AI Coding Quality

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

Interlacing (bitmaps)

In computing, interlacing (also known as interleaving) is a method of encoding a bitmap image such that a person who has partially received it sees a degraded copy of the entire image. When communicating over a slow communications link, this is often preferable to seeing a perfectly clear copy of one part of the image, as it helps the viewer decide more quickly whether to abort or continue the transmission. Interlacing is supported by the following formats, where it is optional: GIF interlacing stores the lines in the order 0 , 8 , 16 , … , ( 8 n ) , 4 , 12 , … , ( 8 n + 4 ) , 2 , 6 , 10 , 14 , … , ( 4 n + 2 ) , 1 , 3 , 5 , 7 , 9 , … , ( 2 n + 1 ) . {\displaystyle 0,8,16,\dots ,(8n),\ 4,12,\dots ,(8n+4),\ 2,6,10,14,\dots ,(4n+2),\ 1,3,5,7,9,\dots ,(2n+1).} PNG uses the Adam7 algorithm, which interlaces in both the vertical and horizontal direction. TGA uses two optional interlacing algorithms: Two-way: 0 , 2 , 4 , … , ( 2 n ) , 1 , 3 , … , ( 2 n + 1 ) , {\displaystyle 0,2,4,\dots ,(2n),\ 1,3,\dots ,(2n+1),} And four-way: 0 , 4 , 8 , … , ( 4 n ) , 1 , 5 , … , ( 4 n + 1 ) , 2 , 6 , … , ( 4 n + 2 ) , 3 , 7 , … , ( 4 n + 3 ) . {\displaystyle 0,4,8,\dots ,(4n),\ 1,5,\dots ,(4n+1),\ 2,6,\dots ,\ (4n+2),3,7,\dots ,(4n+3).} JPEG, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR (actually using a frequency decomposition hierarchy rather than interlacing of pixel values) PGF (also using a frequency decomposition) Interlacing is a form of incremental decoding, because the image can be loaded incrementally. Another form of incremental decoding is progressive scan. In progressive scan the loaded image is decoded line for line, so instead of becoming incrementally clearer it becomes incrementally larger. The main difference between the interlace concept in bitmaps and in video is that even progressive bitmaps can be loaded over multiple frames. For example: Interlaced GIF is a GIF image that seems to arrive on your display like an image coming through a slowly opening Venetian blind. A fuzzy outline of an image is gradually replaced by seven successive waves of bit streams that fill in the missing lines until the image arrives at its full resolution. Interlaced graphics were once widely used in web design and before that in the distribution of graphics files over bulletin board systems and other low-speed communications methods. The practice is much less common today, as common broadband internet connections allow most images to be downloaded to the user's screen nearly instantaneously, and interlacing is usually an inefficient method of encoding images. Interlacing has been criticized because it may not be clear to viewers when the image has finished rendering, unlike non-interlaced rendering, where progress is apparent (remaining data appears as blank). Also, the benefits of interlacing to those on low-speed connections may be outweighed by having to download a larger file, as interlaced images typically do not compress as well.
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Jean Véronis

Jean Véronis (3 June 1955 – 8 September 2013) was a French linguist, computer scientist and blogger, and a research professor at Aix-Marseille University. His research interests included natural language processing, text mining and standardisation. He was a founder of the field that is now called digital humanities. In 2006, his blog was listed among the 15 most influential by Le Monde.
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Deterministic finite automaton

In the theory of computation, a branch of theoretical computer science, a deterministic finite automaton (DFA)—also known as deterministic finite acceptor (DFA), deterministic finite-state machine (DFSM), or deterministic finite-state automaton (DFSA)—is a finite-state machine that accepts or rejects a given string of symbols, by running through a state sequence uniquely determined by the string. Deterministic refers to the uniqueness of the computation run. In search of the simplest models to capture finite-state machines, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts were among the first researchers to introduce a concept similar to finite automata in 1943. The figure illustrates a deterministic finite automaton using a state diagram. In this example automaton, there are three states: S0, S1, and S2 (denoted graphically by circles). The automaton takes a finite sequence of 0s and 1s as input. For each state, there is a transition arrow leading out to a next state for both 0 and 1. Upon reading a symbol, a DFA jumps deterministically from one state to another by following the transition arrow. For example, if the automaton is currently in state S0 and the current input symbol is 1, then it deterministically jumps to state S1. A DFA has a start state (denoted graphically by an arrow coming in from nowhere) where computations begin, and a set of accept states (denoted graphically by a double circle) which help define when a computation is successful. A DFA is defined as an abstract mathematical concept, but is often implemented in hardware and software for solving various specific problems such as lexical analysis and pattern matching. For example, a DFA can model software that decides whether or not online user input such as email addresses are syntactically valid. DFAs have been generalized to nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) which may have several arrows of the same label starting from a state. Using the powerset construction method, every NFA can be translated to a DFA that recognizes the same language. DFAs, and NFAs as well, recognize exactly the set of regular languages. == Formal definition == A deterministic finite automaton M is a 5-tuple, (Q, Σ, δ, q0, F), consisting of a finite set of states Q a finite set of input symbols called the alphabet Σ a transition function δ : Q × Σ → Q an initial (or start) state q 0 ∈ Q {\displaystyle q_{0}\in Q} a set of accepting (or final) states F ⊆ Q {\displaystyle F\subseteq Q} Let w = a1a2...an be a string over the alphabet Σ. The automaton M accepts the string w if a sequence of states, r0, r1, ..., rn, exists in Q with the following conditions: r0 = q0 ri+1 = δ(ri, ai+1), for i = 0, ..., n − 1 r n ∈ F {\displaystyle r_{n}\in F} . In words, the first condition says that the machine starts in the start state q0. The second condition says that given each character of string w, the machine will transition from state to state according to the transition function δ. The last condition says that the machine accepts w if the last input of w causes the machine to halt in one of the accepting states. Otherwise, it is said that the automaton rejects the string. The set of strings that M accepts is the language recognized by M and this language is denoted by L(M). A deterministic finite automaton without accept states and without a starting state is known as a transition system or semiautomaton. For more comprehensive introduction of the formal definition see automata theory. == Example == The following example is of a DFA M, with a binary alphabet, which requires that the input contains an even number of 0s. M = (Q, Σ, δ, q0, F) where Q = {S1, S2} Σ = {0, 1} q0 = S1 F = {S1} and δ is defined by the following state transition table: The state S1 represents that there has been an even number of 0s in the input so far, while S2 signifies an odd number. A 1 in the input does not change the state of the automaton. When the input ends, the state will show whether the input contained an even number of 0s or not. If the input did contain an even number of 0s, M will finish in state S1, an accepting state, so the input string will be accepted. The language recognized by M is the regular language given by the regular expression (1) (0 (1) 0 (1)), where is the Kleene star, e.g., 1 denotes any number (possibly zero) of consecutive ones. == Variations == === Complete and incomplete === According to the above definition, deterministic finite automata are always complete: they define from each state a transition for each input symbol. While this is the most common definition, some authors use the term deterministic finite automaton for a slightly different notion: an automaton that defines at most one transition for each state and each input symbol; the transition function is allowed to be partial. When no transition is defined, such an automaton halts. === Local automata === A local automaton is a DFA, not necessarily complete, for which all edges with the same label lead to a single vertex. Local automata accept the class of local languages, those for which membership of a word in the language is determined by a "sliding window" of length two on the word. A Myhill graph over an alphabet A is a directed graph with vertex set A and subsets of vertices labelled "start" and "finish". The language accepted by a Myhill graph is the set of directed paths from a start vertex to a finish vertex: the graph thus acts as an automaton. The class of languages accepted by Myhill graphs is the class of local languages. === Randomness === When the start state and accept states are ignored, a DFA of n states and an alphabet of size k can be seen as a digraph of n vertices in which all vertices have k out-arcs labeled 1, ..., k (a k-out digraph). It is known that when k ≥ 2 is a fixed integer, with high probability, the largest strongly connected component (SCC) in such a k-out digraph chosen uniformly at random is of linear size and it can be reached by all vertices. It has also been proven that if k is allowed to increase as n increases, then the whole digraph has a phase transition for strong connectivity similar to Erdős–Rényi model for connectivity. In a random DFA, the maximum number of vertices reachable from one vertex is very close to the number of vertices in the largest SCC with high probability. This is also true for the largest induced sub-digraph of minimum in-degree one, which can be seen as a directed version of 1-core. == Closure properties == If DFAs recognize the languages that are obtained by applying an operation on the DFA recognizable languages then DFAs are said to be closed under the operation. The DFAs are closed under the following operations. For each operation, an optimal construction with respect to the number of states has been determined in state complexity research. Since DFAs are equivalent to nondeterministic finite automata (NFA), these closures may also be proved using closure properties of NFA. == As a transition monoid == A run of a given DFA can be seen as a sequence of compositions of a very general formulation of the transition function with itself. Here we construct that function. For a given input symbol a ∈ Σ {\displaystyle a\in \Sigma } , one may construct a transition function δ a : Q → Q {\displaystyle \delta _{a}:Q\rightarrow Q} by defining δ a ( q ) = δ ( q , a ) {\displaystyle \delta _{a}(q)=\delta (q,a)} for all q ∈ Q {\displaystyle q\in Q} . (This trick is called currying.) From this perspective, δ a {\displaystyle \delta _{a}} "acts" on a state in Q to yield another state. One may then consider the result of function composition repeatedly applied to the various functions δ a {\displaystyle \delta _{a}} , δ b {\displaystyle \delta _{b}} , and so on. Given a pair of letters a , b ∈ Σ {\displaystyle a,b\in \Sigma } , one may define a new function δ ^ a b = δ a ∘ δ b {\displaystyle {\widehat {\delta }}_{ab}=\delta _{a}\circ \delta _{b}} , where ∘ {\displaystyle \circ } denotes function composition. Clearly, this process may be recursively continued, giving the following recursive definition of δ ^ : Q × Σ ⋆ → Q {\displaystyle {\widehat {\delta }}:Q\times \Sigma ^{\star }\rightarrow Q} : δ ^ ( q , ϵ ) = q {\displaystyle {\widehat {\delta }}(q,\epsilon )=q} , where ϵ {\displaystyle \epsilon } is the empty string and δ ^ ( q , w a ) = δ a ( δ ^ ( q , w ) ) {\displaystyle {\widehat {\delta }}(q,wa)=\delta _{a}({\widehat {\delta }}(q,w))} , where w ∈ Σ ∗ , a ∈ Σ {\displaystyle w\in \Sigma ^{},a\in \Sigma } and q ∈ Q {\displaystyle q\in Q} . δ ^ {\displaystyle {\widehat {\delta }}} is defined for all words w ∈ Σ ∗ {\displaystyle w\in \Sigma ^{}} . A run of the DFA is a sequence of compositions of δ ^ {\displaystyle {\widehat {\delta }}} with itself. Repeated function composition forms a monoid. For the transition functions, this monoid is known as the transition monoid, or sometimes the transformation semigroup. The construction can also be reversed: given a δ ^ {\displaystyle {\wide
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Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi (Italian pronunciation: [nikoˈlɔ tˈtʃɛːza ˈbjaŋki]) is an Italian computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan. He is a researcher in the field of machine learning, and co-author of the books "Prediction, Learning, and Games" with Gabor Lugosi and "Regret analysis of stochastic and nonstochastic multi-armed bandit problems" with Sébastien Bubeck == Education and career == Cesa-Bianchi graduated in Computer Science from the University of Milan in 1988 where he received a PhD in Computer Science in 1993 supervised by Alberto Bertoni. During his PhD, he visited UC Santa Cruz where he worked with Manfred Warmuth and David Haussler. He did his postdoctoral studies at Graz University of Technology under the supervision of Wolfgang Maass. == Research == His research contributions focus on the following areas: design and analysis of machine learning algorithms, especially in online machine learning algorithms for multi-armed bandit problems, with applications to recommender systems and online auctions graph analytics, with applications to social networks and bioinformatics == Awards and honors == Cesa-Bianchi received a Google Research Award in 2010, a Xerox University Affairs Committee Award in 2011, a Criteo Faculty Award in 2017, a Google Faculty Award in 2018, and a IBM Academic Award in 2021. Since 2023 he is corresponding member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
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Capture the flag (cybersecurity)

In computer security, Capture the Flag (CTF) is an exercise in which participants attempt to find text strings, called "flags", which are secretly hidden in purposefully vulnerable programs or websites. They can be used for both competitive or educational purposes. In two main variations of CTFs, participants either steal flags from other participants (attack/defense-style CTFs) or from organizers (jeopardy-style challenges). A mixed competition combines these two styles. Competitions can include hiding flags in hardware devices, they can be both online or in-person, and can be advanced or entry-level. The game is inspired by the traditional outdoor sport with the same name. CTFs are used as a tool for developing and refining cybersecurity skills, making them popular in both professional and academic settings. == Overview == Capture the Flag (CTF) is a cybersecurity competition that is used to test and develop computer security skills. It was first developed in 1996 at DEF CON, the largest cybersecurity conference in the United States which is hosted annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference hosts a weekend of cybersecurity competitions, including their flagship CTF. Two popular CTF formats are jeopardy and attack-defense. Both formats test participant’s knowledge in cybersecurity, but differ in objective. In the Jeopardy format, participating teams must complete as many challenges of varying point values from a various categories such as cryptography, web exploitation, and reverse engineering. In the attack-defense format, competing teams must defend their vulnerable computer systems while attacking their opponent's systems. The exercise involves a diverse array of tasks, including exploitation and cracking passwords, but there is little evidence showing how these tasks translate into cybersecurity knowledge held by security experts. Recent research has shown that the Capture the Flag tasks mainly covered technical knowledge but lacked social topics like social engineering and awareness on cybersecurity. == Educational applications == CTFs have been shown to be an effective way to improve cybersecurity education through gamification. There are many examples of CTFs designed to teach cybersecurity skills to a wide variety of audiences, including PicoCTF, organized by the Carnegie Mellon CyLab, which is oriented towards high school students, and Arizona State University supported pwn.college. Beyond educational CTF events and resources, CTFs has been shown to be a highly effective way to instill cybersecurity concepts in the classroom. CTFs have been included in undergraduate computer science classes such as Introduction to Information Security at the National University of Singapore. CTFs are also popular in military academies. They are often included as part of the curriculum for cybersecurity courses, with the NSA organized Cyber Exercise culminating in a CTF competition between the US service academies and military colleges. == Competitions == Many CTF organizers register their competition with the CTFtime platform. This allows the tracking of the position of teams over time and across competitions. These include "Plaid Parliament of Pwning", "More Smoked Leet Chicken", "Dragon Sector", "dcua", "Eat, Sleep, Pwn, Repeat", "perfect blue", "organizers" and "Blue Water". Overall the "Plaid Parliament of Pwning" and "Dragon Sector" have both placed first worldwide the most with three times each. === Community competitions === Every year there are dozens of CTFs organized in a variety of formats. Many CTFs are associated with cybersecurity conferences such as DEF CON, various editions of SANS Institute's NetWars, HITCON, and BSides. The DEF CON CTF, an attack-defence CTF, is notable for being one of the oldest CTF competitions to exist, and has been variously referred to as the "World Series", "Superbowl", and "Olympics", of hacking by media outlets. The NYU Tandon hosted Cybersecurity Awareness Worldwide (CSAW) CTF is one of the largest open-entry competitions for students learning cybersecurity from around the world. In 2021, it hosted over 1200 teams during the qualification round. In addition to conference organized CTFs, many CTF clubs and teams organize CTF competitions. Many CTF clubs and teams are associated with universities, such as the CMU associated Plaid Parliament of Pwning, which hosts PlaidCTF, and the ASU associated Shellphish. Some community CTFs are online and open to all participants. The SANS Institute Holiday Hack Challenge and TryHackMe Advent of Cyber. === Government-supported competitions === Governmentally supported CTF competitions include the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge and ENISA European Cybersecurity Challenge. In 2023, the US Space Force-sponsored Hack-a-Sat CTF competition included, for the first time, a live orbital satellite for participants to exploit. === Corporate-supported competitions === Corporations and other organizations sometimes use CTFs as a training or evaluation exercise, with benefits similar to those in educational settings. In addition to internal CTF exercises, some corporations such as Google and Tencent host publicly accessible CTF competitions. == In popular culture == In Mr. Robot, a qualification round for the DEF CON CTF competition is depicted in the season 3 opener "eps3.0_power-saver-mode.h". The logo for DEF CON can be seen in the background. In The Undeclared War, a CTF is depicted in the opening scene of the series as a recruitment exercise used by GCHQ. Go Go Squid!, a Chinese television series, is based around training for and competing in highly stylized CTF competitions .
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Constrained conditional model

A constrained conditional model (CCM) is a machine learning and inference framework that augments the learning of conditional (probabilistic or discriminative) models with declarative constraints. The constraint can be used as a way to incorporate expressive prior knowledge into the model and bias the assignments made by the learned model to satisfy these constraints. The framework can be used to support decisions in an expressive output space while maintaining modularity and tractability of training and inference. Models of this kind have recently attracted much attention within the natural language processing (NLP) community. Formulating problems as constrained optimization problems over the output of learned models has several advantages. It allows one to focus on the modeling of problems by providing the opportunity to incorporate domain-specific knowledge as global constraints using a first order language. Using this declarative framework frees the developer from low level feature engineering while capturing the problem's domain-specific properties and guarantying exact inference. From a machine learning perspective it allows decoupling the stage of model generation (learning) from that of the constrained inference stage, thus helping to simplify the learning stage while improving the quality of the solutions. For example, in the case of generating compressed sentences, rather than simply relying on a language model to retain the most commonly used n-grams in the sentence, constraints can be used to ensure that if a modifier is kept in the compressed sentence, its subject will also be kept. == Motivation == Making decisions in many domains (such as natural language processing and computer vision problems) often involves assigning values to sets of interdependent variables where the expressive dependency structure can influence, or even dictate, what assignments are possible. These settings are applicable not only to Structured Learning problems such as semantic role labeling, but also for cases that require making use of multiple pre-learned components, such as summarization, textual entailment and question answering. In all these cases, it is natural to formulate the decision problem as a constrained optimization problem, with an objective function that is composed of learned models, subject to domain- or problem-specific constraints. Constrained conditional models form a learning and inference framework that augments the learning of conditional (probabilistic or discriminative) models with declarative constraints (written, for example, using a first-order representation) as a way to support decisions in an expressive output space while maintaining modularity and tractability of training and inference. These constraints can express either hard restrictions, completely prohibiting some assignments, or soft restrictions, penalizing unlikely assignments. In most applications of this framework in NLP, following, Integer Linear Programming (ILP) was used as the inference framework, although other algorithms can be used for that purpose. == Formal Definition == Given a set of feature functions { ϕ i ( x , y ) } {\displaystyle \{\phi _{i}(x,y)\}} and a set of constraints { C i ( x , y ) } {\displaystyle \{C_{i}(x,y)\}} , defined over an input structure x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\in X} and an output structure y ∈ Y {\displaystyle y\in Y} , a constraint conditional model is characterized by two weight vectors, w and ρ {\displaystyle \rho } , and is defined as the solution to the following optimization problem: a r g m a x y ∑ i w i ϕ i ( x , y ) − ∑ ρ i C i ( x , y ) {\displaystyle argmax_{y}\sum _{i}w_{i}\phi _{i}(x,y)-\sum \rho _{i}C_{i}(x,y)} . Each constraint C i ∈ C {\displaystyle C_{i}\in C} is a boolean mapping indicating if the joint assignment ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} violates a constraint, and ρ {\displaystyle \rho } is the penalty incurred for violating the constraints. Constraints assigned an infinite penalty are known as hard constraints, and represent unfeasible assignments to the optimization problem. == Training paradigms == === Learning local vs. global models === The objective function used by CCMs can be decomposed and learned in several ways, ranging from a complete joint training of the model along with the constraints to completely decoupling the learning and the inference stage. In the latter case, several local models are learned independently and the dependency between these models is considered only at decision time via a global decision process. The advantages of each approach are discussed in which studies the two training paradigms: (1) local models: L+I (learning + inference) and (2) global model: IBT (Inference based training), and shows both theoretically and experimentally that while IBT (joint training) is best in the limit, under some conditions (basically, ”good” components) L+I can generalize better. The ability of CCM to combine local models is especially beneficial in cases where joint learning is computationally intractable or when training data are not available for joint learning. This flexibility distinguishes CCM from the other learning frameworks that also combine statistical information with declarative constraints, such as Markov logic network, that emphasize joint training. === Minimally supervised CCM === CCM can help reduce supervision by using domain knowledge (expressed as constraints) to drive learning. These settings were studied in and. These works introduce semi-supervised Constraints Driven Learning (CODL) and show that by incorporating domain knowledge the performance of the learned model improves significantly. === Learning over latent representations === CCMs have also been applied to latent learning frameworks, where the learning problem is defined over a latent representation layer. Since the notion of a correct representation is inherently ill-defined, no gold-standard labeled data regarding the representation decision is available to the learner. Identifying the correct (or optimal) learning representation is viewed as a structured prediction process and therefore modeled as a CCM. This problem was covered in several papers, in both supervised and unsupervised settings. In all cases research showed that explicitly modeling the interdependencies between representation decisions via constraints results in an improved performance. == Integer linear programming for natural language processing applications == The advantages of the CCM declarative formulation and the availability of off-the-shelf solvers have led to a large variety of natural language processing tasks being formulated within the framework, including semantic role labeling, syntactic parsing, coreference resolution, summarization, transliteration, natural language generation and joint information extraction. Most of these works use an integer linear programming (ILP) solver to solve the decision problem. Although theoretically solving an Integer Linear Program is exponential in the size of the decision problem, in practice using state-of-the-art solvers and approximate inference techniques large scale problems can be solved efficiently. The key advantage of using an ILP solver for solving the optimization problem defined by a constrained conditional model is the declarative formulation used as input for the ILP solver, consisting of a linear objective function and a set of linear constraints. == Resources == CCM Tutorial Predicting Structures in NLP: Constrained Conditional Models and Integer Linear Programming in NLP
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Ernst Dickmanns

Ernst Dieter Dickmanns is a German pioneer of dynamic computer vision and of driverless cars. Dickmanns has been a professor at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich (1975–2001), and visiting professor to Caltech and to MIT, teaching courses on "dynamic vision". == Biography == Dickmanns was born in 1936. He studied aerospace and aeronautics at RWTH Aachen (1956–1961), and control engineering at Princeton University (1964/65); from 1961 to 1975 he was associated with the German Aero-Space Research Establishment (now DLR) Oberpfaffenhofen, working in the fields of flight dynamics and trajectory optimization. In 1971/72 he spent a Post-Doc Research Associateship with the NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville (orbiter re-entry). From 1975 to 2001 he was with UniBw Munich, where he initiated the 'Institut fuer Flugmechanik und Systemdynamik' (IFS), the Institut fuer die 'Technik Autonomer Systeme' (TAS), and the research activities in machine vision for vehicle guidance. == Pioneering work in autonomous driving == In the early 1980s his team equipped a Mercedes-Benz van with cameras and other sensors. The 5-ton van was re-engineered that it was possible to control steering wheel, throttle, and brakes through computer commands based on real-time evaluation of image sequences. Software was written that translated the sensory data into appropriate driving commands. For safety reasons, initial experiments in Bavaria took place on streets without traffic. In 1986 the Robot Car "VaMoRs" managed to drive all by itself and by 1987 was capable of driving itself at speeds up to 96 kilometres per hour (60 mph). One of the greatest challenges in high-speed autonomous driving arises through the rapidly changing visual street scenes. Back then, computers were much slower than they are today (~1% of 1%); therefore, sophisticated computer vision strategies were necessary to react in real time. The team of Dickmanns solved the problem through an innovative approach to dynamic vision. Spatiotemporal models were used right from the beginning, dubbed '4-D approach', which did not need storing previous images but nonetheless was able to yield estimates of all 3-D position and velocity components. Attention control including artificial saccadic movements of the platform carrying the cameras allowed the system to focus its attention on the most relevant details of the visual input. Kalman filters have been extended to perspective imaging and were used to achieve robust autonomous driving even in presence of noise and uncertainty. Feedback of prediction errors allowed bypassing the (ill-conditioned) inversion of perspective projection by least-squares parameter fits. When in 1986/83 the EUREKA-project 'PROgraMme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety' (PROMETHEUS) was initiated by the European car manufacturing industry (funding in the range of several hundred million Euros), the initially planned autonomous lateral guidance by buried cables was dropped and substituted by the much more flexible machine vision approach proposed by Dickmanns, and partially encouraged by his successes. Most of the major car companies participated; so did Dickmanns and his team in cooperation with the Daimler-Benz AG. Substantial progress was made in the following 7 years. In particular, Dickmanns' robot cars learned to drive in traffic under various conditions. An accompanying human driver with a "red button" made sure the robot vehicle could not get out of control and become a danger to the public. Since 1992, driving in public traffic was standard as final step in real-world testing. Several dozen Transputers, a special breed of parallel computers, were used to deal with the (by 1990s standards) enormous computational demands. Two culmination points were achieved in 1994/95, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz performed international demonstrations. The first was the final presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the airport Charles-de-Gaulle in Paris. With guests on board, the twin vehicles of Daimler-Benz (VITA-2) and UniBwM (VaMP) drove more than 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) on the three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 kilometres per hour (81 mph). Driving in free lanes, convoy driving with distance keeping depending on speed, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing have been demonstrated; the latter required interpreting the road scene also in the rear hemisphere. Two cameras with different focal lengths for each hemisphere have been used in parallel for this purpose. The second culmination point was a 1,758 kilometres (1,092 mi) trip in the fall of 1995 from Munich in Bavaria to Odense in Denmark to a project meeting and back. Both longitudinal and lateral guidance were performed autonomously by vision. On highways, the robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 kilometres per hour (109 mph) (there is no general speed limit on the Autobahn). Publications from Dickmann's research group indicate a mean autonomously driven distance without resets of ~9 kilometres (5.6 mi); the longest autonomously driven stretch reached 158 kilometres (98 mi). More than half of the resets required were achieved autonomously (no human intervention). This is particularly impressive considering that the system used black-and-white video-cameras and did not model situations like road construction sites with yellow lane markings; lane-changes at over 140 kilometres per hour (87 mph), and other traffic with more than 40 kilometres per hour (25 mph) relative speed have been handled. In total, 95% autonomous driving (by distance) was achieved. In the years 1994 to 2004 the elder 5-ton van 'VaMoRs' was used to develop the capabilities needed for driving on networks of minor (also unsealed) roads and for cross-country driving including avoidance of negative obstacles like ditches. Turning off onto crossroads of unknown width and intersection angles required a big effort, but has been achieved with "Expectation-based, Multi-focal, Saccadic vision" (EMS-vision). This vertebrate-type vision uses animation capabilities based on knowledge about subject classes (including the autonomous vehicle itself) and their potential behaviour in certain situations. This rich background is used for control of gaze and attention as well as for locomotion. Beside ground vehicle guidance, also applications of the 4-D approach to dynamic vision for unmanned air vehicles (conventional aircraft and helicopters) have been investigated. Autonomous visual landing approaches and landings have been demonstrated in hardware-in-the-loop simulations with visual/inertial data fusion. Real-world autonomous visual landing approaches till shortly before touchdown have been performed in 1992 with the twin-propeller aircraft Dornier 128 of the University of Brunswick at the airport there. Another success of this machine vision technology was the first ever visually controlled grasping experiment of a free-floating object in weightlessness on board the Space Shuttle Columbia D2-mission in 1993 as part of the 'Rotex'-experiment of DLR.
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Sinkov statistic

Sinkov statistics, also known as log-weight statistics, is a specialized field of statistics that was developed by Abraham Sinkov, while working for the small Signal Intelligence Service organization, the primary mission of which was to compile codes and ciphers for use by the U.S. Army. The mathematics involved include modular arithmetic, a bit of number theory, some linear algebra of two dimensions with matrices, some combinatorics, and a little statistics. Sinkov did not explain the theoretical underpinnings of his statistics, or characterized its distribution, nor did he give a decision procedure for accepting or rejecting candidate plaintexts on the basis of their S1 scores. The situation becomes more difficult when comparing strings of different lengths because Sinkov does not explain how the distribution of his statistics changes with length, especially when applied to higher-order grams. As for how to accept or reject a candidate plaintext, Sinkov simply said to try all possibilities and to pick the one with the highest S1 value. Although the procedure works for some applications, it is inadequate for applications that require on-line decisions. Furthermore, it is desirable to have a meaningful interpretation of the S1 values.
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Verbal overshadowing

Verbal overshadowing is a phenomenon where giving a verbal description of sensory input impairs formation of memories of that input. This was first reported by Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) where it was shown that the effects can be observed across multiple domains of cognition which are known to rely on non-verbal knowledge and perceptual expertise. One example of this is memory, which has been known to be influenced by language. Seminal work by Carmichael and collaborators (1932) demonstrated that when verbal labels are connected to non-verbal forms during an individual's encoding process, it could potentially bias the way those forms are reproduced. Because of this, memory performance relying on reportable aspects of memory that encode visual forms should be vulnerable to the effects of verbalization. == Initial findings == Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) were the first to report findings of verbal overshadowing. In their study, participants watched a video of a simulated robbery and were instructed to either verbally describe the robber or engage in a control task. Those who engaged in giving a verbal description were less likely to correctly identify the robber from a test lineup, compared to those who engaged in the control task. A larger effect was detected when the verbal description was provided 20, rather than 5, minutes after the video, and immediately before the test lineup. A meta-analysis by Meissner and Brigham (2001) supported the effects of verbal overshadowing, showing a small but reliably negative effect. == General effects of verbal overshadowing == The effects of verbal overshadowing have been generalized across multiple domains of cognition that are known to rely on non-verbal knowledge and perceptual expertise, such as memory. Memory has been known to be influenced by language. Seminal work by Carmichael and collaborators (1932) demonstrated that labels attached to, or associated with, non-verbal forms during memory encoding can affect the way the forms were subsequently reproduced. Because of this, memory performance that relies on reportable aspects of memory that encode visual forms should be vulnerable to the effects of verbalization. Pelizzon, Brandimonte, and Luccio (2002) found that visual memory representations appear to incorporate visual, spatial, and temporal characteristics. It is explained as follows: With the temporal code (where the only information available is the sequence of the stimuli), performance levels remain high, unless participants are required to retrieve the stimuli in a different order from that used at encoding (visual cue). In this case, performance is significantly impaired, even in the presence of a visual cue. The study showed that order information acts as a link between the two separate representations of figure and background, hence preventing verbal overshadowing at encoding (temporal component) or attenuating its influence at retrieval (spatial component).(p. 960) Hatano, Ueno, Kitagami, and Kawaguchi found that verbal overshadowing is likely to occur when participants verbally described targets in detail. Detailed verbal descriptions resulted in more frequently inaccurate descriptions that in turn created inaccurate representations in the memories of participants. Inaccuracies are also likely to occur when face recognition comes immediately after verbalization. Other forms of non-verbal knowledge affected by verbal overshadowing include the following: [Verbal overshadowing] has also been observed when participants attempt to generate descriptions of other 'difficult-to-describe' stimuli such as colors (Schooler and Engstler-Schooler, 1990) or abstract figures (Brandimonte et al., 1997), or other non-visual tasks such as wine tasting (Melcher and Schooler, 1996), decision making (Wilson and Schooler, 1991), and insight problem-solving. (p. 871) (Schooler et al., 1993) Verbalization of stimuli leads to the disruption of non-reportable processes that are necessary for achieving insight solutions, which are distinct from language processes. Schooler, Ohlsson, and Brooks (1993) found that face recognition requires information that cannot be adequately verbalized, giving rise to difficulty in describing factors in recognition judgments. Subjects were less effective in solving insight problems when compelled to put their thoughts in words, which suggests that language may interfere with thought. The verbal overshadowing effect was not seen when participants engaged in articulatory suppression. Performance was reduced in both the verbal and non-verbal description conditions. This is evidence that verbal encoding plays a role in face recognition. By testing with distracting faces presented between study and test, Lloyd-Jones and Brown (2008) suggested a dual-process approach to recognition memory took place, that verbalization influenced familiarity-based processes at first, but its effects were later seen on recollection, when discrimination between items became more difficult. == Verbal overshadowing in facial recognition == The verbal overshadowing effect can be found for facial recognition because faces are predominately processed in a holistic or configurable manner. (Tanaka & Farah, 1993; Tanaka & Sengco, 1997) Verbalizing one's memory for a face is done using a featural or analytic strategy, leading to a drift from the configurable information about the face and to impaired recognition performance. However, Fallshore & Schooler (1995) found that the verbal overshadowing effect was not found when participants described faces of races different from their own. A study by Brown and Lloyd-Jones (2003) found that there was no verbal overshadowing effect found in car descriptions; it was only seen in facial descriptions. The authors noted that descriptions were no different on any measure including accuracy. It is suggested that less expertise in verbalizing faces rather than cars invokes a stronger shift in verbal and featural processing. This supports the concept of a transfer inappropriate retrieval framework and addresses some limitations of the effect. Wickham and Swift (2006) suggested that the verbal overshadowing effect is not seen in describing all faces, and one aspect that determines this is distinctiveness. Results showed that typical faces produce verbal overshadowing, while distinctive faces did not. In studies of eyewitness reports, variation in response criteria given by participants influenced the quality of the descriptions generated and accuracy on identification task, known as the retrieval-based effect. Face recognition was also impaired when subjects described a familiar face, such as a parent, or when describing a previously seen but novel face. Dodson, Johnson, and Schooler (1997) found that recognition was also impaired when participants were provided with a description of a previously seen face, and they were able to ignore provided versus self-generated descriptions more easily. This finding of verbal overshadowing suggested that eyewitness recognition is not only affected by their own descriptions, but of descriptions heard from others, such other eyewitness testimonies. == Voice recognition == The verbal overshadowing effect has also been found to affect voice identification. Research shows that describing a non-verbal stimuli leads to a decrease in recognition accuracy. In an unpublished study by Schooler, Fiore, Melcher, and Ambadar (1996), participants listened to a tape-recorded voice, after which they were asked either to verbally describe it or to not do so, and then asked to distinguish the voice from 3 similar distractor voices. The results showed that verbal overshadowing impaired accuracy of recognition based on gut feeling, suggesting an overall verbal overshadowing for voice recognition. Due to the forensic relevance of voices heard over the telephone and harassing phone calls that are often a problem for police, Perfect, Hunt, and Harris (2002) examined the influence of three factors on accuracy and confidence in voice recognition from a line-up. They expected to find an effect, because voice represents a class of stimuli that is difficult to describe verbally. This meets Schooler et al.'s (1997) modality mismatch criterion, meaning that describing the speakers age, gender, or accent is difficult, making voice recognition susceptible to the verbal overshadowing phenomenon. It was found that the method of memory encoding had no impact on performance, and that hearing a telephone voice reduced confidence but did not affect accuracy. They also found that providing a verbal description impaired accuracy but had no effect on confidence. The data showed an effect of verbal overshadowing in voice recognition and provided yet another disassociation between confidence and performance. Although there was a difference in confidence level, witnesses were able to identify voices over the telephone as accurately as voices heard direc
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Pushmeet Kohli

Pushmeet Kohli is an Indian British computer scientist and Vice President of research at Google DeepMind. At Deepmind, he heads the "Science and Strategic Initiatives Unit". He was noted by Time magazine as being one of the 100 most influential people in AI according to the Time 100 AI list. Kohli has led and supervised a number of projects including AlphaFold, a system for predicting the 3D structures of proteins; AlphaEvolve, a general-purpose evolutionary coding agent; SynthID, a system for watermarking and detecting AI-generated content; and Co-Scientist, an agent for generating and testing new scientific hypotheses. == Education == Kohli received a Bachelor of Technology (BTech) degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Warangal. He went on to study at Oxford Brookes University, where he earned a PhD in computer vision for research supervised by Philip Torr in 2007. == Career and research == After his PhD, Kohli was a postdoctoral associate at the Psychometric Centre, University of Cambridge. Before joining Google DeepMind, Kohli was partner scientist and director of research at Microsoft Research. His research investigates applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Kohli has made research contributions in the fields of computational biology, program synthesis, superoptimization, discrete optimization, and psychometrics. Notable research projects he has contributed to include: AlphaFold - breakthrough AI system for protein structure prediction AlphaEvolve - agent for code super optimization. AlphaTensor - Reinforcement learning agent for discovering new algorithms for matrix multiplication SynthID - system for watermarking AI generated images. AlphaGenome and AlphaMissense - AI models for predicting the effect of mutations in the genome AlphaCode - Competition-level code generation with AI FunSearch - Discovering algorithms using LLMs to search over program space. Neural Program Synthesis Probabilistic Programming Community based Crowdsourcing of Data for Training AI Models Behavioral analysis and personality prediction using online networks Human Pose Estimation using the Kinect Learnt Magnetic confinement control for Fusion Learnt Density Functional for solving the fractional electron problem === Awards and honours === Kohli's research in computer vision and machine learning has been recognized by a number of scientific awards and prizes. Some notable ones include: Koenderink Prize (Test of Time award) by the European Conference of Computer Vision British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern Recognition (BMVA) Sullivan Prize for the best PhD thesis. IEEE Mixed Augmented Reality (ISMAR) Impact Paper award Lasting Impact Award by the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Best paper award at the International World Wide Web Conference 2014 Best paper award in the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2010 Best paper award in the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)
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Mona Diab

Mona Talat Diab (Arabic: منى طلعت دياب) is a computer science professor and director of Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute. Previously, she was a professor at George Washington University and a research scientist with Facebook AI. Her research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, cross lingual/multilingual processing, computational socio-pragmatics, Arabic language processing, and applied machine learning. == Education == Diab completed her M.Sc. in computer science with a major in machine learning and artificial intelligence at The George Washington University (1997) and her Ph.D. in computational linguistics at the University of Maryland, Linguistics Department and University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) in 2003, under the supervision of Philip Resnik. She was also a postdoctoral research scientist at Stanford University (2003–2005) under the mentorship of Dan Jurafsky, where she was a part of the Stanford NLP Group. == Career == After her postdoc at Stanford, Diab took a position as research scientist (principal investigator) at the Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS) in Columbia University, where she was also adjunct professor in the computer science department. In 2013 she joined the George Washington University as an associate professor, where she was promoted to full professor in 2017. Diab is the founder and director of the GW NLP lab CARE4Lang. Diab served as an elected faculty senator at Columbia University for 6 years (2007–2012) and an elected faculty senator at GW (2013–2014). She served the computational linguistics community as elected member, secretary and president of ACL SIGLEX (2005–2016) and elected president of ACL SIGSemitic. She currently serves as the elected VP-elect for ACL SIGDAT. In 2017 Diab joined Amazon AWS AI Deep Learning Group for Human Language Technologies, where she led the AWS Lex project for task oriented dialogue systems for enterprises. A couple of years later, she moved to Facebook AI as a research scientist. In the fall of 2023, she became the director of CMU's Language Technologies Institute -- the first full time director since the passing of its founder Jaime Carbonell. == Research == Diab's research interests include several areas in computational linguistics/natural language processing, like conversational AI, computational lexical semantics, multilingual and cross lingual processing, social media processing with an emphasis on computational socio- pragmatics, information extraction & text analytics, machine translation. Besides this, she also has special interests in Arabic NLP and low resource scenarios. Diab co-established two research trends in the computational linguistics field, computational approaches to linguistic code switching in 2007 and semantic textual similarity in 2010. Diab together with Nizar Habash and Owen Rambow, co-founded CADIM in 2005, a global reference point in Arabic dialect processing. In 2012, Diab together with Eneko Agirre and Johan Bos, brought together two ACL communities SIGLEX and SIGSEM and established the 1st tier conference SEM. == Awards and recognition == Selected as one of top 150 leaders and visionaries in AI nationwide to participate in White House AI Summit in Government, Washington, D.C., US, September 2019 March 2017: 3 Muslim Women in STEM You Should Know About, Teen Vogue, March 2017 May 2017: Behind Every Strong Woman Is...Another Strong Woman: Ten women give thanks to the women who supported them on the way up. Elle, May 2017. Google Faculty Research Award – Tharwa++: Building a multidialectal Arabic Lexical Repository, (PI), 09.2015 –12.2016. Google Faculty Research Award – Nuanced Sentiment and Perspective Analysis for Arabic Social Media Text, (PI), 12.2014 –12.2015 QNRF Best Poster Award – Ossama Obeid, Houda Bouamor, Wajdi Zaghouani, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Abdelati Hawwari, Mona Diab, Kemal Oflazer. (2016) MANDIAC: A Web-based Annotation System For Manual Arabic Diacritization. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, LREC 2016. Best Paper Award – Aminian, Maryam, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Mona Diab. (2015) Unsupervised False Friend Disambiguation Using Contextual Word Clusters and Parallel Word Alignments. In Proceedings of Workshop 9th Semantics Syntax Statistical Translation, NAACL 2015, Denver CO, US. == Publications == Diab has over 250 publications, and she is an acting editor for several scientific journals. === Selected publications === Semeval-2012 task 6: A pilot on semantic textual similarity. E. Agirre, D. Cer, M. Diab, A. Gonzalez-Agirre. SEM 2012: The First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics–Volume 1: Proceedings of the main conference and the shared task, and Volume 2: Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2012) Predictive linguistic features of schizophrenia. ES Kayi, M Diab, L Pauselli, M Compton, G Coppersmith. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.09377 Ideological perspective detection using semantic features. H Elfardy, M Diab, C Callison-Burch – Proceedings of SEM 2015 DeSePtion: Dual sequence prediction and adversarial examples for improved fact-checking. Christopher Hidey, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Tariq Alhindi, Siddharth Varia, Kriste Krstovski, Mona Diab, Smaranda Muresan, 2020 Does Causal Coherence Predict Online Spread of Social Media? Pedram Hosseini, Mona Diab, David A Broniatowski. Proceedings of International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, 2019. Diversity, Density, and Homogeneity: Quantitative Characteristic Metrics for Text Collections. YA Lai, X Zhu, Y Zhang, M Diab, arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.08529, 2020 Readability of written medicine information materials in Arabic language: expert and consumer evaluation. S Al Aqeel, N Abanmy, A Aldayel, H Al-Khalifa, M Al-Yahya, M Diab. BMC health services research 18 (1), 1–7, 2019 Unsupervised word mapping using structural similarities in monolingual embeddings. H Aldarmaki, M Mohan, M Diab – Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018 An unsupervised method for word sense tagging using parallel corpora M Diab, P Resnik. Proceedings of ACL 2002 Overview for the first shared task on language identification in code-switched data. Thamar Solorio, Elizabeth Blair, Suraj Maharjan, Steven Bethard, Mona Diab, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Abdelati Hawwari, Fahad AlGhamdi, Julia Hirschberg, Alison Chang, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching, 2014 Modeling sentences in the latent space. W Guo, M Diab – ACL 20 12 Task-based evaluation of multiword expressions: a pilot study in statistical machine translation. M Carpuat, M Diab – NAACL-HLT 2010 Rumor detection and classification for twitter data. S Hamidian, MT Diab – arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.08926, 2019 Subgroup detection in ideological discussions. A Abu-Jbara, P Dasigi, M Diab, D Radev – ACL 2012 Madamira: A fast, comprehensive tool for morphological analysis and disambiguation of arabic. A. Pasha, M. Al-Badrashiny, M. Diab, A. El Kholy, R. Eskander, N. Habash, M. Pooleery, O. Rambow, R. Roth. LREC 14, 1094–1101. 2014 Context-Aware Self-Attentive Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Chatbots. A. Gupta, P. Zhang, G. Lalwani, M. Diab. EMNLP 2019 A multitask learning approach for diacritic restoration. S. Alqahtani, A. Mishra, M. Diab. ACL 2020
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Dialogflow

Dialogflow is a natural language understanding platform used to design and integrate a conversational user interface into mobile apps, web applications, devices, bots, interactive voice response systems and related uses. == History == In May 2012, Speaktoit received a venture round (funding terms undisclosed) from Intel Capital. In July 2014, Speaktoit closed their Series B funding led by Motorola Solutions Venture Capital with participation from new investor Plug and Play Ventures and existing backers Intel Capital and Alpine Technology Fund. In September 2014, Speaktoit released api.ai (the voice-enabling engine that powers Assistant) to third-party developers, allowing the addition of voice interfaces to apps based on Android, iOS, HTML5, and Cordova. The SDK's contain voice recognition, natural language understanding, and text-to-speech. api.ai offers a web interface to build and test conversation scenarios. The platform is based on the natural language processing engine built by Speaktoit for its Assistant application. Api.ai allows Internet of Things developers to include natural language voice interfaces in their products. Assistant and Speaktoit's websites now redirect to api.ai's website Archived 2017-10-10 at the Wayback Machine, which redirects to the Dialogflow website. Google bought the company in September 2016 and was initially known as API.AI; it provides tools to developers building apps ("Actions") for the Google Assistant virtual assistant. The organization discontinued the Assistant app on December 15, 2016. In October 2017, it was renamed as Dialogflow. In November 2017, Dialogflow became part of Google Cloud Platform.
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Cloud management

Cloud management refers to the administration and oversight of cloud computing products and services. Public clouds are managed by cloud service providers, which operate the underlying infrastructure such as servers, storage, networking, and data center facilities. Users may also opt to manage their public cloud services with a third-party cloud management tool. Users of public cloud services can generally select from three basic cloud provisioning categories: User self-provisioning: Customers purchase cloud services directly from the provider, typically through a web form or console interface. The customer pays on a per-transaction basis. Advanced provisioning: Customers contract in advance a predetermined amount of resources, which are prepared in advance of service. The customer pays a flat fee or a monthly fee. Dynamic provisioning: The provider allocates resources when the customer needs them, then decommissions them when they are no longer needed. The customer is charged on a pay-per-use basis. Managing a private cloud requires software tools to help create a virtualized pool of compute resources, provide a self-service portal for end users and handle security, resource allocation, tracking and billing. Management tools for private clouds tend to be service driven, as opposed to resource driven, because cloud environments are typically highly virtualized and organized in terms of portable workloads. In hybrid cloud environments, compute, network and storage resources must be managed across multiple domains, so a good management strategy should start by defining what needs to be managed, and where and how to do it. Policies to help govern these domains should include configuration and installation of images, access control, and budgeting and reporting. Access control often includes the use of Single sign-on (SSO), in which a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them. == Characteristics of Cloud Management == Cloud management combines software and technologies in a design for managing cloud environments. Software developers have responded to the management challenges of cloud computing with a variety of cloud management platforms and tools. These tools include native tools offered by public cloud providers as well as third-party tools designed to provide consistent functionality across multiple cloud providers. Administrators must balance the competing requirements of efficient consistency across different cloud platforms with access to different native functionality within individual cloud platforms. The growing acceptance of public cloud and increased multicloud usage is driving the need for consistent cross-platform management. Rapid adoption of cloud services is introducing a new set of management challenges for those technical professionals responsible for managing IT systems and services. Cloud-management platforms and tools should have the ability to provide minimum functionality in the following categories. Functionality can be both natively provided or orchestrated via third-party integration. Provisioning and orchestration: create, modify, and delete resources as well as orchestrate workflows and management of workloads Automation: Enable cloud consumption and deployment of app services via infrastructure-as-code and other DevOps concepts Security and compliance: manage role-based access of cloud services and enforce security configurations Service request: collect and fulfill requests from users to access and deploy cloud resources. Monitoring and logging: collect performance and availability metrics as well as automate incident management and log aggregation Inventory and classification: discover and maintain pre-existing brownfield cloud resources plus monitor and manage changes Cost management and optimization: track and rightsize cloud spend and align capacity and performance to actual demand Migration, backup, and DR: enable data protection, disaster recovery, and data mobility via snapshots and/or data replication Organizations may group these criteria into key use cases including Cloud Brokerage, DevOps Automation, Governance, and Day-2 Life Cycle Operations. Enterprises with large-scale cloud implementations may require more robust cloud management tools which include specific characteristics, such as the ability to manage multiple platforms from a single point of reference, or intelligent analytics to automate processes like application lifecycle management. High-end cloud management tools should also have the ability to handle system failures automatically with capabilities such as self-monitoring, an explicit notification mechanism, and include failover and self-healing capabilities. == Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Management Challenges == Legacy management infrastructures, which are based on the concept of dedicated system relationships and architecture constructs, are not well suited to cloud environments where instances are continually launched and decommissioned. Instead, the dynamic nature of cloud computing requires monitoring and management tools that are adaptable, extensible and customizable. Cloud computing presents a number of management challenges. Companies using public clouds do not have ownership of the equipment hosting the cloud environment, and because the environment is not contained within their own networks, public cloud customers do not have full visibility or control. Users of public cloud services must also integrate with an architecture defined by the cloud provider, using its specific parameters for working with cloud components. Integration includes tying into the cloud APIs for configuring IP addresses, subnets, firewalls and data service functions for storage. Because control of these functions is based on the cloud provider’s infrastructure and services, public cloud users must integrate with the cloud infrastructure management. Capacity management is a challenge for both public and private cloud environments because end users have the ability to deploy applications using self-service portals. Applications of all sizes may appear in the environment, consume an unpredictable amount of resources, then disappear at any time. A possible solution is profiling the applications impact on computational resources. As result, the performance models allow the prediction of how resource utilization changes according to application patterns. Thus, resources can be dynamically scaled to meet the expected demand. This is critical to cloud providers that need to provision resources quickly to meet a growing demand by their applications. Charge-back—or, pricing resource use on a granular basis—is a challenge for both public and private cloud environments. Charge-back is a challenge for public cloud service providers because they must price their services competitively while still creating profit. Users of public cloud services may find charge-back challenging because it is difficult for IT groups to assess actual resource costs on a granular basis due to overlapping resources within an organization that may be paid for by an individual business unit, such as electrical power. For private cloud operators, charge-back is fairly straightforward, but the challenge lies in guessing how to allocate resources as closely as possible to actual resource usage to achieve the greatest operational efficiency. Exceeding budgets can be a risk. Hybrid cloud environments, which combine public and private cloud services, sometimes with traditional infrastructure elements, present their own set of management challenges. These include security concerns if sensitive data lands on public cloud servers, budget concerns around overuse of storage or bandwidth and proliferation of mismanaged images. Managing the information flow in a hybrid cloud environment is also a significant challenge. On-premises clouds must share information with applications hosted off-premises by public cloud providers, and this information may change constantly. Hybrid cloud environments also typically include a complex mix of policies, permissions and limits that must be managed consistently across both public and private clouds. == Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) == CMPs provide a means for a cloud service customer to manage the deployment and operation of applications and associated datasets across multiple cloud service infrastructures, including both on-premises cloud infrastructure and public cloud service provider infrastructure. In other words, CMPs provide management capabilities for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. A cloud management platform (CMP) provides broad cloud management functionality atop both public cloud provider platforms and private cloud platforms. CMPs manage cloud services and resources that are distributed across multiple cloud platforms. The value of CMPs stands in delivering the maximum level of consistency between platforms without comp
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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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Timo Honkela

Timo Untamo Honkela (August 4, 1962 – May 9, 2020) was a computer scientist at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University School of Science and Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture. He holds a PhD from Helsinki University of Technology. From 2014 until 2018 he held a fixed-term professorship at the University of Helsinki. Before joining the University of Helsinki he worked as a non-tenured professor in two Schools of the Aalto University, The School of Art, Design and Architecture and the School of Science. He has presented his thoughts on his studies and work in the joint blog 375 Humanists. Timo Honkela conducted research on several areas related to knowledge engineering, cognitive modeling and natural language processing. Honkela was born in Kalajoki. From 1998 to 2000 he worked as a professor in the Aalto Media Lab. To the media Lab Honkela brought his expertise in Kohonen self-organising map (SOM) and worked closely with artist and designers around the topic. In 2001 Honkela collaborated with George Legrady to produce an interactive museum installation, Pockets Full of Memories to the Centre Georges Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The concept, created by Legrady, provided for visitors a possibility to scan their own objects to a database and then organise them by Kohonen Self-Organizing Map algorithm. In 2017 Honkela published a book in Finnish. The book Rauhankone (English: Peace Machine) presents his idea of designing artificial intelligence and machine learning to serve humanity, in practice to help people to live in peace with each other. He died in Helsinki. == Publications == Timo Honkela, Wlodzislaw Duch, Mark Girolami and Samuel Kaski (editors): Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning, Springer, 2011. Jorma Laaksonen and Timo Honkela (editors): Advances in Self-Organizing Maps, Springer, 2011. Timo Honkela: Rauhankone. Gaudeamus, 2017.
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