AI For Business Hkbu

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

TAPPS2

TAPPS2 (Technische Alternative Planungs- und Programmier-System) is a tool used for developing the program logic for the universal, heating and solar thermal controllers by Austrian manufacturer Technische Alternative. Its primary usecase is defining the exact reaction of the controller to a certain event. Other than its predecessor, TAPPS, which could only be used to program controllers of type UVR1611, TAPPS2 is mainly used to program the UVR16x2 and RSM610 controllers, as well as several extension modules. == Development == Development in TAPPS2 is done on a vector-based drawing surface using components that can be placed via drag and drop. The components, which can be separated into inputs, functions and outputs are then being connected according to their individual features. Available components vary according to the current solar thermal control unit.
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SNNS

SNNS (Stuttgart Neural Network Simulator) is a neural network simulator originally developed at the University of Stuttgart. While it was originally built for X11 under Unix, there are Windows ports. Its successor JavaNNS never reached the same popularity. == Features == SNNS is written around a simulation kernel to which user written activation functions, learning procedures and output functions can be added. It has support for arbitrary network topologies and the standard release contains support for a number of standard neural network architectures and training algorithms. == Status == There is currently no ongoing active development of SNNS. In July 2008 the license was changed to the GNU LGPL.
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AI Pair Programmers: Free vs Paid (2026)

Trying to pick the best AI pair programmer? An AI pair programmer is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI pair programmer 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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Nicholas Carlini

Nicholas Carlini is an American researcher affiliated with Anthropic and previously with Google DeepMind who has published research in the fields of computer security and machine learning. He is known for his work on adversarial machine learning, particularly his work on the Carlini & Wagner attack in 2016. This attack was particularly useful in defeating defensive distillation, a method used to increase model robustness, and has since been effective against other defenses against adversarial input. In 2018, Carlini demonstrated an attack on Mozilla's DeepSpeech model, showing that hidden commands could be embedded in speech inputs, which the model would execute even if they were inaudible to humans. He also led a team at UC Berkeley that successfully broke seven out of nine defenses against adversarial attacks presented at the 2018 International Conference on Learning Representations. In addition to his work on adversarial attacks, Carlini has made significant contributions to understanding the privacy risks of machine learning models. In 2020, he revealed that large language models, like GPT-2, could memorize and output personally identifiable information. His research demonstrated that this issue worsened with larger models, and he later showed similar vulnerabilities in generative image models, such as Stable Diffusion. == Life and career == Nicholas Carlini obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. He then continued his studies at the same university, where he pursued a PhD under the supervision of David Wagner, completing it in 2018. Carlini became known for his work on adversarial machine learning. In 2016, he worked alongside Wagner to develop the Carlini & Wagner attack, a method of generating adversarial examples against machine learning models. The attack was proved to be useful against defensive distillation, a popular mechanism where a student model is trained based on the features of a parent model to increase the robustness and generalizability of student models. The attack gained popularity when it was shown that the methodology was also effective against most other defenses, rendering them ineffective. In 2018, Carlini demonstrated an attack against Mozilla Foundation's DeepSpeech model where he showed that by hiding malicious commands inside normal speech input the speech model would respond to the hidden commands even when the commands were not discernible by humans. In the same year, Carlini and his team at UC Berkeley showed that out of the 11 papers presenting defenses to adversarial attacks accepted in that year's ICLR conference, seven of the defenses could be broken. Since 2021, he and his team have been working on large language models, creating a questionnaire where humans typically scored 35% whereas AI models scored in the 40%, with GPT-3 getting 38% which could be improved to 40% through few shot prompting. The best performer in the test was UnifiedQA, a model developed by Google specifically for answer questions and answer sets. Carlini has also developed methods to cause large language models like ChatGPT to answer harmful questions like how to construct bombs. He is also known for his work studying the privacy of machine learning models. In 2020, he showed for the first time that large language models would memorize some of the text data that they were trained on. For example, he found that GPT-2 could output personally identifiable information. He then led an analysis of larger models and studied how memorization increased with model size. Then, in 2022 he showed the same vulnerability in generative image models, and specifically diffusion models, by showing that Stable Diffusion could output images of people's faces that it was trained on. Following on this, Carlini then showed that ChatGPT would also sometimes output exact copies of webpages it was trained on, including personally identifiable information. Some of these studies have since been referenced by the courts in debating the copyright status of AI models. == Other work == Carlini received the Best of Show award at the 2020 IOCCC for implementing a tic-tac-toe game entirely with calls to printf, expanding on work from a research paper of his from 2015. The judges commented on his submission "This year's Best of Show (carlini) is such a novel way of obfuscation that it would be worth of a special mention in the (future) Best of IOCCC list!". [sic] == Awards == Best Student Paper Award, IEEE S&P 2017 ("Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks") Best Paper Award, ICML 2018 ("Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples") Distinguished Paper Award, USENIX 2021 ("Poisoning the Unlabeled Dataset of Semi-Supervised Learning") Distinguished Paper Award, USENIX 2023 ("Tight Auditing of Differentially Private Machine Learning") Best Paper Award, ICML 2024 ("Stealing Part of a Production Language Model") Best Paper Award, ICML 2024 ("Considerations for Differentially Private Learning with Large-Scale Public Pretraining")
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Imaging phantom

An imaging phantom, or simply phantom (less commonly spelled fantom), is a specially designed object that is scanned or imaged in the field of medical imaging to evaluate, analyze, and tune the performance of various imaging devices. A phantom is more readily available and provides more consistent results than the use of a living subject or cadaver, while also avoiding direct risks to living subjects. Phantoms were originally employed in 2D x-ray–based imaging techniques such as radiography or fluoroscopy, but more recently phantoms with desired imaging characteristics have been developed for 3D techniques such as SPECT, MRI, CT, ultrasound, PET, and other imaging modalities. == Design == A phantom used to evaluate an imaging device should respond in a similar manner to how human tissues and organs would act in that specific imaging modality. For instance, phantoms made for 2D radiography may hold various quantities of x-ray contrast agents with similar x-ray absorbing properties (such as the attenuation coefficient) to normal tissue to tune the contrast of the imaging device or modulate the patient's exposure to radiation. In such a case, the radiography phantom would not necessarily need to have similar textures and mechanical properties since these are not relevant in x-ray imaging modalities. However, in the case of ultrasonography, a phantom with similar rheological and ultrasound scattering properties to real tissue would be essential, but x-ray absorbing properties would not be relevant. The term "phantom" describes an object that is designed to resemble human tissue and can be evaluated, analyzed or manipulated to study the performance of a medical device. Phantoms are created using a digital file that is rendered through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computer-aided design (CAD). The digital files allow for quick modifications that are read by the 3D printer. The 3D printer will create the product in successive layers using polymeric materials. There are several types of phantoms including tissue-mimicking, radiological phantoms, dental phantoms, BOMABs (used to calibrate whole-body counters), and more.
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Max Welling

Max Welling (born 1968) is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam. In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm. He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, based in Amsterdam. Welling received his PhD in physics with a thesis on quantum gravity under the supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft (1998) at the Utrecht University. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics, and has most notably invented variational autoencoders (VAEs), together with Diederik P Kingma. In 2025 Welling was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Sophia Ananiadou

Sophia Ananiadou is a Greek-British computer scientist and computational linguist. She led the development of and directs the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) in the United Kingdom. She is also Professor in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Her research focusses on biomedical text mining and natural language processing and has fed into the development of numerous applications that, for example, facilitate the discovery of new knowledge, enable exploration of historical archives, allow semantic search of biomedical literature, reduce human effort in screening search hits for production of systematic reviews, enable enrichment of metabolic pathway models with evidence from the literature, allow discovery of risk in the construction industry from health and safety incident reports and enable interoperability of components in text mining workflows. == Education == Ananiadou was educated at the Lycée français St Joseph in Athens, Greece (1969–1975). She received a Bachelor of Arts (Ptychion) from the University of Athens (1979), a Master of Advanced Studies (DEA) in Linguistics from Paris VII, Jussieu, France (1980), a DEA in Literature from Paris IV, Sorbonne, France (1984) and a PhD in Computational linguistics from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), in 1988. == Career and research == Ananiadou was a research assistant at Dalle Molle Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies (ISSCO, 1983–1984), a research assistant (1985–1988) then research associate (1988–1993) in the department of language engineering at UMIST, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University (1993–1999), senior lecturer then reader in the School of Computing Science and Engineering, University of Salford (2000–2005), then reader in the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester (2005–2009). Since 2009, she has served as professor in computer science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. In July 2025, she became deputy director of the Christabel Pankhurst Institute for health technology research and innovation, University of Manchester. From 2018–2026, she served as the deputy director of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Manchester. She is a senior lead researcher of the ARCHIMEDES research unit of the Athena Research Centre, Greece. ARCHIMEDES is a research and innovation hub fostering international collaboration and knowledge exchange on Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. On February 7, 2025, she was appointed a member of the Artificial Intelligence Sectoral Scientific Council of the Greek Ministry of Development (announcement of appointment in Greek). She is also a Visiting Distinguished Research Fellow in the Knowledge and Information Research Team at the Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC), Japan, which is a research unit of the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). In addition, she was appointed to the honorary position of Adjunct Professor of Wuhan University, People's Republic of China, for the period October 2025 to October 2028, collaborating with the School of Artificial Intelligence. Ananiadou has published since 1986, has an h-index of 81 and a Research.com United Kingdom ranking in Computer Science of 104. She is also ranked number 1 internationally in text mining by ScholarGPS. In addition, she is included in the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2% Scientist Rankings for 2025. Ananiadou received a Diplôme de traducteur (Diploma of Translator) from the Institut français d'Athènes, Greece (1979) and a Certificate in Counselling from the University of Salford, UK (2004). === Awards and honours === In 2019, in recognition of her contributions in Artificial Intelligence and text mining for Biomedicine, Ananiadou received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Aegean, on the 20th anniversary of its Department of Mediterranean Studies, Rhodes. Ananiadou received the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) innovation award from IBM three years running (2006, 2007 & 2008). She was awarded the Daiwa Adrian Prize in 2004 and also received a Japan Trust award from the Ministry of Education, Japan in 1997. Ananiadou was a Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London from 2018 to 2023. Since 2021, she is a member and, since 2024, a Fellow, of the ELLIS Society, the professional society of the cross-national European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. Ananiadou served as vice president (VP) of the European Association for Terminology from 1997 to 1999. At the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020), she received, with M. Li and H. Takamura, an Outstanding Paper designation for the paper "A Neural Model for Aggregating Coreference Annotation in Crowdsourcing".
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Is an AI Content Generator Worth It in 2026?

Trying to pick the best AI content generator? An AI content generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI content generator 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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Boundary vector field

The boundary vector field (BVF) is an external force for parametric active contours (i.e. Snakes). In the fields of computer vision and image processing, parametric active contours are widely used for segmentation and object extraction. The active contours move progressively towards its target based on the external forces. There are a number of shortcomings in using the traditional external forces, including the capture range problem, the concave object extraction problem, and high computational requirements. The BVF is generated by an interpolation scheme which reduces the computational requirement significantly, and at the same time, improves the capture range and concave object extraction capability. The BVF is also tested in moving object tracking and is proven to provide fast detection method for real time video applications.
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Is an AI Chatbot Worth It in 2026?

Curious about the best AI chatbot? An AI chatbot 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 chatbot 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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Google matrix

A Google matrix is a particular stochastic matrix that is used by Google's PageRank algorithm. The matrix represents a graph with edges representing links between pages. The PageRank of each page can then be generated iteratively from the Google matrix using the power method. However, in order for the power method to converge, the matrix must be stochastic, irreducible and aperiodic. == Adjacency matrix A and Markov matrix S == In order to generate the Google matrix G, we must first generate an adjacency matrix A which represents the relations between pages or nodes. Assuming there are N pages, we can fill out A by doing the following: A matrix element A i , j {\displaystyle A_{i,j}} is filled with 1 if node j {\displaystyle j} has a link to node i {\displaystyle i} , and 0 otherwise; this is the adjacency matrix of links. A related matrix S corresponding to the transitions in a Markov chain of given network is constructed from A by dividing the elements of column "j" by a number of k j = Σ i = 1 N A i , j {\displaystyle k_{j}=\Sigma _{i=1}^{N}A_{i,j}} where k j {\displaystyle k_{j}} is the total number of outgoing links from node j to all other nodes. The columns having zero matrix elements, corresponding to dangling nodes, are replaced by a constant value 1/N. Such a procedure adds a link from every sink, dangling state a {\displaystyle a} to every other node. Now by the construction the sum of all elements in any column of matrix S is equal to unity. In this way the matrix S is mathematically well defined and it belongs to the class of Markov chains and the class of Perron-Frobenius operators. That makes S suitable for the PageRank algorithm. == Construction of Google matrix G == Then the final Google matrix G can be expressed via S as: G i j = α S i j + ( 1 − α ) 1 N ( 1 ) {\displaystyle G_{ij}=\alpha S_{ij}+(1-\alpha ){\frac {1}{N}}\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;(1)} By the construction the sum of all non-negative elements inside each matrix column is equal to unity. The numerical coefficient α {\displaystyle \alpha } is known as a damping factor. Usually S is a sparse matrix and for modern directed networks it has only about ten nonzero elements in a line or column, thus only about 10N multiplications are needed to multiply a vector by matrix G. == Examples of Google matrix == An example of the matrix S {\displaystyle S} construction via Eq.(1) within a simple network is given in the article CheiRank. For the actual matrix, Google uses a damping factor α {\displaystyle \alpha } around 0.85. The term ( 1 − α ) {\displaystyle (1-\alpha )} gives a surfer probability to jump randomly on any page. The matrix G {\displaystyle G} belongs to the class of Perron-Frobenius operators of Markov chains. The examples of Google matrix structure are shown in Fig.1 for Wikipedia articles hyperlink network in 2009 at small scale and in Fig.2 for University of Cambridge network in 2006 at large scale. == Spectrum and eigenstates of G matrix == For 0 < α < 1 {\displaystyle 0<\alpha <1} there is only one maximal eigenvalue λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} with the corresponding right eigenvector which has non-negative elements P i {\displaystyle P_{i}} which can be viewed as stationary probability distribution. These probabilities ordered by their decreasing values give the PageRank vector P i {\displaystyle P_{i}} with the PageRank K i {\displaystyle K_{i}} used by Google search to rank webpages. Usually one has for the World Wide Web that P ∝ 1 / K β {\displaystyle P\propto 1/K^{\beta }} with β ≈ 0.9 {\displaystyle \beta \approx 0.9} . The number of nodes with a given PageRank value scales as N P ∝ 1 / P ν {\displaystyle N_{P}\propto 1/P^{\nu }} with the exponent ν = 1 + 1 / β ≈ 2.1 {\displaystyle \nu =1+1/\beta \approx 2.1} . The left eigenvector at λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} has constant matrix elements. With 0 < α {\displaystyle 0<\alpha } all eigenvalues move as λ i → α λ i {\displaystyle \lambda _{i}\rightarrow \alpha \lambda _{i}} except the maximal eigenvalue λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} , which remains unchanged. The PageRank vector varies with α {\displaystyle \alpha } but other eigenvectors with λ i < 1 {\displaystyle \lambda _{i}<1} remain unchanged due to their orthogonality to the constant left vector at λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} . The gap between λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} and other eigenvalue being 1 − α ≈ 0.15 {\displaystyle 1-\alpha \approx 0.15} gives a rapid convergence of a random initial vector to the PageRank approximately after 50 multiplications on G {\displaystyle G} matrix. At α = 1 {\displaystyle \alpha =1} the matrix G {\displaystyle G} has generally many degenerate eigenvalues λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} (see e.g. [6]). Examples of the eigenvalue spectrum of the Google matrix of various directed networks is shown in Fig.3 from and Fig.4 from. The Google matrix can be also constructed for the Ulam networks generated by the Ulam method [8] for dynamical maps. The spectral properties of such matrices are discussed in [9,10,11,12,13,15]. In a number of cases the spectrum is described by the fractal Weyl law [10,12]. The Google matrix can be constructed also for other directed networks, e.g. for the procedure call network of the Linux Kernel software introduced in [15]. In this case the spectrum of λ {\displaystyle \lambda } is described by the fractal Weyl law with the fractal dimension d ≈ 1.3 {\displaystyle d\approx 1.3} (see Fig.5 from ). Numerical analysis shows that the eigenstates of matrix G {\displaystyle G} are localized (see Fig.6 from ). Arnoldi iteration method allows to compute many eigenvalues and eigenvectors for matrices of rather large size [13]. Other examples of G {\displaystyle G} matrix include the Google matrix of brain [17] and business process management [18], see also. Applications of Google matrix analysis to DNA sequences is described in [20]. Such a Google matrix approach allows also to analyze entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles abouts persons [21] == Historical notes == The Google matrix with damping factor was described by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 [22], see also articles on PageRank history [23], [24].
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Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

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

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing and mobile computing to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications on a plethora of mobile devices, with a rich user experience. MCC provides business opportunities for mobile network operators as well as cloud providers. More comprehensively, MCC can be defined as "a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility to serve a multitude of mobile devices anywhere, anytime through the channel of Ethernet or Internet regardless of heterogeneous environments and platforms based on the pay-as-you-use principle." == Architecture == MCC uses computational augmentation approaches (computations are executed remotely instead of on the device) by which resource-constraint mobile devices can utilize computational resources of varied cloud-based resources. In MCC, there are four types of cloud-based resources, namely distant immobile clouds, proximate immobile computing entities, proximate mobile computing entities, and hybrid (combination of the other three model). Giant clouds such as Amazon EC2 are in the distant immobile groups whereas cloudlet or surrogates are member of proximate immobile computing entities. Smartphones, tablets, handheld devices, and wearable computing devices are part of the third group of cloud-based resources which is proximate mobile computing entities. Vodafone, Orange and Verizon have started to offer cloud computing services for companies. == Challenges == In the MCC landscape, an amalgam of mobile computing, cloud computing, and communication networks (to augment smartphones) creates several complex challenges such as Mobile Computation Offloading, Seamless Connectivity, Long WAN Latency, Mobility Management, Context-Processing, Energy Constraint, Vendor/data Lock-in, Security and Privacy, Elasticity that hinder MCC success and adoption. === Open research issues === Although significant research and development in MCC is available in the literature, efforts in the following domains is still lacking: Architectural issues: A reference architecture for heterogeneous MCC environment is a crucial requirement for unleashing the power of mobile computing towards unrestricted ubiquitous computing. Energy-efficient transmission: MCC requires frequent transmissions between cloud platform and mobile devices, due to the stochastic nature of wireless networks, the transmission protocol should be carefully designed. Context-awareness issues: Context-aware and socially-aware computing are inseparable traits of contemporary handheld computers. To achieve the vision of mobile computing among heterogeneous converged networks and computing devices, designing resource-efficient environment-aware applications is an essential need. Live VM migration issues: Executing resource-intensive mobile application via Virtual Machine (VM) migration-based application offloading involves encapsulation of application in VM instance and migrating it to the cloud, which is a challenging task due to additional overhead of deploying and managing VM on mobile devices. Mobile communication congestion issues: Mobile data traffic is tremendously hiking by ever increasing mobile user demands for exploiting cloud resources which impact on mobile network operators and demand future efforts to enable smooth communication between mobile and cloud endpoints. Trust, security, and privacy issues: Trust is an essential factor for the success of the burgeoning MCC paradigm. It is because the data along with code/component/application/complete VM is offloaded to the cloud for execution. Moreover, just like software and mobile application piracy, the MCC application development models are also affected by the piracy issue. Pirax is known to be the first specialized framework for controlling application piracy in MCC requirements == MCC research groups and activities == Several academic and industrial research groups in MCC have been emerging since last few years. Some of the MCC research groups in academia with large number of researchers and publications include: MDC, Mobile and Distributed Computing research group is at Faculty of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University. MDC research group focuses on architectures, platforms, and protocols for mobile and distributed computing. The group has developed algorithms, tools, and technologies which offer energy efficient, fault tolerant, scalable, secure, and high performance computing on mobile devices. MobCC lab, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University Malaya. The lab was established in 2010 under the High Impact Research Grant, Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia. It has 17 researchers and has track of 22 published articles in international conference and peer-reviewed CS journals. ICCLAB, Zürich University of Applied Sciences has a segment working on MCC. The InIT Cloud Computing Lab is a research lab within the Institute of Applied Information Technology (InIT) of Zürich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). It covers topic areas across the entire cloud computing technology stack. Mobile & Cloud Lab, Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu. Mobile & Cloud Lab conducts research and teaching in the mobile computing and cloud computing domains. The research topics of the group include cloud computing, mobile application development, mobile cloud, mobile web services and migrating scientific computing and enterprise applications to the cloud. SmartLab, Data Management Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus. SmartLab is a first-of-a-kind open cloud of smartphones that enables a new line of systems-oriented mobile computing research. Mobile Cloud Networking: Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) was an EU FP7 Large-scale Integrating Project (IP, 15m Euro) funded by the European Commission. The MCN project was launched in November 2012 for the period of 36 month. The project was coordinated by SAP Research and the ICCLab at the Zurich University of Applied Science. In total 19 partners from industry and academia established the first vision of Mobile Cloud Computing. The project was primarily motivated by an ongoing transformation that drives the convergence between the Mobile Communications and Cloud Computing industry enabled by the Internet and is considered the first pioneer in the area of Network Function Virtualization.
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Top 10 AI Virtual Assistants Compared (2026)

Looking for the best AI virtual assistant? An AI virtual assistant 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 virtual 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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Armin B. Cremers

Armin Bernd Cremers (born June 7, 1946) is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor in the computer science institute at the University of Bonn, Germany. He is most notable for his contributions to several fields of discrete mathematics including formal languages and automata theory. In more recent years he has been recognized for his work in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics as well as in geoinformatics and deductive databases. == Life and work == Armin B. Cremers studied mathematics and physics at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. After his graduate diploma (1971) and PhD (1972), both in mathematics, both summa cum laude, he received his academic lectureship qualification for computer science (1974), all from the University of Karlsruhe. Following an invitation by Seymour Ginsburg, he joined the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, in 1973 where he worked until 1976 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. With Ginsburg he initiated Grammar Forms, a new formalism for grammatical families. In 1976 A. B. Cremers returned to Germany and was appointed to full professor of computer science at the University of Dortmund, where he remained until 1990, holding the chair for information systems. During the same time he continued working as a visiting research professor at USC, where together with Thomas N. Hibbard he developed the concept of Data Spaces, a comprehensive computational model, in theory and applications. At the University of Dortmund A. B. Cremers served as chairman of the computer science department and, since early 1985, as vice president for Research and Junior Scientific Staff. In this position he was liaison for the development of the Technology Center Dortmund Archived 2021-05-09 at the Wayback Machine. He was the initiator and founding director of the Center for Expert Systems Dortmund (ZEDO) and the NRW State Research Collaborative in Artificial Intelligence (KI-NRW). From 1988 to 1996 he was also a member of the supervisory board of the German National Research Center for Mathematics and Data Processing (GMD). Since 1990 A. B. Cremers has been professor and director of computer science and head of the research group in artificial intelligence at the University of Bonn. From Bonn he has contributed fundamentally to artificial intelligence and robotics (with Wolfram Burgard, Dieter Fox, Sebastian Thrun among his students), and to the development of software engineering, particularly in civil engineering, and information systems, particularly in the geosciences. The paper "The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot" won the AAAI Classic Paper award of 2016. Together with Matthias Jarke A. B. Cremers established the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT) in 2001 and led this as Founding Scientific Director from the University of Bonn side until his retirement from teaching in 2014. From 2004 to 2008 Cremers was Dean of the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, and from April 2009 to July 2014 University Vice President for Planning and Finance. He is member of advisory boards, e.g., as well as Chairman of the University Council of the University of Koblenz-Landau.
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