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  • Avizo (software)

    Avizo (software)

    Avizo (pronounce: 'a-VEE-zo') is a general-purpose commercial software application for scientific and industrial data visualization and analysis. Avizo is developed by Thermo Fisher Scientific and was originally designed and developed by the Visualization and Data Analysis Group at Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) under the name Amira. Avizo was commercially released in November 2007. For the history of its development, see the Wikipedia article about Amira. == Overview == Avizo is a software application which enables users to perform interactive visualization and computation on 3D data sets. The Avizo interface is modelled on the visual programming. Users manipulate data and module components, organized in an interactive graph representation (called Pool), or in a Tree view. Data and modules can be interactively connected together, and controlled with several parameters, creating a visual processing network whose output is displayed in a 3D viewer. With this interface, complex data can be interactively explored and analyzed by applying a controlled sequence of computation and display processes resulting in a meaningful visual representation and associated derived data. == Application areas == Avizo has been designed to support different types of applications and workflows from 2D and 3D image data processing to simulations. It is a versatile and customizable visualization tool used in many fields: Scientific visualization Materials Research Tomography, Microscopy, etc. Nondestructive testing, Industrial Inspection, and Visual Inspection Computer-aided Engineering and simulation data post-processing Porous medium analysis Civil Engineering Seismic Exploration, Reservoir Engineering, Microseismic Monitoring, Borehole Imaging Geology, Digital Rock Physics (DRP), Earth Sciences Archaeology Food technology and agricultural science Physics, Chemistry Climatology, Oceanography, Environmental Studies Astrophysics == Features == Data import: 2D and 3D image stack and volume data: from microscopes (electron, optical), X-ray tomography (CT, micro-/nano-CT, synchrotron), neutron tomography and other acquisition devices (MRI, radiography, GPR) Geometric models (such as point sets, line sets, surfaces, grids) Numerical simulation data (such as Computational fluid dynamics or Finite element analysis data) Molecular data Time series and animations Seismic data Well logs 4D Multivariate Climate Models 2D/3D data visualization: Volume rendering Digital Volume Correlation Visualization of sections, through various slicing and clipping methods Isosurface rendering Polygonal meshes Scalar fields, Vector fields, Tensor representations, Flow visualization (Illuminated Streamlines, Stream Ribbons) Image processing: 2D/3D Alignment of image slices, Image registration Image filtering Mathematical Morphology (erode, dilate, open, close, tophat) Watershed Transform, Distance Transform Image segmentation 3D models reconstruction: Polygonal surface generation from segmented objects Generation of tetrahedral grids Surface reconstruction from point clouds Skeletonization (reconstruction of dendritic, porous or fracture network) Surface model simplification Quantification and analysis: Measurements and statistics Analysis spreadsheet and charting Material properties computation, based on 3D images: Absolute permeability Thermal conductivity Molecular diffusivity Electrical resistivity/formation factor 3D image-based meshing for CFD and FEA: From 3D imaging modalities (CT, micro-CT, MRI, etc.) Surface and volume meshes generation Export to FEA and CFD solvers for simulation Post-processing for simulation analysis Presentation, automation: MovieMaker, Multiscreen, Video wall, collaboration, and VR support TCL Scripting, C++ extension API Avizo is based on Open Inventor 3D graphics toolkits (FEI Visualization Sciences Group).

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  • MindSpore

    MindSpore

    MindSpore is an open-source software framework for deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence developed by Huawei. == Overview == MindSpore provides support for Python by allowing users to define models, control flow, and custom operators using native Python syntax. Unlike graph-based frameworks that require users to learn DSL or complex APIs, MindSpore adopts a source-to-source (S2S) automatic differentiation approach, allowing Python code to be automatically transformed into optimized computational graphs. It has support for custom OpenHarmony-based HarmonyOS NEXT single core framework system built for HarmonyOS, includes an AI system stack that comes with Huawei's built LLM model called PanGu-Σ with full MindSpore framework support. Alongside, OpenHarmony Native device-side AI support for training interface and ArkTS programming interface for its NNRt (Neural Network Runtime) backend configurations via MindSpore Lite AI framework codebase introduced in API 11 Beta 1 of OpenHarmony 4.1. MindSpore platform runs on Ascend AI chips and Kirin alongside other HiSilicon NPU chips. CANN (Compute Architecture of Neural Networks), heterogeneous computing architecture for AI developed by Huawei. With CANN backend in OpenCV DNN, giving developers ability to run created AI models on the Ascend, Kirin and other HiSilicon NPU enabled chips. It supports cross platform development such as Android, iOS, Windows, global OpenHarmony-based distro, Eclipse Oniro, Linux-based EulerOS alongside OpenEuler Huawei's server OS platforms, macOS and Linux. == History == On April 24, 2024, Huawei's MindSpore 2.3.RC1 was released to open source community with Foundation Model Training, Full-Stack Upgrade of Foundation Model Inference, Static Graph Optimization, IT Features and new MindSpore Elec MT (MindSpore-powered magnetotelluric) Intelligent Inversion Model.

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  • User profile

    User profile

    A user profile is a collection of settings and information associated with a user. It contains critical information that is used to identify an individual, such as their name, age, portrait photograph and individual characteristics such as knowledge or expertise. User profiles are most commonly present on social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; and serve as voluntary digital identity of an individual, highlighting their key features and traits. In personal computing and operating systems, user profiles serve to categorise files, settings, and documents by individual user environments, known as 'accounts', allowing the operating system to be more friendly and catered to the user. Physical user profiles serve as identity documents such as passports, driving licenses and legal documents that are used to identify an individual under the legal system. A user profile can also be considered as the computer representation of a user model. A user model is a (data) structure that is used to capture certain characteristics about an individual user, and the process of obtaining the user profile is called user modeling or profiling. == Origin == The origin of user profiles can be traced to the origin of the passport, an identity document (ID) made mandatory in 1920, after World War I following negotiations at the League of Nations. The passport served as an official government record of an individual. Consequently, Immigration Act of 1924 was established to identify an individual's country of origin. In the 21st century, passports have now become a highly sought-after commodity as it is widely accepted as a source of verifying an individual's identity under the legal system. With the advent of digital revolution and social media websites, user profiles have transitioned to an organised group of data describing the interaction between a user and a system. Social media sites like Instagram allow individuals to create profiles that are representative of their desired personality and image. Filling all fields of profile information may not be necessary to create a meaningful self-presentation, which grants individual more control over of the identity they wish to present by displaying the most meaningful attributes. A personal user profile is a key aspect of an individual's social networking experience, around which his/her public identity is built. == Types of user profiles == A user profile can be of any format if it contains information, settings and/or characteristics specific to an individual. Most popular user profiles include those on photo and video sharing websites such as Facebook and Instagram, accounts on operating systems, such as those on Windows and MacOS and physical documents such as passports and driving licenses. === Social media === Effectively structured user profiles on social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook offer a way for people to form impressions about someone that is predictive or similarly meeting them offline. The condensed format of social media profiles allows for quick filtering of millions of profiles by matching individuals by similar characteristics and interests; information provided upon sign up. A research conducted highlights that only a "thin slice" of information is required to form an impression about an individual online (Stecher and Counts 2008). Online user profiles eliminate the complexity of interaction that is present in 'face-to-face' meetings such as behavioural, facial, and environmental information, resulting in increased predictiveness of user personality. Dating apps and websites solely rely on an individual's user profile and the information provided to form interactions and communication with others on the platform. Despite having control over presented information, lying is minimal in online dating contexts (Hancock, Toma and Ellison, 2007). Apps such as Bumble allow users to 'match' with other individuals based on their characteristics and selected filters that allow users to narrow the spectrum of search to their preference. Information for a user's profile is voluntarily specified by the user and includes information such as height, interests, photographs, gender or education. The requirement of information varies respective to each platform, and there surrounds little consensus to an appropriate amount of information for a condensed user profile. Universally, all social networking platforms display an individual's profile picture and an "about me" page that allows for self-expression. === Influencers === Influencer user profiles are third party endorsers who shape audience attitudes and decisions through social media content such as photos, blogs and tweets. Social Media Influencers (SMI) often hold a significant following on a social media platform which enables them to be recognised as opinion leaders to shape an information influence to their audience. 'Influencer marketing' industry gained prominence in 2018, when the photo sharing app Instagram crossed 1 billion users, subsequently with approximately 60,000 google search queries for 'influencer marketing' the same year. Influencer user profiles hold a unique selling point, or public personality that is unique and charismatic to the needs and wants of their target audience. SMI profiles advertise product information, latest promotions and regularly engage with their followers to maintain their online persona. Messages endorsed by social media influencers are often perceived as reliable and compelling, as a study conducted found 82% of followers were more inclined to follow the suggestions of their favorite influencer. This allows advertisers to leverage online user profiles and their audience rapport to target younger and niche audiences. According to a market survey, influencer marketing through social media profiles yields a return 11 times higher than traditional marketing, as they are more capable of communicating to a niche segment. Most popular influencers include sport starts such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Hollywood personalities such as Dwayne Johnson and Kylie Jenner each with over 200 million followers respectively. === Ecommerce === Online shopping or Ecommerce websites such as Amazon use information from a customer's user profile and interests to generate a list of recommended items to shop. Recommendation algorithms analyse user demographic data, history, and favourite artists to compile suggestions. The store rapidly adapts to changing user needs and preferences, with generation of real time results required within half of a second. New profiles naturally have limited information for algorithms to analyse, and customer data of each interaction provides valuable information which is stored as a database linked with each individual profile. User profiles on ecommerce websites also serve to improve sales of sellers as individuals are recommend products that other "customers who bought this item also bought" to widen the selection of the buyer. A study conducted found that user profiles and recommendation algorithms have significant impact on related product sales and overall spending of an individual. A process known as "collaborative filtering" tries to analyse common products of interest for an individual on the basis of views expressed by other similar behaving profiles. Features such as product ratings, seller ratings and comments allow individual user profiles to contribute to recommendation algorithms, eliminate adverse selection and contribute to shaping an online marketplace adhering to Amazons zero tolerance policy for misleading products. == Digital user profiles == Modern software and applications account for user profiles as a foundation on which a usable application is built. The structure and layout of an application such as its menus, features and controls are often derived from user's selected settings and preferences. The origin of digital user profiles in computer systems was first initiated by Windows NT that held user settings and information in a separate environment variable named %USERPROFILE% and held the framework to a user's profile root. Consequently, operating systems such as MacOS further accelerated prominence of user profiles in Mac OS X 10.0. Iterations since have been made with each operating system release with the aim to maximise user friendliness with the system. Features such as keyboard layouts, time zones, measurement units, synchronisation of different services and privacy preferences are made available during the setup of a user account on the computer === Types of accounts === ==== Administrator ==== Administrator user profiles have complete access to the system and its permissions. It is often the first user profile on a system by design, and is what allows other accounts to be created. However, since the administrator account has no restrictions, they are highly vulnerable to malware and viruses, with potential to impact all other accounts.

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  • R2ML

    R2ML

    The REWERSE Rule Markup Language (R2ML) is developed by the REWERSE Working Group I1 for the purpose of rules interchange between different systems and tools. == Scope == An XML based rule language; Support for: integrity rules, derivation rules, production rules and reaction rules; Integrate functional languages (such as OCL) with Datalog languages (such as SWRL); Serialization and interchange of rules by specific software tools; Integrating rule reasoning with actual server side technologies; Deploying, publishing and communicating rules in a network. == Design principles == Modeled using MDA; Rule concepts defined with the help of MOF/UML; Required to accommodate: Web naming concepts, such as URIs and XML namespaces; The ontological distinction between objects and data values; The datatype concepts of RDF and user-defined datatypes; Actions (following OMG PRR submission); Events; EBNF abstract syntax; XML based concrete syntax validated by an XML Schema; Allowing different semantics for rules.

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  • Gradient vector flow

    Gradient vector flow

    Gradient vector flow (GVF), a computer vision framework introduced by Chenyang Xu and Jerry L. Prince, is the vector field that is produced by a process that smooths and diffuses an input vector field. It is usually used to create a vector field from images that points to object edges from a distance. It is widely used in image analysis and computer vision applications for object tracking, shape recognition, segmentation, and edge detection. In particular, it is commonly used in conjunction with active contour model. == Background == Finding objects or homogeneous regions in images is a process known as image segmentation. In many applications, the locations of object edges can be estimated using local operators that yield a new image called an edge map. The edge map can then be used to guide a deformable model, sometimes called an active contour or a snake, so that it passes through the edge map in a smooth way, therefore defining the object itself. A common way to encourage a deformable model to move toward the edge map is to take the spatial gradient of the edge map, yielding a vector field. Since the edge map has its highest intensities directly on the edge and drops to zero away from the edge, these gradient vectors provide directions for the active contour to move. When the gradient vectors are zero, the active contour will not move, and this is the correct behavior when the contour rests on the peak of the edge map itself. However, because the edge itself is defined by local operators, these gradient vectors will also be zero far away from the edge and therefore the active contour will not move toward the edge when initialized far away from the edge. Gradient vector flow (GVF) is the process that spatially extends the edge map gradient vectors, yielding a new vector field that contains information about the location of object edges throughout the entire image domain. GVF is defined as a diffusion process operating on the components of the input vector field. It is designed to balance the fidelity of the original vector field, so it is not changed too much, with a regularization that is intended to produce a smooth field on its output. Although GVF was designed originally for the purpose of segmenting objects using active contours attracted to edges, it has been since adapted and used for many alternative purposes. Some newer purposes including defining a continuous medial axis representation, regularizing image anisotropic diffusion algorithms, finding the centers of ribbon-like objects, constructing graphs for optimal surface segmentations, creating a shape prior, and much more. == Theory == The theory of GVF was originally described by Xu and Prince. Let f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle \textstyle f(x,y)} be an edge map defined on the image domain. For uniformity of results, it is important to restrict the edge map intensities to lie between 0 and 1, and by convention f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle \textstyle f(x,y)} takes on larger values (close to 1) on the object edges. The gradient vector flow (GVF) field is given by the vector field v ( x , y ) = [ u ( x , y ) , v ( x , y ) ] {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} (x,y)=[u(x,y),v(x,y)]} that minimizes the energy functional In this equation, subscripts denote partial derivatives and the gradient of the edge map is given by the vector field ∇ f = ( f x , f y ) {\displaystyle \textstyle \nabla f=(f_{x},f_{y})} . Figure 1 shows an edge map, the gradient of the (slightly blurred) edge map, and the GVF field generated by minimizing E {\displaystyle \textstyle {\mathcal {E}}} . Equation 1 is a variational formulation that has both a data term and a regularization term. The first term in the integrand is the data term. It encourages the solution v {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} } to closely agree with the gradients of the edge map since that will make v − ∇ f {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} -\nabla f} small. However, this only needs to happen when the edge map gradients are large since v − ∇ f {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} -\nabla f} is multiplied by the square of the length of these gradients. The second term in the integrand is a regularization term. It encourages the spatial variations in the components of the solution to be small by penalizing the sum of all the partial derivatives of v {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} } . As is customary in these types of variational formulations, there is a regularization parameter μ > 0 {\displaystyle \textstyle \mu >0} that must be specified by the user in order to trade off the influence of each of the two terms. If μ {\displaystyle \textstyle \mu } is large, for example, then the resulting field will be very smooth and may not agree as well with the underlying edge gradients. Theoretical Solution. Finding v ( x , y ) {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} (x,y)} to minimize Equation 1 requires the use of calculus of variations since v ( x , y ) {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} (x,y)} is a function, not a variable. Accordingly, the Euler equations, which provide the necessary conditions for v {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} } to be a solution can be found by calculus of variations, yielding where ∇ 2 {\displaystyle \textstyle \nabla ^{2}} is the Laplacian operator. It is instructive to examine the form of the equations in (2). Each is a partial differential equation that the components u {\displaystyle u} and v {\displaystyle v} of v {\displaystyle \mathbf {v} } must satisfy. If the magnitude of the edge gradient is small, then the solution of each equation is guided entirely by Laplace's equation, for example ∇ 2 u = 0 {\displaystyle \textstyle \nabla ^{2}u=0} , which will produce a smooth scalar field entirely dependent on its boundary conditions. The boundary conditions are effectively provided by the locations in the image where the magnitude of the edge gradient is large, where the solution is driven to agree more with the edge gradients. Computational Solutions. There are two fundamental ways to compute GVF. First, the energy function E {\displaystyle {\mathcal {E}}} itself (1) can be directly discretized and minimized, for example, by gradient descent. Second, the partial differential equations in (2) can be discretized and solved iteratively. The original GVF paper used an iterative approach, while later papers introduced considerably faster implementations such as an octree-based method, a multi-grid method, and an augmented Lagrangian method. In addition, very fast GPU implementations have been developed in Extensions and Advances. GVF is easily extended to higher dimensions. The energy function is readily written in a vector form as which can be solved by gradient descent or by finding and solving its Euler equation. Figure 2 shows an illustration of a three-dimensional GVF field on the edge map of a simple object (see ). The data and regularization terms in the integrand of the GVF functional can also be modified. A modification described in , called generalized gradient vector flow (GGVF) defines two scalar functions and reformulates the energy as While the choices g ( ∇ f | ) = μ {\displaystyle \textstyle g(\nabla f|)=\mu } and h ( | ∇ f | ) = | ∇ f | 2 {\displaystyle \textstyle h(|\nabla f|)=|\nabla f|^{2}} reduce GGVF to GVF, the alternative choices g ( | ∇ f | ) = exp ⁡ { − | ∇ f | / K } {\displaystyle \textstyle g(|\nabla f|)=\exp\{-|\nabla f|/K\}} and h ( ∇ f | ) = 1 − g ( | ∇ f | ) {\displaystyle \textstyle h(\nabla f|)=1-g(|\nabla f|)} , for K {\displaystyle K} a user-selected constant, can improve the tradeoff between the data term and its regularization in some applications. The GVF formulation has been further extended to vector-valued images in where a weighted structure tensor of a vector-valued image is used. A learning based probabilistic weighted GVF extension was proposed in to further improve the segmentation for images with severely cluttered textures or high levels of noise. The variational formulation of GVF has also been modified in motion GVF (MGVF) to incorporate object motion in an image sequence. Whereas the diffusion of GVF vectors from a conventional edge map acts in an isotropic manner, the formulation of MGVF incorporates the expected object motion between image frames. An alternative to GVF called vector field convolution (VFC) provides many of the advantages of GVF, has superior noise robustness, and can be computed very fast. The VFC field v V F C {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {v} _{\mathrm {VFC} }} is defined as the convolution of the edge map f {\displaystyle f} with a vector field kernel k {\displaystyle \mathbf {k} } where The vector field kernel k {\displaystyle \textstyle \mathbf {k} } has vectors that always point toward the origin but their magnitudes, determined in detail by the function m {\displaystyle m} , decrease to zero with increasing distance from the origin. The beauty of VFC is that it can be computed very rapidly using a fast Fourier tra

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  • Brain.js

    Brain.js

    Brain.js is a JavaScript library used for neural networking, which is released as free and open-source software under the MIT License. It can be used in both the browser and Node.js backends. Brain.js is most commonly used as a simple introduction to neural networking, as it hides complex mathematics and has a familiar modern JavaScript syntax. It is maintained by members of the Brain.js organization and open-source contributors. == Examples == Creating a feedforward neural network with backpropagation: Creating a recurrent neural network: Train the neural network on RGB color contrast:

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  • Semantic analysis (knowledge representation)

    Semantic analysis (knowledge representation)

    Semantic analysis is a method for eliciting and representing knowledge about organisations. Initially the problem must be defined by domain experts and passed to the project analyst(s). The next step is the generation of candidate affordances. This step will generate a list of semantic units that may be included in the schema. The candidate grouping follows where some of the semantic units that will appear in the schema are placed in simple groups. Finally the groups will be integrated together into an ontology chart. Semantic analysis always starts from the problem definition which if not clear, require the analyst to employ relevant literature, interviews with the stakeholders and other techniques towards collecting supplementary information. All assumptions made must be genuine and not limiting the system.

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  • OpenAI Five

    OpenAI Five

    OpenAI Five is a computer program by OpenAI that plays the five-on-five video game Dota 2. Its first public appearance occurred in 2017, where it was demonstrated in a live one-on-one game against the professional player Dendi, who lost to it. The following year, the system had advanced to the point of performing as a full team of five, and began playing against and showing the capability to defeat professional teams. By choosing a game as complex as Dota 2 to study machine learning, OpenAI thought they could more accurately capture the unpredictability and continuity seen in the real world, thus constructing more general problem-solving systems. The algorithms and code used by OpenAI Five were eventually borrowed by another neural network in development by the company, one which controlled a physical robotic hand. OpenAI Five has been compared to other similar cases of artificial intelligence (AI) playing against and defeating humans, such as AlphaStar in the video game StarCraft II, AlphaGo in the board game Go, Deep Blue in chess, and Watson on the television game show Jeopardy!. == History == Development on the algorithms used for the bots began in November 2016. OpenAI decided to use Dota 2, a competitive five-on-five video game, as a base due to it being popular on the live streaming platform Twitch, having native support for Linux, and had an application programming interface (API) available. Before becoming a team of five, the first public demonstration occurred at The International 2017 in August, the annual premiere championship tournament for the game, where Dendi, a Ukrainian professional player, lost against an OpenAI bot in a live one-on-one matchup. After the match, CTO Greg Brockman explained that the bot had learned by playing against itself for two weeks of real time, and that the learning software was a step in the direction of creating software that can handle complex tasks "like being a surgeon". OpenAI used a methodology called reinforcement learning, as the bots learn over time by playing against itself hundreds of times a day for months, in which they are rewarded for actions such as killing an enemy and destroying towers. By June 2018, the ability of the bots expanded to play together as a full team of five and were able to defeat teams of amateur and semi-professional players. At The International 2018, OpenAI Five played in two games against professional teams, one against the Brazilian-based paiN Gaming and the other against an all-star team of former Chinese players. Although the bots lost both matches, OpenAI still considered it a successful venture, stating that playing against some of the best players in Dota 2 allowed them to analyze and adjust their algorithms for future games. The bots' final public demonstration occurred in April 2019, where they won a best-of-three series against The International 2018 champions OG at a live event in San Francisco. A four-day online event to play against the bots, open to the public, occurred the same month. There, the bots played in 42,729 public games, winning 99.4% of those games. == Architecture == Each OpenAI Five bot is a neural network containing a single layer with a 4096-unit LSTM that observes the current game state extracted from the Dota developer's API. The neural network conducts actions via numerous possible action heads (no human data involved), and every head has meaning. For instance, the number of ticks to delay an action, what action to select – the X or Y coordinate of this action in a grid around the unit. In addition, action heads are computed independently. The AI system observes the world as a list of 20,000 numbers and takes an action by conducting a list of eight enumeration values. Also, it selects different actions and targets to understand how to encode every action and observe the world. OpenAI Five has been developed as a general-purpose reinforcement learning training system on the "Rapid" infrastructure. Rapid consists of two layers: it spins up thousands of machines and helps them 'talk' to each other and a second layer runs software. By 2018, OpenAI Five had played around 180 years worth of games in reinforcement learning running on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores, using Proximal Policy Optimization, a policy gradient method. == Comparisons with other game AI systems == Prior to OpenAI Five, other AI versus human experiments and systems have been successfully used before, such as Jeopardy! with Watson, chess with Deep Blue, and Go with AlphaGo. In comparison with other games that have used AI systems to play against human players, Dota 2 differs as explained below: Long run view: The bots run at 30 frames per second for an average match time of 45 minutes, which results in 80,000 ticks per game. OpenAI Five observes every fourth frame, generating 20,000 moves. By comparison, chess usually ends before 40 moves, while Go ends before 150 moves. Partially observed state of the game: Players and their allies can only see the map directly around them. The rest of it is covered in a fog of war which hides enemies units and their movements. Thus, playing Dota 2 requires making inferences based on this incomplete data, as well as predicting what their opponent could be doing at the same time. By comparison, Chess and Go are "full-information games", as they do not hide elements from the opposing player. Continuous action space: Each playable character in a Dota 2 game, known as a hero, can take dozens of actions that target either another unit or a position. The OpenAI Five developers allow the space into 170,000 possible actions per hero. Without counting the perpetual aspects of the game, there are an average of ~1,000 valid actions each tick. By comparison, the average number of actions in chess is 35 and 250 in Go. Continuous observation space: Dota 2 is played on a large map with ten heroes, five on each team, along with dozens of buildings and non-player character (NPC) units. The OpenAI system observes the state of a game through developers' bot API, as 20,000 numbers that constitute all information a human is allowed to get access to. A chess board is represented as about 70 lists, whereas a Go board has about 400 enumerations. == Reception == OpenAI Five have received acknowledgement from the AI, tech, and video game community at large. Microsoft founder Bill Gates called it a "big deal", as their victories "required teamwork and collaboration". Chess champion Garry Kasparov, who lost against the Deep Blue AI in 1997, stated that despite their losing performance at The International 2018, the bots would eventually "get there, and sooner than expected". In a conversation with MIT Technology Review, AI experts also considered OpenAI Five system as a significant achievement, as they noted that Dota 2 was an "extremely complicated game", so even beating non-professional players was impressive. PC Gamer wrote that their wins against professional players was a significant event in machine learning. In contrast, Motherboard wrote that the victory was "basically cheating" due to the simplified hero pools on both sides, as well as the fact that bots were given direct access to the API, as opposed to using computer vision to interpret pixels on the screen. The Verge wrote that the bots were evidence that the company's approach to reinforcement learning and its general philosophy about AI was "yielding milestones". In 2019, DeepMind unveiled a similar bot for StarCraft II, AlphaStar. Like OpenAI Five, AlphaStar used reinforcement learning and self-play. The Verge reported that "the goal with this type of AI research is not just to crush humans in various games just to prove it can be done. Instead, it's to prove that — with enough time, effort, and resources — sophisticated AI software can best humans at virtually any competitive cognitive challenge, be it a board game or a modern video game." They added that the DeepMind and OpenAI victories were also a testament to the power of certain uses of reinforcement learning. It was OpenAI's hope that the technology could have applications outside of the digital realm. In 2018, they were able to reuse the same reinforcement learning algorithms and training code from OpenAI Five for Dactyl, a human-like robot hand with a neural network built to manipulate physical objects. In 2019, Dactyl solved the Rubik's Cube.

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  • Sketch Engine

    Sketch Engine

    Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour (lexicographers, researchers in corpus linguistics, translators or language learners) to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in over 100 languages. == History of development == Sketch Engine is a product of Lexical Computing, a company founded in 2003 by the lexicographer and research scientist Adam Kilgarriff. He started a collaboration with Pavel Rychlý, a computer scientist working at the Natural Language Processing Centre, Masaryk University, and the developer of Manatee and Bonito (two major parts of the software suite). Kilgarriff also introduced the concept of word sketches. Since then, Sketch Engine has been commercial software, however, all the core features of Manatee and Bonito that were developed by 2003 (and extended since then) are freely available under the GPL license within the NoSketch Engine suite. == Features == A list of tools available in Sketch Engine: Word sketches – a one-page automatic derived summary of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour Word sketch difference – compares and contrasts two words by analysing their collocations Distributional thesaurus – automated thesaurus for finding words with similar meaning or appearing in the same/similar context Concordance search – finds occurrences of a word form, lemma, phrase, tag or complex structure Collocation search – word co-occurrence analysis displaying the most frequent words (for a search word) which can be regarded as collocation candidates Word lists – generates frequency lists which can be filtered with complex criteria n-grams – generates frequency lists of multi-word expressions Terminology / Keyword extraction (both monolingual and bilingual) – automatic extraction of key words and multi-word terms from texts (based on frequency count and linguistic criteria) Diachronic analysis (Trends) – detecting words which undergo changes in the frequency of use in time (show trending words) Corpus building and management – create corpora from the Web or uploaded texts including part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization which can be used as data mining software Parallel corpus (bilingual) facilities – looking up translation examples (EUR-Lex corpus, Europarl corpus, OPUS corpus, etc.) or building a parallel corpus from own aligned texts Text type analysis – statistics of metadata in the corpus === Keywords and terminology extraction === Sketch Engine can perform automatic term extraction by identifying words typical of a particular corpus, document, or text. Single words and multi-word units can be extracted from monolingual or bilingual texts. The terminology extraction feature provides a list of relevant terms based on comparison with a large corpus of general language. This functionality is also available as a separate service called OneClick Terms with a dedicated interface. === SKELL === A free web service based on Sketch Engine and aimed at language learners and teachers is SKELL (formerly SkELL). It exploits Sketch Engine's proprietary GDEX (Good Dictionary Examples) scoring function to provide authentic example sentences for specific target words. Results are drawn from a special corpus of high-quality texts covering everyday, standard, formal, and professional language and displayed as a concordance. SKELL also includes simplified versions of Sketch Engine's word sketch and thesaurus functions. It has been suggested that SKELL can be used, for instance, to help students understand the meaning and/or usage of a word or phrase; to help teachers wanting to use example sentences in a class; to discover and explore collocates; to create gap-fill exercises; to teach various kinds of homonyms and polysemous words. SKELL was first presented in 2014, when only English was supported. Later, support was added for Russian, Czech, German, Italian and Estonian. == List of text corpora == Sketch Engine provides access to more than 800 text corpora. There are monolingual as well as multilingual corpora of different sizes (from one thousand words up to 85 billion words) and various sources (e.g. web, books, subtitles, legal documents). The list of corpora includes British National Corpus, Brown Corpus, Cambridge Academic English Corpus and Cambridge Learner Corpus, CHILDES corpora of child language, OpenSubtitles (a set of 60 parallel corpora), 24 multilingual corpora of EUR-Lex documents, the TenTen Corpus Family (multi-billion web corpora), and Trends corpora (monitor corpora with daily updates). == Architecture == Sketch Engine consists of three main components: an underlying database management system called Manatee, a web interface search front-end called Bonito, and a web interface for corpus building and management called Corpus Architect. === Manatee === Manatee is a database management system specifically devised for effective indexing of large text corpora. It is based on the idea of inverted indexing (keeping an index of all positions of a given word in the text). It has been used to index text corpora comprising tens of billions of words. Searching corpora indexed by Manatee is performed by formulating queries in the Corpus Query Language (CQL). Manatee is written in C++ and offers an API for a number of other programming languages including Python, Java, Perl and Ruby. Recently, it was rewritten into Go for faster processing of corpus queries. === Bonito === Bonito is a web interface for Manatee providing access to corpus search. In the client–server model, Manatee is the server and Bonito plays the client part. It is written in Python. === Corpus Architect === Corpus Architect is a web interface providing corpus building and management features. It is also written in Python. == Applications == Sketch Engine has been used by major British and other publishing houses for producing dictionaries such as Macmillan English Dictionary, Dictionnaires Le Robert, Oxford University Press or Shogakukan. Four of United Kingdom's five biggest dictionary publishers use Sketch Engine.

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  • General-Purpose AI Code of Practice

    General-Purpose AI Code of Practice

    The General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (GPAI CoP) is a compliance tool released by the European Commission on 10 July 2025 to support compliance with the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). It provides operational guidance for providers of general-purpose AI models, particularly in relation to Articles 53 and 55 of the AI Act, which entered into application on 2 August 2025. The Code is organised into three chapters (Transparency, Copyright, and Safety and Security) and outlines how providers can meet the Act's relevant obligations. Although non-binding, providers can rely on adherence to the Code, meaning that EU regulators will assume that providers following the Code meet the corresponding legal requirements of the AI Act. As such, signatories to the Code will benefit from reduced administrative burdens and increased legal certainty compared to providers that prove compliance in other ways. While adherence to the Code is voluntary, compliance with the AI Act is not. == Background == The EU AI Act, adopted in 2024, established a risk-based regulatory regime for artificial intelligence in the European Union. The rationale for the GPAI CoP stems from Article 56 of the AI Act, which empowers the EU AI Office to develop a voluntary rulebook to guide how AI model providers can meet their legal obligations – specifically those found in Articles 53 and 55. Under Articles 53 and 55, developers of general-purpose AI models whose training compute exceeds 1023 floating-point operations (FLOPs) and that are placed on the EU market must meet transparency obligations and put in place a policy for EU copyright law. Models trained with more than 1025 FLOPs are classified as presenting systemic risk and are subject to enhanced safety requirements. The Commission may also designate a model as presenting systemic risk if it has equivalent impact or capabilities (Annex XIII criteria), even below that compute figure. Because the AI Act is relatively vague on how model providers should implement these requirements, the Code is meant to help by detailing processes and practices for compliance. == Drafting process == The development of the GPAI CoP was drawn up by 13 independent experts and involved four thematic working groups: Transparency & Copyright, Risk assessment for systemic risk, Technical risk mitigation for systemic risk, and Governance risk mitigation for systemic risk. Each group was coordinated by the European Union Artificial Intelligence Office (EU AI Office), drawing on contributions from nearly 1,000 stakeholders, including AI developers, academics, civil society organisations, national authorities, and international observers. The Code underwent three earlier iterations in November 2024, December 2024, and March 2025, before the final version was published on 10 July 2025, more than two months later than initially planned. The GPAI CoP will likely be updated continuously by the EU AI Office, alongside other tools such as the training data summary template. == Signatories == Among U.S.-based technology companies, Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and OpenAI have signed the GPAI CoP. xAI, founded by Elon Musk, has signed only one of the three chapters, namely the safety and security chapter. Prominent European AI companies that have signed include Aleph Alpha and Mistral AI. The European Commission maintains an updated list of signatories. As of January 2026, Meta is the most notable company that has declined to sign the Code. Major Chinese AI companies, such as Alibaba, Baidu or Deepseek, have also not signed. Providers that do not sign the GPAI CoP will still have to adhere to the binding requirements of the EU AI Act. The European Commission has indicated that it may take tougher action against companies that didn't sign the Code. == Transparency and Copyright chapters == The first two chapters of the GPAI CoP address transparency and copyright compliance and apply to all GPAI providers. They offer a way to demonstrate compliance with their obligations under Article 53 AI Act. The Transparency chapter addresses the documentation of a model's capabilities, limitations, and points of contact, and expects providers to make key documentation available to downstream providers. Signatories must also publish summaries of the content used to train their models. In the Copyright chapter, Signatories commit to follow a policy that aligns with EU copyright law. For example, they commit to mitigating the risk of copyright-infringing output. == Safety and Security chapter == The Safety and Security chapter is the most extensive chapter of the Code, and it applies to GPAI models with systemic risk, meaning it's only relevant to the small number of providers of the most advanced models. It specifies how Signatories commit to meeting Article 55(1) obligations to: Conduct model evaluations to identify systemic risks Assess and mitigate those risks Track and report serious incidents Ensure the cyber and physical security of their models The chapter outlines a comprehensive risk management process that must be applied before major deployment decisions, such as releasing a new systemic-risk GPAI model in the EU market, or substantially updating an existing one. Signatories commit to identifying systemic risks of their model, analysing and evaluating them, determining whether risk levels are acceptable, and implementing mitigation measures if necessary. This process should be repeated until models achieve an acceptable level of risk across all identified risks. === Risk identification === Signatories commit to analysing and evaluating at least four “specified” categories of systemic risk: CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) Loss of control Cyber offence Harmful manipulation They are also expected to identify other systemic risks to public health, safety, and fundamental rights. The Code instructs providers to consider model capabilities, propensities, and affordances in this identification. Signatories commit to developing risk scenarios illustrating how identified risks could materialise in real-world conditions. === Risk analysis and risk evaluation === After identifying potential systemic risks, Signatories commit to analysing and evaluating the risks in order to determine whether they are acceptable or not, drawing on scientific literature, training data analysis, incident databases, expert consultation, and other sources. They also commit to conducting state-of-the-art model evaluations such as benchmarking, red teaming, and human uplift studies, targeting each risk. The risk analysis process is interconnected: insights from risk modelling should inform model evaluation design, while post-market monitoring should feed back into ongoing analysis. Signatories commit to ultimately estimating the likelihood and severity of each systemic risk. ==== Independent external model evaluations ==== Appendix 3.5 of the Safety and Security chapter requires signatories to ensure that independent external evaluators conduct model evaluations. Signatories may claim an exemption from this requirement only if they can demonstrate that their model is “similarly safe” to another model that has already been shown to comply with the Code, or if they are unable to appoint an appropriately qualified evaluator. The determination of “similarly safe” is based on comparable performance on benchmarks and the similarity of other model characteristics, such as their architecture. The CoP acknowledges that this kind of information is typically available only for models by the same provider, or potentially for open-weights or open-source models. === Risk acceptance criteria === The Code requires providers to compare estimated risks against predefined acceptance criteria, which must be measurable, based on model capabilities, and defined preemptively. While providers get to determine the level of risk they deem acceptable themselves, the pre-defined criteria and acceptance thresholds ensure providers cannot adjust their level of tolerance flexibly ahead of deployment decisions. Only if all risks are below acceptable levels should a model be deployed. === Continuous risk management and governance === The Code mandates ongoing risk management throughout the model lifecycle, including light-touch evaluations, continuous mitigation, post-market monitoring, and incident tracking and reporting. It further requires organisational governance structures assigning responsibility for risk management and expects providers to promote a “healthy risk culture,” including informing employees about the whistleblower protection policy, allowing internal challenges of decisions concerning systemic risk management, and committing to not retaliating against employees who disclose concerns about systemic risks to oversight authorities. === Documentation and transparency === Signatories commit to creating two types of documentation: Safety and Security Frame

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  • WordNet

    WordNet

    WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words that links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into synsets with short definitions and usage examples. It can thus be seen as a combination and extension of a dictionary and thesaurus. Its primary use is in automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications. It was first created in the English language and the English WordNet database and software tools have been released under a BSD style license and are freely available for download. The latest official release from Princeton was released in 2011. Princeton currently has no plans to release any new versions due to staffing and funding issues. New versions are still being released annually through the Open English WordNet website. Until about 2024 an online version was previously available through wordnet.princeton.edu. That version of WordNet has been deprecated, but a new online version is available at en-word.net. There are now WordNets in more than 200 languages. == History and team members == WordNet was first created in 1985, in English only, in the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University under the direction of psychology professor George Armitage Miller. It was later directed by Christiane Fellbaum. The project was initially funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and later also by other U.S. government agencies including the DARPA, the National Science Foundation, the Disruptive Technology Office (formerly the Advanced Research and Development Activity) and REFLEX. George Miller and Christiane Fellbaum received the 2006 Antonio Zampolli Prize for their work with WordNet. The Global WordNet Association is a non-commercial organization that provides a platform for discussing, sharing and connecting WordNets for all languages in the world. Christiane Fellbaum and Piek Th.J.M. Vossen are its co-presidents. == Database contents == The database contains 155,327 words organized in 175,979 synsets for a total of 207,016 word-sense pairs; in compressed form, it is about 12 megabytes in size. It includes the lexical categories nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs but ignores prepositions, determiners and other function words. Words from the same lexical category that are roughly synonymous are grouped into synsets, which include simplex words as well as collocations like "eat out" and "car pool." The different senses of a polysemous word form are assigned to different synsets. A synset's meaning is further clarified with a short defining gloss and one or more usage examples. An example adjective synset is: good, right, ripe – (most suitable or right for a particular purpose; "a good time to plant tomatoes"; "the right time to act"; "the time is ripe for great sociological changes") All synsets are connected by means of semantic relations. These relations, which are not all shared by all lexical categories, include: Nouns hypernym: Y is a hypernym of X if every X is a (kind of) Y (canine is a hypernym of dog) hyponym: Y is a hyponym of X if every Y is a (kind of) X (dog is a hyponym of canine) coordinate term: Y is a coordinate term of X if X and Y share a hypernym (wolf is a coordinate term of dog, and dog is a coordinate term of wolf) holonym: Y is a holonym of X if X is a part of Y (building is a holonym of window) meronym: Y is a meronym of X if Y is a part of X (window is a meronym of building) Verbs hypernym: the verb Y is a hypernym of the verb X if the activity X is a (kind of) Y (to perceive is an hypernym of to listen) troponym: the verb Y is a troponym of the verb X if the activity Y is doing X in some manner (to lisp is a troponym of to talk) entailment: the verb Y is entailed by the verb X if by doing X you must be doing Y (to sleep is entailed by to snore) coordinate term: the verb Y is a coordinate term of the verb X if X and Y share a hypernym (to lisp is a coordinate term of to yell, and to yell is a coordinate term of to lisp) These semantic relations hold among all members of the linked synsets. Individual synset members (words) can also be connected with lexical relations. For example, (one sense of) the noun "director" is linked to (one sense of) the verb "direct" from which it is derived via a "morphosemantic" link. The morphology functions of the software distributed with the database try to deduce the lemma or stem form of a word from the user's input. Irregular forms are stored in a list, and looking up "ate" will return "eat," for example. == Knowledge structure == Both nouns and verbs are organized into hierarchies, defined by hypernym or IS A relationships. For instance, one sense of the word dog is found following hypernym hierarchy; the words at the same level represent synset members. Each set of synonyms has a unique index. At the top level, these hierarchies are organized into 25 beginner "trees" for nouns and 15 for verbs (called lexicographic files at a maintenance level). All are linked to a unique beginner synset, "entity". Noun hierarchies are far deeper than verb hierarchies. Adjectives are not organized into hierarchical trees. Instead, two "central" antonyms such as "hot" and "cold" form binary poles, while 'satellite' synonyms such as "steaming" and "chilly" connect to their respective poles via a "similarity" relations. The adjectives can be visualized in this way as "dumbbells" rather than as "trees". == Psycholinguistic aspects == The initial goal of the WordNet project was to build a lexical database that would be consistent with theories of human semantic memory developed in the late 1960s. Psychological experiments indicated that speakers organized their knowledge of concepts in an economic, hierarchical fashion. Retrieval time required to access conceptual knowledge seemed to be directly related to the number of hierarchies the speaker needed to "traverse" to access the knowledge. Thus, speakers could more quickly verify that canaries can sing because a canary is a songbird, but required slightly more time to verify that canaries can fly (where they had to access the concept "bird" on the superordinate level) and even more time to verify canaries have skin (requiring look-up across multiple levels of hyponymy, up to "animal"). While such psycholinguistic experiments and the underlying theories have been subject to criticism, some of WordNet's organization is consistent with experimental evidence. For example, anomic aphasia selectively affects speakers' ability to produce words from a specific semantic category, a WordNet hierarchy. Antonymous adjectives (WordNet's central adjectives in the dumbbell structure) are found to co-occur far more frequently than chance, a fact that has been found to hold for many languages. == As a lexical ontology == WordNet is sometimes called an ontology, a persistent claim that its creators do not make. The hypernym/hyponym relationships among the noun synsets can be interpreted as specialization relations among conceptual categories. In other words, WordNet can be interpreted and used as a lexical ontology in the computer science sense. However, such an ontology should be corrected before being used, because it contains hundreds of basic semantic inconsistencies; for example there are, (i) common specializations for exclusive categories and (ii) redundancies in the specialization hierarchy. Furthermore, transforming WordNet into a lexical ontology usable for knowledge representation should normally also involve (i) distinguishing the specialization relations into subtypeOf and instanceOf relations, and (ii) associating intuitive unique identifiers to each category. Although such corrections and transformations have been performed and documented as part of the integration of WordNet 1.7 into the cooperatively updatable knowledge base of WebKB-2, most projects claiming to reuse WordNet for knowledge-based applications (typically, knowledge-oriented information retrieval) simply reuse it directly. WordNet has also been converted to a formal specification, by means of a hybrid bottom-up top-down methodology to automatically extract association relations from it and interpret these associations in terms of a set of conceptual relations, formally defined in the DOLCE foundational ontology. In most works that claim to have integrated WordNet into ontologies, the content of WordNet has not simply been corrected when it seemed necessary; instead, it has been heavily reinterpreted and updated whenever suitable. This was the case when, for example, the top-level ontology of WordNet was restructured according to the OntoClean-based approach, or when it was used as a primary source for constructing the lower classes of the SENSUS ontology. == Limitations == The most widely discussed limitation of WordNet (and related resources like ImageNet) is that some of the semantic relations are more suited to concrete concepts than to abstract concepts. For example,

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  • LIFER/LADDER

    LIFER/LADDER

    LIFER/LADDER was one of the first database natural language processing systems. It was designed as a natural language interface to a database of information about US Navy ships. This system, as described in a paper by Hendrix (1978), used a semantic grammar to parse questions and query a distributed database. It was implemented in Interlisp. The LIFER/LADDER system could only support simple one-table queries or multiple table queries with easy join conditions. Some examples of queries it could accept: What are the length, width, and draft of the Kitty Hawk? When will Reeves achieve readiness rating C2? What is the nearest ship to Naples with a doctor on board? What ships are carrying cargo for the United States? Where are they going? Print the American cruisers’ current positions and states of readiness?

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  • Inpainting

    Inpainting

    Inpainting is a conservation process where damaged, deteriorated, or missing parts of an artwork are filled in to present a complete image. This process is commonly used in image restoration. It can be applied to both physical and digital art mediums such as oil or acrylic paintings, chemical photographic prints, sculptures, or digital images and video. With its roots in physical artwork, such as painting and sculpture, traditional inpainting is performed by a trained art conservator who has carefully studied the artwork to determine the mediums and techniques used in the piece, potential risks of treatments, and ethical appropriateness of treatment. == History == The modern use of inpainting can be traced back to Pietro Edwards (1744–1821), Director of the Restoration of the Public Pictures in Venice, Italy. Using a scientific approach, Edwards focused his restoration efforts on the intentions of the artist. It was during the 1930 International Conference for the Study of Scientific Methods for the Examination and Preservation of Works of Art, that the modern approach to inpainting was established. Helmut Ruhemann (1891–1973), a German restorer and conservator, led the discussions on the use of inpainting in conservation. Helmut Ruhemann was a leading figure in modernizing restoration and conservation. His greatest contribution to the field of conservation "was his insistence on following the methods of the original painter exactly, and on understanding the painter's artistic intention". After his career of over 40 years as a conservator, Ruhemann published his treatise The Cleaning of Paintings: Problems & Potentialities in 1968. In describing his method, Ruhemann states that "The surface [of the fill] should be slightly lower than that of the surrounding paint to allow for the thickness of the inpainting...Inpainting medium should look and behave like the original medium, but must not darken with age." Cesare Brandi (1906–1988) developed the teoria del restauro, the inpainting approach combining aesthetics and psychology. However, this approach was used primarily by Italian restorers and conservators, with the terminology becoming widespread in the 1990s. Technological advancements led to new applications of inpainting. Widespread use of digital techniques range from entirely automatic computerized inpainting to tools used to simulate the process manually. Since the mid-1990s, the process of inpainting has evolved to include digital media. More commonly known as image or video interpolation, a form of estimation, digital inpainting includes the use of computer software that relies on sophisticated algorithms to replace lost or corrupted parts of the image data. == Ethics == In order to preserve the integrity of an original artwork, any inpainting technique or treatment applied to physical or digital work should be reversible or distinguishable from the original content of the artwork. Prior to any treatments, conservators proceed according to the American Institute of Conservation of Historical and Artistic Works. There are several ethic considerations before Inpainting can be justified. Various deliberation decisions over the ethical appropriateness of the amount and type of inpainting done, resides on many factors. As most conservation treatments, inpainting's ethical questions rest mainly with authenticity, reversibility and documentation.Any intervention to compensate for loss should be documented in treatment records and reports and should be detectable by common examination methods. Such compensation should be reversible and should not falsely modify the known aesthetic, conceptual, and physical characteristics of the cultural property, especially by removing or obscuring original material.New technologies and the aesthetic demand for perfect images without imperfections challenge conservators' ethical practices to protect the integrity of originals. == Methods == Inpainting methods and techniques depend on the desired goal and type of image being treated. Treatments to fill in the gaps are different between physical and digital art. In inpainting, detailed records of the initial state of the images can help with the treatment and replicate the original closer. === Physical inpainting === Inpainting is rooted in the conservation and restoration of paintings. Inpainting can aim to make a visual improvement to the artwork as a whole by repairing missing or damaged parts using methods and materials equivalent to the original artist's work. ==== Application techniques ==== By studying the painting methods of various artists and the composition of paints used historically, conservators are able to restore works very closely to their original visual appearance. The picture as a whole determines how to fill in the gap. Helmut Ruhemann's inpainting techniques by Jessell have procedures to "preserve" the quality of oil and tempera paintings. === Digital inpainting === Many programs are able to reconstruct missing or damaged areas of digital photographs and videos. Most widely known for use with digital images is Adobe Photoshop. Given the various abilities of the digital camera and the digitization of old photos, inpainting has become an automatic process that can be performed on digital images. The inpainting techniques can be applied to object removal, text removal, and other automatic modifications of images and videos. In video special effects, inpainting is usually performed after video matting. They can also be observed in applications like image compression and super-resolution. In photography and cinema, it is used for film restoration to reverse, repair, or mitigate deterioration (e.g., physical damage such as cracks in photographs, scratches and dust spots in film, or chemical damage resulting in image loss; performed infrared cleaning). It can also be used for removing red-eye, the stamped date from photographs, and objects for creative effect. This technique can be used to replace any lost blocks in the coding and transmission of images, for example, in a streaming video. It can also be used to remove logos or watermarks in videos. Deep learning neural network-based inpainting can be used for decensoring images. Deep image prior-based techniques can be used for digital image inpainting, where a trained deep learning model is either unavailable or infeasible. Deep models for visual content generation, like text-to-image or text-to-video, learn complex priors over the distribution of visual content, and can be used to inpaint missing parts. For example, videos can be separated into layers, using a technique called omnimatte, which either pretrain an omnimatte model or without any training using an omnimatte-zero model. Three main groups of 2D image-inpainting algorithms can be found in the literature. The first one to be noted is structural (or geometric) inpainting, the second one is texture inpainting, the last one is a combination of these two techniques. They use the information of the known or non-destroyed image areas in order to fill the gap, similar to how physical images are restored. ==== Structural ==== Structural or geometric inpainting is used for smooth images that have strong, defined borders. There are many different approaches to geometric inpainting, but they all come from the idea that geometry can be recovered from similar areas or domains. Bertalmio proposed a method of structural inpainting that mimics how conservators address painting restoration. Bertalmio proposed that by progressively transferring similar information from the borders of an inpainting domain inwards, the gap can be filled. ==== Textural ==== While structural/geometric inpainting works to repair smooth images, textural inpainting works best with images that are heavily textured. Texture has a repetitive pattern which means that a missing portion cannot be restored by continuing the level lines into the gap; level lines provide a complete, stable representation of an image. To repair texture in an image, one can combine frequency and spatial domain information to fill in a selected area with a desired texture. This method, while the most simple and very effective, works well when selecting a texture to be in-painted. For a texture that covers a wider area or a larger frame one would have to go through the image segmenting the areas to be in-painted and selecting the corresponding textures from throughout the image; there are programs that can help find the corresponding areas that work in a similar way as 'find and replace' works in a word processor. ==== Combined structural and textural ==== Combined structural and textural inpainting approaches simultaneously try to perform texture- and structure-filling in regions of missing image information. Most parts of an image consist of texture and structure and the boundaries between image regions contain a large amount of structural information. This is the result when blending differ

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  • ChessMachine

    ChessMachine

    The ChessMachine was a chess computer sold between 1991 and 1995 by TASC (The Advanced Software Company). It was unique at the time for incorporating both an ARM2 coprocessor for the chess engine on an ISA card which plugged into an IBM PC and a software interface running on the PC to display a chess board and control the engine. The ISA card was sold with a CPU running at either 16 MHz or 32 MHz, and 128 KB, 512 KB, or 1 MB of onboard memory for transposition tables. This made economic sense at the time of introduction because mainstream PCs were only running from 10 MHz to 25 MHz. Two engines were sold with the card: The King by Johann de Koning and Gideon by Ed Schröder. Gideon was famed for winning two World Computer Chess Championships on this hardware. The King later became the engine used in the popular Chessmaster series of chess programs. TASC later incorporated the technology into a dedicated unit, sold from 1993 to 1997. There were two models, the R30 and R40, running at 30 MHz and 40 MHz respectively, and having 512 KB and 1 MB of transposition tables, respectively. The SmartBoard, a wooden sensory board, was connected to the units, which were in tiny boxes approximately the size of chess clocks. They were only sold with The King chess engine. This was the end of the era of strong dedicated chess computers, and these two models are acknowledged as the strongest dedicated chess computers that were ever sold. At the height of its strength, the R30 attained a rating over 2350 on computer rating lists, higher than any other dedicated unit. According to the SSDF rating list, the R30 held its own against its contemporary programs running a Pentium-90 MHz and won against other dedicated units.

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  • Oracle Database

    Oracle Database

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

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