AI For Business Rules

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

Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms (formerly Office 365 Forms) is an online survey creator, part of Microsoft 365. == Usage == Forms allows users to create surveys and quizzes with automatic marking. The data can be exported to Microsoft Excel, Power BI dashboards and viewed live using the Present feature. == Phishing and fraud == Due to a wave of phishing attacks utilizing Microsoft 365 in early 2021, Microsoft uses algorithms to automatically detect and block phishing attempts with Microsoft Forms. Also, Microsoft advises Forms users not to submit personal information, such as passwords, in a form or survey. It also place a similar advisory underneath the “Submit” button in every form created with Forms, warning users not to give out their password.
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Artificial intelligence in Brazilian industry

In 2022, 16.9% (1,620) of the 9,586 Brazilian industrial companies with 100 or more employees used artificial intelligence in their operations Among the companies that used AI, the areas of administration (73.8%), product project development (65.9%), processes, services and marketing (65.1%) were those that used it the most, followed by the areas of production (56.4%) and logistics (48.4%). == Current scenario == === Adoption in Brazilian industrial sectors === In senior management, the majority (56%) of executives have a long-term vision for its use. The study also shows that IT, Innovation, and Marketing are the areas where AI use is most widespread, and that 43% of companies are developing or adapting the algorithms they use. The majority of large institutions that reported some type of AI use purchased these solutions from other companies (76%). Some factors for the adoption of artificial intelligence in companies include the establishment of an autonomous strategy by the company (87.0%), and the influence of suppliers and/or customers (63.0%) and the main difficulties in using technologies were high costs (80.8%), lack of qualified personnel in the company (54.6%) and excessive economic risks (49.5%). Three variables are considered the most relevant to explain the option to use AI: the implementation of a digital security policy, the size of companies with 250 or more employees and the characteristics of the company related to information and communication. When analyzing AI use by company size in Brazil, large companies have the highest proportion of AI use, mainly due to their investment capacity and technology experimentation. However, when comparing Brazil and Europe, indicators show an acceleration in AI use among large European companies, while in Brazil the situation remains stable. In 2023, 30% of large companies in the European bloc used some type of AI, a figure that rose to 41% in 2024, while in Brazil these proportions were 41% in 2023 and 38% in 2024. === Workforce === The challenge of upskilling begins with employees who are capable of understanding recent technological changes. Similarly, companies must create the environment and conditions for workforce development conducive to innovation, and universities must be prepared to provide knowledge aligned with the transition process, which in turn must be supported by public policies. The concern with training a specialized workforce in AI can be seen in the low number of graduates and PhDs in computer science and computer engineering in Brazil, compared to the number shown in other countries. As recorded in the document Recommendations for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Brazil, 2019 data from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) indicate that "the number of PhDs graduated annually in computing remained below 400 in 2016, and is not expected to have increased during the Covid-19 pandemic" (ABC, 2023). In the United States, by contrast, the number of PhDs graduated in these two areas has remained around 1,800 for the past 11 years, and during this period, the number of PhDs specializing in AI jumped from 10% to 19%. Based on data from the CNPq Lattes Platform (October 2019), it is possible to observe that the number of professionals in the AI field in Brazil is 4,429 specialists. This is still a small number compared to the 415,166 IT jobs in the country's business sector alone. === R&D, scientific production and integration with industry === China and the United States lead in the number of publications. These two countries are followed by the G7 members: India, Austria, South Korea, and Spain. Brazil appears in the next group, alongside the Netherlands, Russia, Indonesia, and Ireland. Regarding the promotion of research and technologies related to AI, public entities such as the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) stood out as the main funders. Currently, different countries and territories have been promoting the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the Brazilian case, one of the main initiatives is the creation of Engineering Research Centers/Applied Research Centers (CPE/CPA) in AI by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), in collaboration with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), the Ministry of Communications (MC) and the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br). In terms of the number of patents filed and the volume of investments, the leading nations in AI are the United States, China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Singapore, Canada, Israel, and Italy. Brazil appears among the top twenty countries in some rankings, mainly due to its good number of publications (approximately 10% of the number of articles published by the United States). The US is home to approximately 60% of the world's top AI researchers, followed by China (11%), Europe (10%), and Canada (6%). To change this scenario, in August 2024, the Brazilian government announced an investment of R$23 billion until 2028 in artificial intelligence, seeking to “transform the country into a global reference in innovation”. == Future challenges == The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2020) report highlighted three factors that hinder the digital transformation journey and application of AI in Brazil: insufficient infrastructure, high costs due to the tax system, and financial limitations, such as limited access to financing. The costs of adopting technology, its incompatibility with the business, and the lack of training also represent obstacles that Brazilian industry must overcome. There are also inherent obstacles for companies. A McKinsey review emphasizes that once a company chooses one or more sectors to focus on, it must select specific applications. Buyers aren't interested in artificial intelligence simply because it's a breakthrough technology; they want AI to generate a good return on investment, whether by solving specific problems, saving money, or increasing sales. If an AI vendor tried to offer a horizontal solution, the value proposition might not be as compelling. Part of the solution to Brazil's technological backwardness involves building an ecosystem fueled by private institutions, universities, and governments.
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Data (word)

The word data is most often used as a singular collective mass noun in educated everyday usage. However, due to the history and etymology of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum. == Usage in English == In one sense, data is the plural form of datum. Datum actually can also be a count noun with the plural datums (see usage in datum article) that can be used with cardinal numbers (e.g., "80 datums"); data (originally a Latin plural) is not used like a normal count noun with cardinal numbers and can be plural with plural determiners such as these and many, or it can be used as a mass noun with a verb in the singular form. Even when a very small quantity of data is referenced (one number, for example), the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum. The debate over appropriate usage continues, but "data" as a singular form is far more common. In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of "an item given". In cartography, geography, nuclear magnetic resonance and technical drawing, it is often used to refer to a single specific reference datum from which distances to all other data are measured. Any measurement or result is a datum, though data point is now far more common. Data is indeed most often used as a singular mass noun in educated everyday usage. Some major newspapers, such as The New York Times, use it either in the singular or plural. In The New York Times, the phrases "the survey data are still being analyzed" and "the first year for which data is available" have appeared within one day. The Wall Street Journal explicitly allows this usage in its style guide. The Associated Press style guide classifies data as a collective noun that takes the singular when treated as a unit but the plural when referring to individual items (e.g., "The data is sound" and "The data have been carefully collected"). In scientific writing, data is often treated as a plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions, but the word is also used as a singular mass entity like information (e.g., in computing and related disciplines). British usage now widely accepts treating data as singular in standard English, including everyday newspaper usage at least in non-scientific use. UK scientific publishing still prefers treating it as a plural. Some UK university style guides recommend using data for both singular and plural use, and others recommend treating it only as a singular in connection with computers. The IEEE Computer Society allows usage of data as either a mass noun or plural based on author preference, while IEEE in the editorial style manual indicates to always use the plural form. Some professional organizations and style guides require that authors treat data as a plural noun. For example, the Air Force Flight Test Center once stated that the word data is always plural, never singular.
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Communication-avoiding algorithm

Communication-avoiding algorithms minimize movement of data within a memory hierarchy for improving its running-time and energy consumption. These minimize the total of two costs (in terms of time and energy): arithmetic and communication. Communication, in this context refers to moving data, either between levels of memory or between multiple processors over a network. It is much more expensive than arithmetic. == Formal theory == === Two-level memory model === A common computational model in analyzing communication-avoiding algorithms is the two-level memory model: There is one processor and two levels of memory. Level 1 memory is infinitely large. Level 0 memory ("cache") has size M {\displaystyle M} . In the beginning, input resides in level 1. In the end, the output resides in level 1. Processor can only operate on data in cache. The goal is to minimize data transfers between the two levels of memory. === Matrix multiplication === Corollary 6.2: More general results for other numerical linear algebra operations can be found in. The following proof is from. == Motivation == Consider the following running-time model: Measure of computation = Time per FLOP = γ Measure of communication = No. of words of data moved = β ⇒ Total running time = γ·(no. of FLOPs) + β·(no. of words) From the fact that β >> γ as measured in time and energy, communication cost dominates computation cost. Technological trends indicate that the relative cost of communication is increasing on a variety of platforms, from cloud computing to supercomputers to mobile devices. The report also predicts that gap between DRAM access time and FLOPs will increase 100× over coming decade to balance power usage between processors and DRAM. Energy consumption increases by orders of magnitude as we go higher in the memory hierarchy. United States president Barack Obama cited communication-avoiding algorithms in the FY 2012 Department of Energy budget request to Congress: New Algorithm Improves Performance and Accuracy on Extreme-Scale Computing Systems. On modern computer architectures, communication between processors takes longer than the performance of a floating-point arithmetic operation by a given processor. ASCR researchers have developed a new method, derived from commonly used linear algebra methods, to minimize communications between processors and the memory hierarchy, by reformulating the communication patterns specified within the algorithm. This method has been implemented in the TRILINOS framework, a highly-regarded suite of software, which provides functionality for researchers around the world to solve large scale, complex multi-physics problems. == Objectives == Communication-avoiding algorithms are designed with the following objectives: Reorganize algorithms to reduce communication across all memory hierarchies. Attain the lower-bound on communication when possible. The following simple example demonstrates how these are achieved. === Matrix multiplication example === Let A, B and C be square matrices of order n × n. The following naive algorithm implements C = C + A B: for i = 1 to n for j = 1 to n for k = 1 to n C(i,j) = C(i,j) + A(i,k) B(k,j) Arithmetic cost (time-complexity): n2(2n − 1) for sufficiently large n or O(n3). Rewriting this algorithm with communication cost labelled at each step for i = 1 to n {read row i of A into fast memory} - n2 reads for j = 1 to n {read C(i,j) into fast memory} - n2 reads {read column j of B into fast memory} - n3 reads for k = 1 to n C(i,j) = C(i,j) + A(i,k) B(k,j) {write C(i,j) back to slow memory} - n2 writes Fast memory may be defined as the local processor memory (CPU cache) of size M and slow memory may be defined as the DRAM. Communication cost (reads/writes): n3 + 3n2 or O(n3) Since total running time = γ·O(n3) + β·O(n3) and β >> γ the communication cost is dominant. The blocked (tiled) matrix multiplication algorithm reduces this dominant term: ==== Blocked (tiled) matrix multiplication ==== Consider A, B and C to be n/b-by-n/b matrices of b-by-b sub-blocks where b is called the block size; assume three b-by-b blocks fit in fast memory. for i = 1 to n/b for j = 1 to n/b {read block C(i,j) into fast memory} - b2 × (n/b)2 = n2 reads for k = 1 to n/b {read block A(i,k) into fast memory} - b2 × (n/b)3 = n3/b reads {read block B(k,j) into fast memory} - b2 × (n/b)3 = n3/b reads C(i,j) = C(i,j) + A(i,k) B(k,j) - {do a matrix multiply on blocks} {write block C(i,j) back to slow memory} - b2 × (n/b)2 = n2 writes Communication cost: 2n3/b + 2n2 reads/writes << 2n3 arithmetic cost Making b as large possible: 3b2 ≤ M we achieve the following communication lower bound: 31/2n3/M1/2 + 2n2 or Ω (no. of FLOPs / M1/2) == Previous approaches for reducing communication == Most of the approaches investigated in the past to address this problem rely on scheduling or tuning techniques that aim at overlapping communication with computation. However, this approach can lead to an improvement of at most a factor of two. Ghosting is a different technique for reducing communication, in which a processor stores and computes redundantly data from neighboring processors for future computations. Cache-oblivious algorithms represent a different approach introduced in 1999 for fast Fourier transforms, and then extended to graph algorithms, dynamic programming, etc. They were also applied to several operations in linear algebra as dense LU and QR factorizations. The design of architecture specific algorithms is another approach that can be used for reducing the communication in parallel algorithms, and there are many examples in the literature of algorithms that are adapted to a given communication topology.
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AFNLP

AFNLP (Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing Associations) is the organization for coordinating the natural language processing related activities and events in the Asia-Pacific region. == Foundation == AFNLP was founded on 4 October 2000. == Member Associations == ALTA – Australasian Language Technology Association ANLP Japan Association of Natural Language Processing ROCLING Taiwan ROC Computational Linguistics Society SIG-KLC Korea SIG-Korean Language Computing of Korea Information Science Society == Existing Asian Initiatives == NLPRS: Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium IRAL: International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages PACLING: Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics PACLIC: Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation PRICAI: Pacific Rim International Conference on AI ICCPOL: International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages ROCLING: Research on Computational Linguistics Conference == Conferences == IJCNLP-04: The 1st International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Hainan Island, China IJCNLP-05: The 2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Jeju Island, Korea IJCNLP-08: The 3rd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Hyderabad, India ACL-IJCNLP-2009: Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) in Singapore IJNCLP-11: The 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Chiang Mai, Thailand
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User-subjective approach

The user-subjective approach is the first interaction design approach dedicated specifically to personal information management (PIM). The approach offers design principles with which PIM systems (e.g. operating systems, email applications and web browsers) can make systematic use of subjective (i.e. user-dependent) attributes. The approach evolved in three stages: (a) theoretical foundations first published in a Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology during 2003. The paper introduces the approach and its design principles (b) evidence and implementation was published in another JASIST paper in 2008. The paper gives empirical evidence in support of the approach as well as seven novel design schemes that derives from it. It has won the Best JASIST paper award in 2009.(c) specific design evaluation this stage has already begun with evaluation of the first user-subjective design prototype called GrayArea in a Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems paper published in 2009. == Theoretical foundations == The user-subjective approach takes advantage of the fact that in PIM the person who retrieves the information is the same person who had previously stored it. PIM can be seen as a communication between the person and him\her self at two different times: the time of storage and the time of retrieval. The PIM system design should help facilitate that unique communication by allowing the user use subjective (user-dependent) attributes in addition to the standard objective ones. PIM systems should capture these subjective attributes when the user interacts with the information item (either automatically or by using direct manipulation interface) in order to help the user retrieve the item later on. The user-subjective approach identifies three subjective attributes – the project which the item was classified to, its degree of importance to the user, and the context in which the item was used during the interaction with it. The approach also assigns a design principle for each. The principles (discussed below) are deliberately abstract to allow for a variety of different implementations. === The subjective project classification principle === The subjective project classification principle suggests that PIM systems design should allow all information items related to a project be classified under the same category regardless of whether they are files, emails, Web Favorites or of any other format. This stands in sharp contrast with the present PIM system design where there are distinct folder hierarchies for each of these formats. The current design forces the user to store information related to a single project in separate locations depending on their format causing the project fragmentation problem. === The subjective importance principle === The subjective importance principle suggests that the subjective importance of information should affect its degree of visual salience and accessibility: important information items should be highly visible and accessible as they are more likely to be retrieved (the promotion principle) and those of lower importance should be demoted (i.e. making them less visible) so as not to distract the user (the demotion principle). While the promotion principle is not new and has been widely applied in PIM system design, the demotion principle is novel and has been applied only sporadically in these systems. Currently these systems allow only two options: keeping information (where unneeded information items could clutter folders and obscure the target item) and deleting it (where there is a risk that the item will not be there when needed). Demotion suggests a third option where the item is less visible so it doesn’t distract the user but is kept within its original context in case the user would need it after all. === The subjective context principle === The subjective context principle suggests that PIM systems should allow users retrieve their information items in the same context that they had previously used in order to bridge the time gap between these two events. By "context" the approach refers to other information items that were used at the time of interaction with the item, thoughts that the users may have regarding the item, the phase the user got to in the interaction with the item and other people the user collaborates with regarding the information item. == Evidence and implementations == === Evidence === The user-subjective approach was evaluated in a multioperational designed study which used questionnaires, screen shots and in-depth interviews (N = 84). The research tested the use of subjective attributes in current PIM systems and its dependency on design. Results show that participants used subjective attributes whenever design allowed them to. When it didn't, they either used their own alternative ways to use these attributes or avoided using subjective attributes at all. Regarding the subjective project classification principle – many of the participants' recent files, emails and web pages related to the same projects (indicating that they were working on the same project using different formats), and they had saved files of different format in the same project folders. However, as design does not suggest storing emails and web favorites with files, users avoid doing so. Regarding the subjective importance principle – users tended to retrieve their important information from highly visible and accessible locations offered by current design (e.g. by using the desktop), however since current systems offers no way to demote files of low subjective importance participants tended to use their own walk around ways for doing so (e.g. by moving them to a folder called "old" inside their original folder). Regarding the subjective context principle – participants tended to talk spontaneously about the context of their information items during the interview. These evidence imply that current PIM systems could possibly be improved if it would allow users to make more use of subjective attributes of their personal information. === Implementations === Each of the user-subjective design principles can be implemented in various ways. Moreover, as the approach is generative it offers PIM designers to use these principles in order to create their own user subjective designs. Below are design schemes that demonstrate an implementation of each of the principles. A more complete set of implementation examples can be found in the user-subjective website Archived 2011-02-01 at the Wayback Machine. The single hierarchy solution – addresses the project fragmentation problem (the current situation where the users stores and retrieve their project-related files, emails and web favorites at different hierarchies) and implements the subjective classification principle by offering the user a single folder hierarchy for all information items. At the operation system level the users would navigate to a folder and find there all project related files, emails, web favorites, tasks, contacts and notes. This would allow them to retrieve all their project-related information items from a single location regardless of their formats. When looking at these folders at their mail box the users would see only their emails and only web favorites through their browser. The single hierarchy design scheme has not been evaluated yet. GrayArea – implements the demotion principle by allowing users to move subjectively unimportant files to a gray area at the bottom end of their folders. This clears the upper part of the folder from file that are unlikely to be retrieved while allowing the users to retrieve these unimportant file in their original context in case they are needed after all. GrayArea design scheme was positively evaluated (see next section). ItemHistory – is an implementation of the subjective context principle. It allows users to reach all information items that were previously retrieved while that information item was open. This design scheme has not been evaluated to date. == Specific design evaluation == The evaluation of specific designs is the third and final step of the approach development. It had begun with the assessment of GrayArea. === GrayArea evaluation === GrayArea was evaluated by using a prototype that simulated the participants' folders but included a gray area where they could drag & drop their subjectively unimportant files. In the study 96 participants were asked to clean up their folders from unimportant files once with GrayArea and once without it. Results show that the use of GrayArea reduced the clutter in folders, that it was easier for participants to demote files than to delete them and that they would use it if provided in their next operating system. These results encourage commercial implementation of GrayArea and the development and testing of other user-subjective designs. == Chronological development == The user-subjective approach was developed by
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Conceptualization (information science)

In information science, a conceptualization is an abstract simplified view of some selected parts of the world, containing the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed of interest for some particular purpose and the relationships between them. An explicit specification of a conceptualization is an ontology, and it may occur that a conceptualization can be realized by several distinct ontologies. An ontological commitment in describing ontological comparisons is taken to refer to that subset of elements of an ontology shared with all the others. "An ontology is language-dependent", its objects and interrelations described within the language it uses, while a conceptualization is always the same, more general, its concepts existing "independently of the language used to describe it". The relation between these terms is shown in the figure to the right. Not all workers in knowledge engineering use the term "conceptualization", but instead refer to the conceptualization itself, or to the ontological commitment of all its realizations, as an overarching ontology. == Purpose and implementation == As a higher level abstraction, a conceptualization facilitates the discussion and comparison of its various ontologies, facilitating knowledge sharing and reuse. Each ontology based upon the same overarching conceptualization maps the conceptualization into specific elements and their relationships. The question then arises as to how to describe the "conceptualization" in terms that can encompass multiple ontologies. This issue has been called the Tower of Babel problem, that is, how can persons used to one ontology talk with others using a different ontology? This problem is easily grasped, but a general resolution is not at hand. It can be a "bottom-up" or a "top-down" approach, or something in between. However, in more artificial situations, such as information systems, the idea of a "conceptualization" and the "ontological commitment" of various ontologies that realize the "conceptualization" is possible. The formation of a conceptualization and its ontologies involves these steps: specification of the conceptualization ontology concepts: every definition involves the definitions of other terms relationships between the concepts: this step maps conceptual relationships onto the ontology structure groups of concepts: this step may lead to the creation of sub-ontologies formal description of ontology commitments, for example, to make them computer readable An example of moving conception into a language leading to a variety of ontologies is the expression of a process in pseudocode (a strictly structured form of ordinary language) leading to implementation in several different formal computer languages like Lisp or Fortran. The pseudocode makes it easier to understand the instructions and compare implementations, but the formal languages make possible the compilation of the ideas as computer instructions. Another example is mathematics, where a very general formulation (the analog of a conceptualization) is illustrated with "applications" that are more specialized examples. For instance, aspects of a function space can be illustrated using a vector space or a topological space that introduce interpretations of the "elements" of the conceptualization and additional relationships between them but preserve the connections required in the function space.
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Jump-and-Walk algorithm

Jump-and-Walk is an algorithm for point location in triangulations (though most of the theoretical analysis were performed in 2D and 3D random Delaunay triangulations). Surprisingly, the algorithm does not need any preprocessing or complex data structures except some simple representation of the triangulation itself. The predecessor of Jump-and-Walk was due to Lawson (1977) and Green and Sibson (1978), which picks a random starting point S and then walks from S toward the query point Q one triangle at a time. But no theoretical analysis was known for these predecessors until after mid-1990s. Jump-and-Walk picks a small group of sample points and starts the walk from the sample point which is the closest to Q until the simplex containing Q is found. The algorithm was a folklore in practice for some time, and the formal presentation of the algorithm and the analysis of its performance on 2D random Delaunay triangulation was done by Devroye, Mucke and Zhu in mid-1990s (the paper appeared in Algorithmica, 1998). The analysis on 3D random Delaunay triangulation was done by Mucke, Saias and Zhu (ACM Symposium of Computational Geometry, 1996). In both cases, a boundary condition was assumed, namely, Q must be slightly away from the boundary of the convex domain where the vertices of the random Delaunay triangulation are drawn. In 2004, Devroye, Lemaire and Moreau showed that in 2D the boundary condition can be withdrawn (the paper appeared in Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 2004). Jump-and-Walk has been used in many famous software packages, e.g., QHULL, Triangle and CGAL.
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Fake nude photography

Fake nude photography is the creation of nude photographs designed to appear as genuine nudes of an individual. The motivations for the creation of these modified photographs include curiosity, sexual gratification, the stigmatization or embarrassment of the subject, and commercial gain, such as through the sale of the photographs via pornographic websites. Fakes can be created using image editing software or through machine learning. Fake images created using the latter method are called deepfakes. == History == Magazines such as Celebrity Skin published non-fake paparazzi shots and illicitly obtained nude photos, showing there was a market for such images. Subsequently, some websites hosted fake nude or pornographic photos of celebrities, which are sometimes referred to as celebrity fakes. In the 1990s and 2000s, fake nude images of celebrities proliferated on Usenet and on websites, leading to campaigns to take legal action against the creators of the images and websites dedicated to determining the veracity of nude photos. "Deepfakes", which use artificial neural networks to superimpose one person's face into an image or video of someone else, were popularized in the late 2010s, leading to concerns about the technology's use in fake news and revenge porn. Fake nude photography is sometimes confused with Deepfake pornography, but the two are distinct. Fake nude photography typically starts with human-made non-sexual images, and merely makes it appear that the people in them are nude (but not having sex). Deepfake pornography typically starts with human-made sexual (pornographic) images or videos, and alters the actors' facial features to make the participants in the sexual act look like someone else. === DeepNude === In June 2019, a downloadable Windows and Linux application called DeepNude was released which used a Generative Adversarial Network to remove clothing from images of women. The images it produced were typically not pornographic, merely nude. Because there were more images of nude women than men available to its creator, the images it produced were all female, even when the original was male. The app had both a paid and unpaid version. A few days later, on June 27, the creators removed the application and refunded consumers, although various copies of the app, both free and for charge, continue to exist. On GitHub, the open-source version of this program called "open-deepnude" was deleted. The open-source version had the advantage of allowing it to be trained on a larger dataset of nude images to increase the resulting nude image's accuracy level. A successor free software application, Dreamtime, was later released, and some copies of it remain available, though some have been suppressed. === Deepfake Telegram Bot === In July 2019 a deepfake bot service was launched on messaging app Telegram that used AI technology to create nude images of women. The service was free and enabled users to submit photos and receive manipulated nude images within minutes. The service was connected to seven Telegram channels, including the main channel that hosts the bot, technical support, and image sharing channels. While the total number of users was unknown, the main channel had over 45,000 members. As of July 2020, it is estimated that approximately 24,000 manipulated images had been shared across the image sharing channels. === Nudify websites === By late 2024, most ways to produce nude images from photographs of clothed people were accessible at websites rather than in apps, and required payment. == Purposes == The reasons for the creation of nude photos may range from a need to discredit the target publicly, personal hatred for the target, or the promise of pecuniary gains for such work on the part of the creator of such photos. Fake nude photos often target prominent figures such as businesspeople or politicians. == Notable cases == In 2010, 97 people were arrested in Korea after spreading fake nude pictures of the group Girls' Generation on the internet. In 2011, a 53-year-old Incheon man was arrested after spreading more fake pictures of the same group. In 2012, South Korean police identified 157 Korean artists of whom fake nudes were circulating. In 2012, when Liu Yifei's fake nude photography released on the network, Liu Yifei Red Star Land Company declared a legal search to find out who created and released the photos. In the same year, Chinese actor Huang Xiaoming released nude photos that sparked public controversy, but they were ultimately proven to be real pictures. In 2014, supermodel Kate Upton threatened to sue a website for posting her fake nude photos. Previously, in 2011, this page was threatened by Taylor Swift. In November 2014, singer Rain was angry because of a fake nude photo that spread throughout the internet. Information reveals that: "Rain's nude photo was released from Kim Tae-hee's lost phone." Rain's label, Cube Entertainment, stated that the person in the nude photo is not Rain and the company has since stated that it will take strict legal action against those who post photos together with false comments. In July 2018, Seoul police launched an investigation after a fake nude photo of President Moon Jae-in was posted on the website of the Korean radical feminist group WOMAD. In early 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic politician, was berated by other political parties over a fake nude photo of her in the bathroom. The picture created a huge wave of media controversy in the United States. == Methods == Fake nude images can be created using image editing software or neural network applications. There are two basic methods: Combine and superimpose existing images onto source images, adding the face of the subject onto a nude model. Remove clothes from the source image to make it look like a nude photo. == Impact == Images of this type may have a negative psychological impact on the victims and may be used for extortion purposes.
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Lancichinetti–Fortunato–Radicchi benchmark

Lancichinetti–Fortunato–Radicchi benchmark is an algorithm that generates benchmark networks (artificial networks that resemble real-world networks). They have a priori known communities and are used to compare different community detection methods. The advantage of the benchmark over other methods is that it accounts for the heterogeneity in the distributions of node degrees and of community sizes. == The algorithm == The node degrees and the community sizes are distributed according to a power law, with different exponents. The benchmark assumes that both the degree and the community size have power law distributions with different exponents, γ {\displaystyle \gamma } and β {\displaystyle \beta } , respectively. N {\displaystyle N} is the number of nodes and the average degree is ⟨ k ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle k\rangle } . There is a mixing parameter μ {\displaystyle \mu } , which is the average fraction of neighboring nodes of a node that do not belong to any community that the benchmark node belongs to. This parameter controls the fraction of edges that are between communities. Thus, it reflects the amount of noise in the network. At the extremes, when μ = 0 {\displaystyle \mu =0} all links are within community links, if μ = 1 {\displaystyle \mu =1} all links are between nodes belonging to different communities. One can generate the benchmark network using the following steps. Step 1: Generate a network with nodes following a power law distribution with exponent γ {\displaystyle \gamma } and choose extremes of the distribution k min {\displaystyle k_{\min }} and k max {\displaystyle k_{\max }} to get desired average degree is ⟨ k ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle k\rangle } . Step 2: ( 1 − μ ) {\displaystyle (1-\mu )} fraction of links of every node is with nodes of the same community, while fraction μ {\displaystyle \mu } is with the other nodes. Step 3: Generate community sizes from a power law distribution with exponent β {\displaystyle \beta } . The sum of all sizes must be equal to N {\displaystyle N} . The minimal and maximal community sizes s min {\displaystyle s_{\min }} and s max {\displaystyle s_{\max }} must satisfy the definition of community so that every non-isolated node is in at least in one community: s min > k min {\displaystyle s_{\min }>k_{\min }} s max > k max {\displaystyle s_{\max }>k_{\max }} Step 4: Initially, no nodes are assigned to communities. Then, each node is randomly assigned to a community. As long as the number of neighboring nodes within the community does not exceed the community size a new node is added to the community, otherwise stays out. In the following iterations the “homeless” node is randomly assigned to some community. If that community is complete, i.e. the size is exhausted, a randomly selected node of that community must be unlinked. Stop the iteration when all the communities are complete and all the nodes belong to at least one community. Step 5: Implement rewiring of nodes keeping the same node degrees but only affecting the fraction of internal and external links such that the number of links outside the community for each node is approximately equal to the mixing parameter μ {\displaystyle \mu } . == Testing == Consider a partition into communities that do not overlap. The communities of randomly chosen nodes in each iteration follow a p ( C ) {\displaystyle p(C)} distribution that represents the probability that a randomly picked node is from the community C {\displaystyle C} . Consider a partition of the same network that was predicted by some community finding algorithm and has p ( C 2 ) {\displaystyle p(C_{2})} distribution. The benchmark partition has p ( C 1 ) {\displaystyle p(C_{1})} distribution. The joint distribution is p ( C 1 , C 2 ) {\displaystyle p(C_{1},C_{2})} . The similarity of these two partitions is captured by the normalized mutual information. I n = ∑ C 1 , C 2 p ( C 1 , C 2 ) log 2 ⁡ p ( C 1 , C 2 ) p ( C 1 ) p ( C 2 ) 1 2 H ( { p ( C 1 ) } ) + 1 2 H ( { p ( C 2 ) } ) {\displaystyle I_{n}={\frac {\sum _{C_{1},C_{2}}p(C_{1},C_{2})\log _{2}{\frac {p(C_{1},C_{2})}{p(C_{1})p(C_{2})}}}{{\frac {1}{2}}H(\{p(C_{1})\})+{\frac {1}{2}}H(\{p(C_{2})\})}}} If I n = 1 {\displaystyle I_{n}=1} the benchmark and the detected partitions are identical, and if I n = 0 {\displaystyle I_{n}=0} then they are independent of each other.
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Harold Borko

Harold Borko (1922-2012) was an American psychologist and researcher working primarily in the field of information science. == Biography == Borko was born in 1922 in New York City, New York. After serving in the US Army from 1942 to 1946 he obtained a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1948 and both his MA and PhD from the University of Southern California in Psychology in 1952. He returned to the army as a psychologist until 1956 after which he began a career working in and teaching information science. He died in California in 2012. == Information Science Career == After leaving the military Borko began working at the RAND Corporation as a Systems Training Specialist in 1956 and moved to the Systems Development Corporation a year later working in the Language Processing and Retrieval department. Alongside this work he taught Psychology at USC from 1957-65 and then moved into teaching Library Science at UCLA from 1965. In 1967 Borko left his role at the Systems Development Corporation and continued as a full-time professor at UCLA until his retirement in 1993.. From 1961 to 1995 Borko authored and co-authored over 100 articles on new developments in the field as well as the historiography of information science. He served as an editor of the Journal of Educational Data Processing from 1963-1975 and as President of the American Society for Information Science in 1966 == Partial list of works == Borko, H. (1962, May). The construction of an empirically based mathematically derived classification system. In Proceedings of the May 1-3, 1962, spring joint computer conference (pp. 279-289). Borko, H., & Bernick, M. (1963). Automatic document classification. Journal of the ACM (JACM), 10(2), 151-162. Borko, H. (1964). The Storage and Retrieval of Educational Information. Journal of Teacher Education, 15(4), 449-452. Borko, H. (1964). Measuring the reliability of subject classification by men and machines. American Documentation, 15(4), 268-273. Borko, H. (1965). The conceptual foundations of information systems. Borko, H. (1968), Information science: What is it?†. Amer. Doc., 19: 3-5. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.5090190103 Borko, H. (1970). Experiments in book indexing by computer. Information storage and retrieval, 6(1), 5-16. Borko, H. (1985). An introduction to computer-based library systems (Lucy A. Tedd). Education for Information, 3(1), 61.
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Information and media literacy

Information and media literacy (IML) is a combination of information literacy and media literacy. It enables people to show and make informed judgments as users of information and media, as well as to become skillful creators and producers of information and media messages. The transformative nature of IML includes creative works and creating new knowledge; to publish and collaborate responsibly requires ethical, cultural and social understanding. IML is also known as media and information literacy (MIL). UNESCO first adopted the term MIL in 2008 as a "composite concept" combining the competencies of information literacy and media literacy. UNESCO emphasizes the importance of global education in media and information literacy, and in 2013 defined Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as the ability to access, evaluate, use, and create information and media content in critical and ethical ways. Prior to the 1990s, the primary focus of information literacy was research skills. Media literacy, a study that emerged around the 1970s, traditionally focuses on the analysis and the delivery of information through various forms of media. Information literacy, as a skill proposed as early as 1974, centers on an individual's ability to recognize information needs and effectively locate, evaluate, and use information. These days, the study of information literacy has been extended to include the study of media literacy in many countries like the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It is also referred to as information and communication technologies (ICT) in the United States. Educators such as Gregory Ulmer have also defined the field as electracy.Media literacy is the ability to actively inquire into and think critically about information. It includes the ability to understand, evaluate, and create media content, and is an essential skill in today's information society. Livingstone, Van Couvering, and Thumim (2008) described the distinction between media literacy and information literacy: "Media literacy views media as lenses or windows for observing the world and expressing the self, whereas information literacy sees information as a tool for taking action in the world." == Integration of media and information literacy == Historically, the fields of information and media literacy have been separate, but over the course of the 21st century there have been calls to integrate both fields. Most definitions of information and media literacy include not only the abilities to locate, access, and analyze information but also the ability to create information. Only by integrating media literacy with information literacy can students better understand the sources of information and how it is used. Media education has primarily taken place in educational institutions, while information education has primarily occurred in libraries. Discussions surrounding the overlap of information literacy and media literacy came to fruition in the mid-to-late 2000s and 2010s as noted by Marcus Leaning. == In the digital age == The definition of literacy is "the ability to read and write". In practice many more skills are needed to locate, critically assess and make effective use of information. By extension, literacy now also includes the ability to manage and interact with digital information and media, in personal, shared and public domains. Historically, "information literacy" has largely been seen from the relatively top-down, organisational viewpoint of library and information sciences. However the same term is also used to describe a generic "information literacy" skill. The modern digital age has led to the proliferation of information spread across the Internet. Individuals must be able to recognize whether information is true or false and better yet know how to locate, evaluate, use, and communicate information in various formats; this is called information literacy. Towards the end of the 20th century, literacy was redefined to include "new literacies" relating to the new skills needed in everyday experience. "Multiliteracies" recognised the multiplicity of literacies, which were often used in combination. "21st century skills" frameworks link new literacies to wider life skills such as creativity, critical thinking, accountability. What these approaches have in common is a focus on the multiple skills needed by individuals to navigate changing personal, professional and public "information landscapes". As the conventional definition of literacy itself continues to evolve among practitioners, so too has the definition of information literacies. Noteworthy definitions include: Zurkowski defined information literacy as "the ability to find known or knowable content on any subject." CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Practitioners, defines information literacy as "the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use". In the United States, the definition proposed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is the most widely recognized. It defines information literacy as "a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and use the needed information effectively." JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, refers to information literacy as one of six "digital capabilities", seen as an interconnected group of elements centered on "ICT literacy". Mozilla groups digital and other literacies as "21st century skills", a "broad set of knowledge, skills, habits and traits that are important to succeed in today's world". UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, recognizing the necessity of teaching and learning both traditional and new types of information, the global importance of education was emphasized in 2008 through the "Teacher Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Curriculum". It defines MIL as a set of competencies that enable citizens to access, retrieve, understand, evaluate, use, create, and share information and media content in all formats through various tools in a critical, ethical, and effective manner, so as to participate in and carry out personal, professional, and social activities. Besides this, UNESCO also asserts information literacy as a "universal human right". == 21st-century students == In modern society, although the overall level of education has improved, the channels for knowledge production and dissemination have become increasingly diverse and commercialized, and traditional authoritative institutions no longer hold a monopoly over knowledge validation. While digital platforms have broadened access to information, they have also weakened trust mechanisms and evaluation standards, making epistemological skepticism a norm. Moreover, with the rise and spread of social media, misinformation and disinformation can be just as easily accessed in both densely and sparsely populated areas. These factors further underscore the importance of information literacy education. The IML learning capacities prepare students to be 21st century literate. According to Jeff Wilhelm (2000), "technology has everything to do with literacy. And being able to use the latest electronic technologies has everything to do with being literate." He supports his argument with J. David Bolter's statement that "if our students are not reading and composing with various electronic technologies, then they are illiterate. They are not just unprepared for the future; they are illiterate right now, in our current time and context". In a broader sense, developing this advanced competency of media and information literacy is essential, as it is crucial for students to exercise their freedom of expression in the 21st century. Wilhelm's statement is supported by the 2005 Wired World Phase II (YCWW II) survey conducted by the Media Awareness Network of Canada on 5000 Grade 4 – 11 students. The key findings of the survey were: 62% of Grade 4 students prefer the Internet. 38% of Grade 4 students prefer the library. 91% of Grade 11 students prefer the Internet. 9% of Grade 11 students prefer the library. Marc Prensky (2001) uses the term "digital native" to describe people who have been brought up in a digital world. The Internet has been a pervasive element of young people's home lives. 94% of kids reported that they had Internet access at home, and a significant majority (61%) had a high-speed connection. By the time kids reach Grade 11, half of them (51 percent) have their own Internet-connected computer, separate and apart from the family computer. The survey also showed that young Canadians are now among the most wired in the world. Contrary to the earlier stereotype of the isolated and awkward computer nerd, today's wired kid is a social kid. In general, many students are better networked through the use of technology than most teachers and parents, who may not understand the abilities of technology.
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Spell checker

In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine. == Design == A basic spell checker carries out the following processes: It scans the text and extracts the words contained in it. It then compares each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes. An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and more complex declension and conjugation, this part of the process is more complicated. It is unclear whether morphological analysis—allowing for many forms of a word depending on its grammatical role—provides a significant benefit for English, though its benefits for highly synthetic languages such as German, Hungarian, or Turkish are clear. As an adjunct to these components, the program's user interface allows users to approve or reject replacements and modify the program's operation. Spell checkers can use approximate string matching algorithms such as Levenshtein distance to find correct spellings of misspelled words. An alternative type of spell checker uses solely statistical information, such as n-grams, to recognize errors instead of correctly-spelled words. This approach usually requires a lot of effort to obtain sufficient statistical information. Key advantages include needing less runtime storage and the ability to correct errors in words that are not included in a dictionary. In some cases, spell checkers use a fixed list of misspellings and suggestions for those misspellings; this less flexible approach is often used in paper-based correction methods, such as the see also entries of encyclopedias. Clustering algorithms have also been used for spell checking combined with phonetic information. == History == === Pre-PC === In 1961, Les Earnest, who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words. Ralph Gorin, a graduate student under Earnest at the time, created the first true spelling checker program written as an applications program (rather than research) for general English text: SPELL for the DEC PDP-10 at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in February 1971. Gorin wrote SPELL in assembly language, for faster action; he made the first spelling corrector by searching the word list for plausible correct spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent letter transpositions and presenting them to the user. Gorin made SPELL publicly accessible, as was done with most SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) programs, and it soon spread around the world via the new ARPAnet, about ten years before personal computers came into general use. SPELL, its algorithms and data structures inspired the Unix ispell program. The first spell checkers were widely available on mainframe computers in the late 1970s. A group of six linguists from Georgetown University developed the first spell-check system for the IBM corporation. Henry Kučera invented one for the VAX machines of Digital Equipment Corp in 1981. === Unix === The International Ispell program commonly used in Unix is based on R. E. Gorin's SPELL. It was converted to C by Pace Willisson at MIT. The GNU project has its spell checker GNU Aspell. Aspell's main improvement is that it can more accurately suggest correct alternatives for misspelled English words. Due to the inability of traditional spell checkers to check words in complex inflected languages, Hungarian László Németh developed Hunspell, a spell checker that supports agglutinative languages and complex compound words. Hunspell also uses Unicode in its dictionaries. Hunspell replaced the previous MySpell in OpenOffice.org in version 2.0.2. Enchant is another general spell checker, derived from AbiWord. Its goal is to combine programs supporting different languages such as Aspell, Hunspell, Nuspell, Hspell (Hebrew), Voikko (Finnish), Zemberek (Turkish) and AppleSpell under one interface. === PCs === The first spell checkers for personal computers appeared in 1980, such as "WordCheck" for Commodore systems which was released in late 1980 in time for advertisements to go to print in January 1981. Developers such as Maria Mariani and Random House rushed OEM packages or end-user products into the rapidly expanding software market. On the pre-Windows PCs, these spell checkers were standalone programs, many of which could be run in terminate-and-stay-resident mode from within word-processing packages on PCs with sufficient memory. However, the market for standalone packages was short-lived, as by the mid-1980s developers of popular word-processing packages like WordStar and WordPerfect had incorporated spell checkers in their packages, mostly licensed from the above companies, who quickly expanded support from just English to many European and eventually even Asian languages. However, this required increasing sophistication in the morphology routines of the software, particularly with regard to heavily-agglutinative languages like Hungarian and Finnish. Although the size of the word-processing market in a country like Iceland might not have justified the investment of implementing a spell checker, companies like WordPerfect nonetheless strove to localize their software for as many national markets as possible as part of their global marketing strategy. When Apple developed "a system-wide spelling checker" for Mac OS X so that "the operating system took over spelling fixes," it was a first: one "didn't have to maintain a separate spelling checker for each" program. Mac OS X's spellcheck coverage includes virtually all bundled and third party applications. Visual Tools' VT Speller, introduced in 1994, was "designed for developers of applications that support Windows." It came with a dictionary but had the ability to build and incorporate use of secondary dictionaries. === Browsers === Web browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome offer spell checking support, using Hunspell. Prior to using Hunspell, Firefox and Chrome used MySpell and GNU Aspell, respectively. === Specialties === Some spell checkers have separate support for medical dictionaries to help prevent medical errors. == Functionality == The first spell checkers were "verifiers" instead of "correctors." They offered no suggestions for incorrectly spelled words. This was helpful for typos but it was not so helpful for logical or phonetic errors. The challenge the developers faced was the difficulty in offering useful suggestions for misspelled words. This requires reducing words to a skeletal form and applying pattern-matching algorithms. It might seem logical that where spell-checking dictionaries are concerned, "the bigger, the better," so that correct words are not marked as incorrect. In practice, however, an optimal size for English appears to be around 90,000 entries. If there are more than this, incorrectly spelled words may be skipped because they are mistaken for others. For example, a linguist might determine on the basis of corpus linguistics that the word baht is more frequently a misspelling of bath or bat than a reference to the Thai currency. Hence, it would typically be more useful if a few people who write about Thai currency were slightly inconvenienced than if the spelling errors of the many more people who discuss baths were overlooked. The first MS-DOS spell checkers were mostly used in proofing mode from within word processing packages. After preparing a document, a user scanned the text looking for misspellings. Later, however, batch processing was offered in such packages as Oracle's short-lived CoAuthor and allowed a user to view the results after a document was processed and correct only the words that were known to be wrong. When memory and processing power became abundant, spell checking was performed in the background in an interactive way, such as has been the case with the Sector Software produced Spellbound program released in 1987 and Microsoft Word since Word 95. Spell checkers became increasingly sophisticated; now capable of recognizing grammatical errors. However, even at their best, they rarely catch all the errors in a text (such as homophone errors) and will flag neologisms and foreign words as misspellings. Nonetheless, spell checkers can be considered as a type of foreign language writing aid that non-native language lea
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Microsoft SQL Server Master Data Services

Microsoft SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) is a Master Data Management (MDM) product from Microsoft that ships as a part of the Microsoft SQL Server relational database management system. Master data management (MDM) allows an organization to discover and define non-transactional lists of data, and compile maintainable, reliable master lists. Master Data Services first shipped with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. Microsoft SQL Server 2016 introduced enhancements to Master Data Services, such as improved performance and security, and the ability to clear transaction logs, create custom indexes, share entity data between different models, and support for many-to-many relationships. == Overview == In Master Data Services, the model is the highest level container in the structure of your master data. You create a model to manage groups of similar data. A model contains one or more entities, and entities contain members that are the data records. An entity is similar to a table. Like other MDM products, Master Data Services aims to create a centralized data source and keep it synchronized, and thus reduce redundancies, across the applications which process the data. Sharing the architectural core with Stratature +EDM, Master Data Services uses a Microsoft SQL Server database as the physical data store. It is a part of the Master Data Hub, which uses the database to store and manage data entities. It is a database with the software to validate and manage the data, and keep it synchronized with the systems that use the data. The master data hub has to extract the data from the source system, validate, sanitize and shape the data, remove duplicates, and update the hub repositories, as well as synchronize the external sources. The entity schemas, attributes, data hierarchies, validation rules and access control information are specified as metadata to the Master Data Services runtime. Master Data Services does not impose any limitation on the data model. Master Data Services also allows custom Business rules, used for validating and sanitizing the data entering the data hub, to be defined, which is then run against the data matching the specified criteria. All changes made to the data are validated against the rules, and a log of the transaction is stored persistently. Violations are logged separately, and optionally the owner is notified, automatically. All the data entities can be versioned. Master Data Services allows the master data to be categorized by hierarchical relationships, such as employee data are a subtype of organization data. Hierarchies are generated by relating data attributes. Data can be automatically categorized using rules, and the categories are introspected programmatically. Master Data Services can also expose the data as Microsoft SQL Server views, which can be pulled by any SQL-compatible client. It uses a role-based access control system to restrict access to the data. The views are generated dynamically, so they contain the latest data entities in the master hub. It can also push out the data by writing to some external journals. Master Data Services also includes a web-based UI for viewing and managing the data. It uses ASP.NET in the back-end. The Silverlight front-end was replaced with HTML5 in SQL Server 2019. Master Data Services provides a Web service interface to expose the data, as well as an API, which internally uses the exposed web services, exposing the feature set, programmatically, to access and manipulate the data. It also integrates with Active Directory for authentication purposes. Unlike +EDM, Master Data Services supports Unicode characters, as well as support multilingual user interfaces. SQL Server 2016 introduced a significant performance increase in Master Data Services over previous versions. == Terminology == Model is the highest level of an MDS instance. It is the primary container for specific groupings of master data. In many ways it is very similar to the idea of a database. Entities are containers created within a model. Entities provide a home for members, and are in many ways analogous to database tables. (e.g. Customer) Members are analogous to the records in a database table (Entity) e.g. Will Smith. Members are contained within entities. Each member is made up of two or more attributes. Attributes are analogous to the columns within a database table (Entity) e.g. Surname. Attributes exist within entities and help describe members (the records within the table). Name and Code attributes are created by default for each entity and serve to describe and uniquely identify leaf members. Attributes can be related to other attributes from other entities which are called 'domain-based' attributes. This is similar to the concept of a foreign key. Other attributes however, will be of type 'free-form' (most common) or 'file'. Attribute Groups are explicitly defined collections of particular attributes. Say you have an entity "customer" that has 50 attributes — too much information for many of your users. Attribute groups enable the creation of custom sets of hand-picked attributes that are relevant for specific audiences. (e.g. "customer - delivery details" that would include just their name and last known delivery address). This is very similar to a database view. Hierarchies organize members into either Derived or Explicit hierarchical structures. Derived hierarchies, as the name suggests, are derived by the MDS engine based on the relationships that exist between attributes. Explicit hierarchies are created by hand using both leaf and consolidated members. Business Rules can be created and applied against model data to ensure that custom business logic is adhered to. In order to be committed into the system data must pass all business rule validations applied to them. e.g. Within the Customer Entity you may want to create a business rule that ensures all members of the 'Country' Attribute contain either the text "USA" or "Canada". The Business Rule once created and ran will then verify all the data is correct before it accepts it into the approved model. Versions provide system owners / administrators with the ability to Open, Lock or Commit a particular version of a model and the data contained within it at a particular point in time. As the content within a model varies, grows or shrinks over time versions provide a way of managing metadata so that subscribing systems can access to the correct content.
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NewSQL

NewSQL is a class of relational database management systems that seek to provide the scalability of NoSQL systems for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads while maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional database system. Many enterprise systems that handle high-profile data (e.g., financial and order processing systems) are too large for conventional relational databases, but have transactional and consistency requirements that are not practical for NoSQL systems. The only options previously available for these organizations were to either purchase more powerful computers or to develop custom middleware that distributes requests over conventional DBMS. Both approaches feature high infrastructure costs and/or development costs. NewSQL systems attempt to reconcile the conflicts. == History == The term was first used by 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in a 2011 research paper discussing the rise of a new generation of database management systems. One of the first NewSQL systems was the H-Store parallel database system. == Applications == Typical applications are characterized by heavy OLTP transaction volumes. OLTP transactions; are short-lived (i.e., no user stalls) touch small amounts of data per transaction use indexed lookups (no table scans) have a small number of forms (a small number of queries with different arguments). However, some support hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) applications. Such systems improve performance and scalability by omitting heavyweight recovery or concurrency control. == List of NewSQL-databases == Apache Trafodion Clustrix CockroachDB Couchbase CrateDB Google Spanner MySQL Cluster NuoDB OceanBase Pivotal GemFire XD SequoiaDB SingleStore was formerly known as MemSQL. TIBCO Active Spaces TiDB TokuDB TransLattice Elastic Database VoltDB YDB YugabyteDB == Features == The two common distinguishing features of NewSQL database solutions are that they support online scalability of NoSQL databases and the relational data model (including ACID consistency) using SQL as their primary interface. NewSQL systems can be loosely grouped into three categories: === New architectures === NewSQL systems adopt various internal architectures. Some systems employ a cluster of shared-nothing nodes, in which each node manages a subset of the data. They include components such as distributed concurrency control, flow control, and distributed query processing. === SQL engines === The second category are optimized storage engines for SQL. These systems provide the same programming interface as SQL, but scale better than built-in engines. === Transparent sharding === These systems automatically split databases across multiple nodes using Raft or Paxos consensus algorithm.
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