AI Essay Outline

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  • Meta AI

    Meta AI

    Meta AI is a research division of Meta (formerly Facebook) that develops artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies. == History == Meta AI was founded in 2013 as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR). It has workspaces in Menlo Park, London, New York City, Paris, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Tel Aviv, and Montreal as of 2025. In 2016, FAIR partnered with Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft in creating the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. Meta AI was directed by Yann LeCun until 2018, when Jérôme Pesenti succeeded the role. Pesenti is formerly the CTO of IBM's big data group. FAIR's research includes self-supervised learning, generative adversarial networks, document classification and translation, and computer vision. FAIR released Torch deep-learning modules as well as PyTorch in 2017, an open-source machine learning framework, which was subsequently used in several deep learning technologies, such as Tesla's autopilot and Uber's Pyro. That same year, a pair of chatbots were falsely rumored to be discontinued for developing a language that was unintelligible to humans. FAIR clarified that the research had been shut down because they had accomplished their initial goal to understand how languages are generated by their models, rather than out of fear. FAIR was renamed Meta AI following the rebranding that changed Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc. On October 1, 2025, Facebook announced "We will soon use your interactions with AI at Meta to personalize the content and ads you see". == Virtual assistant == Meta AI is also the name of the virtual assistant developed by the team, now integrated as a chatbot into Meta's social networking products. It is also available as a subscription-based stand-alone app. The virtual assistant was pre-installed on the second generation of Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, and can incorporate inputs from the glasses' cameras after an update. It is also available on Quest 2 and newer HMDs. Since May 2024, the chatbot has summarized news from various outlets without linking directly to original articles, including in Canada, where news links are banned on its platforms. This use of news content without compensation and attribution has raised ethical and legal concerns, especially as Meta continues to reduce news visibility on its platforms. == Current research == === Natural language processing and chatbot === Natural language processing is the ability for machines to understand and generate natural language. The team is also researching unsupervised machine translation and multilingual chatbots. ==== Galactica ==== Galactica is a large language model (LLM) designed for generating scientific text. It was available for three days from 15 November 2022, before being withdrawn for generating racist and inaccurate content. ==== Llama ==== Llama is an LLM released in February 2023. As of January 2026, the most recent release is the Llama 4. === Hardware === Meta used CPUs and in-house custom chips before 2022; they switched to Nvidia GPUs since then. MTIA v1, one of their early chips, is designed for the company's content recommendation algorithms. It was fabricated on TSMC's 7 nm process technology and consumed 25W, capable of 51.2 TFlops FP16. == Controversy == The French media outlet Mediapart reports that in 2022, Facebook's parent company illegally used works accumulated by the pirate site LibGen to train its artificial intelligence.

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  • Data cube

    Data cube

    In computer programming, a data cube (or datacube) is a multi-dimensional array of values. Typically, the term "data cube" is applied in contexts where these arrays are massively larger than the hosting computer's main memory; examples include multi-terabyte/petabyte data warehouses and time series of image data. Even though it is called a cube, a data cube generally is a multi-dimensional concept which can be 1-dimensional, 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional, or higher-dimensional. The data cube is used to represent data (sometimes called facts) along some dimensions of interest. In satellite image timeseries, dimensions would be latitude and longitude coordinates and time; a fact (sometimes called measure) would be a pixel at a given space and time as taken by the satellite. For example, in online analytical processing, an OLAP cube about a company would have dimensions that could be the company subsidiaries, the company products, and time; in this setup, a fact would be a sales event where a particular product has been sold in a particular subsidiary at a particular time. In any case, every dimension divides data into groups of cells whereas each cell in the cube represents a single measure of interest. Sometimes cubes hold only a few values with the rest being empty, i.e. undefined, while sometimes most or all cube coordinates hold a cell value. In the first case such data are called sparse, and in the second case they are called dense, although there is no hard delineation between the two. Data cubes may be stored in database management systems (DBMS) as part of array DBMS. Spatio-temporal databases and geospatial databases may also be represented as coverage data. == History == Multi-dimensional arrays have long been familiar in programming languages. Fortran offers arbitrarily-indexed 1-D arrays and arrays of arrays, which allows the construction of higher-dimensional arrays, up to 15 dimensions. APL supports n-D arrays with a rich set of operations. All these have in common that arrays must fit into the main memory and are available only while the particular program maintaining them (such as image processing software) is running. A series of data exchange formats support storage and transmission of data cube-like data, often tailored towards particular application domains. Examples include MDX for statistical (in particular, business) data, Zarr and Hierarchical Data Format for general scientific data, and TIFF for imagery. In 1992, Peter Baumann introduced management of massive data cubes with high-level user functionality combined with an efficient software architecture. Datacube operations include subset extraction, processing, fusion, and in general queries in the spirit of data manipulation languages like SQL. Some years after, the data cube concept was applied to describe time-varying business data as data cubes by Jim Gray, et al., and by Venky Harinarayan, Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman. Around that time, a working group on Multi-Dimensional Databases ("Arbeitskreis Multi-Dimensionale Datenbanken") was established at German Gesellschaft für Informatik. Datacube Inc. was an image processing company selling hardware and software applications for the PC market in 1996, however without addressing data cubes as such. The EarthServer initiative has established geo data cube service requirements. == Standardization == In 2018, the ISO SQL database language was extended with data cube functionality as "SQL – Part 15: Multi-dimensional arrays (SQL/MDA)". Web Coverage Processing Service is a geo data cube analytics language issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. In addition to the common data cube operations, the language knows about the semantics of space and time and supports both regular and irregular grid data cubes, based on the concept of coverage data. An industry standard for querying business data cubes, originally developed by Microsoft, is MultiDimensional eXpressions. == Implementation == Many high-level computer languages treat data cubes and other large arrays as single entities distinct from their contents. These languages, of which Fortran, APL, IDL, NumPy, PDL, and S-Lang are examples, allow the programmer to manipulate complete film clips and other data en masse with simple expressions derived from linear algebra and vector mathematics. Some languages (such as PDL) distinguish between a list of images and a data cube, while many (such as IDL) do not. Array DBMSs (Database Management Systems) offer a data model which generically supports definition, management, retrieval, and manipulation of n-dimensional data cubes. This database category has been pioneered by the rasdaman system since 1994. == Applications == Multi-dimensional arrays can meaningfully represent spatio-temporal sensor, image, and simulation data, but also statistics data where the semantics of dimensions is not necessarily of spatial or temporal nature. Generally, any kind of axis can be combined with any other into a data cube. === Mathematics === In mathematics, a one-dimensional array corresponds to a vector, a two-dimensional array resembles a matrix; more generally, a tensor may be represented as an n-dimensional data cube. === Science and engineering === For a time sequence of color images, the array is generally four-dimensional, with the dimensions representing image X and Y coordinates, time, and RGB (or other color space) color plane. For example, the EarthServer initiative unites data centers from different continents offering 3-D x/y/t satellite image timeseries and 4-D x/y/z/t weather data for retrieval and server-side processing through the Open Geospatial Consortium WCPS geo data cube query language standard. A data cube is also used in the field of imaging spectroscopy, since a spectrally-resolved image is represented as a three-dimensional volume. Earth observation data cubes combine satellite imagery such as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 with Geographic information system analytics. === Business intelligence === In online analytical processing (OLAP), data cubes are a common arrangement of business data suitable for analysis from different perspectives through operations like slicing, dicing, pivoting, and aggregation.

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  • Cygwin

    Cygwin

    Cygwin ( SIG-win) is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and command-line interface (CLI) for Microsoft Windows. The project also provides a software repository containing open-source packages. Cygwin allows source code for Unix-like operating systems to be compiled and run on Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications. The terminal emulator mintty is the default command-line interface provided to interact with the environment. The Cygwin installation directory layout mimics the root file system of Unix-like systems, with directories such as /bin, /home, /etc, /usr, and /var. Cygwin is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3. It was originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, which was later acquired by Red Hat (now part of IBM), to port the GNU toolchain to Win32, including the GNU Compiler Suite. Rather than rewrite the tools to use the Win32 runtime environment, Cygwin implemented a POSIX-compatible environment in the form of a DLL. The brand motto is "Get that Linux feeling – on Windows", although Cygwin doesn't have Linux in it. == History == Cygwin began in 1995 as a project of Steve Chamberlain, a Cygnus engineer who observed that Windows NT and 95 used COFF as their object file format, and that GNU already included support for x86 and COFF, and the C library newlib. He thought that it would be possible to retarget GCC and produce a cross compiler generating executables that could run on Windows. A prototype was later developed. Chamberlain bootstrapped the compiler on a Windows system, to emulate Unix to let the GNU configure shell script run. Initially, Cygwin was called Cygwin32. When Microsoft registered the trademark Win32, the "32" was dropped to simply become Cygwin. In 1999, Cygnus offered Cygwin 1.0 as a commercial product. Subsequent versions have not been released, instead relying on continued open source releases. Geoffrey Noer was the project lead from 1996 to 1999. Christopher Faylor was lead from 1999 to 2004; he left Red Hat and became co-lead with Corinna Vinschen. Corinna Vinschen has been the project lead from mid-2014 to date (as of September, 2024). From June 23, 2016, the Cygwin library version 2.5.2 was licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3. == Description == Cygwin is provided in two versions: the full 64-bit version and a stripped-down 32-bit version, whose final version was released in 2022. Cygwin consists of a library that implements the POSIX system call API in terms of Windows system calls to enable the running of a large number of application programs equivalent to those on Unix systems, and a GNU development toolchain (including GCC and GDB). Programmers have ported the X Window System, K Desktop Environment 3, GNOME, Apache, and TeX. Cygwin permits installing inetd, syslogd, sshd, Apache, and other daemons as standard Windows services. Cygwin programs have full access to the Windows API and other Windows libraries. Cygwin programs are installed by running Cygwin's "setup" program, which downloads them from repositories on the Internet. The Cygwin API library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 (or later), with an exception to allow linking to any free and open-source software whose license conforms to the Open Source Definition. Cygwin consists of two parts: A dynamic-link library in the form of a C standard library that acts as a compatibility layer for the POSIX API and A collection of software tools and applications that provide a Unix-like look and feel. Cygwin supports POSIX symbolic links, representing them as plain-text files with the system attribute set. Cygwin 1.5 represented them as Windows Explorer shortcuts, but this was changed for reasons of performance and POSIX correctness. Cygwin also recognises NTFS junction points and symbolic links and treats them as POSIX symbolic links, but it does not create them. The POSIX API for handling access control lists (ACLs) is supported. === Technical details === A Cygwin-specific version of the Unix mount command allows mounting Windows paths as "filesystems" in the Unix file space. Initial mount points can be configured in /etc/fstab, which has a format very similar to Unix systems, except that Windows paths appear in place of devices. Filesystems can be mounted in binary mode (by default), or in text mode, which enables automatic conversion between LF and CRLF endings (which only affects programs that open files without explicitly specifying text or binary mode). Cygwin 1.7 introduced comprehensive support for POSIX locales, and the UTF-8 Unicode encoding became the default. The fork system call for duplicating a process is fully implemented, but the copy-on-write optimization strategy could not be used. Cygwin's default user interface is the bash shell running in the mintty terminal emulator. The DLL also implements pseudo terminal (pty) devices, and Cygwin ships with a number of terminal emulators that are based on them, including rxvt/urxvt and xterm. The version of GCC that comes with Cygwin has various extensions for creating Windows DLLs, such as specifying whether a program is a windowing or console-mode program. Support for compiling programs that do not require the POSIX compatibility layer provided by the Cygwin DLL used to be included in the default GCC, but as of 2014, it is provided by cross-compilers contributed by the MinGW-w64 project. == Software packages == Cygwin's base package selection is approximately 100MB, containing the bash (interactive user) and dash (installation) shells and the core file and text manipulation utilities. Additional packages are available as optional installs from within the Cygwin "setup" program and package manager ("setup-x86_64.exe" – 64 bit). The Cygwin Ports project provided additional packages that were not available in the Cygwin distribution itself. Examples included GNOME, K Desktop Environment 3, MySQL database, and the PHP scripting language. Most ports have been adopted by volunteer maintainers as Cygwin packages, and Cygwin Ports are no longer maintained. Cygwin ships with GTK+ and Qt. The Cygwin/X project allows graphical Unix programs to display their user interfaces on the Windows desktop for both local and remote programs.

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  • PerfKitBenchmarker

    PerfKitBenchmarker

    PerfKit Benchmarker is an open source benchmarking tool used to measure and compare cloud offerings. PerfKit Benchmarker is licensed under the Apache 2 license terms. PerfKit Benchmarker is a community effort involving over 500 participants including researchers, academic institutions and companies together with the originator, Google. == General == PerfKit Benchmarker (PKB) is a community effort to deliver a repeatable, consistent, and open way of measuring Cloud Performance. It supports a growing list of cloud providers including: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, Rackspace, IBM Bluemix (Softlayer). In addition to Cloud Providers to supports container orchestration including Kubernetes [1] and Mesos [2] and local "static" workstations and clusters of computers [3]. The goal is to create an open source living benchmark [framework] that represents how Cloud developers are building applications, evaluating Cloud alternatives, learning how to architect applications for each cloud. Living because it will change and morph quickly as developers change. PerfKit Benchmarker measures the end to end time to provision resources in the cloud, in addition to reporting on the most standard metrics of peak performance, e.g.: latency, throughput, time-to-complete, IOPS. PerfKit Benchmarker reduces the complexity in running benchmarks on supported cloud providers by unified and simple commands. It's designed to operate via vendor provided command line tools. PerfKit Benchmarker contains a canonical set of public benchmarks. All benchmarks are running with default/initial state and configuration (Not tuned to in favor of any providers). This provides a way to benchmark across cloud platforms, while getting a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance, and overhead. == History == PerfKit Benchmarker (PKB) was started by Anthony F. Voellm, Alain Hamel, and Eric Hankland at Google in 2014. Once an initial "alpha" was in place Anthony F. Voellm and Ivan Santa Maria Filho built a community including ARM, Broadcom, Canonical, CenturyLink, Cisco, CloudHarmony, CloudSpectator, EcoCloud@EPFL, Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Rackspace, Red Hat, Tradeworx Inc., and Thesys Technologies LLC. This community worked together behind the scenes in a private GitHub project to create an open way to measure cloud performance. This community released the first public "beta" was released on February 11, 2015, and announced in a blog post at which point the GitHub project was open to everyone. After almost a year and with large adaption (600+ participants on GitHub) the V1.0.0 was released along with a detailed architectural design on December 10, 2015. == Benchmarks == A list of available benchmarks from PerfKitBenchmarker: (The latest set of benchmarks can be found at GitHub readme file.) == Industry participants == Since Google open sourced the PerfKitBenchmarker, it became a community effort from over 30 leading researchers, academic schools and industry companies. Those organizations include: ARM, Broadcom, Canonical, CenturyLink, Cisco, CloudHarmony, Cloud Spectator, EcoCloud@EPFL, Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Qualcomm Technologies, Rackspace, Red Hat, and Thesys Technologies. In addition, Stanford and MIT are leading quarterly discussions on default benchmarks and settings proposed by the community. EcoCloud@EPFL is integrating CloudSuite into PerfKit Benchmarker. == Example runs == On Google Cloud Platform On AWS On Azure On Rackspace On a local machine

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  • GitHub Codespaces

    GitHub Codespaces

    GitHub Codespaces is a cloud-based online integrated development environment developed by GitHub. It allows users to create and manage development environments directly within the browser or through Visual Studio Code desktop. Codespaces is tightly integrated with GitHub repositories and enables on-demand coding, debugging, and testing in a full-featured development container hosted in the cloud. == Features == Instant development environments integrated with GitHub Browser-based and desktop access via Visual Studio Code Configurable Dockerfile or devcontainer.json environments Built-in support for GitHub Copilot, extensions, snippets, and SSH. == Licensing == GitHub Codespaces is proprietary software and available to GitHub users under various subscription plans. Codespaces includes a monthly usage quota for free tier users of 120 hours, and expanded access for GitHub education, Pro, Team, and GitHub Enterprise plans. == GitHub Classroom == GitHub Classroom is an educational tool developed by GitHub to streamline the process of managing programming assignments and coursework. Integrated with GitHub repositories, it allows instructors to distribute starter code, automate grading workflows, and track student progress. GitHub Classroom is widely used in computer science education and supports integration with GitHub Codespaces for cloud-based development environments. == Programming languages supported == == Extensions == Some of the popular extensions include:

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  • Decorrelation

    Decorrelation

    Decorrelation is a general term for any process that is used to reduce autocorrelation within a signal, or cross-correlation within a set of signals, while preserving other aspects of the signal. A frequently used method of decorrelation is the use of a matched linear filter to reduce the autocorrelation of a signal as far as possible. Since the minimum possible autocorrelation for a given signal energy is achieved by equalising the power spectrum of the signal to be similar to that of a white noise signal, this is often referred to as signal whitening. == Process == === Signal processing === Most decorrelation algorithms are linear, but there are also non-linear decorrelation algorithms. Many data compression algorithms incorporate a decorrelation stage. For example, many transform coders first apply a fixed linear transformation that would, on average, have the effect of decorrelating a typical signal of the class to be coded, prior to any later processing. This is typically a Karhunen–Loève transform, or a simplified approximation such as the discrete cosine transform. By comparison, sub-band coders do not generally have an explicit decorrelation step, but instead exploit the already-existing reduced correlation within each of the sub-bands of the signal, due to the relative flatness of each sub-band of the power spectrum in many classes of signals. Linear predictive coders can be modelled as an attempt to decorrelate signals by subtracting the best possible linear prediction from the input signal, leaving a whitened residual signal. Decorrelation techniques can also be used for many other purposes, such as reducing crosstalk in a multi-channel signal, or in the design of echo cancellers. In image processing decorrelation techniques can be used to enhance or stretch, colour differences found in each pixel of an image. This is generally termed as 'decorrelation stretching'. === Neuroscience === In neuroscience, decorrelation is used in the analysis of the neural networks in the human visual system. The raw inputs from cone cells and rod cells under go many steps of processing before it is handled by the visual cortex. These steps generally perform decorrelation, both spatial (surround suppression in the retina) and temporal (handling of movement in the lateral geniculate nucleus). === Cryptography === In cryptography, decorrelation is used in cipher design (see Decorrelation theory) and in the design of hardware random number generators.

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  • Princh

    Princh

    Princh is a Danish software company, which is headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark. Founded in 2015, Princh develops cloud printing and electronic payment products. The company is headquartered in the city of Aarhus. While utilizing a smartphone or web app, users can locate a nearby printer to their current location, get directions to access said printer, and/or authorize a print and pay for the print job in question. The product is available as a native mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as on web and desktop products for businesses and libraries. The app connects a network of printer owners and users around the world. Princh supports an array of printable files. == History == The company was founded in 2015. The company is currently based in the southern part of Aarhus. The Princh printing service was officially launched on June 23, 2015. Currently, Princh is available as a service in a multitude of locations such as print shops, libraries, hotels, or universities. Princh is a popular printing and payment product among libraries and can among other places be found in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. == How it works == With the Princh app, users will be able to locate their nearest printer. Once the user is at the printer, the user chooses the document to be printed out and shares it with the Princh app. The user then selects the desired nearby printer entering the printer ID number or scanning the QR-code located on top of the printer, pays electronically and the print job is processed by the printer. Printer owners get access to a personal control panel where they can set printing prices and monitor all Princh activity for their business. == Notes and references ==

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  • Morphobank

    Morphobank

    MorphoBank is a web application for collaborative evolutionary research, specifically phylogenetic systematics or cladistics, on the phenotype. Historically, scientists conducting research on phylogenetic systematics have worked individually or in small groups employing traditional single-user software applications such as MacClade, Mesquite and Nexus Data Editor. As the hypotheses under study have grown more complex, large research teams have assembled to tackle the problem of discovering the Tree of Life for the estimated 4-100 million living species(Wilson 2003, pp. 77–80) and the many thousands more extinct species known from fossils. Because the phenotype is fundamentally visual, and as phenotype-based phylogenetic studies have continued to increase in size, it becomes important that observations be backed up by labeled images. Traditional desktop software applications currently in wide use do not provide robust support for team-based research or for image manipulation and storage. MorphoBank is a particularly important tool for the growing scientific field of phenomics. The development of MorphoBank, which began in 2001, has been funded by the National Science Foundation's Directorates for Geosciences, Biological Sciences and Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The significance of the scientific work on MorphoBank has been featured in the New York Times(here and here), among other publications. == Advantages == Teams of scientists studying phylogenetics to build the Tree of Life assemble large spreadsheets of observations about species (referred to as "matrices"). These teams require simultaneous access by each team member to a single and secure copy of the team's data during a scientific research project. This single copy of the data also changes with great frequency during the data collection phase. Images that can be very helpful for documenting homology statements must be displayed, labeled and shared as homology statements develop. This cannot be accomplished elegantly with a desktop software package alone because in a desktop environment each collaborator is working on his own private copy of project data. Changes made by one participant cannot automatically propagate to others, preventing collaborators from seeing each other's data edits until they are manually (and due to the effort involved, often only periodically) merged into a single "true" dataset. In all but the smallest and most disciplined of teams, file version control and the reconciliation of changes made on multiple copies of the data emerge quickly as significant drags on productivity. MorphoBank is an attempt to address these issues by leveraging the ubiquity of the web and modern web-based application techniques, including Ajax, web service layers, and rich web applications to provide a full-featured, net-accessible collaborative workspace for phylogenetic research. In particular, MorphoBank makes it easy to: Share all kinds of data with geographically separated team members, including taxonomy, character and specimen data, media (including images, video and audio), phylogenetic matrices (including data in the widely used NEXUS and TNT format) and other data such as documents and genetic sequences. Label high-resolution images using a web-based image annotation application. Collaboratively edit project data such as phylogenetic matrices using a built-in web-based matrix editor. The editor allows the linking of labeled images to individual cells of a matrix. Manage access to project data. Access ranges from full-access for team members to anonymous read-only access for potential reviewers. Publish completed project data on the web in support of a published paper with a persistent URL. Search The Encyclopedia of Life for taxon exemplar images. Store high resolution CT data Create ontologies for updating and populating matrix cells. These tasks are difficult or impossible in most existing software applications. == History == In 2001 the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a workshop, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to develop the outlines of a web-based system for a collaborative, media-rich research tool for morphological phylogenetics. An application prototype presented at the workshop was later refined with feedback from the workshop and became MorphoBank version 1.0. A grant from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funded further revisions resulting in version 2.0, released in 2005. Current support from the NSF is funding current feature enhancements to MorphoBank. MorphoBank was hosted by Stony Brook University until late October 2021 and received back up support from the American Museum of Natural History. The current version is 3.0. Rationale for the software was described in the journal Cladistics. MorphoBank has also received support from NESCENT and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Since 2018, MorphoBank has been supported in part by Phoenix Bioinformatics, a non-profit company founded to sustain databases for the basic sciences. A permanent move of MorphoBank from Stony Brook University to Phoenix Bioinformatics was complete in late October 2021. The San Diego Supercomputer Center has previously provided technical and hosting resources to the MorphoBank project. == Usage == MorphoBank hosts the products of peer-reviewed scientific research on phenotypes. An increasing volume of systematics data is "born digital" and MorphoBank is well suited to handle this type of material. On August 24, 2007, 62 active research projects were hosted by MorphoBank, as well as 6 completed (and published) projects. By 2017 over 2000 scientists and their students were registered content builders (users are not required to register and are even more numerous) and has more than 500 publicly available projects with approximately 80,000 images that are the products of scientific research. Over 1,500 active research projects are hosted by MorphoBank. The software has been used to assemble phylogenetic research on such groups as mammals, from bats to whales, bivalve molluscs, arachnids, fossil plants and living and extinct amniotes. It has also been used more broadly in evolutionary and paleontological research to host curated images associated with published research on lacewing insects geckos, raptor birds, dinosaurs, frogs and nematodes. MorphoBank is increasingly used in conjunction with the Paleobiology Database. Example published projects: Project 1097: Blank CE, 2013 Origin and early evolution of photosynthetic eukaryotes in freshwater environments – reinterpreting proterozoic paleobiology and biogeochemical processes in light of trait evolution Project 2520: Carvalho, T. P., R. E. Reis, and J. P. Friel, 2017 A new species of Hoplomyzon (Siluriformes: Aspredinidae) from Maracaibo Basin, Venezuela: osteological description using high-resolution Project 2651: Baron, M. G., Norman, D. B., Barrett, P. M., 2017 A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution MorphoBank has been particularly important to the Assembling the Tree of Life initiative sponsored by the National Science Foundation. MorphoBank is well-suited to such projects because of its tools for merging taxonomic, character and matrix-based data, as well as its collaborative features. Highlights of this research include a collaborative matrix on mammal evolution published in Science that included over 4,000 phenomic characters scored for over 80 species, a matrix on extant baleen whales featuring nearly 600 images, and more.

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  • Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales

    Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales

    Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales, or ADAMS was a $35 million DARPA project designed to identify patterns and anomalies in very large data sets. It is under DARPA's Information Innovation office and began in 2011 and ended in August 2014 The project was intended to detect and prevent insider threats such as "a soldier in good mental health becoming homicidal or suicidal", an "innocent insider becoming malicious", or "a government employee [who] abuses access privileges to share classified information". Specific cases mentioned are Nadal Malik Hasan and WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning. Commercial applications may include finance. The intended recipients of the system output are operators in the counterintelligence agencies. A final report was published on May 11, 2015, detailing a system known as Anomaly Detection Engine for Networks, or ADEN, developed by the University of Maryland, College Park, whose goal was to "identify malicious users within a network." Using multiple datasets from Wikipedia, Slashdot, and others, researchers were able to identify vandals and malicious users on a website using both conventional algorithms and artificial intelligence. The Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning was part of the ADAMS project. The Georgia Tech team includes noted high-performance computing researcher David Bader (computer scientist).

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  • Write or Die

    Write or Die

    Write or Die is an online web application designed to combat writer's block by letting users of the application punish themselves if they slow down or stop typing in the application's window. How severe the punishments are depends on the mode the user chooses, which ranges from "Gentle" to "Kamikaze". It was reviewed by publications PCWorld, the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, and it was most notably used by writers Helen Oyeyemi and David Nicholls. The creator, Jeff Printy, explained that he wrote the application because he wants "to be published and make a living as a writer."

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  • Microsoft Sway

    Microsoft Sway

    Microsoft Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Sway was offered for general release by Microsoft in August 2015. It allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create a presentable website. Users can pull content locally from the device in use, or from internet sources such as Bing, Facebook, OneDrive, and YouTube. Sway is distinguished from Microsoft FrontPage and Microsoft Expression Web – unrelated web design programs previously developed by Microsoft – in that Sway includes a method for hosting sites. Sway sites are stored on Microsoft's servers and are tied to the user's Microsoft account. They can be viewed and edited from any web browser through Office on the web. There is no offline editing or viewing function, but sites can be accessed using the app for Windows, and formerly iOS. == History == Sway was developed internally by Microsoft. In late 2014, the company announced an invite-only preview version of Sway and announced that Sway would not require an Office 365 subscription. An iOS app was released as a preview on 31 October 2014, but was discontinued on 17 December 2018 due to low usage. As of July 17, 2021, the Sway iOS app's discontinuance in 2018 was the last piece of news posted in the Sway tech blog. The Sway feature blog has not received an update since April 2017. The Microsoft Office Roadmap did not include any items related to Sway ever since. The iOS application is no longer under active development, and is not available for download. Since 2023, Microsoft has been consolidating the domains of its Microsoft 365 apps and services under cloud.microsoft. By 2025, the vast majority of services, including Sway, have already migrated to the cloud.microsoft domain. == Features == Users are able to add content from various sources into their Sway presentations. Some of the integrated services are owned by Microsoft, including OneNote, Bing, and other Sway sites. The program also provides native integration with other services, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Mixcloud, and Infogram.

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  • Suno (platform)

    Suno (platform)

    Suno is a generative artificial intelligence music creation platform. It is designed to generate music that can include vocals and instrumentation. The platform was initially developed by Suno, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Suno has been widely available since December 20, 2023, after the launch of a web application and a partnership with Microsoft, which included Suno as a plugin in Microsoft Copilot. The program operates by producing songs based on text or audio prompts provided by its users. Suno does not disclose the dataset used to train its artificial intelligence. == History == Suno, Inc., was founded by four people: Michael Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg. They all worked for Kensho, an AI startup, before starting their own company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In April 2023, Suno released their open-source text-to-speech and audio model called "Bark" on GitHub. On March 21, 2024, Suno released its V3 version for all users. The new version allowed users to create a limited number of four-minute songs using a free account. Users can pay for more features. In April 2024, a sentimental ballad was generated with Suno based on the text of the MIT License. In June 2024, a lawsuit, led by the Recording Industry Association of America, was filed against Suno and Udio alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings. The lawsuit sought to bar the companies from training on copyrighted music, as well as damages of up to $150,000 per work from infringements that have already taken place. On July 1, 2024, a mobile app for Suno was released. On November 19, 2024, Suno upgraded its AI song model program to v4. In January 2025, Michael Shulman remarked on a podcast, "I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." In March 2025, one day after thousands of musicians including Thom Yorke and ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus signed a letter calling for Suno to stop training its model on copyrighted music, Timbaland endorsed Suno in a video on the company's website. In July 2025, Suno user imoliver signed a record deal with Hallwood Media, which became the first instance of a traditional music label signing an AI-based creator. Hallwood later signed with AI-artist Xania Monet for US$3 million. Monet's songs were generated by Suno AI by poet Telisha Jones. In November 2025, Suno agreed to a $500 million dollar lawsuit settlement, in which Suno would be allowed to train its models on Warner Music Group's music catalog, and WMG would control aspects of AI likeness, music, audio, software, copyrights, AI tools and music created by users on Suno. As part of the settlement, Suno also acquired the concert discovery platform Songkick from WMG. == Controversy == Suno, Inc., has been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement, and thousands of musicians have signed a letter demanding that the company cease using copyrighted music in their training data. Suno does not disclose the dataset used to train its artificial intelligence.

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  • AirDine

    AirDine

    AirDine was a mobile app within the platform economy where individuals acted as both supplier and customer for a supper club. AirDine discontinued their service after 31 October 2017. == Operations == AirDine was an online marketplace for home dining that connected users that liked to cook with users looking for a dining experience. Users were categorized as "Hosts" and "Guests," both of whom needed to register with AirDine. AirDine acted as a two-sided market for home dining that allowed hosts and guests, and did not act as a restaurant or host any dinners itself. AirDine charged a service fee. Security and safety of the host were not vetted by AirDine and were completely left to users based on published reviews. Profiles included user reviews and shared social connections to build trust among users. AirDine also included a private messaging system.

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  • The Cancer Imaging Archive

    The Cancer Imaging Archive

    The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) is an open-access database of medical images for cancer research. The site is funded by the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Cancer Imaging Program, and the contract is operated by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Data within the archive is organized into collections which typically share a common cancer type and/or anatomical site. The majority of the data consists of CT, MRI, and nuclear medicine (e.g. PET) images stored in DICOM format, but many other types of supporting data are also provided or linked to, in order to enhance research utility. All data are de-identified in order to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and National Institutes of Health data sharing policies. TCIA resources are intended to support: Development of computer aided diagnosis methods (quantitative imaging) Evaluation of unbiased science reproducibility by acceptable standard statistical methods Research on correlation of clinical diagnostic medical images with digital microscopic histological images Exploratory biomarker research for which imaging is a key element Collaboration between cross-disciplinary investigators where imaging is crucial to research on tumor heterogeneity, between patients and within the tumor; tissue temporal response tracking - objective measurements of tumor progression; imaging genomics and Big Data linkages and analysis (clinical, histo-pathology, genomics) TCIA is recognized as a recommended repository for the Scientific Data, PLOS One, and F1000Research journals. It is also listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories. == History == Prior to the creation of TCIA, the NCI funded development of the National Biomedical Imaging Archive. NBIA is an open-source Web application which was designed to allow the storage and query of DICOM images. TCIA was subsequently initiated in December 2010 to expand data sharing activities by funding a service component which would help address the technical and policy challenges associated with medical imaging research. TCIA leverages open-source tools such as NBIA and Clinical Trials Processor in order to provide its services. == Organization of the archive == The site content is organized into five categories: About Us - Provides a general overview of the site the organizations responsible for operating it. Share Your Data - Provides an overview of how to apply to upload data to the archive. Access the Archive - Provides information about the available data, methods for accessing that data and system usage metrics. Research Activities - Provides information about major research initiatives being conducted using TCIA data as well as information about publication guidelines. Help - Provides information about how to get support using the archive as well as documentation and data usage policies. == Methods for accessing data == Most collections on the Cancer Imaging Archive can be accessed without an account, but a few are restricted to specific users and therefore require an account to access them. TCIA has several ways to browse, filter, and download data. They include: Downloading the entire contents of a collection in bulk Leveraging the NBIA application to filter or search within or across collections Utilizing the RESTful Application programming interface to filter or search within or across collections === Browsing, bulk downloading and access to supporting data === The home page includes a list of all available collections. Basic information about the data such as the cancer type, cancer location, modalities, and number of subjects are also provided. Clicking on a collection name presents a page which describes the data including its original research purpose, how the data were generated, and how it might be useful to other TCIA users. For example, doi:10.7937/K9/TCIA.2015.L4FRET6Z describes the NSCLC-Radiomics-Genomics Collection. In the lower section of the page there are links to search or download the images and any available supporting data in the Data Access tab. Additional tabs provide information about data versions and how to cite the data if used in publications. Many collections contain additional data types such as genomics, patient demographics, treatment details, and expert analyses of the images. This data is usually only found by browsing the collection pages as opposed to searching in NBIA or using the API. === Filtering or searching with NBIA === On each Collection page and also in the main menu of the site there are links to "Search TCIA". This will load the NBIA application which allows simple, advanced and free text searches. Search results follow the conventional DICOM hierarchy of patient -> study -> series. TCIA provides comprehensive documentation on the various features of the NBIA software. === RESTful API === A number of search and download commands are also available through the API. New iterations on the API are released as new versions, so that existing applications developed against older versions of the API continue to function. == Research activities == A list of known publications based on TCIA data is maintained as a convenience to researchers who might want to investigate how it has been used previously. In addition to peer-reviewed publications there are also several major research initiatives described in the Research Activities section of the site. === The CIP TCGA Radiology Initiative for Radiogenomics Research === A large number of collections contain subjects which were analyzed as part of the NIH/NHGRI database known as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). This offers researchers the ability to correlate clinical images using shared unique identifiers each study that has in TCGA extensive genomic analysis, digital pathology slides and bulk download of individual demographic data and clinical data. A multi-institutional network of investigators volunteering their time is using the data to develop methods to determine prognosis or predict the response to therapy. TCGA collections are designated by nomenclature shared by the TCGA Data Portal (e.g.: TCGA-BRCA, TCGA-GBM, etc). They are subject to a special publication policy which is unique from the other public data on TCIA. === Challenge competitions === TCIA also provides specific data sets used for "Challenge" competitions such as international digital image-focused professional societies like MICCAI, SPIE, or ISBI. A directory of previous and upcoming challenges is maintained on the site. === Digital object identifiers === To facilitate data sharing, many publications encourage authors to include data citations to the data that the authors used in creating the results described in their scholarly papers. In addition, new journals are now available for describing data collections outright (e.g., Nature Scientific Data). TCIA assigns digital object identifiers (DOIs) to all collections when they are submitted, and also has the ability to create persistent identifiers linked to subsets of data held within TCIA that authors may use for data citations in their scholarly papers.

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  • Webmail

    Webmail

    Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Additionally, many internet service providers (ISP) provide webmail as part of their internet service package. Similarly, some web hosting providers also provide webmail as a part of their hosting package. As with any web application, webmail's main advantage over the use of a desktop email client is the ability to send and receive email anywhere from a web browser. == History == === Early implementations === The first Web Mail implementation was developed at CERN in 1993 by Phillip Hallam-Baker as a test of the HTTP protocol stack, but was not developed further. In the next two years, however, several people produced working webmail applications. In Europe, there were three implementations, Søren Vejrum's "WWW Mail", Luca Manunza's "WebMail", and Remy Wetzels' "WebMail". Søren Vejrum's "WWW Mail" was written when he was studying and working at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, and was released on February 28, 1995. Luca Manunza's "WebMail" was written while he was working at CRS4 in Sardinia, from an idea of Gianluigi Zanetti, with the first source release on March 30, 1995. Remy Wetzels' "WebMail" was written while he was studying at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands for the DSE and was released early January 1995. In the United States, Matt Mankins wrote "Webex", and Bill Fitler, while at Lotus cc:Mail, began working on an implementation which he demonstrated publicly at Lotusphere on January 24, 1995. Customers who saw the cc:Mail demonstration were very enthusiastic, one recalling that they were "like an angry mob. People were yelling, 'We want this now!'". Matt Mankins, under the supervision of Dr. Burt Rosenberg at the University of Miami, released his "Webex" application source code in a post to comp.mail.misc on August 8, 1995, although it had been in use as the primary email application at the School of Architecture where Mankins worked for some months prior. Bill Fitler's webmail implementation was further developed as a commercial product, which Lotus announced and released in the fall of 1995 as cc:Mail for the World Wide Web 1.0; thereby providing an alternative means of accessing a cc:Mail message store (the usual means being a cc:Mail desktop application that operated either via dialup or within the confines of a local area network). Early commercialization of webmail was also achieved when "Webex" began to be sold by Mankins' company, DotShop, Inc., at the end of 1995. Within DotShop, "Webex" changed its name to "EMUmail"; which would be sold to companies like UPS and Rackspace until its sale to Accurev in 2001. EMUmail was one of the first applications to feature a free version that included embedded advertising, as well as a licensed version that did not. Hotmail and Four11's RocketMail both launched in 1996 as free services and immediately became very popular. === Widespread deployment === As the 1990s progressed, and into the 2000s, it became more common for the general public to have access to webmail because: many Internet service providers (such as EarthLink) and web hosting providers (such as Verio) began bundling webmail into their service offerings (often in parallel with POP/SMTP services); many other enterprises (such as universities and large corporations) also started offering webmail as a way for their user communities to access their email (either locally managed or outsourced); webmail service providers (such as Hotmail and RocketMail) emerged in 1996 as a free service to the general public, and rapidly gained in popularity. In some cases, webmail application software is developed in-house by the organizations running and managing the application, and in some cases it is obtained from software companies that develop and sell such applications, usually as part of an integrated mail server package (an early example being Netscape Messaging Server). The market for webmail application software has continued into the 2010s. == Rendering and compatibility == Email users may find the use of both a webmail client and a desktop client using the POP3 protocol presents some difficulties. For example, email messages that are downloaded by the desktop client and are removed from the server will no longer be available on the webmail client. The user is limited to previewing messages using the web client before they are downloaded by the desktop email client. However, one may choose to leave the emails on the server, in which case this problem does not occur. The use of both a webmail client and a desktop client using the IMAP4 protocol allows the contents of the mailbox to be consistently displayed in both the webmail and desktop clients and any action the user performs on messages in one interface will be reflected when the email is accessed via the other interface. There are significant differences in rendering capabilities for many popular webmail services such as Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail. Due to the varying treatment of HTML tags, such as