AI Driven Spreadsheet

AI Driven Spreadsheet — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Source-code editor

    Source-code editor

    A source-code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing the source code of computer programs. It includes basic functionality such as syntax highlighting, and sometimes debugging. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment (IDE). == Features == Source-code editors have features specifically designed to simplify and speed up typing of source code, such as syntax highlighting(syntax error highlighting), auto indentation, autocomplete and brace matching functionality. These editors may also provide a convenient way to run a compiler, interpreter, debugger, or other program relevant for the software-development process. While many text editors like Notepad can be used to edit source code, if they do not enhance, automate or ease the editing of code, they are not defined as source-code editors. Structure editors are a different form of a source-code editor, where instead of editing raw text, one manipulates the code's structure, generally the abstract syntax tree. In this case features such as syntax highlighting, validation, and code formatting are easily and efficiently implemented from the concrete syntax tree or abstract syntax tree, but editing is often more rigid than free-form text. Structure editors also require extensive support for each language, and thus are harder to extend to new languages than text editors, where basic support only requires supporting syntax highlighting or indentation. For this reason, strict structure editors are not popular for source code editing, though some IDEs provide similar functionality. A source-code editor can check syntax dynamically while code is being entered and immediately warn of syntax problems, as well as suggest code autocomplete snippets. A few source-code editors compress source code, typically converting common keywords into single-byte tokens, removing unnecessary whitespace, and converting numbers to a binary form. Such tokenizing editors later uncompress the source code when viewing it, possibly prettyprinting it with consistent capitalization and spacing. A few source-code editors do both. The Language Server Protocol, first used in Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, allows for source code editors to implement an LSP client that can read syntax information about any language with a LSP server. This allows for source code editors to easily support more languages with syntax highlighting, refactoring, and reference finding. Many source code editors such as Neovim and Brackets have added a built-in LSP client while other editors such as Emacs, Vim, and Sublime Text have support for an LSP Client via a separate plug-in. == History == In 1985, Mike Cowlishaw of IBM created LEXX while seconded to the Oxford University Press. LEXX used live parsing and used color and fonts for syntax highlighting. IBM's LPEX (Live Parsing Extensible Editor) was based on LEXX and ran on VM/CMS, OS/2, OS/400, Windows, and Java Although the initial public release of vim was in 1991, the syntax highlighting feature was not introduced until version 5.0 in 1998. On November 1, 2015, the first version of NeoVim was released. In 2003, Notepad++, a source code editor for Windows, was released by Don Ho. The intention was to create an alternative to the java-based source code editor, JEXT In 2015, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code as a lightweight and cross-platform alternative to their Visual Studio IDE. The following year, Visual Studio Code became the Microsoft product using the Language Server Protocol. This code editor quickly gained popularity and emerged as the most widely used source code editor. == Comparison with IDEs == A source-code editor is one component of a Integrated Development Environment. In contrast to a standalone source-code editor, an IDE typically also includes several tools which enhance the software development process. Such tools include syntax highlighting, code autocomplete suggestions, version control, automatic formatting, integrated runtime environments, debugger, and build tools. Standalone source code editors are preferred over IDEs by some developers when they believe the IDEs are bloated with features they do not need. == Notable examples == == Controversy == Many source-code editors and IDEs have been involved in ongoing user arguments, sometimes referred to jovially as "holy wars" by the programming community. Notable examples include vi vs. Emacs and Eclipse vs. NetBeans. These arguments have formed a significant part of internet culture and they often start whenever either editor is mentioned anywhere.

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  • T-norm fuzzy logics

    T-norm fuzzy logics

    T-norm fuzzy logics are a family of non-classical logics, informally delimited by having a semantics that takes the real unit interval [0, 1] for the system of truth values and functions called t-norms for permissible interpretations of conjunction. They are mainly used in applied fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory as a theoretical basis for approximate reasoning. T-norm fuzzy logics belong in broader classes of fuzzy logics and many-valued logics. In order to generate a well-behaved implication, the t-norms are usually required to be left-continuous; logics of left-continuous t-norms further belong in the class of substructural logics, among which they are marked with the validity of the law of prelinearity, (A → B) ∨ (B → A). Both propositional and first-order (or higher-order) t-norm fuzzy logics, as well as their expansions by modal and other operators, are studied. Logics that restrict the t-norm semantics to a subset of the real unit interval (for example, finitely valued Łukasiewicz logics) are usually included in the class as well. Important examples of t-norm fuzzy logics are monoidal t-norm logic (MTL) of all left-continuous t-norms, basic logic (BL) of all continuous t-norms, product fuzzy logic of the product t-norm, or the nilpotent minimum logic of the nilpotent minimum t-norm. Some independently motivated logics belong among t-norm fuzzy logics, too, for example Łukasiewicz logic (which is the logic of the Łukasiewicz t-norm) or Gödel–Dummett logic (which is the logic of the minimum t-norm). == Motivation == As members of the family of fuzzy logics, t-norm fuzzy logics primarily aim at generalizing classical two-valued logic by admitting intermediary truth values between 1 (truth) and 0 (falsity) representing degrees of truth of propositions. The degrees are assumed to be real numbers from the unit interval [0, 1]. In propositional t-norm fuzzy logics, propositional connectives are stipulated to be truth-functional, that is, the truth value of a complex proposition formed by a propositional connective from some constituent propositions is a function (called the truth function of the connective) of the truth values of the constituent propositions. The truth functions operate on the set of truth degrees (in the standard semantics, on the [0, 1] interval); thus the truth function of an n-ary propositional connective c is a function Fc: [0, 1]n → [0, 1]. Truth functions generalize truth tables of propositional connectives known from classical logic to operate on the larger system of truth values. T-norm fuzzy logics impose certain natural constraints on the truth function of conjunction. The truth function ∗ : [ 0 , 1 ] 2 → [ 0 , 1 ] {\displaystyle \colon [0,1]^{2}\to [0,1]} of conjunction is assumed to satisfy the following conditions: Commutativity, that is, x ∗ y = y ∗ x {\displaystyle xy=yx} for all x and y in [0, 1]. This expresses the assumption that the order of fuzzy propositions is immaterial in conjunction, even if intermediary truth degrees are admitted. Associativity, that is, ( x ∗ y ) ∗ z = x ∗ ( y ∗ z ) {\displaystyle (xy)z=x(yz)} for all x, y, and z in [0, 1]. This expresses the assumption that the order of performing conjunction is immaterial, even if intermediary truth degrees are admitted. Monotony, that is, if x ≤ y {\displaystyle x\leq y} then x ∗ z ≤ y ∗ z {\displaystyle xz\leq yz} for all x, y, and z in [0, 1]. This expresses the assumption that increasing the truth degree of a conjunct should not decrease the truth degree of the conjunction. Neutrality of 1, that is, 1 ∗ x = x {\displaystyle 1x=x} for all x in [0, 1]. This assumption corresponds to regarding the truth degree 1 as full truth, conjunction with which does not decrease the truth value of the other conjunct. Together with the previous conditions this condition ensures that also 0 ∗ x = 0 {\displaystyle 0x=0} for all x in [0, 1], which corresponds to regarding the truth degree 0 as full falsity, conjunction with which is always fully false. Continuity of the function ∗ {\displaystyle } (the previous conditions reduce this requirement to the continuity in either argument). Informally this expresses the assumption that microscopic changes of the truth degrees of conjuncts should not result in a macroscopic change of the truth degree of their conjunction. This condition, among other things, ensures a good behavior of (residual) implication derived from conjunction; to ensure the good behavior, however, left-continuity (in either argument) of the function ∗ {\displaystyle } is sufficient. In general t-norm fuzzy logics, therefore, only left-continuity of ∗ {\displaystyle } is required, which expresses the assumption that a microscopic decrease of the truth degree of a conjunct should not macroscopically decrease the truth degree of conjunction. These assumptions make the truth function of conjunction a left-continuous t-norm, which explains the name of the family of fuzzy logics (t-norm based). Particular logics of the family can make further assumptions about the behavior of conjunction (for example, Gödel–Dummett logic requires its idempotence) or other connectives (for example, the logic IMTL (involutive monoidal t-norm logic) requires the involutiveness of negation). All left-continuous t-norms ∗ {\displaystyle } have a unique residuum, that is, a binary function ⇒ {\displaystyle \Rightarrow } such that for all x, y, and z in [0, 1], x ∗ y ≤ z {\displaystyle xy\leq z} if and only if x ≤ y ⇒ z . {\displaystyle x\leq y\Rightarrow z.} The residuum of a left-continuous t-norm can explicitly be defined as ( x ⇒ y ) = sup { z ∣ z ∗ x ≤ y } . {\displaystyle (x\Rightarrow y)=\sup\{z\mid zx\leq y\}.} This ensures that the residuum is the pointwise largest function such that for all x and y, x ∗ ( x ⇒ y ) ≤ y . {\displaystyle x(x\Rightarrow y)\leq y.} The latter can be interpreted as a fuzzy version of the modus ponens rule of inference. The residuum of a left-continuous t-norm thus can be characterized as the weakest function that makes the fuzzy modus ponens valid, which makes it a suitable truth function for implication in fuzzy logic. Left-continuity of the t-norm is the necessary and sufficient condition for this relationship between a t-norm conjunction and its residual implication to hold. Truth functions of further propositional connectives can be defined by means of the t-norm and its residuum, for instance the residual negation ¬ x = ( x ⇒ 0 ) {\displaystyle \neg x=(x\Rightarrow 0)} or bi-residual equivalence x ⇔ y = ( x ⇒ y ) ∗ ( y ⇒ x ) . {\displaystyle x\Leftrightarrow y=(x\Rightarrow y)(y\Rightarrow x).} Truth functions of propositional connectives may also be introduced by additional definitions: the most usual ones are the minimum (which plays a role of another conjunctive connective), the maximum (which plays a role of a disjunctive connective), or the Baaz Delta operator, defined in [0, 1] as Δ x = 1 {\displaystyle \Delta x=1} if x = 1 {\displaystyle x=1} and Δ x = 0 {\displaystyle \Delta x=0} otherwise. In this way, a left-continuous t-norm, its residuum, and the truth functions of additional propositional connectives determine the truth values of complex propositional formulae in [0, 1]. Formulae that always evaluate to 1 are called tautologies with respect to the given left-continuous t-norm ∗ , {\displaystyle ,} or ∗ - {\displaystyle {\mbox{-}}} tautologies. The set of all ∗ - {\displaystyle {\mbox{-}}} tautologies is called the logic of the t-norm ∗ , {\displaystyle ,} as these formulae represent the laws of fuzzy logic (determined by the t-norm) that hold (to degree 1) regardless of the truth degrees of atomic formulae. Some formulae are tautologies with respect to a larger class of left-continuous t-norms; the set of such formulae is called the logic of the class. Important t-norm logics are the logics of particular t-norms or classes of t-norms, for example: Łukasiewicz logic is the logic of the Łukasiewicz t-norm x ∗ y = max ( x + y − 1 , 0 ) {\displaystyle xy=\max(x+y-1,0)} Gödel–Dummett logic is the logic of the minimum t-norm x ∗ y = min ( x , y ) {\displaystyle xy=\min(x,y)} Product fuzzy logic is the logic of the product t-norm x ∗ y = x ⋅ y {\displaystyle xy=x\cdot y} Monoidal t-norm logic MTL is the logic of (the class of) all left-continuous t-norms Basic fuzzy logic BL is the logic of (the class of) all continuous t-norms It turns out that many logics of particular t-norms and classes of t-norms are axiomatizable. The completeness theorem of the axiomatic system with respect to the corresponding t-norm semantics on [0, 1] is then called the standard completeness of the logic. Besides the standard real-valued semantics on [0, 1], the logics are sound and complete with respect to general algebraic semantics, formed by suitable classes of prelinear commutative bounded integral residuated lattices. == History == Some particular t-norm fuzzy logics have been introduced and investigated long before the family was re

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  • Digital fashion

    Digital fashion

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

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  • CogX Festival

    CogX Festival

    CogX Festival is a global festival focusing on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technology on industry, government, and society. It takes place annually, usually in September, in London, England. Founded by Charlie Muirhead and Tabitha Goldstaub in 2017, CogX aims to facilitate dialogue and understanding about AI and its implications across various sectors. CogX Festival 2023 was held from September 12 to September 14 across multiple sites in London. == History == The inaugural CogX event took place in 2017, intending to bring together experts from diverse fields to discuss the role and impact of AI and emerging technologies. Since then, it has evolved to include a broader range of topics and attract a diverse audience. In 2018, the first CogX Awards festival was hosted. That year, over 50 awards were shown to 300 guests. In 2021, CogX and Hopin, a video conferencing software, signed an agreement lasting 4 years to make CogX a hybrid conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic. CogX 2021 attracted over 5,000 attendees in-person and over 100,000 virtually. In 2022, they returned to a live event format after two years of hybrid events and controlled physical attendance. They also launched the CogX app, which curated insights from the world's top podcasts. In 2023, after he had delivered the keynote address guest speaker Stephen Fry fell off the stage and subsequently broke his leg, hip, pelvis and a "bunch of ribs". A court filing in 2026 revealed that Fry was seeking £100,000 in damages from CogX Festival Ltd and creative agency Blonstein Events. == Programming == The festival features sessions, discussions, workshops, and exhibitions, encompassing various domains of AI and technology. In recent CogX Festivals, they have featured summits encompassing topics like global leadership and industry transformation.

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  • Environmental impact of AI

    Environmental impact of AI

    The environmental impact of the design, training, deployment and use of artificial intelligence includes the greenhouse gas emissions from generating electricity for data centres and computing hardware, operational and upstream water use, and material impacts from hardware manufacturing, mining and electronic waste. Estimating AI's environmental effects can be difficult because results depend on how impacts are measured, including whether accounting includes only model computation or also data-centre overhead, idle capacity, hardware manufacture, and local electricity supply. As these issues have received greater attention, governments and regulators have increasingly considered data-centre reporting requirements, energy-efficiency standards, and broader transparency measures for AI-related resource use. == Carbon footprint and energy use == AI-related energy use arises at multiple stages, including model training, fine-tuning, inference, storage, networking, and supporting infrastructure such as cooling and power conversion. === Individual level === Published estimates of energy use per AI request vary widely across models, tasks and measurement methods. A benchmark study presented at the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency found substantial differences between task types, with lower energy use for some text tasks and much higher energy use for image generation in the study's test conditions. In that benchmark, simple classification tasks consumed about 0.002–0.007 Wh per prompt on average (about 9% of a smartphone charge for 1,000 prompts), while text generation and text summarisation each used about 0.05 Wh per prompt; image generation averaged 2.91 Wh per prompt, and the least efficient image model in the study used 11.49 Wh per image (roughly equivalent to half a smartphone charge). First-party measurements in production environments have also been published. A 2025 Google study on Gemini assistant serving reported median per-prompt energy, emissions, and water-use estimates under the authors' accounting framework, while noting that different system boundaries can produce substantially different results. The study reported a median text-prompt estimate of about 0.24 Wh, which is roughly as much energy as watching nine seconds of television. The study also stated that software and infrastructure improvements reduced energy use by a factor of 33 and carbon emissions by a factor of 44 for a typical prompt over one year within the authors' framework. Researchers at the University of Michigan measured the energy consumption of various Meta Llama 3.1 models released in 2024 and found that smaller language models (8 billion parameters) use about 114 joules (0.03167 Wh) per response, while larger models (405 billion parameters) require up to 6,700 joules (1.861 Wh) per response. This corresponds to the energy needed to run a microwave oven for roughly one-tenth of a second and eight seconds, respectively. Comparisons between AI systems and human labour for specific tasks have produced mixed results and remain sensitive to assumptions about output quality, workload and system boundaries. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports reported 130 to 2900 times lower estimated carbon emissions for selected AI systems than for human writers and illustrators under its assumptions. A later Scientific Reports paper reported a counterexample for programming tasks under its assumptions, finding 5 to 19 times higher estimated emissions for the evaluated AI system than for human programmers on the benchmark used in that study. === System level === ==== Energy use and efficiency ==== AI electricity intensity depends not only on model architecture but also on hardware and facility efficiency. Data-centre operators commonly report Power usage effectiveness (PUE), which measures the ratio of total facility energy to IT equipment energy; a lower PUE indicates less overhead energy for cooling and other supporting infrastructure. Operators may also publish metrics and case studies on hardware efficiency, cooling systems and power sourcing. In its 2024 environmental report, Google stated that its 2023 total greenhouse gas emissions increased 13% year over year, primarily because of increased data-centre energy consumption and supply-chain emissions, while also reporting lower PUE than industry averages for its own facilities. The International Energy Agency has also reported that data centres remain a relatively small share of global electricity use overall, but that their local effects can be much more pronounced because demand is geographically concentrated. ==== Carbon footprint ==== At system level, AI contributes to rising electricity demand in data centres and related infrastructure. The International Energy Agency estimated that data centres used about 415 TWh of electricity in 2024, or around 1.5% of global electricity consumption, and projected that data-centre electricity use could rise to about 945 TWh by 2030, with AI identified as the main driver of that growth alongside other digital services. The carbon footprint of AI systems depends strongly on electricity sources, hardware efficiency, utilisation rates, and what stages are included in the accounting. Training large models can require substantial electricity, while total lifecycle impacts also depend on deployment scale and the amount of inference performed after training. Early analyses of frontier-model development reported rapid historical growth in training compute for selected systems, although later trends have depended on changes in model design, hardware and efficiency gains. Accounting methods that include upstream or embodied impacts, such as hardware manufacture and facilities construction, can materially affect estimates of AI-related emissions. === Decisions and strategies by individual companies === Large technology companies have reported that the expansion of AI and cloud infrastructure affects their sustainability targets, electricity demand, and resource use. Google, for example, attributed part of its emissions growth in 2023 to increased data-centre energy consumption and supply-chain emissions in its 2024 environmental report. Cloud and AI companies have also announced measures intended to reduce environmental impacts, including investment in more efficient hardware, low-carbon electricity procurement, alternative cooling systems, and water stewardship programmes. The extent, comparability, and third-party verification of such disclosures vary between firms and jurisdictions. == Water usage == Data centres can use water directly for cooling and indirectly through the water used in electricity generation, depending on the local energy mix. Public reporting on data-centre water use has often been inconsistent, making comparisons between operators and regions difficult. To standardise operational reporting, The Green Grid proposed the metric water usage effectiveness (WUE), defined as annual site water use divided by IT equipment energy use. WUE does not by itself measure local water stress, source sustainability, or all upstream water impacts. Studies of AI water use also distinguish between water withdrawal and water consumption. Research on AI-specific water use has argued that the water footprint of AI systems can be difficult to observe and may vary substantially by location, cooling design, and electricity source. A 2025 Communications of the ACM article summarised methods for estimating AI water footprints and emphasised the distinction between water withdrawal and water consumption. Li and colleagues estimated that global AI water withdrawal could reach 4.2–6.6 billion cubic metres in 2027 under the scenarios examined in their article. Using GPT-3, released by OpenAI in 2020, as an example, they estimated that training the model in Microsoft's U.S. data centres could consume about 700,000 litres of onsite water and about 5.4 million litres in total when offsite electricity-related water use was included; they also estimated that 10–50 medium-length GPT-3 responses could consume about 500 mL of water, depending on when and where the model was deployed. Published prompt-level estimates have also varied by system and accounting framework: the 2025 Google study on Gemini assistant serving reported a median text-prompt estimate of about 0.26 mL under its framework. Location can materially affect the significance of data-centre water use. Research on U.S. data centres found that one-fifth of servers' direct water footprint came from moderately to highly water-stressed watersheds, while nearly half of servers were fully or partially powered by plants located in water-stressed regions. A 2025 Reuters report, citing data from Verisk Maplecroft and NatureFinance, said that an average mid-sized data centre uses about 1.4 million litres of water per day for cooling and that Phoenix would experience a 32% increase in annual water stress if currently pl

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  • Vehicle infrastructure integration

    Vehicle infrastructure integration

    The Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII), also known as "Connected Roadways" or "vehicle-to-everything" (V2X) technology, is a United States Department of Transportation initiative that aims to improve road safety by developing technology that connects road vehicles with their environment. This development draws on several disciplines, including transport engineering, electrical engineering, automotive engineering, telematics, and computer science. Although VII specifically covers road transport, similar technologies are under development for other modes of transport. For example, airplanes may use ground-based beacons for automated guidance, allowing the autopilot to fly the plane without human intervention. == Goals == The goal of VII is to establish a communication link between vehicles (via On-Board Equipment, or OBE) and roadside infrastructure (via Roadside Equipment, or RSE) to enhance the safety, efficiency, and convenience of transportation systems. Two potential approaches are the widespread deployment of a dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) link on the 5.9GHz band, and cellular communication (C-V2X). Either of these methods would allow vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. The initiative has three priorities: Stakeholder evaluation and acceptance of the business model and its deployment schedule, Validation of the technology, with a focus on communications systems, in relation to deployment costs, and Creation of legal structures and policies, especially concerning digital privacy, to improve the system's long-term potential for success. === Safety === Current automotive safety technology relies primarily on vehicle-based radar, lidar, and sonar systems. This technology allows, for instance, a potential reduction in rear-end collisions by monitoring obstacles in front of or behind the vehicle and automatically applying the brakes when necessary. This technology, however, is limited by the sensing range of vehicle-based radar, particularly in angled and left-turn collisions, such as a motorist losing control of the vehicle during an impending head-on collision. The rear-end collisions addressed by current technology are generally less severe than angled, left-turn, or head-on collisions. VII promotes the development of a direct communication link between road vehicles and all other vehicles nearby, allowing for the exchange of information on vehicle speed and orientation or driver awareness and intent. This real-time exchange of information may enable more effective automated emergency maneuvers, such as steering, decelerating, or braking. In addition to nearby vehicle awareness, VII promotes a communication link between vehicles and roadway infrastructure. Such a link may allow for improved real-time traffic information, better queue management, and feedback to vehicles. Existing implementations of VII use vehicle-based sensors that can recognize and respond to roadway markings or signs, automatically adjusting vehicle parameters to follow the recognized instructions. However, this information may also be acquired via roadside beacons or stored in a centralized database accessible to all vehicles. === Efficiency === With a VII system in place, vehicles will be linked together. The headway between vehicles may therefore be reduced so that there is less empty space on the road, increasing the available capacity per lane. More capacity per lane will in turn imply fewer lanes in general, possibly satisfying the community's concerns about the impact of roadway widening. VII will enable precise traffic-signal coordination by tracking vehicle platoons and will benefit from accurate timing by drawing on real-time traffic data covering volume, density, and turning movements. Real-time traffic data can also be used in the design of new roadways or modification of existing systems as the data could be used to provide accurate origin-destination studies and turning-movement counts for uses in transportation forecasting and traffic operations. Such technology would also lead to improvements for transport engineers to address problems whilst reducing the cost of obtaining and compiling data. Tolling is another prospect for VII technology as it could enable roadways to be automatically tolled. Data could be collectively transmitted to road users for in-vehicle display, outlining the lowest cost, shortest distance, and/or fastest route to a destination on the basis of real-time conditions. === Existing applications === To some extent, results along these lines have been achieved in trials performed around the globe, making use of GPS, mobile phone signals, and vehicle registration plates. GPS is becoming standard in many new high-end vehicles and is an option on most new low- and mid-range vehicles. In addition, many users also have mobile phones that transmit trackable signals (and may also be GPS-enabled). Mobile phones can already be traced for purposes of emergency response. GPS and mobile phone tracking, however, do not provide fully reliable data. Furthermore, integrating mobile phones in vehicles may be prohibitively difficult. Data from mobile phones, though useful, might even increase risks to motorists as they tend to look at their phones rather than concentrate on their driving. Automatic registration plate recognition can provide large quantities of data, but continuously tracking a vehicle through a corridor is a difficult task with existing technology. Today's equipment is designed for data acquisition and functions such as enforcement and tolling, not for returning data to vehicles or motorists for response. GPS will nevertheless be one of the key components in VII systems. == Limitations == === Privacy === VII architecture is designed to prevent identification of individual vehicles, with all data exchange between the vehicle and the system occurring anonymously. Exchanges between the vehicles and third parties such as OEMs and toll collectors will occur, but the network traffic will be sent via encrypted tunnels and will therefore not be decipherable by the VII system. Data sharing with law enforcement or Homeland Security was not included in system design as of 2006. === Technical issues === ==== Coordination ==== A major issue facing the deployment of VII is the problem of how to set up the system initially. The costs associated with installing the technology in vehicles and providing communications and power at every intersection are significant. ==== Maintenance ==== Another factor for consideration in regard to the technology's distribution is how to update and maintain the units. Traffic systems are highly dynamic, with new traffic controls implemented every day and roadways constructed or repaired every year. The vehicle-based option could be updated via the internet (preferably wireless) but may subsequently require all users to have access to internet technology. Alternatively, if receivers were placed in all vehicles and the VII system was primarily located along the roadside, information could be stored in a centralized database. This would allow the agency responsible to issue updates at any time. These would then be disseminated to the roadside units for passing motorists. Operationally, this method is currently considered to provide the greatest effectiveness but at a high cost to the authorities. ==== Security ==== Security of the units is another concern, especially in light of the public acceptance issue. Criminals could tamper, remove, or destroy VII units regardless of whether they are installed inside vehicles or along the roadside. Magnets, electric shocks, and malicious software (viruses, hacking, or jamming) could be used to damage VII systems – regardless of whether units are located inside vehicle or along the roadside. == Recent developments == Much of the current research and experimentation is conducted in the United States where coordination is ensured through the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium; consisting of automobile manufacturers (Ford, General Motors, Daimler Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW), IT suppliers, U.S. Federal and state transportation departments, and professional associations. Trialing is taking place in Michigan and California. The specific applications now being developed under the U.S. initiative are: Warning drivers of unsafe conditions or imminent collisions. Warning drivers if they are about to run off the road or speed around a curve too fast. Informing system operators of real-time congestion, weather conditions and incidents. Providing operators with information on corridor capacity for real-time management, planning and provision of corridor-wide advisories to drivers. In mid-2007, a VII environment covering some 20 square miles (52 km2) near Detroit was used to test 20 prototype VII applications. Several automobile manufacturers are also conducting their own VII research and triali

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  • Padre Pio (2022 film)

    Padre Pio (2022 film)

    Padre Pio is a 2022 biographical drama film co-written and directed by Abel Ferrara. It stars Shia LaBeouf as the titular role of Padre Pio, a Capuchin Franciscan priest who receives the stigmata, in the background of the World War I in Italy. The film is a co-production of Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. During its production, LaBeouf converted to Catholicism as result of his spiritual experiences in character as Pio, who is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church. The film had its world premiere in the Giornate degli Autori section of the 79th Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2022. It was released theatrically in the United Kingdom on 26 January 2024 by Dazzler Media and in Italy on 18 July 2024 by RS Productions. == Plot == It is the year 1920. Italian WWI veterans have returned to their impoverished villages. Padre Pio arrives at San Giovanni Rotondo after living with his family in Pietrelcina for a number of years. While still sick, he continues to encounter Satan. Satan reveals himself as the instigator of the war and the sociopolitical problems of San Giovanni. While having little contact with the people of this town, Padre Pio learns what the poor are suffering from in the Sacrament of Confession and the Holy Mass, such as when a crippled man walks again because of Padre Pio's prayer. Besides the effects of war, such as medical inadequacy, health conditions and labourers dying from the effects of mustard gas, the people suffer from corrupt, wealthy landowners. Gerardo, a militaristic anti-socialist, threatens to kill any communal labourers tending his land. Many of them join the socialist party as a way to improve their lives. However, after they win the first free election in San Giovanni, Gerardo's forces massacre many of them. Padre Pio asks God that he may become a suffering servant for their salvation. He receives the wounds of Jesus Christ. The stigmata disrupts Satan's influence on San Giovanni Rotondo. == Cast == Shia LaBeouf as Padre Pio Marco Leonardi as Gerardo Salvatore Ruocco as Vincenzo Cristina Chiriac as Giovanna Brando Pacitto as Renato Luca Lionello as Silvestro Asia Argento as Tall Man == Production == According to Abel Ferrara, actor Willem Dafoe suggested that Shia LaBeouf should be cast for the film's leading role. After Ferrara held several Zoom calls with LaBeouf, the latter agreed to join the film, even though very little money was raised (the film was almost never made) and LaBeouf did the project for free. LaBeouf arrived at Old Mission Santa Inés in July 2021 to learn about Padre Pio with the Capuchin Franciscan friars. Thanks to Father Bobby Barbato and Brother Jude Quinto, Br. Alexander Rodriguez met LaBeouf while he attended Mass every day. He learned about the Catholic Church and the Capuchins while living in his truck or spending a few nights in the Capuchin's guest room. He was immersing himself in the Catholic faith. He enrolled in RCIA, revised the script with Rodriguez and trained to do the Latin Mass. Rodriguez traveled with LaBeouf as his spiritual adviser and catechist and was in the film as Padre Pio's companion. Filming occurred in Apulia, Italy, in December 2021. The first place was at the Capuchin friary in San Marco la Catola. Padre Pio exchanged letters with his provincial and spiritual director while living in Pietrelcina with his family. The time was around 1909–1916. Both directors were living in San Marco during these years. Padre Pio expressed in his letters his deep and mysterious relationship with God and health difficulties. This event is in the film. While filming, LaBeouf slept in Padre Pio's bedroom. After San Marco, filming continued outside the Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel in Monte Sant'Angelo. Traditionally, St. Michael appeared here in the late 400s. LaBeouf stayed and filmed for a few weeks at the Abbey of Saint Mary of Pulsano. It is near the sanctuary. The rest of the filming took place outside the sanctuary. Ferrara said in 2024 that he used AI for the Italian dub of this film. == Release == Padre Pio had its world premiere in the Giornate degli Autori section of the 79th Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2022. It received a four-minute ovation. It also competed at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival. At the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival, it was chosen to compete for the "Best Film Award." During its North American premiere at the Mammoth Film Festival, it won the "Achievement for Filmmaking" award for cinematography. At the Taormina Film Festival, it premiered worldwide in Italian. In March 2023, Gravitas Ventures acquired North American rights to the film. It was released in select theaters and on video on demand in the United States on 2 June 2023. The film was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 26 January 2024 by Dazzler Media. RS Productions released it in Italy on 18 July 2024. == Reception == On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 30% based on 43 reviews, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Tonally unbalanced and burdened with a distracting Shia LaBeouf performance, Padre Pio is one of Abel Ferrara's less divine works." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 45 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.. Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a negative review, describing it as "clunky" and criticizing its political themes for possessing "the subtlety of a cartoon for preschoolers." Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com gave the film one and a half stars out of four, describing it as a "dull slog". Journalist Glenn Kenny of The New York Times found the film "occasionally rank" and panned LaBeouf's performance, though complimented Ferrara's "sometimes Brechtian consideration of the nodes of political history and spirituality." Film critic Armond White of National Review also criticized the film, describing it as "a work of deluded, semi-improvisational navel-gazing". Film critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film a positive review, with three out of five stars, writing that it is "a weird film...with an undeveloped, improvised feel, like a fragment or shard of something else. Yet there is a background hum there...an awareness of something dark and malign. It is a minor film but interesting." Writing for The New Yorker, Richard Brody considered that "in its hectic, scattershot way, Padre Pio feels very much of the desperate present day," describing it as "a historical drama without historical distance" and "a wild effort to reach the immediate experience of the past and its furies." Faith-based reviews for the film were generally negative. It received negative reviews from Catholic Answers, The Catholic World Report, The Catholic Weekly, The Catholic Thing, and Crisis Magazine. Conversely, it received a mixed review from The Catholic Review, as well as a positive review from America. Criticisms were generally aimed at the film's sexual content and perceived support of left-wing politics.

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  • Netflix Prize

    Netflix Prize

    The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users being identified except by numbers assigned for the contest. The competition was held by Netflix, a video streaming service, and was open to anyone who was neither connected with Netflix (current and former employees, agents, close relatives of Netflix employees, etc.) nor a resident of certain blocked countries (such as Cuba or North Korea). On September 21, 2009, the grand prize of US$1,000,000 was given to the BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos team which bested Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10.06%. == Problem and data sets == Netflix provided a training data set of 100,480,507 ratings that 480,189 users gave to 17,770 movies. Each training rating is a quadruplet of the form . The user and movie fields are integer IDs, while grades are from 1 to 5 (integer) stars. The qualifying data set contains over 2,817,131 triplets of the form , with grades known only to the jury. A participating team's algorithm must predict grades on the entire qualifying set, but they are informed of the score for only half of the data: a quiz set of 1,408,342 ratings. The other half is the test set of 1,408,789, and performance on this is used by the jury to determine potential prize winners. Only the judges know which ratings are in the quiz set, and which are in the test set—this arrangement is intended to make it difficult to hill climb on the test set. Submitted predictions are scored against the true grades in the form of root mean squared error (RMSE), and the goal is to reduce this error as much as possible. Note that, while the actual grades are integers in the range 1 to 5, submitted predictions need not be. Netflix also identified a probe subset of 1,408,395 ratings within the training data set. The probe, quiz, and test data sets were chosen to have similar statistical properties. In summary, the data used in the Netflix Prize looks as follows: Training set (99,072,112 ratings not including the probe set; 100,480,507 including the probe set) Probe set (1,408,395 ratings) Qualifying set (2,817,131 ratings) consisting of: Test set (1,408,789 ratings), used to determine winners Quiz set (1,408,342 ratings), used to calculate leaderboard scores For each movie, the title and year of release are provided in a separate dataset. No information at all is provided about users. In order to protect the privacy of the customers, "some of the rating data for some customers in the training and qualifying sets have been deliberately perturbed in one or more of the following ways: deleting ratings; inserting alternative ratings and dates; and modifying rating dates." The training set is constructed such that the average user rated over 200 movies, and the average movie was rated by over 5000 users. But there is wide variance in the data—some movies in the training set have as few as 3 ratings, while one user rated over 17,000 movies. There was some controversy as to the choice of RMSE as the defining metric. It has been claimed that even as small an improvement as 1% RMSE results in a significant difference in the ranking of the "top-10" most recommended movies for a user. == Prizes == Prizes were based on improvement over Netflix's own algorithm, called Cinematch, or the previous year's score if a team has made improvement beyond a certain threshold. A trivial algorithm that predicts for each movie in the quiz set its average grade from the training data produces an RMSE of 1.0540. Cinematch uses "straightforward statistical linear models with a lot of data conditioning." The performance of Cinematch had plateaued by 2006. Using only the training data, Cinematch scores an RMSE of 0.9514 on the quiz data, roughly a 10% improvement over the trivial algorithm. Cinematch has a similar performance on the test set, 0.9525. In order to win the grand prize of $1,000,000, a participating team had to improve this by another 10%, to achieve 0.8572 on the test set. Such an improvement on the quiz set corresponds to an RMSE of 0.8563. As long as no team won the grand prize, a progress prize of $50,000 was awarded every year for the best result thus far. However, in order to win this prize, an algorithm had to improve the RMSE on the quiz set by at least 1% over the previous progress prize winner (or over Cinematch, the first year). If no submission succeeded, the progress prize was not to be awarded for that year. To win a progress or grand prize a participant had to provide source code and a description of the algorithm to the jury within one week after being contacted by them. Following verification the winner also had to provide a non-exclusive license to Netflix. Netflix would publish only the description, not the source code, of the system. (To keep their algorithm and source code secret, a team could choose not to claim a prize.) The jury also kept their predictions secret from other participants. A team could send as many attempts to predict grades as they wish. Originally submissions were limited to once a week, but the interval was quickly modified to once a day. A team's best submission so far counted as their current submission. Once one of the teams succeeded in improving the RMSE by 10% or more, the jury would issue a last call, giving all teams 30 days to send their submissions. Only then, the team with the best submission was asked for the algorithm description, source code, and non-exclusive license, and, after successful verification; declared a grand prize winner. The contest would last until the grand prize winner was declared. Had no one received the grand prize, it would have lasted for at least five years (until October 2, 2011). After that date, the contest could have been terminated at any time at Netflix's sole discretion. == Progress over the years == The competition began on October 2, 2006. By October 8, a team called WXYZConsulting had already beaten Cinematch's results. By October 15, there were three teams who had beaten Cinematch, one of them by 1.06%, enough to qualify for the annual progress prize. By June 2007 over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets. Over the first year of the competition, a handful of front-runners traded first place. The more prominent ones were: WXYZConsulting, a team of Wei Xu and Yi Zhang. (A front runner during November–December 2006.) ML@UToronto A, a team from the University of Toronto led by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton. (A front runner during parts of October–December 2006.) Gravity, a team of four scientists from the Budapest University of Technology (A front runner during January–May 2007.) BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs. (A front runner since May 2007.) Dinosaur Planet, a team of three undergraduates from Princeton University. (A front runner on September 3, 2007 for one hour before BellKor snatched back the lead.) The algorithms used by the leading teams were usually an ensemble of singular value decomposition, k-nearest neighbor, neural networks, and so on. On August 12, 2007, many contestants gathered at the KDD Cup and Workshop 2007, held at San Jose, California. During the workshop all four of the top teams on the leaderboard at that time presented their techniques. The team from IBM Research—Yan Liu, Saharon Rosset, Claudia Perlich, and Zhenzhen Kou—won the third place in Task 1 and first place in Task 2. Over the second year of the competition, only three teams reached the leading position: BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs (front runner during May 2007 – September 2008) BigChaos, a team of Austrian scientists from Commendo Research & Consulting (single team front runner since October 2008) BellKor in BigChaos, a joint team of the two leading single teams (a front runner since September 2008) === 2007 Progress Prize === On September 2, 2007, the competition entered the "last call" period for the 2007 Progress Prize. Over 40,000 teams from 186 countries had entered the contest. They had thirty days to tender submissions for consideration. At the beginning of this period the leading team was BellKor, with an RMSE of 0.8728 (8.26% improvement), followed by Dinosaur Planet (RMSE = 0.8769; 7.83% improvement), and Gravity (RMSE = 0.8785; 7.66% improvement). In the last hour of the last call period, an entry by "KorBell" took first place. This turned out to be an alternate name for Team BellKor. On November 13, 2007, team KorBell (formerly BellKor) was declared the winner of the $50,000 Progress Prize with an RMSE of 0.8712 (8.43% improvement). The team consisted of three researchers from AT&T Labs, Yehuda Koren, Robert Bell, and Chris Volinsky. As required, they published a description of their a

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  • Automated Lip Reading

    Automated Lip Reading

    Automated Lip Reading (ALR) is a software technology developed by speech recognition expert Frank Hubner. A video image of a person talking can be analysed by the software. The shapes made by the lips can be examined and then turned into sounds. The sounds are compared to a dictionary to create matches to the words being spoken. The technology was used successfully to analyse silent home movie footage of Adolf Hitler taken by Eva Braun at their Bavarian retreat Berghof. The video, with words, was included in a documentary titled "Hitler's Private World", Revealed Studios, 2006 Source: New Technology catches Hitler off guard

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  • We Appreciate Power

    We Appreciate Power

    "We Appreciate Power" is a song by Canadian musician Grimes, featuring American musician Hana. It was released on November 29, 2018, billed as the lead single from her fifth studio album Miss Anthropocene, however it is only available on the Japanese and deluxe releases. The song was written and produced by Grimes, Poppy (originally), Hana and Chris Greatti. == Background and release == The song was supposed to be one of two collaborations between Grimes and American singer Poppy, for the latter's second studio album Am I a Girl?. In an interview, Poppy mentioned that she wrote two songs with Grimes; one about "destroying things" and another about "power". The other song, "Play Destroy", was featured on the album. Grimes shared a lyric of the song with a photo of her with Poppy on Twitter in May 2018. Following feuds between the two singers, the song was released by Grimes featuring singer Hana instead. On November 26, Grimes announced she would be releasing new music on November 29. Two days later, she revealed that the single is titled "We Appreciate Power" and features Hana, and shared the artwork. The release of the song was accompanied by a lyric video directed by Grimes and her brother Mac Boucher. == Music and lyrics == "We Appreciate Power" is an industrial rock, nu metal, and techno-industrial song. The track is regarded as a further step into Grimes's experimentation with guitars that started on 2015's Art Angels. The track was compared to the works of Nine Inch Nails; Jillian Mapes of Pitchfork described the song as "an immediate onslaught of mutilated noise—distorted metal guitar chug, bloody screams, a guitar loop that conjures fear and demands worship. Flashes of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine reverberate through the drum programming and synths." Brendan Klinkenberg of Rolling Stone placed the song "somewhere between power pop and straightforward industrial (with an extended bridge reminiscent of the most sweeping moments in a Final Fantasy score)" and "a distinctly 2018 take on Nine Inch Nails-esque hard-edged rock." A press release stated that the song was inspired by the North Korean band Moranbong and was written "from the perspective of a Pro-A.I. Girl Group Propaganda machine who use song, dance, sex and fashion to spread goodwill towards Artificial Intelligence." In addition Grimes stated that by simply listening to the song you will be reducing your risk of ending up on any future AI overlord's hit list when it reigns supreme, mirroring the Roko's basilisk theory. Lyrically, the song touches on transhumanist ideas such as the betterment and future of the human race, the possibilities of merging consciousness with machines to extend life indefinitely through mind uploading, and the idea that reality may be simulated. The song's chorus generated a spike in interest in the word "capitulate". == Critical reception == Pitchfork critic Jillian Mapes wrote: "If "Freak on a Leash" isn't a dealbreaker, then the supervillain allure of "We Appreciate Power" might pull you in (it legitimately slaps), but it just as well may leave you weighed down by Grimes' commitment to the absolute darkest timeline." Billboard's Gil Kaufman described the song as "a dystopian, aggressive dive into a more rock-leaning sound." Similarly, Brendan Klinkenberg of Rolling Stone called it "the most aggressive single Grimes has released to date" Noisey called the song "an absolute motherfucker of a single" and opined it sounds "like a K-pop band covering nu-metal". Justin Kamp of Paste described the track as a "glitchy empowerment anthem that chugs along on screeching synths and Grimes' repeated exultations of power." == Personnel == Credits adapted from Tidal. Grimes – vocals, guitar, production, engineering Hana – vocals, guitar, additional production Chris Greatti – guitar, keyboards, production, engineering Zakk Cervini – mixing == Track listing == == Charts ==

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  • Statistical semantics

    Statistical semantics

    In linguistics, statistical semantics applies the methods of statistics to the problem of determining the meaning of words or phrases, ideally through unsupervised learning, to a degree of precision at least sufficient for the purpose of information retrieval. == History == The term statistical semantics was first used by Warren Weaver in his well-known paper on machine translation. He argued that word-sense disambiguation for machine translation should be based on the co-occurrence frequency of the context words near a given target word. The underlying assumption that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was advocated by J. R. Firth. This assumption is known in linguistics as the distributional hypothesis. Emile Delavenay defined statistical semantics as the "statistical study of the meanings of words and their frequency and order of recurrence". "Furnas et al. 1983" is frequently cited as a foundational contribution to statistical semantics. An early success in the field was latent semantic analysis. == Applications == Research in statistical semantics has resulted in a wide variety of algorithms that use the distributional hypothesis to discover many aspects of semantics, by applying statistical techniques to large corpora: Measuring the similarity in word meanings Measuring the similarity in word relations Modeling similarity-based generalization Discovering words with a given relation Classifying relations between words Extracting keywords from documents Measuring the cohesiveness of text Discovering the different senses of words Distinguishing the different senses of words Subcognitive aspects of words Distinguishing praise from criticism == Related fields == Statistical semantics focuses on the meanings of common words and the relations between common words, unlike text mining, which tends to focus on whole documents, document collections, or named entities (names of people, places, and organizations). Statistical semantics is a subfield of computational semantics, which is in turn a subfield of computational linguistics and natural language processing. Many of the applications of statistical semantics (listed above) can also be addressed by lexicon-based algorithms, instead of the corpus-based algorithms of statistical semantics. One advantage of corpus-based algorithms is that they are typically not as labour-intensive as lexicon-based algorithms. Another advantage is that they are usually easier to adapt to new languages or noisier new text types from e.g. social media than lexicon-based algorithms are. However, the best performance on an application is often achieved by combining the two approaches.

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  • Recraft

    Recraft

    Recraft is a generative artificial intelligence program and service developed by the London-based startup Recraft, Inc. The company also offers Recraft Studio, a web-based workspace that lets users create and edit images, vectors, and mockups using various text-to-image models. Like models such as Midjourney and DALL-E, the Recraft model generates digital images from natural language prompts, and is specifically tailored for creative workflows, with features that emphasize brand consistency, text fidelity, and layout control. == History and background == Recraft, Inc. was founded in 2022 by machine learning scientist Anna Veronika Dorogush, best known for co-creating the CatBoost machine learning library at Yandex. The company emerged from stealth on May 31, 2023, with a public release of its vector graphics generation capability on Product Hunt. On January 17, 2024, TechCrunch profiled Recraft’s foundational model for graphic design, noting its emphasis on addressing copyright and ethical concerns associated with AI-generated imagery. On October 28, 2024, TechCrunch reported that Recraft's third major model, V3, had topped a crowdsourced benchmark, surpassing Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E in overall image quality. On May 5, 2025, Recraft announced a $30 million Series B funding round led by Accel, reporting more than four million registered users at the time of the announcement. == Models == Recraft has developed multiple generations of its text-to-image models since 2022. Each generation reflects improvements in fidelity, controllability, and support for both raster and vector outputs. The models are proprietary and accessible through the Recraft API, Recraft Studio. Recraft models are also hosted as an image generation API on fal, Replicate, Prodia, and others. === Recraft V2 === Recraft V2 was released in March 2024 and was the company’s first model trained from scratch. It contained roughly 20 billion parameters and introduced native vector image generation, brand-color conditioning, and improved stylistic consistency for icons and illustrations. === Recraft V3 === Recraft V3 was released in October 2024 and achieved first place on the Artificial Analysis benchmark hosted on Hugging Face. The model introduced advances in photorealism, improved rendering of multi-word text, and increased responsiveness to detailed descriptive prompts. It also added the “Artistic” parameter, which allowed users to adjust stylistic intensity within generated images. === Recraft V4 === Recraft V4 was released in February 2026. According to Recraft, V4 is a “ground-up rebuild” aimed at improving prompt accuracy and output quality for design workflows, with the company emphasizing “design taste” and art-directed results. Recraft states that V4 is available in two versions: V4 for faster iteration and V4 Pro for higher-resolution, print-ready assets; the API documentation describes V4 as 1-megapixel output and V4 Pro as 4-megapixel output, with vector variants available for each. === Features === Vectorization: Recraft’s models can generate and convert images into native vector formats, producing scalable graphics composed of editable paths rather than fixed pixels. Style reference: The models support the use of reference images to guide stylistic characteristics such as color palette, line quality, composition, or visual tone. Style mixing: Recraft models can combine multiple stylistic inputs within a single generation. By blending attributes from different references or stylistic instructions, the system produces images that reflect hybrid visual characteristics while maintaining internal consistency. Inpainting editing: The models support localized image modification through inpainting, enabling users to regenerate selected regions of an image while preserving surrounding content. === Model capabilities === Recraft’s models generate raster and vector images from natural-language prompts and are designed to interpret detailed descriptions with attention to composition, style, and text placement. The models support controlled stylistic variation through preset or reference-based guidance and can maintain coherent line, color, or layout structure across multiple outputs. They produce scalable vector graphics alongside high-resolution raster images, and include features for localized image modification through inpainting or outpainting operations. === Technology === Recraft has not publicly disclosed the detailed technical architecture of its models. However, third-party reviews and benchmarks have noted that its performance resembles diffusion models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The model is designed for creative workflows requiring visual consistency and flexible output formats. Reviewers have noted its ability to generate legible multi-line text, produce high-resolution imagery at various canvas sizes, and to maintain alignment with user-defined brand palettes and design themes. Though not open-source, Recraft's models are accessible through a web interface and commercial API. Advanced features such as style settings and positioning control differentiate it from general-purpose text-to-image models. == Recraft Studio == Recraft Studio is a web-based workspace for generating and editing images using Recraft’s image models and selected external models. The infinite canvas interface provides access to a range of creation and refinement tools within a single environment. Raster and vector generation with styles: Recraft Studio supports the generation of both raster and vector images. Users can apply predefined or reference-based styles during generation, allowing for visual consistency across multiple outputs. Mockups: The studio includes mockup tools that allow generated designs to be placed onto predefined surfaces or templates for visualization and presentation purposes. Vectorization: Recraft Studio provides vectorization tools that convert raster images into editable vector graphics, enabling further modification of shapes, colors, and layout. Image upscaling: The workspace includes image upscaling functionality for increasing resolution while preserving visual detail. Editing tools and natural-language editing: Recraft Studio offers a set of editing tools for modifying images within the canvas, including localized adjustments and natural-language–based editing commands that allow users to describe changes using text. === Supported models === Recraft Studio provides access to Recraft’s proprietary image models as well as other external frontier image models such as Nano Banana, GPT 4-o, Imagen, Flux, and others. == Business model == Recraft develops proprietary image models that are accessible through Recraft Studio and the Recraft API. Recraft Studio operates on a freemium model, offering a free tier with limited daily credits and paid subscriptions for access to additional features. The API follows a credit-based system in which units are purchased separately for programmatic image generation. A team plan supports collaborative use, and the API enables organizations and developers to integrate Recraft’s image generation and editing capabilities into their own systems and workflows.

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  • Scale space implementation

    Scale space implementation

    In the areas of computer vision, image analysis and signal processing, the notion of scale-space representation is used for processing measurement data at multiple scales, and specifically enhance or suppress image features over different ranges of scale (see the article on scale space). A special type of scale-space representation is provided by the Gaussian scale space, where the image data in N dimensions is subjected to smoothing by Gaussian convolution. Most of the theory for Gaussian scale space deals with continuous images, whereas one when implementing this theory will have to face the fact that most measurement data are discrete. Hence, the theoretical problem arises concerning how to discretize the continuous theory while either preserving or well approximating the desirable theoretical properties that lead to the choice of the Gaussian kernel (see the article on scale-space axioms). This article describes basic approaches for this that have been developed in the literature, see also for an in-depth treatment regarding the topic of approximating the Gaussian smoothing operation and the Gaussian derivative computations in scale-space theory, and for a complementary treatment regarding hybrid discretization methods. == Statement of the problem == The Gaussian scale-space representation of an N-dimensional continuous signal, f C ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) , {\displaystyle f_{C}\left(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t\right),} is obtained by convolving fC with an N-dimensional Gaussian kernel: g N ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) . {\displaystyle g_{N}\left(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t\right).} In other words: L ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) = ∫ u 1 = − ∞ ∞ ⋯ ∫ u N = − ∞ ∞ f C ( x 1 − u 1 , ⋯ , x N − u N , t ) ⋅ g N ( u 1 , ⋯ , u N , t ) d u 1 ⋯ d u N . {\displaystyle L\left(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t\right)=\int _{u_{1}=-\infty }^{\infty }\cdots \int _{u_{N}=-\infty }^{\infty }f_{C}\left(x_{1}-u_{1},\cdots ,x_{N}-u_{N},t\right)\cdot g_{N}\left(u_{1},\cdots ,u_{N},t\right)\,du_{1}\cdots du_{N}.} However, for implementation, this definition is impractical, since it is continuous. When applying the scale space concept to a discrete signal fD, different approaches can be taken. This article is a brief summary of some of the most frequently used methods. == Separability == Using the separability property of the Gaussian kernel g N ( x 1 , … , x N , t ) = G ( x 1 , t ) ⋯ G ( x N , t ) {\displaystyle g_{N}\left(x_{1},\dots ,x_{N},t\right)=G\left(x_{1},t\right)\cdots G\left(x_{N},t\right)} the N-dimensional convolution operation can be decomposed into a set of separable smoothing steps with a one-dimensional Gaussian kernel G along each dimension L ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) = ∫ u 1 = − ∞ ∞ ⋯ ∫ u N = − ∞ ∞ f C ( x 1 − u 1 , ⋯ , x N − u N , t ) G ( u 1 , t ) d u 1 ⋯ G ( u N , t ) d u N , {\displaystyle L(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t)=\int _{u_{1}=-\infty }^{\infty }\cdots \int _{u_{N}=-\infty }^{\infty }f_{C}(x_{1}-u_{1},\cdots ,x_{N}-u_{N},t)G(u_{1},t)\,du_{1}\cdots G(u_{N},t)\,du_{N},} where G ( x , t ) = 1 2 π t e − x 2 2 t {\displaystyle G(x,t)={\frac {1}{\sqrt {2\pi t}}}e^{-{\frac {x^{2}}{2t}}}} and the standard deviation of the Gaussian σ is related to the scale parameter t according to t = σ2. Separability will be assumed in all that follows, even when the kernel is not exactly Gaussian, since separation of the dimensions is the most practical way to implement multidimensional smoothing, especially at larger scales. Therefore, the rest of the article focuses on the one-dimensional case. == The sampled Gaussian kernel == When implementing the one-dimensional smoothing step in practice, the presumably simplest approach is to convolve the discrete signal fD with a sampled Gaussian kernel: L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − ∞ ∞ f ( x − n ) G ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-\infty }^{\infty }f(x-n)\,G(n,t)} where G ( n , t ) = 1 2 π t e − n 2 2 t {\displaystyle G(n,t)={\frac {1}{\sqrt {2\pi t}}}e^{-{\frac {n^{2}}{2t}}}} (with t = σ2) which in turn is truncated at the ends to give a filter with finite impulse response L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − M M f ( x − n ) G ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-M}^{M}f(x-n)\,G(n,t)} for M chosen sufficiently large (see error function) such that 2 ∫ M ∞ G ( u , t ) d u = 2 ∫ M t ∞ G ( v , 1 ) d v < ε . {\displaystyle 2\int _{M}^{\infty }G(u,t)\,du=2\int _{\frac {M}{\sqrt {t}}}^{\infty }G(v,1)\,dv<\varepsilon .} A common choice is to set M to a constant C times the standard deviation of the Gaussian kernel M = C σ + 1 = C t + 1 {\displaystyle M=C\sigma +1=C{\sqrt {t}}+1} where C is often chosen somewhere between 3 and 6. Using the sampled Gaussian kernel can, however, lead to implementation problems, in particular when computing higher-order derivatives at finer scales by applying sampled derivatives of Gaussian kernels. When accuracy and robustness are primary design criteria, alternative implementation approaches should therefore be considered. For small values of ε (10−6 to 10−8) the errors introduced by truncating the Gaussian are usually negligible. For larger values of ε, however, there are many better alternatives to a rectangular window function. For example, for a given number of points, a Hamming window, Blackman window, or Kaiser window will do less damage to the spectral and other properties of the Gaussian than a simple truncation will. Notwithstanding this, since the Gaussian kernel decreases rapidly at the tails, the main recommendation is still to use a sufficiently small value of ε such that the truncation effects are no longer important. == The discrete Gaussian kernel == A more refined approach is to convolve the original signal with the discrete Gaussian kernel T(n, t) L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − ∞ ∞ f ( x − n ) T ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-\infty }^{\infty }f(x-n)\,T(n,t)} where T ( n , t ) = e − t I n ( t ) {\displaystyle T(n,t)=e^{-t}I_{n}(t)} and I n ( t ) {\displaystyle I_{n}(t)} denotes the modified Bessel functions of integer order, n. This is the discrete counterpart of the continuous Gaussian in that it is the solution to the discrete diffusion equation (discrete space, continuous time), just as the continuous Gaussian is the solution to the continuous diffusion equation. This filter can be truncated in the spatial domain as for the sampled Gaussian L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − M M f ( x − n ) T ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-M}^{M}f(x-n)\,T(n,t)} or can be implemented in the Fourier domain using a closed-form expression for its discrete-time Fourier transform: T ^ ( θ , t ) = ∑ n = − ∞ ∞ T ( n , t ) e − i θ n = e t ( cos ⁡ θ − 1 ) . {\displaystyle {\widehat {T}}(\theta ,t)=\sum _{n=-\infty }^{\infty }T(n,t)\,e^{-i\theta n}=e^{t(\cos \theta -1)}.} With this frequency-domain approach, the scale-space properties transfer exactly to the discrete domain, or with excellent approximation using periodic extension and a suitably long discrete Fourier transform to approximate the discrete-time Fourier transform of the signal being smoothed. Moreover, higher-order derivative approximations can be computed in a straightforward manner (and preserving scale-space properties) by applying small support central difference operators to the discrete scale space representation. As with the sampled Gaussian, a plain truncation of the infinite impulse response will in most cases be a sufficient approximation for small values of ε, while for larger values of ε it is better to use either a decomposition of the discrete Gaussian into a cascade of generalized binomial filters or alternatively to construct a finite approximate kernel by multiplying by a window function. If ε has been chosen too large such that effects of the truncation error begin to appear (for example as spurious extrema or spurious responses to higher-order derivative operators), then the options are to decrease the value of ε such that a larger finite kernel is used, with cutoff where the support is very small, or to use a tapered window. == Recursive filters == Since computational efficiency is often important, low-order recursive filters are often used for scale-space smoothing. For example, Young and van Vliet use a third-order recursive filter with one real pole and a pair of complex poles, applied forward and backward to make a sixth-order symmetric approximation to the Gaussian with low computational complexity for any smoothing scale. By relaxing a few of the axioms, Lindeberg concluded that good smoothing filters would be "normalized Pólya frequency sequences", a family of discrete kernels that includes all filters with real poles at 0 < Z < 1 and/or Z > 1, as well as with real zeros at Z < 0. For symmetry, which leads to approximate directional homogeneity, these filters must be further restricted to pairs of poles and zeros that lead to zero-phase filters. To match the transfer function curvature at zero frequency of the discrete Gaussian, which ensures an approximate semi-group property of additive t, two poles at Z = 1 + 2 t − ( 1 + 2 t ) 2 − 1 {\displaystyle

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  • BL (logic)

    BL (logic)

    In mathematical logic, basic fuzzy logic (or shortly BL), the logic of the continuous t-norms, is one of the t-norm fuzzy logics. It belongs to the broader class of substructural logics, or logics of residuated lattices; it extends the logic MTL of all left-continuous t-norms. == Syntax == === Language === The language of the propositional logic BL consists of countably many propositional variables and the following primitive logical connectives: Implication → {\displaystyle \rightarrow } (binary) Strong conjunction ⊗ {\displaystyle \otimes } (binary). The sign & is a more traditional notation for strong conjunction in the literature on fuzzy logic, while the notation ⊗ {\displaystyle \otimes } follows the tradition of substructural logics. Bottom ⊥ {\displaystyle \bot } (nullary — a propositional constant); 0 {\displaystyle 0} or 0 ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {0}}} are common alternative signs and zero a common alternative name for the propositional constant (as the constants bottom and zero of substructural logics coincide in MTL). The following are the most common defined logical connectives: Weak conjunction ∧ {\displaystyle \wedge } (binary), also called lattice conjunction (as it is always realized by the lattice operation of meet in algebraic semantics). Unlike MTL and weaker substructural logics, weak conjunction is definable in BL as A ∧ B ≡ A ⊗ ( A → B ) {\displaystyle A\wedge B\equiv A\otimes (A\rightarrow B)} Negation ¬ {\displaystyle \neg } (unary), defined as ¬ A ≡ A → ⊥ {\displaystyle \neg A\equiv A\rightarrow \bot } Equivalence ↔ {\displaystyle \leftrightarrow } (binary), defined as A ↔ B ≡ ( A → B ) ∧ ( B → A ) {\displaystyle A\leftrightarrow B\equiv (A\rightarrow B)\wedge (B\rightarrow A)} As in MTL, the definition is equivalent to ( A → B ) ⊗ ( B → A ) . {\displaystyle (A\rightarrow B)\otimes (B\rightarrow A).} (Weak) disjunction ∨ {\displaystyle \vee } (binary), also called lattice disjunction (as it is always realized by the lattice operation of join in algebraic semantics), defined as A ∨ B ≡ ( ( A → B ) → B ) ∧ ( ( B → A ) → A ) {\displaystyle A\vee B\equiv ((A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow B)\wedge ((B\rightarrow A)\rightarrow A)} Top ⊤ {\displaystyle \top } (nullary), also called one and denoted by 1 {\displaystyle 1} or 1 ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {1}}} (as the constants top and zero of substructural logics coincide in MTL), defined as ⊤ ≡ ⊥ → ⊥ {\displaystyle \top \equiv \bot \rightarrow \bot } Well-formed formulae of BL are defined as usual in propositional logics. In order to save parentheses, it is common to use the following order of precedence: Unary connectives (bind most closely) Binary connectives other than implication and equivalence Implication and equivalence (bind most loosely) === Axioms === A Hilbert-style deduction system for BL has been introduced by Petr Hájek (1998). Its single derivation rule is modus ponens: from A {\displaystyle A} and A → B {\displaystyle A\rightarrow B} derive B . {\displaystyle B.} The following are its axiom schemata: ( B L 1 ) : ( A → B ) → ( ( B → C ) → ( A → C ) ) ( B L 2 ) : A ⊗ B → A ( B L 3 ) : A ⊗ B → B ⊗ A ( B L 4 ) : A ⊗ ( A → B ) → B ⊗ ( B → A ) ( B L 5 a ) : ( A → ( B → C ) ) → ( A ⊗ B → C ) ( B L 5 b ) : ( A ⊗ B → C ) → ( A → ( B → C ) ) ( B L 6 ) : ( ( A → B ) → C ) → ( ( ( B → A ) → C ) → C ) ( B L 7 ) : ⊥ → A {\displaystyle {\begin{array}{ll}{\rm {(BL1)}}\colon &(A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow ((B\rightarrow C)\rightarrow (A\rightarrow C))\\{\rm {(BL2)}}\colon &A\otimes B\rightarrow A\\{\rm {(BL3)}}\colon &A\otimes B\rightarrow B\otimes A\\{\rm {(BL4)}}\colon &A\otimes (A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow B\otimes (B\rightarrow A)\\{\rm {(BL5a)}}\colon &(A\rightarrow (B\rightarrow C))\rightarrow (A\otimes B\rightarrow C)\\{\rm {(BL5b)}}\colon &(A\otimes B\rightarrow C)\rightarrow (A\rightarrow (B\rightarrow C))\\{\rm {(BL6)}}\colon &((A\rightarrow B)\rightarrow C)\rightarrow (((B\rightarrow A)\rightarrow C)\rightarrow C)\\{\rm {(BL7)}}\colon &\bot \rightarrow A\end{array}}} The axioms (BL2) and (BL3) of the original axiomatic system were shown to be redundant (Chvalovský, 2012) and (Cintula, 2005). All the other axioms were shown to be independent (Chvalovský, 2012). == Semantics == Like in other propositional t-norm fuzzy logics, algebraic semantics is predominantly used for BL, with three main classes of algebras with respect to which the logic is complete: General semantics, formed of all BL-algebras — that is, all algebras for which the logic is sound Linear semantics, formed of all linear BL-algebras — that is, all BL-algebras whose lattice order is linear Standard semantics, formed of all standard BL-algebras — that is, all BL-algebras whose lattice reduct is the real unit interval [0, 1] with the usual order; they are uniquely determined by the function that interprets strong conjunction, which can be any continuous t-norm.

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  • Big Mechanism

    Big Mechanism

    Big Mechanism is a $45 million DARPA research program, begun in 2014, aimed at developing software that will read cancer research papers, integrate them into a cancer model and frame new hypotheses by the end of 2017 through the automated collection of big data and integrating across various disciplines such as knowledge-based NLP, curation and ontology, systems and mathematical biology by reading research abstracts and papers to extract pieces of causal mechanisms. == Ras gene == The program focuses on mutations in the Ras gene family, which underlie some one-third of human cancers. Currently, a rough road map shows interaction sequences among proteins affecting cell replication and death. However, the causal relations are poorly understood. == Plan == The program is to occur in three stages. The first is to read literature and convert it into formal representations. Second is to integrate the knowledge into computational models. Third is to produce experimentally testable explanations and predictions. Research teams are developing four separate systems targeting all three tasks. In February 2015, an evaluation meeting reviewed progress on the first stage. Multiple tasks were considered. One was extraction of experimental procedure details and evaluating statements such as "we demonstrate" and "we suggest." Another worked to map sentence meaning and relationships. The best machine-reading system extracted 40% of relevant information from a small corpus and correctly determined how each passage related to the model. The second stage is to become active in summer 2015, when members attempt to produce a single reference model. The third stage is the most challenging, because the artificial intelligence community has had limited success at developing hypothesis generators. Molecular biology may be more amenable, because most domain knowledge is technical and available in written form.

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