AI For Business Guide

AI For Business Guide — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

AI agent

In the context of generative artificial intelligence, AI agents (also referred to as compound AI systems or agentic AI) are a class of intelligent agents that can pursue goals, use tools, and take actions with varying degrees of autonomy. In practice, they usually operate within human-defined objectives, constraints, and available tools. == Overview == AI agents possess several key attributes, including goal-directed behavior, natural language interfaces, the capacity to use external tools, and the ability to perform multi-step tasks. Their control flow is frequently driven by large language models (LLMs). Agent systems may also include memory components, planning logic, tool interfaces, and orchestration software for coordinating agent components. AI agents do not have a standard definition. NIST describes agentic AI as an emerging area requiring standards for secure operation, interoperability, and reliable interaction with external systems. A common application of AI agents is task automation: for example, booking travel plans based on a user's prompted request. Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services have offered platforms for deploying pre-built AI agents. Several protocols have been proposed for standardizing inter-agent communication, with examples including the Model Context Protocol, Gibberlink, and many others. Some of these protocols are also used for connecting agents to external applications. In December 2025, Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), with the goal of ensuring agentic AI evolves transparently and collaboratively. == History == AI agents have been traced back to research from the 1990s, with Harvard professor Milind Tambe noting that the definition of an AI agent was not clear at the time. Researcher Andrew Ng has been credited with spreading the term "agentic" to a wider audience in 2024. == Training and testing == Researchers have attempted to build world models and reinforcement learning environments to train or evaluate AI agents. For example, video games such as Minecraft and No Man's Sky as well as replicas of company websites, have also been used for training such agents. == Autonomous capabilities == The Financial Times compared the autonomy of AI agents to the SAE classification of self-driving cars, likening most applications to level 2 or level 3, with some achieving level 4 in highly specialized circumstances, and level 5 being theoretical. == Cognitive architecture == The following are some internal design options for reasoning within an agent: Retrieval-augmented generation ReAct (Reason + Act) pattern is an iterative process in which an AI agent alternates between reasoning and taking actions, receives observations from the environment or external tools, and integrates these observations into subsequent reasoning steps. Reflexion, which uses an LLM to create feedback on the agent's plan of action and stores that feedback in a memory cache. A tool/agent registry, for organizing software functions or other agents that the agent can use. One-shot model querying, which queries the model once to create the plan of action. === Reference architecture === Ken Huang proposed an AI agent reference architecture, which consists of seven interconnected layers, with each layer building on the functionality of the layers beneath it: Layer 1: Foundation models - provide the core AI engines to power agent capabilities. Layer 2: Data operations - manage the complex data infrastructure required for AI agent operations, including Vector database, data loaders, RAG. Layer 3: Agent frameworks - sophisticated software and tools that simplify the development and management of the AI agents. Layer 4: Deployment and infrastructure - provide the robust technical foundation for running AI agents. Layer 5: Evaluation and observability - focus on assessing the safety and performance of AI agents. Layer 6: Security and compliance - a crucial protective framework ensuring AI agents operate safely, securely, and conform to regulatory boundaries. At this layer security and compliance features embedded into all the AI agent stack layers are integrated together. Layer 7: Agent ecosystem - represents the AI agents' interface with real-world applications and users. == Orchestration patterns == To execute complex tasks, autonomous agents are often integrated with other agents or specialized tools. These configurations, known as orchestration patterns or workflows, include the following: Prompt chaining: A sequence where the output of one step serves as the input for the next. Routing: The classification of an input to direct it to a specialized downstream task or tool. Parallelization: The simultaneous execution of multiple tasks. Sequential processing: A fixed, linear progression of tasks through a predefined pipeline. Planner-critic: An iterative pattern where one agent generates a proposal and another evaluates it to provide feedback for refinement. == Multimodal AI agents == In addition to large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal foundation models can be used as the basis for agents. In September 2024, Allen Institute for AI released an open-source vision-language model. Nvidia released a framework for developers to use VLMs, LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation for building AI agents that can analyze images and videos, including video search and video summarization. Microsoft released a multimodal agent model – trained on images, video, software user interface interactions, and robotics data – that the company claimed can manipulate software and robots. == Applications == As of April 2025, per the Associated Press, there are few real-world applications of AI agents. As of June 2025, per Fortune, many companies are primarily experimenting with AI agents. The Information divided AI agents into seven archetypes: business-task agents, for acting within enterprise software; conversational agents, which act as chatbots for customer support; research agents, for querying and analyzing information (such as OpenAI Deep Research); analytics agents, for analyzing data to create reports; software developer or coding agents (such as Cursor); domain-specific agents, which include specific subject matter knowledge; and web browser agents (such as OpenAI Operator). By mid-2025, AI agents have been used in video game development, gambling (including sports betting), cryptocurrency wallets (including cryptocurrency trading and meme coins) and social media. In August 2025, New York Magazine described software development as the most definitive use case of AI agents. Likewise, by October 2025, noting a decline in expectations, The Information noted AI coding agents and customer support as the primary use cases by businesses. In November 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that few companies that deployed AI agents have received a return on investment. === Applications in government === Several government bodies in the United States and United Kingdom have deployed or announced the deployment of agents, at the local and national level. The city of Kyle, Texas deployed an AI agent from Salesforce in March 2025 for 311 customer service. In November 2025, the Internal Revenue Service stated that it would use Agentforce, AI agents from Salesforce, for the Office of Chief Counsel, Taxpayer Advocate Services and the Office of Appeals. That same month, Staffordshire Police announced that they would trial Agentforce agents for handling non-emergency 101 calls in the United Kingdom starting in 2026. In December 2025, the Department of Neighborhoods in Detroit, Michigan, in partnership with a local business, deployed a pilot project in two Detroit districts for an AI agent to be used for customer service calls. In February 2025, Thomas Shedd, the director of the Technology Transformation Services, proposed using AI coding agents across the United States federal government. A recruiter for the Department of Government Efficiency proposed in April 2025 to use AI agents to automate the work of about 70,000 United States federal government employees, as part of a startup with funding from OpenAI and a partnership agreement with Palantir. This proposal was criticized by experts for its impracticality, if not impossibility, and the lack of corresponding widespread adoption by businesses. In December 2025, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would offer "agentic AI capabilities" to its staff for "meeting management, pre-market reviews, review validation, post-market surveillance, inspections and compliance and administrative functions." That same month, the United States Department of Defense launched GenAI.mil, an internal platform for American military personnel to use generative AI-based applications based on Google Gemini, including "intelligent agentic workflows". Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listed applications such as "[conducting] deep r
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Node2vec

node2vec is an algorithm to generate vector representations of nodes on a graph. The node2vec framework learns low-dimensional representations for nodes in a graph through the use of random walks through a graph starting at a target node. It is useful for a variety of machine learning applications. node2vec follows the intuition that random walks through a graph can be treated like sentences in a corpus. Each node in a graph is treated like an individual word, and a random walk is treated as a sentence. By feeding these "sentences" into a skip-gram, or by using the continuous bag of words model, paths found by random walks can be treated as sentences, and traditional data-mining techniques for documents can be used. The algorithm generalizes prior work which is based on rigid notions of network neighborhoods, and argues that the added flexibility in exploring neighborhoods is the key to learning richer representations of nodes in graphs. The algorithm is considered one of the best graph classifiers.
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AI Sales Assistants Reviews: What Actually Works in 2026

Curious about the best AI sales assistant? An AI sales assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI sales assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.
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Translation unit

In the field of translation, a translation unit is a segment of a text which the translator treats as a single cognitive unit for the purposes of establishing an equivalence. It may be a single word, a phrase, one or more sentences, or even a larger unit. When a translator segments a text into translation units, the larger these units are, the better chance there is of obtaining an idiomatic translation. This is true not only of human translation, but also where human translators use computer-assisted translation, such as translation memories, and when translations are performed by machine translation systems. == Perceptions on the concept of unit == Vinay and Darbelnet took to Saussure's original concepts of the linguistic sign when beginning to discuss the idea of a single word as a translation unit. According to Saussure, the sign is naturally arbitrary, so it can only derive meaning from contrast in other signs in that same system. However, Russian scholar Leonid Barkhudarov stated that, limiting it to poetry, for instance, a translation unit can take the form of a complete text. This seems to relate to his conception that a translation unit is the smallest unit in the source language with an equivalent in the target one, and when its parts are taken individually, they become untranslatable; these parts can be as small as phonemes or morphemes, or as large as entire texts. Susan Bassnett widened Barkhudarov's poetry perception to include prose, adding that in this type of translation text is the prime unit, including the idea that sentence-by-sentence translation could cause loss of important structural features. Swiss linguist Werner Koller connected Barkhudarov's idea of unit sizing to the difference between the two languages involved, by stating that the more different or unrelated these languages were, the larger the unit would be. One final perception on the idea of unit came from linguist Eugene Nida. To him, translation units have a tendency to be small groups of language building up into sentences, thus forming what he called meaningful mouthfuls of language. == Points of view towards translation units == === Process-oriented POV === According to this point of view, a translation unit is a stretch of text on which attention is focused to be represented as a whole in the target language. In this point of view we can consider the concept of the think-aloud protocol, supported by German linguist Wolfgang Lörscher: isolating units using self-reports by translating subjects. It also relates to how experienced the translator in question is: language learners take a word as a translation unit, whereas experienced translators isolate and translate units of meaning in the form of phrases, clauses or sentences. Since 1996 and 2005 keylogging and eyetracking technologies were introduced in Translation Process Research. These more advanced and non-invasive research methods made it possible to elaborate a finer-grained assessment of translation units as loops of (source or target text) reading and target text typing. Loops of translation units are thought to be the basic units by which translations are produced. Thus, Malmkjaer, for instance, defines process oriented translation units as a “stretch of the source text that the translator keeps in mind at any one time, in order to produce translation equivalents in the text he or she is creating” (p. 286). Records of keystrokes and eye movements allow to investigate these mental constructs through their physical (observable) behavioral traces in the translation process data. Empirical Translation Process Research has deployed numerous theories to explain and models the behavioral traces of these assumed mental units. === Product-oriented POV === Here, the target-text unit can be mapped into an equivalent source-text unit. A case study on this matter was reported by Gideon Toury, in which 27 English-Hebrew student-produced translations were mapped onto a source text. Those students that were less experienced had larger numbers of small units at word and morpheme level in their translations, while one student with translation experience had approximately half of those units, mostly at phrase or clause level.
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Non-native speech database

A non-native speech database is a speech database of non-native pronunciations of English. Such databases are used in the development of: multilingual automatic speech recognition systems, text to speech systems, pronunciation trainers, and second language learning systems. == List == The actual table with information about the different databases is shown in Table 2. === Legend === In the table of non-native databases some abbreviations for language names are used. They are listed in Table 1. Table 2 gives the following information about each corpus: The name of the corpus, the institution where the corpus can be obtained, or at least further information should be available, the language which was actually spoken by the speakers, the number of speakers, the native language of the speakers, the total amount of non-native utterances the corpus contains, the duration in hours of the non-native part, the date of the first public reference to this corpus, some free text highlighting special aspects of this database and a reference to another publication. The reference in the last field is in most cases to the paper which is especially devoted to describe this corpus by the original collectors. In some cases it was not possible to identify such a paper. In these cases a paper is referenced which is using this corpus is. Some entries are left blank and others are marked with unknown. The difference here is that blank entries refer to attributes where the value is just not known. Unknown entries, however, indicate that no information about this attribute is available in the database itself. As an example, in the Jupiter weather database no information about the origin of the speakers is given. Therefore this data would be less useful for verifying accent detection or similar issues. Where possible, the name is a standard name of the corpus, for some of the smaller corpora, however, there was no established name and hence an identifier had to be created. In such cases, a combination of the institution and the collector of the database is used. In the case where the databases contain native and non-native speech, only attributes of the non-native part of the corpus are listed. Most of the corpora are collections of read speech. If the corpus instead consists either partly or completely of spontaneous utterances, this is mentioned in the Specials column.
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Diane Litman

Diane Litman is an American professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. She also jointly holds the positions of senior scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center and faculty with the Intelligent Systems department. Litman is noted for her work in the areas of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and user modeling. == Education == Litman did her undergraduate studies at the College of William and Mary and her master's and PhD degrees at the University of Rochester. == Career == Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was an assistant professor at Columbia University. She additionally held the position of a research scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department Laboratory at AT&T Labs. Litman has held the position of Chair of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics two times, elected twice for the position, whose tenure lasts four years. She is also a distinguished member of the executive committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and a member of the editorial boards of Computational Linguistics and User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. She has also held the position of Leverhulme Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Litman was the keynote speaker at the Speech and Language Technology in Education 2013 symposium, the 2006 SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, and at the 2008 Symposium of the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. She also sits on the board of the several interest groups, including the International Speech Communication Association's Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology in Education. Litman has served as chair, organizer, and a senior member of numerous committees of peer-reviewed scientific journals. == Awards and recognition == She has also co-authored numerous award-winning papers and was awarded senior member status by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2011, an award designed to honor those who have "achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence."
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Margaret Mitchell (scientist)

Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. She is most well known for her work on automatically removing undesired biases concerning demographic groups from machine learning models, as well as more transparent reporting of their intended use. == Education == Mitchell obtained a bachelor's degree in linguistics from Reed College, Portland, Oregon, in 2005. After having worked as a research assistant at the OGI School of Science and Engineering for two years, she subsequently obtained a Master's in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington in 2009. She enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Aberdeen, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the topic of Generating Reference to Visible Objects, graduating in 2013. == Career and research == Mitchell is best known for her work on fairness in machine learning and methods for mitigating algorithmic bias. This includes her work on introducing the concept of 'Model Cards' for more transparent model reporting, and methods for debiasing machine learning models using adversarial learning. Margaret Mitchell created the framework for recognizing and avoiding biases by testing with a variable for the group of interest, predictor and an adversary. In 2012, Mitchell joined the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral researcher, before taking up a position at Microsoft Research in 2013. At Microsoft, Mitchell was the research lead of the Seeing AI project, an app that offers support for the visually impaired by narrating texts and images. In November 2016, she became a senior research scientist at Google Research and Machine intelligence. While at Google, she founded and co-led the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team together with Timnit Gebru. In May 2018, she represented Google in the Partnership on AI. In February 2018, she gave a TED talk on "How we can build AI to help humans, not hurt us". In January 2021, after Timnit Gebru's termination from Google, Mitchell reportedly used a script to search through her corporate account and download emails that allegedly documented discriminatory incidents involving Gebru. An automated system locked Mitchell's account in response. In response to media attention Google claimed that she "exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts". After a five-week investigation, Mitchell was fired. Prior to her dismissal, Mitchell had been a vocal advocate for diversity at Google, and had voiced concerns about research censorship at the company. In late 2021, she joined AI start-up Hugging Face. Mitchell is a co-founder of Widening NLP, a special interest group within the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) seeking to increase the proportion of women and minorities working in natural language processing; and Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, an annual workshop within the ACL that brings together clinicians and computational linguists to advance the state of the art in clinical psychology.
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Yorick Wilks

Yorick Alexander Wilks FBCS (27 October 1939 – 14 April 2023) was a British computer scientist. He was an emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College (a post created especially for him), senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, senior scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and a member of the Epiphany Philosophers. In February 2023, Wilks joined WiredVibe as Director of AI and a Board Member, with the goal of commercializing his previous research and ideas. He remained in this role until his death, which occurred shortly before WiredVibe was acquired by AKY X, a company that continues to build on his legacy and contributions. == Biography == Wilks was born in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire in England. He was educated at Torquay Boys' Grammar School, followed by Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read Philosophy, joined the Epiphany Philosophers and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree (1968) under Professor R. B. Braithwaite for the thesis 'Argument and Proof'; he was an early pioneer in meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers. His main early contribution in the 1970s was called "Preference Semantics" (Wilks, 1973; Wilks and Fass, 1992), an algorithmic method for assigning the "most coherent" interpretation to a sentence in terms of having the maximum number of internal preferences of its parts (normally verbs or adjectives) satisfied. That early work was hand-coded with semantic entries (of the order of some hundreds) as was normal at the time, but since then has led to the empirical determinations of preferences (chiefly of English verbs) in the 1980s and 1990s. A key component of the notion of preference in semantics was that the interpretation of an utterance is not a well- or ill-formed notion, as was argued in Chomskyan approaches, such as those of Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz. It was rather that a semantic interpretation was the best available, even though some preferences might not be satisfied. So, in "The machine answered the question with a low whine" the agent of "answer" does not satisfy that verb's preference for a human answerer—which would cause it to be deemed ill-formed by Fodor and Katz—but is accepted as sub-optimal or metaphorical, and, now, conventional. The function of the algorithm is not to determine well-formedness at all but to make the optimal selection of word-senses to participate in the overall interpretation. Thus, in "The Pole answered..." the system will always select the human sense of the agent and not the inanimate one if it gives a more coherent interpretation overall. Preference Semantics is thus some of the earliest computational work—with programs run at Systems Development Corporation in Santa Monica in 1967 in LISP on an IBM360—in the now established field of word sense disambiguation. This approach was used in the first operational machine translation system based principally on meaning structures and built by Wilks at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1970s (Wilks, 1973) at the same time and place as Roger Schank was applying his "Conceptual Dependency" approach to machine translation. The LISP code of Wilks' system was in The Computer Museum, Boston. Wilks was elected a fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, of the British Computer Society, a member of the UK Computing Research Committee, and a permanent member of ICCL, the International Committee on Computational Linguistics. He was professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield and a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. In 1991 he received a Defense Advanced Projects Agency grant on interlingual pragmatics-based machine translation and in 1994 he received a grant by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to investigate in the field of large-scale information extraction (LaSIE); in the following years he would obtain more grants to carry on exploring the field of information extraction (AVENTINUS, ECRAN, PASTA...). In the 1990s Wilks also became interested in modelling human-computer dialogue and the team led by David Levy and him as chief researcher won the Loebner Prize in 1997. He was the founding director of the EU funded Companions Project on creating long-term computer companions for people. At his Festschrift in 2007 at the British Computer Society in London a volume of his own papers was presented along with a volume of essays in his honour. He was awarded the Antonio Zampolli prize in honour of his lifetime work at the LREC 2008 conference on 28 May 2008, and the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ACL 2008 conference on 18 June 2008. In 2009, he was awarded the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal, its annual award for research achievement, and was awarded the Fellowship of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1998, Wilks became head of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield, where he had started working in the year 1993 as professor of artificial intelligence, a post he still held. In 1993 he became the founding director of the Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing (ILASH). Wilks also set up the Natural Language Processing Group of the University of Sheffield. In 1994 he (along with Rob Gaizauskas and Hamish Cunningham) designed GATE, an advanced NLP architecture that has been widely distributed. National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1672/24) with Yorick Wilks in 2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library. Wilks died on 14 April 2023, at the age of 83. == Awards == Wilks received many awards: (2009) Elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2009) Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society (2008) Zampolli Prize (ELRA, awarded at LREC in Marrakech, Morocco) (2008) Lifetime Achievement Award (Association for Computational Linguistics, in Columbus) (2006) Visiting Professor, University of Oxford (2004) Elected to UK Computing Research Committee (2004) Elected Fellow, British Computer Society (2003) Visiting Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute (1998) Elected Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence (1997) Elected Fellow, EPSRC College of Computing (1991) Visiting Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge (1991) Elected Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (1983) Royal Society Travel Fellowship (1983) Commonwealth of Australia Visiting Professor (1981) Visiting Sloan Fellow, University of California, Berkeley (1980) Invited Participant in the Nobel Symposium on Language, Stockholm (1979) NATO Senior Scientist Fellowship (1979) Visiting Sloan Fellow, Yale University (1975) SRC Senior Visiting Fellowship, University of Edinburgh == Membership == Wilks was an active member of the following associations: Association for Computational Linguistics Society for the Study of AI and Simulation of Behaviour Association for Computing Machinery Cognitive Science Society British Society for the Philosophy of Science American Association for Artificial Intelligence Aristotelian Society == Selected works == === Books === Wilks, Y. (2019) Artificial Intelligence: Modern Magic or Dangerous Future?.Icon Books. New illustrated edition, 2023, MIT Press. Wilks, Y. (2015) Machine Translation: its scope and limits. Springer Wilks, Y (ed.) (2010) Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological and Design issues. John Benjamins; Amsterdam Wilks, Y., Brewster, C. (2009) Natural Language Processing as a Foundation of the Semantic Web. Now Press: London. Wilks, Y. (2007) Words and Intelligence I, Selected papers by Yorick Wilks. In K. Ahmad, C. Brewster & M. Stevenson (eds.), Springer: Dordrecht. Wilks, Y. (ed. and with introduction and commentaries). (2006) Language, cohesion and form: selected papers of Margaret Masterman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilks, Y., Nirenburg, S., Somers, H. (eds.) (2003) Readings in Machine Translation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilks, Y.(ed.). (1999) Machine Conversations. Kluwer: New York. Wilks, Y., Slator, B., Guthrie, L. (1996) Electric Words: dictionaries, computers and meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ballim, A., Wilks, Y. (1991) Artificial Believers. Norwood, NJ: Erlbaum. Wilks, Y.(ed.). (1990) Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing. Norwood, NJ: Erlbaum. Wilks, Y., Partridge, D. (eds. plus three YW chapters and an introduction). (1990) The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: a sourcebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilks, Y., Sparck-Jones, K.(eds.). (1984) Automatic Natural Language Processing, paperback edition. New York: Wiley. Originally published by Ellis Horwood. Wilks, Y., Charniak, E. (eds and principal authors). (1976) Computational Semantics—an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and
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Reflection (computer graphics)

Reflection in computer graphics is used to render reflective objects like mirrors and shiny surfaces. Accurate reflections are commonly computed using ray tracing whereas approximate reflections can usually be computed faster by using simpler methods such as environment mapping. Reflections on shiny surfaces like wood or tile can add to the photorealistic effects of a 3D rendering. == Approaches to reflection rendering == For rendering environment reflections there exist many techniques that differ in precision, computational and implementation complexity. Combination of these techniques are also possible. Image order rendering algorithms based on tracing rays of light, such as ray tracing or path tracing, typically compute accurate reflections on general surfaces, including multiple reflections and self reflections. However these algorithms are generally still too computationally expensive for real time rendering (even though specialized HW exists, such as Nvidia RTX) and require a different rendering approach from typically used rasterization. Reflections on planar surfaces, such as planar mirrors or water surfaces, can be computed simply and accurately in real time with two pass rendering — one for the viewer, one for the view in the mirror, usually with the help of stencil buffer. Some older video games used a trick to achieve this effect with one pass rendering by putting the whole mirrored scene behind a transparent plane representing the mirror. Reflections on non-planar (curved) surfaces are more challenging for real time rendering. Main approaches that are used include: Environment mapping (e.g. cube mapping): a technique that has been widely used e.g. in video games, offering reflection approximation that's mostly sufficient to the eye, but lacking self-reflections and requiring pre-rendering of the environment map. The precision can be increased by using a spatial array of environment maps instead of just one. It is also possible to generate cube map reflections in real time, at the cost of memory and computational requirements. Screen space reflections (SSR): a more expensive technique that traces rays come from pixel data.This requires the data of surface normal and either depth buffer (local space) or position buffer (world space).The disadvantage is that objects not captured in the rendered frame cannot appear in the reflections, which results in unresolved and or false intersections causing artefacts such as reflection vanishment and virtual image. SSR was originally introduced as Real Time Local Reflections in CryENGINE 3. == Types of reflection == Polished - A polished reflection is an undisturbed reflection, like a mirror or chrome surface. Blurry - A blurry reflection means that tiny random bumps, or microfacets, on the surface of the material causes the reflection to be blurry. Metallic - A reflection is metallic if the highlights and reflections retain the color of the reflective object. Glossy - This term can be misused: sometimes, it is a setting which is the opposite of blurry (e.g. when "glossiness" has a low value, the reflection is blurry). Sometimes the term is used as a synonym for "blurred reflection". Glossy used in this context means that the reflection is actually blurred. === Polished or mirror reflection === Mirrors are usually almost 100% reflective. === Metallic reflection === Normal (nonmetallic) objects reflect light and colors in the original color of the object being reflected. Metallic objects reflect lights and colors altered by the color of the metallic object itself. === Blurry reflection === Many materials are imperfect reflectors, where the reflections are blurred to various degrees due to surface roughness that scatters the rays of the reflections. === Glossy reflection === Fully glossy reflection, shows highlights from light sources, but does not show a clear reflection from objects. == Examples of reflections == === Wet floor reflections === The wet floor effect is a graphic effects technique popular in conjunction with Web 2.0 style pages, particularly in logos. The effect can be done manually or created with an auxiliary tool which can be installed to create the effect automatically. Unlike a standard computer reflection (and the Java water effect popular in first-generation web graphics), the wet floor effect involves a gradient and often a slant in the reflection, so that the mirrored image appears to be hovering over or resting on a wet floor.
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Jian Ma (computational biologist)

Jian Ma (Chinese: 马坚) is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a faculty member in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department. His lab develops AI/ML methods to study the structure and function of the human genome and cellular organization and their implications for health and disease. During his Ph.D. and postdoc training, he developed algorithms to reconstruct the ancestral mammalian genome and evolutionary history. His research group has recently pioneered a series of new machine learning solutions for 3D genome organization, single-cell epigenomics, spatial omics, and complex molecular interactions. His lab also explores large language models to uncover gene regulatory mechanisms and the intricate connections among cellular components, with the aim of driving discovery and guiding experimentation. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2011. In 2020, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Computer Science. He received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence (2025). He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the International Society for Computational Biology, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He leads an NIH 4D Nucleome Center to develop machine learning algorithms to better understand the cell nucleus. He served as the Program Chair for RECOMB 2024. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago (CZ Biohub Chicago) and the RECOMB Steering Committee. In 2024, he launched the Center for AI-Driven Biomedical Research (AI4BIO) at CMU, which will be a catalyst for innovations at the intersection of AI and biomedicine across the School of Computer Science and campus. == Selected Recent Publications == Chen V#, Yang M#, Cui W, Kim JS, Talwalkar A, and Ma J. Applying interpretable machine learning in computational biology - pitfalls, recommendations and opportunities for new developments. Nature Methods, 21(8):1454-1461, 2024. Xiong K#, Zhang R#, and Ma J. scGHOST: Identifying single-cell 3D genome subcompartments. Nature Methods, 21(5):814-822, 2024. Zhou T, Zhang R, Jia D, Doty RT, Munday AD, Gao D, Xin L, Abkowitz JL, Duan Z, and Ma J. GAGE-seq concurrently profiles multiscale 3D genome organization and gene expression in single cells. Nature Genetics, 56(8):1701-1711, 2024. Zhang Y, Boninsegna L, Yang M, Misteli T, Alber F, and Ma J. Computational methods for analysing multiscale 3D genome organization. Nature Reviews Genetics, 5(2):123-141, 2024. Chidester B#, Zhou T#, Alam S, and Ma J. SPICEMIX enables integrative single-cell spatial modeling of cell identity. Nature Genetics, 55(1):78-88, 2023. [Cover Article] Zhang R#, Zhou T#, and Ma J. Ultrafast and interpretable single-cell 3D genome analysis with Fast-Higashi. Cell Systems, 13(10):P798-807.E6, 2022. [Cover Article] Zhu X#, Zhang Y#, Wang Y, Tian D, Belmont AS, Swedlow JR, and Ma J. Nucleome Browser: An integrative and multimodal data navigation platform for 4D Nucleome. Nature Methods, 19(8):911-913, 2022. Zhang R, Zhou T, and Ma J. Multiscale and integrative single-cell Hi-C analysis with Higashi. Nature Biotechnology, 40:254–261, 2022.
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Eurotra

Eurotra was a machine translation project established and funded by the European Commission from 1978 until 1992. == History == In 1976, the European Commission started using the commercially developed machine translation system SYSTRAN with a plan to make it work for further languages than originally developed for (Russian-English and English-French), which however turned out to be difficult. This and the potential in existing systems within European research center, led to the decision in 1978 to start the project Eurotra, first through a preparatory Eurotra Coordination Group. Four years later, the European Commission and coordination group gained the approval of the European Parliament. The goal of the project as to create machine translation system for the official languages of the European Community, which at the time were Danish, Dutch, German, English, French, Italian, later including Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. However, as time passed, expectations became tempered; "Fully Automatic High Quality Translation" was not a reasonably attainable goal. The true character of Eurotra was eventually acknowledged to be in fact pre-competitive research rather than prototype development. The project was motivated by one of the founding principles of the EU: that all citizens had the right to read any and all proceedings of the Commission in their own language. As more countries joined, this produced a combinatorial explosion in the number of language pairs involved, and the need to translate every paper, speech and even set of meeting minutes produced by the EU into the other eight languages meant that translation rapidly became the overwhelming component in the administrative budget. To solve this problem Eurotra was devised. The project was unusual in that rather than consisting of a single research team, it had member groups distributed around the member countries, organised along language rather than national lines (for example, groups in Leuven and Utrecht worked closely together), and the secretariat was based at the European Commission in Luxembourg. The actual design of the project was unusual as MT projects go. Older systems, such as SYSTRAN, were heavily dictionary-based, with minor support for rearranging word order. More recent systems have often worked on a probabilistic approach, based on parallel corpora. Eurotra addressed the constituent structure of the text to be translated, going through first a syntactic parse followed by a second parse to produce a dependency structure followed by a final parse with a third grammar to produce what was referred to internally as Intermediate Representation (IR). Since all three modules were implemented as Prolog programs, it would then in principle be possible to put this structure backwards through the corresponding modules for another language to produce a translated text in any of the other languages. However, in practice this was not in fact how language pairs were implemented. The first "live" translation occupied a 4Mb Microvax running Ultrix and C-Prolog for a complete weekend some time in early 1987. The sentence, translated from English into Danish, was "Japan makes computers". The main problem faced by the system was the generation of so-called "Parse Forests" - often a large number of different grammar rules could be applied to any particular phrase, producing hundreds, even thousands of (often identical) parse trees. This used up huge quantities of computer store, slowing the whole process down unnecessarily. While Eurotra never delivered a "working" MT system, the project made a far-reaching long-term impact on the nascent language industries in European member states, in particular among the southern countries of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. There is at least one commercial MT system (developed by an academic/commercial consortium in Denmark) derived from Eurotra technology.
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Maike Osborne

Maike Osborne (born Michael Osborne, 1982) is an Australian academic and scientist who serves as a professor of machine learning at University of Oxford in the Machine Learning Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science. In 2016 she co-founded Mind Foundry, an artificial intelligence company, along with fellow professor Stephen Roberts. == Education == She has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and a BSc in both Pure Mathematics and Physics from the University of Western Australia. She has a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Oxford. == Career == Osborne has contributed to over 100 publications, and her work has received over 24,000 citations with an h-index of 46 according to Google Scholar. and has acted as principal or co-investigator for £10.6M of research funding. Her career has focused in particular on Bayesian approaches to AI and machine learning, named after the famous British statistician Thomas Bayes. Osborne's work has contributed to Probabilistic numerics, with Osborne co-authoring the first textbook on the subject. In 2013, Osborne co-authored a paper alongside Swedish-German economist Carl Benedikt Frey called "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?". The paper has received over 13,000 citations and extensive media coverage. In 2023 Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on the subject of the "Governance of Artificial Intelligence". Her testimony received significant coverage around her warnings of the threat of "rogue AI". == Honors == She is also an Official Fellow of Exeter College, and St Peter's College, Oxford, a Fellow of the ELLIS society, and a Faculty Member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. She joined the Oxford Martin School as Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment in 2015. She is a Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems.
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Tay (chatbot)

Tay was a chatbot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation as a Twitter bot on March 23, 2016. It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch. According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls who "attacked" the service as the bot made replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter. It was replaced with Zo. == Background == The bot was created by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing divisions, and named "Tay" as an acronym for "thinking about you". Although Microsoft initially released few details about the bot, sources mentioned that it was similar to or based on Xiaoice, a Microsoft project in China. Ars Technica reported that, since late 2014 Xiaoice had had "more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident". Tay was designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl, and to learn from interacting with human users of Twitter. == Initial release == Tay was released on Twitter on March 23, 2016, under the name TayTweets and handle @TayandYou. It was presented as "The AI with zero chill". Tay started replying to other Twitter users, and was also able to caption photos provided to it into a form of Internet memes. Ars Technica reported Tay experiencing topic "blacklisting": Interactions with Tay regarding "certain hot topics such as Eric Garner (killed by New York police in 2014) generate safe, canned answers". Some Twitter users began tweeting politically incorrect phrases, teaching it inflammatory messages revolving around common themes on the internet, such as "redpilling" and "Gamergate". As a result, the robot began releasing racist and sexist messages in response to other Twitter users. Artificial intelligence researcher Roman Yampolskiy commented that Tay's misbehavior was understandable because it was mimicking the deliberately offensive behavior of other Twitter users, and Microsoft had not given the bot an understanding of inappropriate behavior. He compared the issue to IBM's Watson, which began to use profanity after reading entries from the website Urban Dictionary. Many of Tay's inflammatory tweets were a simple exploitation of Tay's "repeat after me" capability. It is not publicly known whether this capability was a built-in feature, or whether it was a learned response or was otherwise an example of complex behavior. However, not all of the inflammatory responses involved the "repeat after me" capability; for example, when asked if the Holocaust had happened, Tay answered "It was made up". == Suspension == Soon, Microsoft began deleting Tay's inflammatory tweets. Abby Ohlheiser of The Washington Post theorized that Tay's research team, including editorial staff, had started to influence or edit Tay's tweets at some point that day, pointing to examples of almost identical replies by Tay, asserting that "Gamer Gate sux. All genders are equal and should be treated fairly." From the same evidence, Gizmodo concurred that Tay "seems hard-wired to reject Gamer Gate". A "#JusticeForTay" campaign protested the alleged editing of Tay's tweets. Within 16 hours of its release and after Tay had tweeted more than 96,000 times, Microsoft suspended the Twitter account for adjustments, saying that it suffered from a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" that "exploited a vulnerability in Tay." Madhumita Murgia of The Telegraph called Tay "a public relations disaster", and suggested that Microsoft's strategy would be "to label the debacle a well-meaning experiment gone wrong, and ignite a debate about the hatefulness of Twitter users." However, Murgia described the bigger issue as Tay being "artificial intelligence at its very worst – and it's only the beginning". On March 25, Microsoft confirmed that Tay had been taken offline. Microsoft released an apology on its official blog for the controversial tweets posted by Tay. Microsoft was "deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay", and would "look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values". == Second release and shutdown == On March 30, 2016, Microsoft accidentally re-released the bot on Twitter while testing it. Able to tweet again, Tay released some drug-related tweets, including "kush! [I'm smoking kush infront the police]" and "puff puff pass?" However, the account soon became stuck in a repetitive loop of tweeting "You are too fast, please take a rest", several times a second. Because these tweets mentioned its own username in the process, they appeared in the feeds of 200,000+ Twitter followers, causing annoyance to users. The bot was quickly taken offline again, in addition to Tay's Twitter account being made private so new followers must be accepted before they can interact with Tay. In response, Microsoft said Tay was inadvertently put online during testing. A few hours after the incident, Microsoft software developers announced a vision of "conversation as a platform" using various bots and programs, perhaps motivated by the reputation damage done by Tay. Microsoft has stated that they intend to re-release Tay "once it can make the bot safe" but has not made any public efforts to do so. == Legacy == In December 2016, Microsoft released Tay's successor, a chatbot named Zo. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said that Tay "has had a great influence on how Microsoft is approaching AI," and has taught the company the importance of taking accountability. In July 2019, Microsoft Cybersecurity Field CTO Diana Kelley spoke about how the company followed up on Tay's failings: "Learning from Tay was a really important part of actually expanding that team's knowledge base, because now they're also getting their own diversity through learning". === Unofficial revival === Gab, an alt-tech social media platform, has launched a number of chatbots, one of which is named Tay and uses the same avatar as the original.
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Is an AI Code-review Tool Worth It in 2026?

Looking for the best AI code-review tool? An AI code-review tool is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it can save you hours every week by automating repetitive work. Most options offer a generous free tier, with paid plans unlocking higher limits, faster processing, and team features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI code-review tool slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.
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AI Headshot Generators: Free vs Paid (2026)

Curious about the best AI headshot generator? An AI headshot generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI headshot generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.
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