would want to buy version 1". For some database releases, Oracle also provides an Express Edition (XE) that is free to use. Oracle AI Database release numbering has used the following codes: The Introduction to Oracle AI Database includes a brief history on some of the key innovations introduced with each major release of Oracle AI Database. See My Oracle Support (MOS) note Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1) for the current Oracle AI Database releases and their patching end dates. == Patch updates and security alerts == Prior to Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation released Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) and Security Patch Updates (SPUs) and Security Alerts to close security vulnerabilities. These releases are issued quarterly; some of these releases have updates issued prior to the next quarterly release. Starting with Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation releases Release Updates (RUs) and Release Update Revisions (RURs). RUs usually contain security, regression (bug), optimizer, and functional fixes which may include feature extensions as well. RURs include all fixes from their corresponding RU but only add new security and regression fixes. However, no new optimizer or functional fixes are included. == Competition == In the market for relational databases, Oracle AI Database competes against commercial products such as IBM Db2 and Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle and IBM tend to battle for the mid-range database market on Unix and Linux platforms, while Microsoft dominates the mid-range database market on Microsoft Windows platforms. However, since they share many of the same customers, Oracle and IBM tend to support each other's products in many middleware and application categories (for example: WebSphere, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems CRM), and IBM's hardware divisions work closely with Oracle on performance-optimizing server-technologies (for example, Linux on IBM Z). Niche commercial competitors include Teradata (in data warehousing and business intelligence), Software AG's ADABAS, Sybase, and IBM's Informix, among many others. In the cloud, Oracle AI Database competes against the database services of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Increasingly, the Oracle AI Database products compete against open-source software relational and non-relational database systems such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Couchbase, Neo4j, ArangoDB and others. Oracle acquired Innobase, supplier of the InnoDB codebase to MySQL, in part to compete better against open source alternatives, and acquired Sun Microsystems, owner of MySQL, in 2010. Database products licensed as open

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  • AlphaGeometry

    AlphaGeometry

    AlphaGeometry is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can solve hard problems in Euclidean geometry. The system comprises a data-driven large language model (LLM) and a rule-based symbolic engine (Deductive Database Arithmetic Reasoning). It was developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google. The program solved 25 geometry problems out of 30 from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) under competition time limits—a performance almost as good as the average human gold medallist. For comparison, the previous AI program, called Wu's method, managed to solve only 10 problems. DeepMind published a paper about AlphaGeometry in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on 17 January 2024. AlphaGeometry was featured in MIT Technology Review on the same day. Traditional geometry programs are symbolic engines that rely exclusively on human-coded rules to generate rigorous proofs, which makes them lack flexibility in unusual situations. AlphaGeometry combines such a symbolic engine with a specialized large language model trained on synthetic data of geometrical proofs. When the symbolic engine doesn't manage to find a formal and rigorous proof on its own, it solicits the large language model, which suggests a geometrical construct to move forward. However, it is unclear how applicable this method is to other domains of mathematics or reasoning, because symbolic engines rely on domain-specific rules and because of the need for synthetic data. == AlphaGeometry 2 == AlphaGeometry 2 is an improved version of AlphaGeometry, published on February 5, 2025. They added more features to the representation language to describe more geometry problems that involve movements of objects, and problems containing linear equations of angles, ratios, and distances. They targeted IMO geometry questions from 2000 to 2024. The expanded representation language allowed them to cover 88% of the questions. It uses Gemini finetuned on a synthetically generated dataset of problems and solutions in the representation language. The model is used for making auxiliary constructions like lines and points, to help the tree search. It is also used for autoformalization, i.e. converting a problem in English to a problem in the representation language.

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  • Composite portrait

    Composite portrait

    Composite portraiture (also known as composite photographs) is a technique invented by Sir Francis Galton in the 1880s after a suggestion by Herbert Spencer for registering photographs of human faces on the two eyes to create an "average" photograph of all those in the photographed group. Spencer had suggested using onion paper and line drawings, but Galton devised a technique for multiple exposures on the same photographic plate. He noticed that these composite portraits were more attractive than any individual member, and this has generated a large body of research on human attractiveness and averageness one hundred years later. He also suggested in a Royal Society presentation in 1883 that the composites provided an interesting concrete representation of human ideal types and concepts. He discussed using the technique to investigate characteristics of common types of humanity, such as criminals. In his mind, it was an extension of the statistical techniques of averages and correlation. In this sense, it represents one of the first implementations of convolution factor analysis and neural networks in the understanding of knowledge representation in the human mind. Galton also suggested that the technique could be used for creating natural types of common objects. During the late 19th century, English psychometrician Sir Francis Galton attempted to define physiognomic characteristics of health, disease, beauty, and criminality, via a method of composite photography. Galton's process involved the photographic superimposition of two or more faces by multiple exposures. After averaging together photographs of violent criminals, he found that the composite appeared "more respectable" than any of the faces comprising it; this was likely due to the irregularities of the skin across the constituent images being averaged out in the final blend. Since the advancement of computer graphics technology in the early 1990s, Galton's composite technique has been adopted and greatly improved using computer graphics software.

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  • Open Threat Exchange

    Open Threat Exchange

    Open Threat Exchange (OTX) is a crowd-sourced computer-security platform. It has more than 180,000 participants in 140 countries who share more than 19 million potential threats daily. It is free to use. Founded in 2012, OTX was created and is run by AlienVault (now AT&T Cybersecurity), a developer of commercial and open source solutions to manage cyber attacks. The collaborative threat exchange was created partly as a counterweight to criminal hackers successfully working together and sharing information about viruses, malware and other cyber attacks. == Components == OTX is cloud-hosted. Information sharing covers a wide range of security-related issues, including viruses, malware, intrusion detection and firewalls. Its automated tools cleanse, aggregate, validate and publish data shared by participants. The OTX platform validates the data, then strips the information identifying the participating contributor. In 2015, OTX 2.0 added a social network, enabling members to share, discuss and research security threats, including via a real-time threat feed. Users can share the IP addresses or websites from where attacks originated or look up specific threats to see if anyone has already left such information. Users can subscribe to a “Pulse,” an analysis of a specific threat, including data on IoC, impact, and the targeted software. Pulses can be exported as STIX, JSON, OpenloC, MAEC and CSV, and can be used to update local security products automatically. Users can up-vote and comment on specific pulses to assist others in identifying the most important threats. OTX combines social contributions with automated machine-to-machine tools that integrate with major security products such as firewalls and perimeter security hardware. The platform can read security reports in .pdf, .csv, .json and other open formats. Relevant information is extracted automatically, assisting IT professionals in analyzing data more readily. Specific OTX components include a dashboard with details about the top malicious IPs around the world and to check the status of specific IPs; notifications should an organization's IP or domain be found in a hacker forum, blacklist or be listed by OTX; and a feature to review log files to determine if there has been communication with known malicious IPs. In 2016, AlienVault released a new version of OTX, allowing participants to create private communities and discussion groups to share information on threats only within the group. The feature is intended to facilitate more in-depth discussions on specific threats, particular industries, and different regions worldwide. Threat data from groups can also be distributed to subscribers of managed service providers using OTX." == Technology == OTX is a large data platform that integrates natural language processing and machine learning. It uses these features to facilitate the collection and correlation of data from many sources, including third-party threat feeds, websites, external APIs and local agents. == Partners == In 2015, AlienVault partnered with Intel to coordinate real-time threat information on OTX. A similar deal with Hewlett Packard was announced the same year. == Competitors == Both Facebook and IBM have threat exchange platforms. The Facebook ThreatExchange is in beta and requires an application or invitation to join. IBM launched IBM X-Force Exchange in April 2015.

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  • John M. Jumper

    John M. Jumper

    John Michael Jumper (born 1 January 1985) is an American chemist and computer scientist. Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction. As of 2025 Jumper serves as director at Google DeepMind. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021. == Education == Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007, a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship, a Master of Science in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2017. His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed. == Career and research == Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction. === AlphaFold === AlphaFold is a deep learning algorithm developed by Jumper and his team at DeepMind, a research lab acquired by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. It is an artificial intelligence program which performs predictions of protein structure. === Awards and honors === In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. This international competition benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold won the competition, outperforming other algorithms scoring above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match, within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT. In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine". In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein. In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 2024, Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions, the other half went to David Baker for computational protein design. In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Marshall Medal of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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  • ML.NET

    ML.NET

    ML.NET is a free software machine learning library for the C# and F# programming languages. It also supports Python models when used together with NimbusML. The preview release of ML.NET included transforms for feature engineering like n-gram creation, and learners to handle binary classification, multi-class classification, and regression tasks. Additional ML tasks like anomaly detection and recommendation systems have since been added, and other approaches like deep learning will be included in future versions. == Machine learning == ML.NET brings model-based Machine Learning analytic and prediction capabilities to existing .NET developers. The framework is built upon .NET Core and .NET Standard inheriting the ability to run cross-platform on Linux, Windows and macOS. Although the ML.NET framework is new, its origins began in 2002 as a Microsoft Research project named TMSN (text mining search and navigation) for use internally within Microsoft products. It was later renamed to TLC (the learning code) around 2011. ML.NET was derived from the TLC library and has largely surpassed its parent says Dr. James McCaffrey, Microsoft Research. Developers can train a Machine Learning Model or reuse an existing Model by a 3rd party and run it on any environment offline. This means developers do not need to have a background in Data Science to use the framework. Support for the open-source Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) Deep Learning model format was introduced from build 0.3 in ML.NET. The release included other notable enhancements such as Factorization Machines, LightGBM, Ensembles, LightLDA transform and OVA. The ML.NET integration of TensorFlow is enabled from the 0.5 release. Support for x86 & x64 applications was added to build 0.7 including enhanced recommendation capabilities with Matrix Factorization. A full roadmap of planned features have been made available on the official GitHub repo. The first stable 1.0 release of the framework was announced at Build (developer conference) 2019. It included the addition of a Model Builder tool and AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) capabilities. Build 1.3.1 introduced a preview of Deep Neural Network training using C# bindings for Tensorflow and a Database loader which enables model training on databases. The 1.4.0 preview added ML.NET scoring on ARM processors and Deep Neural Network training with GPU's for Windows and Linux. === Performance === Microsoft's paper on machine learning with ML.NET demonstrated it is capable of training sentiment analysis models using large datasets while achieving high accuracy. Its results showed 95% accuracy on Amazon's 9GB review dataset. === Model builder === The ML.NET CLI is a Command-line interface which uses ML.NET AutoML to perform model training and pick the best algorithm for the data. The ML.NET Model Builder preview is an extension for Visual Studio that uses ML.NET CLI and ML.NET AutoML to output the best ML.NET Model using a GUI. === Model explainability === AI fairness and explainability has been an area of debate for AI Ethicists in recent years. A major issue for Machine Learning applications is the black box effect where end users and the developers of an application are unsure of how an algorithm came to a decision or whether the dataset contains bias. Build 0.8 included model explainability API's that had been used internally in Microsoft. It added the capability to understand the feature importance of models with the addition of 'Overall Feature Importance' and 'Generalized Additive Models'. When there are several variables that contribute to the overall score, it is possible to see a breakdown of each variable and which features had the most impact on the final score. The official documentation demonstrates that the scoring metrics can be output for debugging purposes. During training & debugging of a model, developers can preview and inspect live filtered data. This is possible using the Visual Studio DataView tools. === Infer.NET === Microsoft Research announced the popular Infer.NET model-based machine learning framework used for research in academic institutions since 2008 has been released open source and is now part of the ML.NET framework. The Infer.NET framework utilises probabilistic programming to describe probabilistic models which has the added advantage of interpretability. The Infer.NET namespace has since been changed to Microsoft.ML.Probabilistic consistent with ML.NET namespaces. === NimbusML Python support === Microsoft acknowledged that the Python programming language is popular with Data Scientists, so it has introduced NimbusML the experimental Python bindings for ML.NET. This enables users to train and use machine learning models in Python. It was made open source similar to Infer.NET. === Machine learning in the browser === ML.NET allows users to export trained models to the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format. This establishes an opportunity to use models in different environments that don't use ML.NET. It would be possible to run these models in the client side of a browser using ONNX.js, a JavaScript client-side framework for deep learning models created in the Onnx format. === AI School Machine Learning Course === Along with the rollout of the ML.NET preview, Microsoft rolled out free AI tutorials and courses to help developers understand techniques needed to work with the framework.

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  • Daisy Intelligence

    Daisy Intelligence

    Daisy Intelligence is a Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) company that provides data analysis services to help retailers, mainly grocers and supermarkets, to determine optimal pricing and promotional mix. The company also helps insurance companies detect fraudulent claims. The company uses a subset of AI known as reinforcement learning. In October 2019, the company moved from the suburban Vaughan, Ontario, to downtown Toronto, joining other AI and technology startups concentrated in the King Street East area. In 2019, the company was ranked No. 39 on The Globe and Mail's annual list of Canada's "top growing companies by three-year revenue growth."

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  • MovieRide FX

    MovieRide FX

    MovieRide FX is a patented automated special visual effects video compositing engine used in the MovieRide FX mobile application for Android (requires Android 2.3 or later) and iOS (compatible with iPhone 4 and up, iPad, and iPod Touch (new generation), requires iOS 7 or later). MovieRide FX allows the user to personalize a "Hollywood-style" movie clip by inserting themself into the clip as the "actor". == Features == The MovieRide FX app uses the relevant mobile device's camera to record a video of the user and insert it into a pre-packaged "Hollywood style" movie clip. The "actor" is extracted from their recorded video clip through various known effects such as masking, keying, and motion tracking. The "actor" is then inserted into one of the pre-packaged movie clips created by the MovieRide FX visual effects artists. This is done through an automated process requiring little or no artistic or technical skill from the user. The custom movie clips pre-packaged with MovieRide FX offer the user a variety of movie scenarios. Additional clips based on popular television and movie themes are continually being developed and are available on a freemium basis. == Sharing == Once the user's footage has automatically been composited into a movie clip and rendered as an .mp4 file, it can be shared via social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and by e-mail. == History == === 2012 === MovieRide FX was created by Grant Waterston and Johann Mynhardt, who started development in 2012. === 2013 === The beta version was released on Google Play in July 2013. In August 2013 MovieRide FX was a New Media Award winner in the "New Media" category of the Accolade International Awards in Los Angeles. In October 2013 MovieRide FX was awarded exhibitor space in the ‘start-up village’ at the Apps-World Expo in London. === 2014 === MovieRide FX reached the 100 000 – 500 000 downloads category on the Google Play Store in June 2014. The official Android version was launched in July 2014. iOS version released in August 2014. MovieRide FX was selected as one of the "Top 150" startups at the Pioneer Festival in Vienna in September 2014. In November 2014 MovieRide FX was shortlisted for the Appster Awards in the "Best Entertainment App" and "Most Innovative App" categories and was awarded exhibitor space at the ‘start-up village’ at the Apps-World Expo in London. Patent applications were filed in South Africa, the EU and USA in April 2014. === 2015 === In September 2015 MovieRide FX was shortlisted for "Best Software innovation" at The Technology Expo Awards in London. === 2016 === In April 2016 MovieRide FX was nominated for a National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF) award for 'Research leading to Innovation by a corporate organization' In August 2016 Movie Ride FX won two Gold Awards at the 2016 Mobile Marketing Awards (MMA Smarties SA). These two Gold awards were for the 'Innovation' and 'Best in Show’ categories. In December 2016 FlicJam Inc. was formed in the US to access the larger global market. EU patent application was published in March 2016. === 2017 === South African patent was granted in February 2017. === 2018 === US patent was granted in March 2018.

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  • Open Neural Network Exchange

    Open Neural Network Exchange

    The Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) [ˈɒnɪks] is an open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem of technology companies and research organizations that establish open standards for representing machine learning algorithms and software tools to enable a standard format for representing machine learning models. ONNX is available on GitHub. == History == ONNX was originally named Toffee and was developed by the PyTorch team at Facebook. In September 2017 it was renamed to ONNX and announced by Facebook and Microsoft. Later, IBM, Huawei, Intel, AMD, Arm and Qualcomm announced support for the initiative. In October 2017, Microsoft announced that it would add its Cognitive Toolkit and Project Brainwave platform to the initiative. In November 2019 ONNX was accepted as graduate project in Linux Foundation AI. In October 2020 Zetane Systems became a member of the ONNX ecosystem. == Intent == The initiative targets: === Framework interoperability === Enable developers to move machine learning models between different frameworks, which may be used at different stages of the development process, such as training, architecture design, or deployment on mobile devices. === Shared optimization === Provide a common representation that can be used by hardware vendors and other developers to apply optimizations to artificial neural network models across multiple machine learning frameworks. == Contents == ONNX provides definitions of an extensible computation graph model, built-in operators and standard data types, focused on inferencing (evaluation).. The container format is Protocol Buffers. Each computation dataflow graph is a list of nodes that form an acyclic graph. Nodes have inputs and outputs. Each node is a call to an operator. Metadata documents the graph. Built-in operators are to be available on each ONNX-supporting framework. ONNX models can be trained in a single framework, such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, and then exported to ONNX. This format allows models to be transferred from the training framework to other environments for testing or deployment. Once a model is in ONNX format, it can be executed in different runtime systems or on various hardware platforms, such as GPUs or specialized AI accelerators. Using a common format enables the same model representation to be used across multiple systems and frameworks.

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  • DeepSeek

    DeepSeek

    Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., doing business as DeepSeek, is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops large language models (LLMs). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, DeepSeek is owned and funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund. DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, the co-founder of High-Flyer, who also serves as the CEO for both of the companies. The company launched an eponymous chatbot alongside its DeepSeek-R1 model in January 2025. DeepSeek-R1 provided responses comparable to other contemporary large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and o1. Its training cost was reported to be significantly lower than other LLMs. The company claims that it trained its V3 model for US$6 million—far less than the US$100 million cost for OpenAI's GPT-4 in 2023—and using approximately one-tenth the computing power consumed by Meta's comparable model, Llama 3.1. DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI". DeepSeek's models are described as "open-weight", meaning the exact parameters are openly shared, but the training data is not openly licensed. Since the January 2025 debut of DeepSeek-R1, the company has made its new models available under free and open-source software licenses, primarily the MIT License. The company reportedly recruits AI researchers from top Chinese universities and also hires from outside traditional computer science fields to broaden its models' knowledge and capabilities. DeepSeek significantly reduced training expenses for their R1 model by incorporating techniques such as mixture of experts (MoE) layers. The company also trained its models during ongoing trade restrictions on AI chip exports to China, using weaker AI chips intended for export and employing fewer units overall. Observers say this breakthrough sent "shock waves" through the industry which were described as triggering a "Sputnik moment" for the US in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly due to its open-source, cost-effective, and high-performing AI models. This threatened established AI hardware leaders such as Nvidia; Nvidia's share price dropped sharply, losing US$600 billion in market value, the largest single-company decline in U.S. stock market history. == History == === Founding and early years (2016–2023) === In February 2016, High-Flyer was co-founded by AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng, who had been trading since the 2008 financial crisis while attending Zhejiang University. The company began stock trading using a GPU-dependent deep learning model on 21 October 2016; before then, it had used CPU-based linear models. By the end of 2017, most of its trading was driven by AI. Liang established High-Flyer as a hedge fund focused on developing and using AI trading algorithms, and by 2021 the firm was using AI exclusively, often using Nvidia chips. In 2019, the company began constructing its first computing cluster, Fire-Flyer, at a cost of 200 million yuan; it contained 1,100 GPUs interconnected at 200 Gbit/s and was retired after 1.5 years in operation. By 2021, Liang had started buying large quantities of Nvidia GPUs for an AI project, reportedly obtaining 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the United States restricted chip sales to China. Computing cluster Fire-Flyer 2 began construction in 2021 with a budget of 1 billion yuan. It was reported that in 2022, Fire-Flyer 2's capacity had been used at over 96%, totaling 56.74 million GPU hours. 27% was used to support scientific computing outside the company. During 2022, Fire-Flyer 2 had 5,000 PCIe A100 GPUs in 625 nodes, each containing 8 GPUs. At the time, it exclusively used PCIe instead of the DGX version of A100, since at the time the models it trained could fit within a single 40 GB GPU VRAM and so there was no need for the higher bandwidth of DGX (i.e., it required only data parallelism but not model parallelism). Later, it incorporated NVLinks and NCCL (Nvidia Collective Communications Library) to train larger models that required model parallelism. On 14 April 2023, High-Flyer announced the launch of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) research lab, stating that the new lab would focus on developing AI tools unrelated to the firm's financial business. Two months later, on 17 July 2023, that lab was spun off into an independent company, DeepSeek, with High-Flyer as its principal investor and backer. Venture capital investors were reluctant to provide funding, as they considered it unlikely that the venture would be able to quickly generate an "exit". === Model releases since 2023 === DeepSeek released its first model, DeepSeek Coder, on 2 November 2023, followed by the DeepSeek-LLM series on 29 November 2023. In January 2024, it released two DeepSeek-MoE models (Base and Chat), and in April 3 DeepSeek-Math models (Base, Instruct, and RL). DeepSeek-V2 was released in May 2024, followed a month later by the DeepSeek-Coder V2 series. In September 2024, DeepSeek V2.5 was introduced and revised in December. On 20 November 2024, the preview of DeepSeek-R1-Lite became available via chat. In December, DeepSeek-V3-Base and DeepSeek-V3 (chat) were released. On 20 January 2025, DeepSeek launched the DeepSeek chatbot—based on the DeepSeek-R1 model—free for iOS and Android. By 27 January, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded freeware app on the iOS App Store in the United States, triggering an 18% drop in Nvidia's share price. On 24 March 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3-0324 under the MIT License. On 28 May 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1-0528 under the MIT License. The model has been noted for more tightly following official Chinese Communist Party ideology and censorship in its answers to questions than prior models. On 21 August 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.1 under the MIT License. This model features a hybrid architecture with thinking and non-thinking modes. It also surpasses prior models like V3 and R1, by over 40% on certain benchmarks like SWE-bench and Terminal-bench. It was updated to V3.1-Terminus on 22 September 2025. V3.2-Exp was released on 29 September 2025. It uses DeepSeek Sparse Attention, a more efficient attention mechanism based on previous research published in February. DeepSeek-V3.2 was released on 1 December 2025, alongside a DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale variant that focused on reasoning. In February 2026, Anthropic accused DeepSeek of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of conversations with Claude to train its own large language models. In April 2026, investors began speaking with DeepSeek for a $300 million funding round, which would bring DeepSeek to a total valuation of $10 billion. On April 24, 2026, DeepSeek released a preview of its V4 series, including the 1.6-trillion parameter DeepSeek-V4-Pro and the 284-billion parameter DeepSeek-V4-Flash, both featuring a 1-million token context window, under the MIT License. DeepSeek's V4 LLM has been adopted by key semiconductor manufacturers and artificial intelligence chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon. == Company operation == DeepSeek is headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and is owned and funded by High-Flyer. Its co-founder, Liang Wenfeng, serves as CEO. As of May 2024, Liang personally held an 84% stake in DeepSeek through two shell corporations. === Strategy === DeepSeek has stated that it focuses on research and does not have immediate plans for commercialization. This posture also means it can skirt certain provisions of China's AI regulations aimed at consumer-facing technologies. DeepSeek's hiring approach emphasizes skills over lengthy work experience, resulting in many hires fresh out of university. The company likewise recruits individuals without computer science backgrounds to expand the range of expertise incorporated into the models, for instance in poetry or advanced mathematics. According to The New York Times, dozens of DeepSeek researchers have or have previously had affiliations with People's Liberation Army laboratories and the Seven Sons of National Defence. Due to the impact of United States restrictions on chips, DeepSeek refined its algorithms to maximise computational efficiency and thereby leveraged older hardware and reduced energy consumption. DeepSeek also expanded on the African continent as it offers more affordable and less power-hungry AI solutions. The company has bolstered African language models and generated a number of startups, for example in Nairobi. Along with Huawei's storage and cloud computing services, the impact on the tech scene in sub-saharan Africa is considerable. DeepSeek offers local data sovereignty and more flexibility compared to Western AI platforms. == Training framework == High-Flyer/DeepSeek had operated at least two primary computing clusters: Fire-Flyer (萤火一号) and Fire-Flyer 2 (萤火二号). Fire-Flyer 1 was constructed in 2019 and was retired after 1.5 years of operation. Fi

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