AI For Business Rules

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

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  Ave!Comics

  Ave!Comics Production is a privately owned French company editing comics on smartphones, tablets and computers. It was founded in 2008 and it is a subsidiary of Aquafadas, a software development company in digital publishing owned by Kobo Inc. AveComics is a comic book store for digital comic books that can be used on computers, tablets, and smartphones.(iOS, Android) Readers can buy and read comic books, manga and graphic novels in French, English and Spanish. AveComics uses a technology created by Aquafadas for comics transformation, distribution and reading, based around its AVE format. The AveComics application was also a finalist in the BlackBerry Innovation Awards 2009, in the "Entertainment" category. == Company history == Aquafadas, a company working on creative software for Flash, HTML5, photo, and video editing, created the application MyComics to allow the reading of comics on mobile in 2006. This application was made available in 2008, to enable the reading and storing of comics on iPhone and iPod Touch. A reading system adapted to low resolution screens was also available. In October of the same year, the company launched a comics library on both devices, in partnership with the Angoulême International Comics Festival, Fnac and SNCF. This library included the official selection of the festival, and was downloaded over 150 000 times. In December 2008 "The Adventures of Lucky Luke n°3", at Lucky Comics was published on both devices. The comic made a 50 000 € turnover. In April 2009, "Les Blondes" 10th volume was the top-selling comic for 10 months on the AppStore. After, in August 2009, the AveComics application was launched on iPhone, iPod Touch and BlackBerry. The company's website was launched in September when more than 100 titles were available on smartphones and computers. == Catalogue == AveComics works with over 80 international publishers including Glénat, Marsu Productions, Delcourt, Casterman, Soleil, Ubisoft, Les Humanoïdes Associés and Mad Fabrik. Comics such as "Assassin's Creed", "Talisman", "Titeuf", and "Seoul District" are sold by the company. == Award == Grand Prix Software Venture Capital - Senate 2008.

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  MultiNet

  Multilayered extended semantic networks (MultiNets) are both a knowledge representation paradigm and a language for meaning representation of natural language expressions that has been developed by Prof. Dr. Hermann Helbig on the basis of earlier Semantic Networks. It is used in a question-answering application for German called InSicht. It is also used to create a tutoring application developed by the university of University of Hagen to teach MultiNet to knowledge engineers. MultiNet is claimed to be one of the most comprehensive and thoroughly described knowledge representation systems. It specifies conceptual structures by means of about 140 predefined relations and functions, which are systematically characterized and underpinned by a formal axiomatic apparatus. Apart from their relational connections, the concepts are embedded in a multidimensional space of layered attributes and their values. Another characteristic of MultiNet distinguishing it from simple semantic networks is the possibility to encapsulate whole partial networks and represent the resulting conceptual capsule as a node of higher order, which itself can be an argument of relations and functions. MultiNet has been used in practical NLP applications such as natural language interfaces to the Internet or question answering systems over large semantically annotated corpora with millions of sentences. MultiNet is also a cornerstone of the commercially available search engine SEMPRIA-Search, where it is used for the description of the computational lexicon and the background knowledge, for the syntactic-semantic analysis, for logical answer finding, as well as for the generation of natural language answers. MultiNet is supported by a set of software tools and has been used to build large semantically based computational lexicons. The tools include a semantic interpreter WOCADI, which translates natural language expressions (phrases, sentences, texts) into formal MultiNet expressions, a workbench MWR+ for the knowledge engineer (comprising modules for automatic knowledge acquisition and reasoning), and a workbench LIA+ for the computer lexicographer supporting the creation of large semantically based computational lexica.

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  ComfyUI

  ComfyUI is an open source, node-based program that allows users to generate images from a series of text prompts. It uses free diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion as the base model for its image capabilities combined with other tools such as ControlNet and LCM Low-rank adaptation with each tool being represented by a node in the program. == History == ComfyUI was released on GitHub in January 2023. According to comfyanonymous, the creator, a major goal of the project was to improve on existing software designs in terms of the user interface. The creator had been involved with Stability AI but by 3 June 2024 that involvement had ended and an organization called Comfy Org had been created along with the core developers. In July 2024, Nvidia announced support for ComfyUI within its RTX Remix modding software. In August 2024, support was added for the Flux diffusion model developed by Black Forest Labs, and Comfy Org joined the Open Model Initiative created by the Linux Foundation. As of Sept 2025, the project has 89.2k stars on GitHub. ComfyUI is one of the most popular user interfaces for Stable Diffusion, along with Automatic1111. == Features == ComfyUI's main feature is that it is node based. Each node has a function such as "load a model" or "write a prompt". The nodes are connected to form a control-flow graph called a workflow. When a prompt is queued, a highlighted frame appears around the currently executing node, starting from "load checkpoint" and ending with the final image and its save location. Workflows commonly consist of tens of nodes, forming a complex directed acyclic graph. Node types include loading a model, specifying prompts, samplers, schedulers, VAE decoders, face restoration and upscaling models, LoRAs, embeddings, and ControlNets. Several samplers are supported, such as Euler, Euler_a, dpmpp_2m_sde and dpmpp_3m_sde. Workflows can be saved to a file, allowing users to re-use node workflows and share them with other users. The file format for the workflows is in JSON and can be embedded in the generated images. Users have also created custom extensions to the base system which are exposed as new nodes, such as the extension for AnimateDiff, which aims to create videos. ComfyUI has been described as more complex compared to other diffusion UIs such as Automatic1111. A default node group is also included with the program. As of December 2024, 1,674 nodes were supported. ComfyUI Supports multiple text-to-image models including, Stable Diffusion, Flux and Tencent's Hunyuan-DiT, as well as custom models from Civitai like Pony. == LLMVision extension compromise == In June 2024, a hacker group called "Nullbulge" compromised an extension of ComfyUI to add malicious code to it. The compromised extension, called ComfyUI_LLMVISION, was used for integrating the interface with AI language models GPT-4 and Claude 3, and was hosted on GitHub. Nullbulge hosted a list of hundreds of ComfyUI users' login details across multiple services on its website, while users of the extension reported receiving numerous login notifications. vpnMentor conducted security research on the extension and claimed it could "steal crypto wallets, screenshot the user’s screen, expose device information and IP addresses, and steal files that contain certain keywords or extensions". Nullbulge's website claims they targeted users who committed "one of our sins", which included AI-art generation, art theft, promoting cryptocurrency, and any other kind of theft from artists such as from Patreon. They claimed that they were "a collective of individuals who believe in the importance of protecting artists' rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work" and that they believed that "AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged".

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  Artificial intelligence systems integration

  The core idea of artificial intelligence systems integration is making individual software components, such as speech synthesizers, interoperable with other components, such as common sense knowledgebases, in order to create larger, broader and more capable A.I. systems. The main methods that have been proposed for integration are message routing, or communication protocols that the software components use to communicate with each other, often through a middleware blackboard system. Most artificial intelligence systems involve some sort of integrated technologies, for example, the integration of speech synthesis technologies with that of speech recognition. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing discussion on the importance of systems integration as a field in its own right. Proponents of this approach are researchers such as Marvin Minsky, Aaron Sloman, Deb Roy, Kristinn R. Thórisson and Michael A. Arbib. A reason for the recent attention A.I. integration is attracting is that there have already been created a number of (relatively) simple A.I. systems for specific problem domains (such as computer vision, speech synthesis, etc.), and that integrating what's already available is a more logical approach to broader A.I. than building monolithic systems from scratch. == Integration focus == The focus on systems' integration, especially with regard to modular approaches, derive from the fact that most intelligences of significant scales are composed of a multitude of processes and/or utilize multi-modal input and output. For example, a humanoid-type of intelligence would preferably have to be able to talk using speech synthesis, hear using speech recognition, understand using a logical (or some other undefined) mechanism, and so forth. In order to produce artificially intelligent software of broader intelligence, integration of these modalities is necessary. == Challenges and solutions == Collaboration is an integral part of software development as evidenced by the size of software companies and the size of their software departments. Among the tools to ease software collaboration are various procedures and standards that developers can follow to ensure quality, reliability and that their software is compatible with software created by others (such as W3C standards for webpage development). However, collaboration in fields of A.I. has been lacking, for the most part not seen outside the respected schools, departments or research institutes (and sometimes not within them either). This presents practitioners of A.I. systems integration with a substantial problem and often causes A.I. researchers to have to 're-invent the wheel' each time they want a specific functionality to work with their software. Even more damaging is the "not invented here" syndrome, which manifests itself in a strong reluctance of A.I. researchers to build on the work of others. The outcome of this in A.I. is a large set of "solution islands": A.I. research has produced numerous isolated software components and mechanisms that deal with various parts of intelligence separately. To take some examples: Speech synthesis FreeTTS from CMU Speech recognition Sphinx from CMU Logical reasoning OpenCyc from Cycorp Open Mind Common Sense Net from MIT With the increased popularity of the free software movement, a lot of the software being created, including A.I. systems, is available for public exploit. The next natural step is to merge these individual software components into coherent, intelligent systems of a broader nature. As a multitude of components (that often serve the same purpose) have already been created by the community, the most accessible way of integration is giving each of these components an easy way to communicate with each other. By doing so, each component by itself becomes a module, which can then be tried in various settings and configurations of larger architectures. Some challenging and limitations of using A.I. software is the uncontrolled fatal errors. For example, serious and fatal errors have been discovered in very precise fields such as human oncology, as in an article published in the journal Oral Oncology Reports entitled "When AI goes wrong: Fatal errors in oncological research reviewing assistance". The article pointed out a grave error in artificial intelligence based on GBT in the field of biophysics. Many online communities for A.I. developers exist where tutorials, examples, and forums aim at helping both beginners and experts build intelligent systems. However, few communities have succeeded in making a certain standard, or a code of conduct popular to allow the large collection of miscellaneous systems to be integrated with ease. == Methodologies == === Constructionist design methodology === The constructionist design methodology (CDM, or 'Constructionist A.I.') is a formal methodology proposed in 2004, for use in the development of cognitive robotics, communicative humanoids and broad AI systems. The creation of such systems requires the integration of a large number of functionalities that must be carefully coordinated to achieve coherent system behavior. CDM is based on iterative design steps that lead to the creation of a network of named interacting modules, communicating via explicitly typed streams and discrete messages. The OpenAIR message protocol (see below) was inspired by the CDM and has frequently been used to aid in the development of intelligent systems using CDM. == Examples == ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and QRIO, Sony's version of a humanoid robot. Cog, M.I.T. humanoid robot project under the direction of Rodney Brooks. AIBO, Sony's robot dog, integrates vision, hearing and motorskills. TOPIO, TOSY's humanoid robot can play ping-pong with human

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  Developmental robotics

  Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development. Developmental robotics is related to but differs from evolutionary robotics (ER). ER uses populations of robots that evolve over time, whereas DevRob is interested in how the organization of a single robot's control system develops through experience, over time. DevRob is also related to work done in the domains of robotics and artificial life. == Background == Can a robot learn like a child? Can it learn a variety of new skills and new knowledge unspecified at design time and in a partially unknown and changing environment? How can it discover its body and its relationships with the physical and social environment? How can its cognitive capacities continuously develop without the intervention of an engineer once it is "out of the factory"? What can it learn through natural social interactions with humans? These are the questions at the center of developmental robotics. Alan Turing, as well as a number of other pioneers of cybernetics, already formulated those questions and the general approach in 1950, but it is only since the end of the 20th century that they began to be investigated systematically. Because the concept of adaptive intelligent machines is central to developmental robotics, it has relationships with fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive robotics or computational neuroscience. Yet, while it may reuse some of the techniques elaborated in these fields, it differs from them from many perspectives. It differs from classical artificial intelligence because it does not assume the capability of advanced symbolic reasoning and focuses on embodied and situated sensorimotor and social skills rather than on abstract symbolic problems. It differs from cognitive robotics because it focuses on the processes that allow the formation of cognitive capabilities rather than these capabilities themselves. It differs from computational neuroscience because it focuses on functional modeling of integrated architectures of development and learning. More generally, developmental robotics is uniquely characterized by the following three features: It targets task-independent architectures and learning mechanisms, i.e. the machine/robot has to be able to learn new tasks that are unknown by the engineer; It emphasizes open-ended development and lifelong learning, i.e. the capacity of an organism to acquire continuously novel skills. This should not be understood as a capacity for learning "anything" or even “everything”, but just that the set of skills that is acquired can be infinitely extended at least in some (not all) directions; The complexity of acquired knowledge and skills shall increase (and the increase be controlled) progressively. Developmental robotics emerged at the crossroads of several research communities including embodied artificial intelligence, enactive and dynamical systems cognitive science, connectionism. Starting from the essential idea that learning and development happen as the self-organized result of the dynamical interactions among brains, bodies and their physical and social environment, and trying to understand how this self-organization can be harnessed to provide task-independent lifelong learning of skills of increasing complexity, developmental robotics strongly interacts with fields such as developmental psychology, developmental and cognitive neuroscience, developmental biology (embryology), evolutionary biology, and cognitive linguistics. As many of the theories coming from these sciences are verbal and/or descriptive, this implies a crucial formalization and computational modeling activity in developmental robotics. These computational models are then not only used as ways to explore how to build more versatile and adaptive machines but also as a way to evaluate their coherence and possibly explore alternative explanations for understanding biological development. == Research directions == === Skill domains === Due to the general approach and methodology, developmental robotics projects typically focus on having robots develop the same types of skills as human infants. A first category that is important being investigated is the acquisition of sensorimotor skills. These include the discovery of one's own body, including its structure and dynamics such as hand-eye coordination, locomotion, and interaction with objects as well as tool use, with a particular focus on the discovery and learning of affordances. A second category of skills targeted by developmental robots are social and linguistic skills: the acquisition of simple social behavioural games such as turn-taking, coordinated interaction, lexicons, syntax and grammar, and the grounding of these linguistic skills into sensorimotor skills (sometimes referred as symbol grounding). In parallel, the acquisition of associated cognitive skills are being investigated such as the emergence of the self/non-self distinction, the development of attentional capabilities, of categorization systems and higher-level representations of affordances or social constructs, of the emergence of values, empathy, or theories of mind. === Mechanisms and constraints === The sensorimotor and social spaces in which humans and robot live are so large and complex that only a small part of potentially learnable skills can actually be explored and learnt within a life-time. Thus, mechanisms and constraints are necessary to guide developmental organisms in their development and control of the growth of complexity. There are several important families of these guiding mechanisms and constraints which are studied in developmental robotics, all inspired by human development: Motivational systems, generating internal reward signals that drive exploration and learning, which can be of two main types: extrinsic motivations push robots/organisms to maintain basic specific internal properties such as food and water level, physical integrity, or light (e.g. in phototropic systems); intrinsic motivations push robot to search for novelty, challenge, compression or learning progress per se, thus generating what is sometimes called curiosity-driven learning and exploration, or alternatively active learning and exploration; Social guidance: as humans learn a lot by interacting with their peers, developmental robotics investigates mechanisms that can allow robots to participate to human-like social interaction. By perceiving and interpreting social cues, this may allow robots both to learn from humans (through diverse means such as imitation, emulation, stimulus enhancement, demonstration, etc. ...) and to trigger natural human pedagogy. Thus, social acceptance of developmental robots is also investigated; Statistical inference biases and cumulative knowledge/skill reuse: biases characterizing both representations/encodings and inference mechanisms can typically allow considerable improvement of the efficiency of learning and are thus studied. Related to this, mechanisms allowing to infer new knowledge and acquire new skills by reusing previously learnt structures is also an essential field of study; The properties of embodiment, including geometry, materials, or innate motor primitives/synergies often encoded as dynamical systems, can considerably simplify the acquisition of sensorimotor or social skills, and is sometimes referred as morphological computation. The interaction of these constraints with other constraints is an important axis of investigation; Maturational constraints: In human infants, both the body and the neural system grow progressively, rather than being full-fledged already at birth. This implies, for example, that new degrees of freedom, as well as increases of the volume and resolution of available sensorimotor signals, may appear as learning and development unfold. Transposing these mechanisms in developmental robots, and understanding how it may hinder or on the contrary ease the acquisition of novel complex skills is a central questi

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  Meta Content Framework

  Meta Content Framework (MCF) is a specification of a content format for structuring metadata about web sites and other data. == History == MCF was developed by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group between 1995 and 1997. Rooted in knowledge-representation systems such as CycL, KRL, and KIF, it sought to describe objects, their attributes, and the relationships between them. One application of MCF was HotSauce, also developed by Guha while at Apple. It generated a 3D visualization of a web site's table of contents, based on MCF descriptions. By late 1996, a few hundred sites were creating MCF files and Apple HotSauce allowed users to browse these MCF representations in 3D. When the research project was discontinued, Guha left Apple for Netscape, where, in collaboration with Tim Bray, he adapted MCF to use XML and created the first version of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). == MCF format == An MCF file consists of one or more blocks, each corresponding to an entity. A block looks like this:The identifier is a unique identifier for that entity (more on the scope of the identifier below) and is used to refer to that entity. The following lines each specify a property and one or more values, separated by commas. Each value can be a reference to another entity (via its identifier), a string (enclosed by double quotes) or a number. For example:NOTE: The identifier must not include a comma (,) and must not be enclosed within double quotes. A common parsing failure is due to odd number of unescaped double quotes in text. For instance, "foo bar" baz" needs to be "foo bar\" baz". Commas within double quotes are not considered as value separators. Every entity has at least one property: typeOf.

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  Alec Radford

  Alec Radford is an American artificial intelligence researcher. == Biography == Radford grew up in Texas. He graduated from Cistercian Preparatory School in 2011, where he became an Eagle Scout, and dropped out of Olin College in August 2014, where he and fellow students Slater Victoroff, Diana Yuan, and Madison May had formed the startup Indico in their dorm room. In 2015, the quartet were joined by Luke Metz and the firm and the Facebook AI research lab in New York used generative adversarial networks to create realistic low pixel images. A demonstration of Indico's technology was used without proper attribution in an April 2016 demonstration by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. Radford joined OpenAI around 2016, where he worked on natural-language processing. The following year, Radford trained a neural network on Amazon reviews. The model was fairly basic, with layers which allowed for human understanding. Upon exploring it, he saw that it had a special neuron linked to the sentiment of the reviews, which it had created on its own. This was a drastic improvement from previous neural networks that had analysed sentiment, because they had to be told to do so and specially trained on data that was explicitly labeled according to sentiment. This development made OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever consider that a future model, using more diverse language data, could map far more structures of meaning, eventually becoming a "learned core module" for superintelligence. In 2018, Radford was the lead author on OpenAI's seminal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers, which form the foundation of ChatGPT. At OpenAI, he worked on early GPT models, Whisper, a speech recognition model, and the image generator DALL-E. He left OpenAI in December 2024 to pursue independent research. Around March 2025, Radford joined Thinking Machines Lab as an advisor. He joined along with Bob McGrew who was previously the chief research officer of OpenAI. In April 2026, Radford, Nick Levine, and David Duvenaud released Talkie, an AI model trained on books, newspapers, scientific journals, patents, and case law published before December 31, 1930. When asked about the state of the world in 2026, it stated that one billion people would live in Europe, that London and New York would be connected by steamships that transit between the two in ten days, and "winter will be passed in Paris, and the summer in London."

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  Interactive activation and competition networks

  Interactive activation and competition (IAC) networks are artificial neural networks used to model memory and intuitive generalizations. They are made up of nodes or artificial neurons which are arrayed and activated in ways that emulate the behaviors of human memory. The IAC model is used by the parallel distributed processing (PDP) Group and is associated with James L. McClelland and David E. Rumelhart; it is described in detail in their book Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing: A Handbook of Models, Programs, and Exercises. This model does not contradict any currently known biological data or theories, and its performance is close enough to human performance as to warrant further investigation.

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  Opponent process

  The opponent process is a hypothesis of color vision that states that the human visual system interprets information about color by processing signals from the three types of photoreceptor cells in an antagonistic manner. The three types of cones are called L, M, and S. The names stand for "Long wavelength sensitive,” "middle wavelength sensitive," and "short wavelength sensitive." The opponent-process theory implicates three opponent channels: L versus M, S versus (L+M), and a luminance channel (+ versus -). These cone-opponent mechanisms were at one time thought to be the neural substrate for a psychological theory called Hering's Opponent Colors Theory, which calls for three psychologically important opponent color processes: red versus green, blue versus yellow, and black versus white (luminance). The Opponent Colors Theory is named for the German physiologist Ewald Hering who proposed the idea in the late 19th century. However, it has been argued that Hering’s Opponent Colors Theory lacks adequate phenomenological and empirical support, and may not be a necessary feature of normal human color experience. Correspondingly, considerable physiological and behavioral evidence proves that the physiological cone opponent mechanisms do not constitute the neurobiological basis for Hering's Opponent Colors Theory. == Color theory == === Complementary colors === When staring at a bright color for a while (e.g. red), then looking away at a white field, an afterimage is perceived, such that the original color will evoke its complementary color (cyan, in the case of red input). When complementary colors are combined or mixed, they "cancel each other out" and become neutral (white or gray). That is, complementary colors are never perceived as a mixture; there is no "greenish red" or "yellowish blue", despite claims to the contrary. The strongest color contrast that a color can have is its complementary color. Complementary colors may also be called "opposite colors" and they were originally considered the primary evidence in support of Hering's Opponent Colors Theory. There are two fatal problems with this evidence. First, the complement of red is not green, as called for by Hering's theory; it is bluish-green. And second, there exists a complementary color for every color, so there is nothing special about the set of complementary pairs picked out by Hering's theory. === Unique hues === The colors that define the extremes for each opponent channel are called unique hues, as opposed to composite (mixed) hues. Ewald Hering first defined the unique hues as red, green, blue, and yellow, and based them on the concept that these colors could not be simultaneously perceived. For example, a color cannot appear both red and green. These definitions have been experimentally refined and are represented today by average hue angles of 353° (carmine red), 128° (cobalt green), 228° (cobalt blue), 58° (yellow). The unique hues are a defining feature of many psychological color spaces, but there is substantial evidence showing that the unique hues are not hard wired in the nervous system, contrary to the stipulations of Hering's Opponent Colors Theory. Unique hues can differ between individuals and are often used in psychophysical research to measure variations in color perception due to color-vision deficiencies or color adaptation. While there is considerable inter-subject variability when defining unique hues experimentally, an individual's unique hues are very consistent, to within a few nanometers of wavelength. == Physiological basis == === Relation to LMS color space === The trichromatic theory is in conflict with Hering's Opponent Colors Theory, although it is compatible with a physiological opponent process that compares the outputs of the different classes of cone types. The poles of these cone opponent mechanisms do not correspond to the unique hues of Hering's Opponent Colors Theory and unlike the unique hues, have no privilege in color perception. Most humans have three different cone cells in their retinas that facilitate trichromatic color vision. Colors are determined by the proportional excitation of these three cone types, i.e. their quantum catch. The levels of excitation of each cone type are the parameters that define LMS color space. To calculate the opponent process tristimulus values from the LMS color space, the cone excitations must be compared: The luminous (achromatic) opponent channel is a weighted sum of all three cone cells (plus the rod cells in some conditions). The red–green opponent channel is equal to the difference of the L- and M-cones. The blue–yellow opponent channel is equal to the difference of the S-cone and the average/weighted sum of the L- and M-cones. Most mammals have no L cone (the primate L cone arose from a gene duplication of the M cone opsin gene). These mammals still show two kinds of opponent channels in their retinal ganglion cells: the achromatic channel and the blue-yellow opponency channel. === Cone opponent mechanisms are encoded in the retina === The output of different types of cones are compared by cells in the retina including retina bipolar cells (which compare signals from L and M cones) and bistratified retinal ganglion cells (which compare S cone signals with L and M cone signals). The output of bipolar cells is relayed to the visual cortex by the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) by way of a thalamic relay station called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus. Much of the scientific knowledge of retinal ganglion cell physiology was obtained by neural recordings of cells in the LGN. The cone-opponent mechanisms in the retina and LGN represent a fundamental physiological opponent process but do not represent the unique hues (or Hering's Opponent Colors Theory). For example, the colors that best elicit responses of the bistratified S-(L+M)-opponent neurons are best described as purplish (or lavender) and lime-green, not "blue" and "yellow". The neurons are sometimes referred to as "blue–yellow" neurons, but this is a historical artifact dating to the time when it was thought that Hering's Opponent Colors Theory was hardwired by the retina and the mismatch between the colors to which they are optimally tuned and Hering's Opponent Colors was overlooked. Cone opponent mechanisms exist in the retinas of many mammals, including monkeys, mice, and cats. In primates, the LGN contains three major classes of layers: Magnocellular layers (M, large-cell) – responsible largely for the luminance channel Parvocellular layers (P, small-cell) – responsible largely for red–green opponency Koniocellular layers (K) – responsible largely for blue–yellow opponency, poor spatial resolution, long latency Other mammals such as cats also have three cell types denoted as X (magno), Y (parvo), and W (konio). The W type is beyond most doubt homologous to the primate K type. There are some subtle differences between the M and X types as well as the Y and P types to make the correspondence unclear. === Advantage === Transmitting information in opponent-channel color space could be advantageous over transmitting it in LMS color space ("raw" signals from each cone type). There is some overlap in the wavelengths of light to which the three types of cones (L for long-wave, M for medium-wave, and S for short-wave light) respond, so it is more efficient for the visual system (from a perspective of dynamic range) to record differences between the responses of cones, rather than each type of cone's individual response. Hurvich and Jameson argued that the use of opponent-channel color space would increase color contrast, making the information easier to process by later stages of vision. === Color blindness === Color blindness can be classified by the cone cell that is affected (protan, deutan, tritan) or by the opponent channel that is affected (red–green or blue–yellow). In either case, the channel can either be inactive (in the case of dichromacy) or have a lower dynamic range (in the case of anomalous trichromacy). For example, individuals with deuteranopia see little difference between the red and green unique hues. == History == Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first studied the physiological effect of opposed colors in his Theory of Colours in 1810. Goethe arranged his color wheel symmetrically "for the colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands purple; orange, blue; red, green; and vice versa: Thus again all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other." Ewald Hering proposed opponent color theory in 1892. He thought that the colors red, yellow, green, and blue are special in that any other color can be described as a mix of them, and that they exist in opposite pairs. That is, either red or green is perceived and never greenish-red: Even though yellow is a mixture of red and green in the RGB color theory, humans

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  Colossus (supercomputer)

  Colossus is a supercomputer developed by xAI. Construction began in 2024 in Memphis, Tennessee; the system became operational in July 2024. It is currently the world's largest AI supercomputer. Colossus's primary purpose is to train the company's chatbot, Grok. In addition, Colossus provides computing support to the social-media platform X and to other projects of Elon Musk, such as SpaceX. In 2025, it expanded to neighboring Southaven, Mississippi across the Tennessee–Mississippi border. As of May 6, 2026, Anthropic has agreed to rent all compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center. == Background == Colossus was launched in September 2024 at a former Electrolux site in South Memphis to train the AI language model Grok. Within 19 days of the project's conception, xAI was ready to begin construction. The site was chosen because the abandoned Electrolux building could be repurposed to expedite construction and its proximity to a nearby wastewater treatment facility provided a water source. As of February 2025, xAI plans to build an $80 million facility to process additional wastewater for use at the supercomputer. === xAI === Musk incorporated xAI in March 2023 with the stated purpose of understanding the "nature of the universe". The team includes former members of OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Tesla. Musk was one of the founding members of the company OpenAI, investing up to US$45 million in 2015. He left OpenAI in 2018, reportedly to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla. It has also been reported that he had made a bid for leadership at OpenAI and left when his proposal was rejected. The exact reasons for his departure from the company are unclear. Both Dell Technologies and Supermicro partnered with xAI to build the supercomputer. It was originally powered by 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and was constructed in 122 days. 3 months after the first 100,000 GPUs were deployed, xAI announced that they had increased the system to 200,000 GPUs and that they intended to continue increasing the computer's processing power to 1 million GPUs. As of April 2025, xAI claimed Colossus was the largest AI training platform in the world. == Choice of location == xAI selected Memphis, in southwestern Tennessee, as the site for Colossus in part because an existing industrial facility allowed the project to proceed more quickly than constructing a new data center. Elon Musk was initially told that building a data center would take 18–24 months. The company instead searched for a vacant facility and selected the former Electrolux factory in Memphis. Electrolux opened the facility in 2012 and operated it for about eight years before closing it in 2020 after relocating operations to Springfield, Tennessee. The building covered 785,000 sq ft (72,900 m2) and had been purchased by Phoenix Investors in December 2023 for $35 million . Because the structure was already in place, work on the supercomputer could begin immediately rather than waiting for a new facility to be constructed. According to Forbes, xAI considered seven or eight other sites before selecting Memphis, and Musk finalized the decision to build in Memphis in about a week. The decision was finalized in March 2024, after which construction began. xAI publicly announced in June 2024 that Colossus would be built in Memphis. The building itself was not the only reason xAI selected Memphis. According to the Greater Memphis Chamber, the company chose the city because of its "reliable power grid, ability to create a water recycling facility, proximity to the Mississippi River and ample land". The city was also able to provide the large amounts of electricity and water needed to operate the supercomputer. At full capacity, the system was expected to require 150 megawatts of electricity and millions of gallons of water per day. The project also relied on partnerships with local and regional organizations including Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW), Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the City of Memphis, and Shelby County. The city also provided financial incentives for the project. == Environmental impact == AI data centers consume large amounts of energy. At the site of Colossus in South Memphis, the grid connection was only 8 MW, so xAI applied to temporarily set up more than a dozen gas turbines (Voltagrid’s 2.5 MW units and Solar Turbines’ 16 MW SMT-130s) which would steadily burn methane gas from a 16-inch natural gas main. Aerial imagery in April 2025 showed 35 gas turbines had been set up at a combined 422 MW. These turbines have been estimated to generate about "72 megawatts, which is approximately 3% of the (TVA) power grid". The higher number of gas turbines and the subsequent emissions requires xAI to have a major source permit. In Memphis, xAI was able to avoid some environmental rules in the construction of Colossus, such as operating without permits for the on-site methane gas turbines because they are "portable". The Shelby County Health Department told NPR that "it only regulates gas-burning generators if they're in the same location for more than 364 days". However, in a January 2026 ruling, the EPA revised its New Source Performance Standard and announced that large methane gas turbines require permits even for temporary operations. In November 2024, the grid connection was upgraded to 150 MW, and some turbines were removed. Along with high electricity needs, the expected water demand is over five million gallons of water per day. While xAI has stated they plan to work with MLGW on a wastewater treatment facility and the installation of 50 megawatts of large battery storage facilities, there are currently no concrete plans in place aside from a one-page factsheet shared by MLGW. == Community response == The plan to build Colossus in Memphis was unknown to residents, City Council members, and environmental agencies. Many did not find out about the project until the day before, or the day of, as they watched the announcement on the local news. Keshaun Pearson, president of Memphis Community Against Pollution, stated that there is a historical lack of transparency and communication surrounding environmental issues in Memphis. Some community members in Memphis have expressed concern about the potential for additional air and water pollution caused by the supercomputer. In a letter to the Shelby County Health Department, the Southern Environmental Law Center stated the emissions from the turbines make the facility "...likely the largest industrial emitter of NOx in Memphis..." This is due to data supplied by the manufacturer showing that "...xAI emits between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx)..." At a public Shelby County Commissioner's hearing on April 9, 2025, residents living near the site of Colossus voiced complaints about air quality, noting that they have chronic respiratory issues related to living in a polluted section of Memphis. One woman said she smells "everything but the right thing and the right thing is the clean air." Other residents voiced frustration that Brent Mayo, the senior xAI official responsible for building out xAI's infrastructure, did not attend the meeting to discuss community concerns. Keshaun Pearson also stated that "We're getting more and more days a year where it is unhealthy for us to go outside." People living near the site of Colossus have said they were not offered the opportunity for a public review of the plans, nor were they provided with information on how their community could potentially benefit. The community is also concerned about the strain on the power grid. Memphis's peak demand is around 3 GW. In November 2024, TVA approved xAI's request for access to more than 100 megawatts of power to Colossus which is supplied by MLGW. In December 2022, MLGW imposed (then rescinded) rolling blackouts during several days of extreme cold, straining the power grid. In a letter to the TVA, the SELC "urged the agency to 'prioritize Memphis families' access to reliable power over the 'secondary purpose' of serving xAI". == Current progress == In early December 2024, Ted Townsend detailed how the power of Colossus doubled in its processing capability. When it first went online in September 2024, it was using "100,000 Nvidia H100 processing chips". This initial launch demonstrated Colossus to be the largest supercomputer globally. The maximum power consumption increased from 150 to 250 MW. As of June 2025, the supercomputer consists of 150,000 H100 GPUs, 50,000 H200 GPUs, and 30,000 GB200 GPUs. Another 110,000 GB200 GPUs are to be brought online at a second data center, also in the Memphis area. The expansion of this supercomputer has already been discussed and will be the second phase of the project. xAI also plans to increase Colossus to 1 million GPUs. Because the supercomputer currently utilizes gas turbines for power, alongside 168 Tesla Megapack battery storage units. xAI is also looking to add more

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  Lumpers and splitters

  Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any academic discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example, schools of literature, biological taxa, and so on. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways. == Origin of the terms == The earliest known use of these terms was thought to be by Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1857: "It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers". But according to research done by the deputy director at NCSE, Glenn Branch, the credit is due to naturalist Edward Newman who wrote in 1845, "The time has arrived for discarding imaginary species, and the duty of doing this is as imperative as the admission of new ones when such are really discovered. The talents described under the respective names of 'hair-splitting' and 'lumping' are unquestionably yielding their power to the mightier power of Truth." They were then introduced more widely by George G. Simpson in his 1945 work The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals. As he put it: splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera ... and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. ... Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat. A later use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper "On lumpers and splitters ..." by the medical geneticist Victor McKusick. Reference to lumpers and splitters in the humanities appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement. It followed from Hexter's detailed review of Hill's book Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, in which Hill developed Max Weber's argument that the rise of capitalism was facilitated by Calvinist Puritanism. Hexter objected to Hill's "mining" of sources to find evidence that supported his theories. Hexter argued that Hill plucked quotations from sources in a way that distorted their meaning. Hexter explained this as a mental habit that he called "lumping". According to him, "lumpers" rejected differences and chose to emphasise similarities. Any evidence that did not fit their arguments was ignored as aberrant. Splitters, by contrast, emphasised differences, and resisted simple schemes. While lumpers consistently tried to create coherent patterns, splitters preferred incoherent complexity. == Usage in various fields == === Biology === The categorisation and naming of a particular species should be regarded as a hypothesis about the evolutionary relationships and distinguishability of that group of organisms. As further information comes to hand, the hypothesis may be confirmed or refuted. Sometimes, especially in the past when communication was more difficult, taxonomists working in isolation have given two distinct names to individual organisms later identified as the same species. When two named species are agreed to be of the same species, the older species name is almost always retained dropping the newer species name honouring a convention known as "priority of nomenclature". This form of lumping is technically called synonymisation. Dividing a taxon into multiple, often new, taxa is called splitting. Taxonomists are often referred to as "lumpers" or "splitters" by their colleagues, depending on their personal approach to recognizing differences or commonalities between organisms. For example, the number of genera used in Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group I (PPG I) has proved controversial. PPG I uses 18 lycophyte and 319 fern genera. The earlier system put forward by Smith et al. (2006) had suggested a range of 274 to 312 genera for ferns alone. By contrast, the system of Christenhusz & Chase (2014) used 5 lycophyte and about 212 fern genera. The number of fern genera was further reduced to 207 in a subsequent publication. Defending PPG I, Schuettpelz et al. (2018) argue that the larger number of genera is a result of "the gradual accumulation of new collections and new data" and hence "a greater appreciation of fern diversity and ... an improved ability to distinguish taxa". They also argue that the number of species per genus in the PPG I system is already higher than in other groups of organisms (about 33 species per genus for ferns as opposed to about 22 species per genus for angiosperms) and that reducing the number of genera as Christenhusz and Chase propose yields the excessive number of about 50 species per genus for ferns. In response, Christenhusz and Chase (2018) argue that the excessive splitting of genera destabilises the usage of names and will lead to greater instability in future, and that the highly split genera have few if any characters that can be used to recognise them, making identification difficult, even to generic level. They further argue that comparing numbers of species per genus in different groups is "fundamentally meaningless". === History === In history, lumpers are those who tend to create broad definitions that cover large periods of time and many disciplines, whereas splitters want to assign names to tight groups of inter-relationships. Lumping tends to create a more and more unwieldy definition, with members having less and less mutually in common. This can lead to definitions which are little more than conventionalities, or groups which join fundamentally different examples. Splitting often leads to "distinctions without difference", ornate and fussy categories, and failure to see underlying similarities. For example, in the arts, "Romantic" can refer specifically to a period of German poetry roughly from 1780 to 1810, but would exclude the later work of Goethe, among other writers. In music it can mean every composer from Hummel through Rachmaninoff, plus many that came after. === Software modelling === Software engineering often proceeds by building models (sometimes known as model-driven architecture). A lumper is keen to generalise, and produces models with a small number of broadly defined objects. A splitter is reluctant to generalise, and produces models with a large number of narrowly defined objects. Conversion between the two styles is not necessarily symmetrical. For example, if error messages in two narrowly defined classes behave in the same way, the classes can be easily combined. But if some messages in a broad class behave differently, every object in the class must be examined before the class can be split. This illustrates the principle that "splits can be lumped more easily than lumps can be split". === Language classification === There is no agreement among historical linguists about what amount of evidence is needed for two languages to be safely classified in the same language family. For this reason, many proposed language families have had lumper–splitter controversies, including Altaic, Pama–Nyungan, Nilo-Saharan, and most of the larger families of the Americas. At a completely different level, the splitting of a mutually intelligible dialect continuum into different languages, or lumping them into one, is also an issue that continually comes up, though the consensus in contemporary linguistics is that there is no completely objective way to settle the question. Splitters regard the comparative method (meaning not comparison in general, but only reconstruction of a common ancestor or protolanguage) as the only valid proof of kinship, and consider genetic relatedness to be the question of interest. American linguists of recent decades tend to be splitters. Lumpers are more willing to admit techniques like mass lexical comparison or lexicostatistics, and mass typological comparison, and to tolerate the uncertainty of whether relationships found by these methods are the result of linguistic divergence (descent from common ancestor) or language convergence (borrowing). Much long-range comparison work has been from Russian linguists belonging to the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics, most notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Sergei Starostin. In the United States, Greenberg and Ruhlen's work has been met with little acceptance from linguists. Earlier American linguists like Morris Swadesh and Edward Sapir also pursued large-scale classifications like Sapir's 1929 scheme for the Americas, accompanied by controversy similar to that today. === Religious studies === Paul F. Bradshaw suggests that the same principles of lumping and splitting apply to the study of early Christian liturgy. Lumpers, who tend to predominate in this field, try to find a single line of successive texts from the apostolic age to the

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  Sriram Krishnan

  Sriram Krishnan (born 1984) is a tech executive and White House official, currently serving as the Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence. Krishnan was named a Time Person of the Year in 2025 as an "Architect of Artificial Intelligence." He was described in Time as providing the "wake-up call that we needed" to the other AI builders, leading to "a multiyear, $500 billion initiative dubbed Stargate" to push American-made AI, as well as numerous other AI initiatives. Also in December 2025, President Trump said of Krishnan, "without him, things on AI would not function well" and cited Krishnan as the leading figure behind the American executive order on AI. As the leader of the United States' policy team regarding artificial intelligence, Krishnan plays "a significant role in shaping the administration’s approach to AI and driving measures to advance federal adoption of AI." The role calls for removing barriers to AI adoption within the government, driving vendors toward solutions suitable for federal needs, designing sensible regulation of private-sector AI, and conducting "AI diplomacy". He has stated a policy goal of "reinvigorating US dominance in emerging technologies," including AI. He also represents the United States' interests in AI abroad, such as at the Paris AI Summit. He is one of the authors of the American "AI Action Plan" released in July, 2025, which he contends is necessary to win the "existential race with China" for AI supremacy. Krishnan, a U.S. citizen born in India, is also a venture capitalist, podcaster, product manager and author. Early in his career, he led product teams at Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Snap. In addition to his work as an investor and technologist, he and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, rose to additional prominence in 2021 as podcast hosts. He served as a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and led its London office. In 2022, Krishnan announced that he was working with Elon Musk on the rebuilding of Twitter following Musk's acquisition of the company. On December 22, 2024, US president-elect Donald Trump announced that Krishnan would be Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in his incoming administration; in 2026 he joined the National Economic Council. == Early life and education == Krishnan was born in Chennai, India. He earned his Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology from SRM University (2001–2005), moved to the United States in 2007 to join Microsoft, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2016. == Career == === Early career === In 2007, he began working at Microsoft where he served as a program manager for Visual Studio. At Facebook, Krishnan built the Facebook Audience Network, a competitive platform to Google's ad technologies. At Twitter, he led product and core user experience, driving a 20% annual user growth rate and launching a redesigned home page and events experience. === Andreessen Horowitz === Krishnan was appointed a general partner of American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ("a16z") in February 2021. He was anticipated to serve consumer and social markets, however he has also theorized on the impact of "deep tech" on society. In 2023 he was appointed to lead the firm's London office, its first non-US location. The office is expected to serve Web3 investments as well as AI and other fields. Krishnan announced that he would leave the firm at the end of 2024. === Social media and AI === In 2022, various news media reported that Krishnan was assisting Elon Musk in the revamp of Twitter following Musk's takeover of the company. Additional reports named Krishnan as the leading candidate for the role of CEO of the newly private company. Krishnan penned a 2023 New York Times opinion column regarding social media, AI, and related fields. He predicted a rise in the number and diversity of online spaces due to decentralization and platforms like Farcaster, Bluesky and Mastodon. === Public office === In 2024, the Financial Times reported that Krishnan was active in international affairs, reintroducing Boris Johnson to Elon Musk, following Musk's nomination to the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. Krishnan was also reported as potentially leaving a16z at the end of the year to "be jumping into something I've wanted to spend [his] energy on," which was widely reported as being related to Musk's and Vivek Ramaswamy's work at DOGE. Others reported to be involved include Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreesen, Bill Ackman, and Travis Kalanick. On December 22, 2024, US president-elect Donald Trump announced that he would be Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in his incoming administration. On February 6, 2025, Reuters reported that Krishnan would be accompanying Vice President Vance to the Paris AI Summit, a "major artificial intelligence" event later that month. Other members of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy would also be joining the event with around 100 other countries to "focus on AI's potential." Krishnan joined a U.S. technology policy delegation to the Middle East in advance of President Trump's visit in May 2025. Conducting "AI diplomacy," Krishnan negotiated the spread of U.S. AI technologies with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, as well as other means to strengthen bilateral trade in artificial intelligence technologies. He explained that the goal of the diplomatic mission was that "we want American A.I. to spread." Krishnan, along with David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, were credited as authors of the American AI Action Plan released in July 2025. The plan is "the administration’s most significant policy directive" regarding artificial intelligence; it calls for financing to support the global spread of American AI models and a policy to enforce neutrality in models. The Washington Post referred to the plan as a "bold action to ensure that American AI remains at the cutting edge." The AI Action Plan is a continuation of prior efforts to reduce barriers to U.S. production of AI systems and the removal of rules that were considered to hinder such growth. Later in 2025, at the POLITICO AI & Tech Summit, Krishnan called national AI development "an existential race with China." He suggested that private companies are best positioned to create new models, quipping "let them cook." He further suggested that state-by-state regulation of AI technologies may hinder national AI competitiveness. Also in 2025, at the Axios AI+ Summit, Krishnan stated that the United States and China are in a race for AI supremacy, in which the winner will be judged by market share. Winning the race is a "business strategy" to Krishnan. Krishnan was named in the 2025 Time Person of the Year article as an "AI Architect". === The Aarthi and Sriram Show and other media === In early 2021, Krishnan and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, launched a Clubhouse talk show that "focuses on organic conversations on anything from startups to venture capitalism and cryptocurrencies." An early appearance by Elon Musk on the Good Time Show was described as the first show that "broke Clubhouse" by rapidly exceeding the limit of 5,000 simultaneous users. The desire to interact with a larger community led to a variety of later innovations to allow streaming and replaying of Clubhouse chats. On that episode, Elon Musk grilled Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev regarding the GameStop trading controversy. As of December 2021, the show had over 187,000 subscribers, plus 735,000 subscribers between Krishnan and Ramamurthy's personal Clubhouse accounts. Other guests have included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Diane von Fürstenberg, Tony Hawk, MrBeast, and A.R. Rahman. In 2022, the Good Time Show moved to YouTube. It then evolved to a podcasting format under the name The Aarthi and Sriram Show, with both audio and video content. The Hollywood Reporter reported that the podcast had received more than 1 million downloads by early 2023. == Personal life == Krishnan is married to Aarthi Ramamurthy, co-host of The Aarthi and Sriram Show (formerly the Good Time Show) and a serial entrepreneur. They met in college in 2003 through a Yahoo! chat room related to a coding project and began dating in 2006 and eloped in 2010. == Awards == Time Person of the Year - 2025

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  Foveated rendering

  Foveated rendering is a rendering technique which uses an eye tracker integrated with a virtual reality headset to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea). A less sophisticated variant called fixed foveated rendering doesn't utilise eye tracking and instead assumes a fixed focal point. == History == Research into foveated rendering dates back at least to 1991. At Tech Crunch Disrupt SF 2014, Fove unveiled a headset featuring foveated rendering. This was followed by a successful kickstarter in May 2015. At CES 2016, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) demoed a new 250 Hz eye tracking system and a working foveated rendering solution. It resulted from a partnership with camera sensor manufacturer Omnivision who provided the camera hardware for the new system. In July 2016, Nvidia demonstrated during SIGGRAPH a new method of foveated rendering claimed to be invisible to users. In February 2017, Qualcomm announced their Snapdragon 835 Virtual Reality Development Kit (VRDK) which includes foveated rendering support called Adreno Foveation. == Use == According to chief scientist Michael Abrash at Oculus, utilising foveated rendering in conjunction with sparse rendering and deep learning image reconstruction has the potential to require an order of magnitude fewer pixels to be rendered in comparison to a full image. Later, these results have been demonstrated and published. In December 2019, fixed foveated rendering support was added to the Oculus Quest SDK. A number of VR headsets have included on-board eye tracking to provide support for foveated rendering, including HTC's Vive Pro Eye (2019), Meta Quest Pro (2022), PlayStation VR2 (2023), and Apple Vision Pro (2024). In 2025, Valve announced the upcoming Steam Frame headset, which applies a variation of the technique known as "foveated streaming" for wireless streaming from a PC to the headset; the method similarly uses variance in bit rate, and is performed at the encoder level rather than the software level.

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  Babelfy

  Babelfy is a software algorithm for the disambiguation of text written in any language. It performs the tasks of multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation (i.e., the disambiguation of common nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and Entity Linking (i.e. the disambiguation of mentions to encyclopedic entities like people, companies, places, etc.). == Overview == Babelfy uses the BabelNet multilingual knowledge graph to perform disambiguation and entity linking in three steps: It associates with each vertex of the BabelNet semantic network, i.e., either concept or named entity, a semantic signature, that is, a set of related vertices. This is a preliminary step which needs to be performed only once, independently of the input text. Given an input text, it extracts all the linkable fragments from this text and, for each of them, lists the possible meanings according to the semantic network. It creates a graph-based semantic interpretation of the whole text by linking the candidate meanings of the extracted fragments using the previously computed semantic signatures. It then extracts a dense subgraph of this representation and selects the best candidate meaning for each fragment. As a result, the text, written in any of the 271 languages supported by BabelNet, is output with possibly overlapping semantic annotations.

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  Mojo (programming language)

  Mojo is an in-development proprietary programming language based on Python available for Linux and macOS. Mojo aims to combine the usability of a high-level programming language, specifically Python, with the performance of a system programming language such as C++, Rust, and Zig. As of October 2025, the Mojo compiler is closed source with an open source standard library. Modular, the company behind Mojo, has stated an intent to open source the Mojo language, committing to open-source Mojo in "fall 2026". Mojo builds on the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) compiler software framework, instead of directly on the lower level LLVM compiler framework like many languages such as Julia, Swift, C++, and Rust. MLIR is a newer compiler framework that allows Mojo to exploit higher level compiler passes unavailable in LLVM alone, and allows Mojo to compile down and target more than only central processing units (CPUs), including producing code that can run on graphics processing units (GPUs), Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and other accelerators. It can also often more effectively use certain types of CPU optimizations directly, like single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) with minor intervention by a developer, as occurs in many other languages. According to Jeremy Howard of fast.ai, Mojo can be seen as "syntax sugar for MLIR" and for that reason Mojo is well optimized for applications like artificial intelligence (AI). == Origin and development history == The Mojo programming language was created by Modular Inc, which was founded by Chris Lattner, the original architect of the Swift programming language and LLVM, and Tim Davis, a former Google employee. The intention behind Mojo is to bridge the gap between Python’s ease of use and the fast performance required for cutting-edge AI applications. According to public change logs, Mojo development goes back to 2022. In May 2023, the first publicly testable version was made available online via a hosted playground. By September 2023 Mojo was available for local download for Linux and by October 2023 it was also made available for download on Apple's macOS. In March 2024, Modular open sourced the Mojo standard library and started accepting community contributions under the Apache 2.0 license. == Features == Mojo was created for an easy transition from Python. The language has syntax similar to Python's, with inferred static typing, and allows users to import Python modules. It uses LLVM and MLIR as its compilation backend. The language also intends to add a foreign function interface to call C/C++ and Python code. The language is not source-compatible with Python 3, only providing a subset of its syntax, e.g. missing the global keyword, list and dictionary comprehensions, and support for classes. Further, Mojo also adds features that enable performant low-level programming: fn for creating typed, compiled functions and "struct" for memory-optimized alternatives to classes. Mojo structs support methods, fields, operator overloading, and decorators. The language also provides a borrow checker, an influence from Rust. Mojo def functions use value semantics by default (functions receive a copy of all arguments and any modifications are not visible outside the function), while Python functions use reference semantics (functions receive a reference on their arguments and any modification of a mutable argument inside the function is visible outside). The language is not currently open source, but it is planned to be made open source in the future. Modular has since committed to open-sourcing the Mojo language in "fall 2026". == Programming examples == In Mojo, functions can be declared using both fn (for performant functions) or def (for Python compatibility). Basic arithmetic operations in Mojo with a def function: and with an fn function: The manner in which Mojo employs var and let for mutable and immutable variable declarations respectively mirrors the syntax found in Swift. In Swift, var is used for mutable variables, while let is designated for constants or immutable variables. Variable declaration and usage in Mojo:

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