AI For Business Strategy Mit

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  Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine

  The Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine (sometimes called the Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine or MENACE) was a mechanical computer made from 304 matchboxes designed and built by artificial intelligence researcher Donald Michie and his colleague Roger Chambers, in 1961. It was designed to play human opponents in games of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) by returning a move for any given state of play and to refine its strategy through reinforcement learning. This was one of the first types of artificial intelligence. Michie and Chambers did not have immediate access to a computer; they worked around this by building the engine out of matchboxes. The matchboxes they used each represented a single possible layout of a noughts and crosses grid. When the computer first played, it would randomly choose moves based on the current layout. As it played more games, through a reinforcement loop, it disqualified strategies that led to losing games, and supplemented strategies that led to winning games. Michie held a tournament against MENACE in 1961, wherein he experimented with different openings. Following MENACE's maiden tournament against Michie, it demonstrated successful artificial intelligence in its strategy. Michie's essays on MENACE's weight initialisation and the BOXES algorithm used by MENACE became popular in the field of computer science research. Michie was honoured for his contribution to machine learning research, and was twice commissioned to program a MENACE simulation on an actual computer. == Origin == Donald Michie (1923–2007) had been on the team decrypting the German Tunny Code during World War II. Fifteen years later, he wanted to further display his mathematical and computational prowess with an early convolutional neural network. Since computer equipment was not obtainable for such uses, and Michie did not have a computer readily available, he decided to display and demonstrate artificial intelligence in a more esoteric format and constructed a functional mechanical computer out of matchboxes and beads. MENACE was constructed as the result of a bet with a computer science colleague who postulated that such a machine was impossible. Michie undertook the task of collecting and defining each matchbox as a "fun project", later turned into a demonstration tool. Michie completed his essay on MENACE in 1963, "Experiments on the mechanization of game-learning", as well as his essay on the BOXES Algorithm, written with R. A. Chambers and had built up an AI research unit in Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, Scotland. MENACE learned by playing successive matches of noughts and crosses. Each time, it would eliminate a losing strategy by the human player confiscating the beads that corresponded to each move. It reinforced winning strategies by making the moves more likely, by supplying extra beads. This was one of the earliest versions of the Reinforcement Loop, the schematic algorithm of looping the algorithm, dropping unsuccessful strategies until only the winning ones remain. This model starts as completely random, and gradually learns. == Composition == MENACE was made from 304 matchboxes glued together in an arrangement similar to a chest of drawers. Each box had a code number, which was keyed into a chart. This chart had drawings of tic-tac-toe game grids with various configurations of X, O, and empty squares, corresponding to all possible permutations a game could go through as it progressed. After removing duplicate arrangements (ones that were simply rotations or mirror images of other configurations), MENACE used 304 permutations in its chart and thus that many matchboxes. Each individual matchbox tray contained a collection of coloured beads. Each colour represented a move on a square on the game grid, and so matchboxes with arrangements where positions on the grid were already taken would not have beads for that position. Additionally, at the front of the tray were two extra pieces of card in a "V" shape, the point of the "V" pointing at the front of the matchbox. Michie and his artificial intelligence team called MENACE's algorithm "Boxes", after the apparatus used for the machine. The first stage "Boxes" operated in five phases, each setting a definition and a precedent for the rules of the algorithm in relation to the game. == Operation == MENACE played first, as O, since all matchboxes represented permutations only relevant to the "X" player. To retrieve MENACE's choice of move, the opponent or operator located the matchbox that matched the current game state, or a rotation or mirror image of it. For example, at the start of a game, this would be the matchbox for an empty grid. The tray would be removed and lightly shaken so as to move the beads around. Then, the bead that had rolled into the point of the "V" shape at the front of the tray was the move MENACE had chosen to make. Its colour was then used as the position to play on, and, after accounting for any rotations or flips needed based on the chosen matchbox configuration's relation to the current grid, the O would be placed on that square. Then the player performed their move, the new state was located, a new move selected, and so on, until the game was finished. When the game had finished, the human player observed the game's outcome. As a game was played, each matchbox that was used for MENACE's turn had its tray returned to it ajar, and the bead used kept aside, so that MENACE's choice of moves and the game states they belonged to were recorded. Michie described his reinforcement system with "reward" and "punishment". Once the game was finished, if MENACE had won, it would then receive a "reward" for its victory. The removed beads showed the sequence of the winning moves. These were returned to their respective trays, easily identifiable since they were slightly open, as well as three bonus beads of the same colour. In this way, in future games MENACE would become more likely to repeat those winning moves, reinforcing winning strategies. If it lost, the removed beads were not returned, "punishing" MENACE, and meaning that in future it would be less likely, and eventually incapable if that colour of bead became absent, to repeat the moves that cause a loss. If the game was a draw, one additional bead was added to each box. == Results in practice == === Optimal strategy === Noughts and crosses has a well-known optimal strategy. A player must place their symbol in a way that blocks the other player from achieving any rows while simultaneously making a row themself. However, if both players use this strategy, the game always ends in a draw. If the human player is familiar with the optimal strategy, and MENACE can quickly learn it, then the games will eventually only end in draws. The likelihood of the computer winning increases quickly when the computer plays against a random-playing opponent. When playing against a player using optimal strategy, the odds of a draw grow to 100%. In Donald Michie's official tournament against MENACE in 1961 he used optimal strategy, and he and the computer began to draw consistently after twenty games. Michie's tournament had the following milestones: Michie began by consistently opening with "Variant 0", the middle square. At 15 games, MENACE abandoned all non-corner openings. At just over 20, Michie switched to consistently using "Variant 1", the bottom-right square. At 60, he returned to Variant 0. As he neared 80 games, he moved to "Variant 2", the top-middle. At 110, he switched to "Variant 3", the top right. At 135, he switched to "Variant 4", middle-right. At 190, he returned to Variant 1, and at 210, he returned to Variant 0. The trend in changes of beads in the "2" boxes runs: === Correlation === Depending on the strategy employed by the human player, MENACE produces a different trend on scatter graphs of wins. Using a random turn from the human player results in an almost-perfect positive trend. Playing the optimal strategy returns a slightly slower increase. The reinforcement does not create a perfect standard of wins; the algorithm will draw random uncertain conclusions each time. After the j-th round, the correlation of near-perfect play runs: 1 − D D − D ( j + 2 ) ∑ i = 0 j D ( j i + 1 ) V i {\displaystyle {1-D \over D-D^{(j+2)}}\sum _{i=0}^{j}D^{(ji+1)}V_{i}} Where Vi is the outcome (+1 is win, 0 is draw and -1 is loss) and D is the decay factor (average of past values of wins and losses). Below, Mn is the multiplier for the n-th round of the game. == Legacy == Donald Michie's MENACE proved that a computer could learn from failure and success to become good at a task. It used what would become core principles within the field of machine learning before they had been properly theorised. For example, the combination of how MENACE starts with equal numbers of types of beads in each matchbox, and how these are then selected at random, creates a learning behaviour similar to weight initialisation

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  Computational learning theory

  In computer science, computational learning theory (or just learning theory) is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms. == Overview == Theoretical results in machine learning often focus on a type of inductive learning known as supervised learning. In supervised learning, an algorithm is provided with labeled samples. For instance, the samples might be descriptions of mushrooms, with labels indicating whether they are edible or not. The algorithm uses these labeled samples to create a classifier. This classifier assigns labels to new samples, including those it has not previously encountered. The goal of the supervised learning algorithm is to optimize performance metrics, such as minimizing errors on new samples. In addition to performance bounds, computational learning theory studies the time complexity and feasibility of learning . In computational learning theory, a computation is considered feasible if it can be done in polynomial time . There are two kinds of time complexity results: Positive results – Showing that a certain class of functions is learnable in polynomial time. Negative results – Showing that certain classes cannot be learned in polynomial time. Negative results often rely on commonly believed, but yet unproven assumptions, such as: Computational complexity – P ≠ NP (the P versus NP problem); Cryptographic – One-way functions exist. There are several different approaches to computational learning theory based on making different assumptions about the inference principles used to generalise from limited data. This includes different definitions of probability (see frequency probability, Bayesian probability) and different assumptions on the generation of samples. The different approaches include: Exact learning, proposed by Dana Angluin; Probably approximately correct learning (PAC learning), proposed by Leslie Valiant; VC theory, proposed by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis; Inductive inference as developed by Ray Solomonoff; Algorithmic learning theory, from the work of E. Mark Gold; Online machine learning, from the work of Nick Littlestone. While its primary goal is to understand learning abstractly, computational learning theory has led to the development of practical algorithms. For example, PAC theory inspired boosting, VC theory led to support vector machines, and Bayesian inference led to belief networks.

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  Swish function

  The swish function is a family of mathematical function defined as follows: swish β ⁡ ( x ) = x sigmoid ⁡ ( β x ) = x 1 + e − β x . {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{\beta }(x)=x\operatorname {sigmoid} (\beta x)={\frac {x}{1+e^{-\beta x}}}.} where β {\displaystyle \beta } can be constant (usually set to 1) or trainable and "sigmoid" refers to the logistic function. The swish family was designed to smoothly interpolate between a linear function and the Rectified linear unit (ReLU) function. When considering positive values, Swish is a particular case of doubly parameterized sigmoid shrinkage function defined in . Variants of the swish function include Mish. == Special values == For β = 0, the function is linear: f(x) = x/2. For β = 1, the function is the Sigmoid Linear Unit (SiLU). For β = 1.702, the function approximates GeLU. With β → ∞, the function converges to ReLU. Thus, the swish family smoothly interpolates between a linear function and the ReLU function. Since swish β ⁡ ( x ) = swish 1 ⁡ ( β x ) / β {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{\beta }(x)=\operatorname {swish} _{1}(\beta x)/\beta } , all instances of swish have the same shape as the default swish 1 {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{1}} , zoomed by β {\displaystyle \beta } . One usually sets β > 0 {\displaystyle \beta >0} . When β {\displaystyle \beta } is trainable, this constraint can be enforced by β = e b {\displaystyle \beta =e^{b}} , where b {\displaystyle b} is trainable. swish 1 ⁡ ( x ) = x 2 + x 2 4 − x 4 48 + x 6 480 + O ( x 8 ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{1}(x)={\frac {x}{2}}+{\frac {x^{2}}{4}}-{\frac {x^{4}}{48}}+{\frac {x^{6}}{480}}+O\left(x^{8}\right)} swish 1 ⁡ ( x ) = x 2 tanh ⁡ ( x 2 ) + x 2 swish 1 ⁡ ( x ) + swish − 1 ⁡ ( x ) = x tanh ⁡ ( x 2 ) swish 1 ⁡ ( x ) − swish − 1 ⁡ ( x ) = x {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}\operatorname {swish} _{1}(x)&={\frac {x}{2}}\tanh \left({\frac {x}{2}}\right)+{\frac {x}{2}}\\\operatorname {swish} _{1}(x)+\operatorname {swish} _{-1}(x)&=x\tanh \left({\frac {x}{2}}\right)\\\operatorname {swish} _{1}(x)-\operatorname {swish} _{-1}(x)&=x\end{aligned}}} == Derivatives == Because swish β ⁡ ( x ) = swish 1 ⁡ ( β x ) / β {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{\beta }(x)=\operatorname {swish} _{1}(\beta x)/\beta } , it suffices to calculate its derivatives for the default case. swish 1 ′ ⁡ ( x ) = x + sinh ⁡ ( x ) 4 cosh 2 ⁡ ( x 2 ) + 1 2 {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{1}'(x)={\frac {x+\sinh(x)}{4\cosh ^{2}\left({\frac {x}{2}}\right)}}+{\frac {1}{2}}} so swish 1 ′ ⁡ ( x ) − 1 2 {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{1}'(x)-{\frac {1}{2}}} is odd. swish 1 ″ ⁡ ( x ) = 1 − x 2 tanh ⁡ ( x 2 ) 2 cosh 2 ⁡ ( x 2 ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{1}''(x)={\frac {1-{\frac {x}{2}}\tanh \left({\frac {x}{2}}\right)}{2\cosh ^{2}\left({\frac {x}{2}}\right)}}} so swish 1 ″ ⁡ ( x ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {swish} _{1}''(x)} is even. == History == SiLU was first proposed alongside the GELU in 2016, then again proposed in 2017 as the Sigmoid-weighted Linear Unit (SiL) in reinforcement learning. The SiLU/SiL was then again proposed as the SWISH over a year after its initial discovery, originally proposed without the learnable parameter β, so that β implicitly equaled 1. The swish paper was then updated to propose the activation with the learnable parameter β. In 2017, after performing analysis on ImageNet data, researchers from Google indicated that using this function as an activation function in artificial neural networks improves the performance, compared to ReLU and sigmoid functions. It is believed that one reason for the improvement is that the swish function helps alleviate the vanishing gradient problem during backpropagation.

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  Information Harvesting

  Information Harvesting (IH) was an early data mining product from the 1990s. It was invented by Ralphe Wiggins and produced by the Ryan Corp, later Information Harvesting Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wiggins had a background in genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic. IH sought to infer rules from sets of data. It did this first by classifying various input variables into one of a number of bins, thereby putting some structure on the continuous variables in the input. IH then proceeds to generate rules, trading off generalization against memorization, that will infer the value of the prediction variable, possibly creating many levels of rules in the process. It included strategies for checking if overfitting took place and, if so, correcting for it. Because of its strategies for correcting for overfitting by considering more data, and refining the rules based on that data, IH might also be considered to be a form of machine learning. The advantage of IH, as compared with other data mining products of its time and even later, was that it provided a mechanism for finding multiple rules that would classify the data and determining, according to set criteria, the best rules to use.

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  ChromaDB

  Chroma or ChromaDB is open-source data infrastructure tailored to applications with large language models. Its headquarters are in San Francisco. In April 2023, it raised 18 million US dollars as seed funding. ChromaDB has been used in academic studies on artificial intelligence, particularly as part of the tech stack for retrieval-augmented generation.

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  Information Harvesting

  Information Harvesting (IH) was an early data mining product from the 1990s. It was invented by Ralphe Wiggins and produced by the Ryan Corp, later Information Harvesting Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wiggins had a background in genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic. IH sought to infer rules from sets of data. It did this first by classifying various input variables into one of a number of bins, thereby putting some structure on the continuous variables in the input. IH then proceeds to generate rules, trading off generalization against memorization, that will infer the value of the prediction variable, possibly creating many levels of rules in the process. It included strategies for checking if overfitting took place and, if so, correcting for it. Because of its strategies for correcting for overfitting by considering more data, and refining the rules based on that data, IH might also be considered to be a form of machine learning. The advantage of IH, as compared with other data mining products of its time and even later, was that it provided a mechanism for finding multiple rules that would classify the data and determining, according to set criteria, the best rules to use.

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  Gaussian adaptation

  Gaussian adaptation (GA), also called normal or natural adaptation (NA) is an evolutionary algorithm designed for the maximization of manufacturing yield due to statistical deviation of component values of signal processing systems. In short, GA is a stochastic adaptive process where a number of samples of an n-dimensional vector x[xT = (x1, x2, ..., xn)] are taken from a multivariate Gaussian distribution, N(m, M), having mean m and moment matrix M. The samples are tested for fail or pass. The first- and second-order moments of the Gaussian restricted to the pass samples are m and M. The outcome of x as a pass sample is determined by a function s(x), 0 < s(x) < q ≤ 1, such that s(x) is the probability that x will be selected as a pass sample. The average probability of finding pass samples (yield) is P ( m ) = ∫ s ( x ) N ( x − m ) d x {\displaystyle P(m)=\int s(x)N(x-m)\,dx} Then the theorem of GA states: For any s(x) and for any value of P < q, there always exist a Gaussian p. d. f. [ probability density function ] that is adapted for maximum dispersion. The necessary conditions for a local optimum are m = m and M proportional to M. The dual problem is also solved: P is maximized while keeping the dispersion constant (Kjellström, 1991). Proofs of the theorem may be found in the papers by Kjellström, 1970, and Kjellström & Taxén, 1981. Since dispersion is defined as the exponential of entropy/disorder/average information it immediately follows that the theorem is valid also for those concepts. Altogether, this means that Gaussian adaptation may carry out a simultaneous maximisation of yield and average information (without any need for the yield or the average information to be defined as criterion functions). The theorem is valid for all regions of acceptability and all Gaussian distributions. It may be used by cyclic repetition of random variation and selection (like the natural evolution). In every cycle a sufficiently large number of Gaussian distributed points are sampled and tested for membership in the region of acceptability. The centre of gravity of the Gaussian, m, is then moved to the centre of gravity of the approved (selected) points, m. Thus, the process converges to a state of equilibrium fulfilling the theorem. A solution is always approximate because the centre of gravity is always determined for a limited number of points. It was used for the first time in 1969 as a pure optimization algorithm making the regions of acceptability smaller and smaller (in analogy to simulated annealing, Kirkpatrick 1983). Since 1970 it has been used for both ordinary optimization and yield maximization. == Natural evolution and Gaussian adaptation == It has also been compared to the natural evolution of populations of living organisms. In this case s(x) is the probability that the individual having an array x of phenotypes will survive by giving offspring to the next generation; a definition of individual fitness given by Hartl 1981. The yield, P, is replaced by the mean fitness determined as a mean over the set of individuals in a large population. Phenotypes are often Gaussian distributed in a large population and a necessary condition for the natural evolution to be able to fulfill the theorem of Gaussian adaptation, with respect to all Gaussian quantitative characters, is that it may push the centre of gravity of the Gaussian to the centre of gravity of the selected individuals. This may be accomplished by the Hardy–Weinberg law. This is possible because the theorem of Gaussian adaptation is valid for any region of acceptability independent of the structure (Kjellström, 1996). In this case the rules of genetic variation such as crossover, inversion, transposition etcetera may be seen as random number generators for the phenotypes. So, in this sense Gaussian adaptation may be seen as a genetic algorithm. == How to climb a mountain == Mean fitness may be calculated provided that the distribution of parameters and the structure of the landscape is known. The real landscape is not known, but figure below shows a fictitious profile (blue) of a landscape along a line (x) in a room spanned by such parameters. The red curve is the mean based on the red bell curve at the bottom of figure. It is obtained by letting the bell curve slide along the x-axis, calculating the mean at every location. As can be seen, small peaks and pits are smoothed out. Thus, if evolution is started at A with a relatively small variance (the red bell curve), then climbing will take place on the red curve. The process may get stuck for millions of years at B or C, as long as the hollows to the right of these points remain, and the mutation rate is too small. If the mutation rate is sufficiently high, the disorder or variance may increase and the parameter(s) may become distributed like the green bell curve. Then the climbing will take place on the green curve, which is even more smoothed out. Because the hollows to the right of B and C have now disappeared, the process may continue up to the peaks at D. But of course the landscape puts a limit on the disorder or variability. Besides — dependent on the landscape — the process may become very jerky, and if the ratio between the time spent by the process at a local peak and the time of transition to the next peak is very high, it may as well look like a punctuated equilibrium as suggested by Gould (see Ridley). == Computer simulation of Gaussian adaptation == Thus far the theory only considers mean values of continuous distributions corresponding to an infinite number of individuals. In reality however, the number of individuals is always limited, which gives rise to an uncertainty in the estimation of m and M (the moment matrix of the Gaussian). And this may also affect the efficiency of the process. Unfortunately very little is known about this, at least theoretically. The implementation of normal adaptation on a computer is a fairly simple task. The adaptation of m may be done by one sample (individual) at a time, for example m(i + 1) = (1 – a) m(i) + ax where x is a pass sample, and a < 1 a suitable constant so that the inverse of a represents the number of individuals in the population. M may in principle be updated after every step y leading to a feasible point x = m + y according to: M(i + 1) = (1 – 2b) M(i) + 2byyT, where yT is the transpose of y and b << 1 is another suitable constant. In order to guarantee a suitable increase of average information, y should be normally distributed with moment matrix μ2M, where the scalar μ > 1 is used to increase average information (information entropy, disorder, diversity) at a suitable rate. But M will never be used in the calculations. Instead we use the matrix W defined by WWT = M. Thus, we have y = Wg, where g is normally distributed with the moment matrix μU, and U is the unit matrix. W and WT may be updated by the formulas W = (1 – b)W + bygT and WT = (1 – b)WT + bgyT because multiplication gives M = (1 – 2b)M + 2byyT, where terms including b2 have been neglected. Thus, M will be indirectly adapted with good approximation. In practice it will suffice to update W only W(i + 1) = (1 – b)W(i) + bygT. This is the formula used in a simple 2-dimensional model of a brain satisfying the Hebbian rule of associative learning; see the next section (Kjellström, 1996 and 1999). The figure below illustrates the effect of increased average information in a Gaussian p.d.f. used to climb a mountain Crest (the two lines represent the contour line). Both the red and green cluster have equal mean fitness, about 65%, but the green cluster has a much higher average information making the green process much more efficient. The effect of this adaptation is not very salient in a 2-dimensional case, but in a high-dimensional case, the efficiency of the search process may be increased by many orders of magnitude. == The evolution in the brain == In the brain the evolution of DNA-messages is supposed to be replaced by an evolution of signal patterns and the phenotypic landscape is replaced by a mental landscape, the complexity of which will hardly be second to the former. The metaphor with the mental landscape is based on the assumption that certain signal patterns give rise to a better well-being or performance. For instance, the control of a group of muscles leads to a better pronunciation of a word or performance of a piece of music. In this simple model it is assumed that the brain consists of interconnected components that may add, multiply and delay signal values. A nerve cell kernel may add signal values, a synapse may multiply with a constant and An axon may delay values. This is a basis of the theory of digital filters and neural networks consisting of components that may add, multiply and delay signalvalues and also of many brain models, Levine 1991. In the figure below the brain stem is supposed to deliver Gaussian distributed signal patterns. This may be possible since certai

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  Oscillatory neural network

  An oscillatory neural network (ONN) is an artificial neural network that uses coupled oscillators as neurons. Oscillatory neural networks are closely linked to the Kuramoto model, and are inspired by the phenomenon of neural oscillations in the brain. Oscillatory neural networks have been trained to recognize images. Complex-Valued Oscillatory network has also been shown to store and retrieve multidimensional aperiodic signals. An oscillatory autoencoder has also been demonstrated, which uses a combination of oscillators and rate-coded neurons. A neuron made of two coupled oscillators, one having a fixed and the other having a tunable natural frequency, has been shown able to run logic gates such as XOR that conventional sigmoid neurons cannot.

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  Monitoring as a service

  Monitoring as a service (MaaS) is a cloud-based framework for the deployment of monitoring functionalities for various other services and applications within the cloud. The most common application for MaaS is online state monitoring, which continuously tracks certain states of applications, networks, systems, instances or any element that may be deployable within the cloud.

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  Julia (programming language)

  Julia is a dynamic general-purpose programming language. As a high-level language, distinctive aspects of Julia's design include a type system with parametric polymorphism, the use of multiple dispatch as a core programming paradigm, just-in-time compilation and a parallel garbage collection implementation. Notably, Julia does not support classes with encapsulated methods but instead relies on the types of all of a function's arguments to determine which method will be called. By default, Julia is run similarly to scripting languages, using its runtime, and allows for interactions, but Julia programs can also be compiled to small binary standalone executables (or to small libraries for e.g. Python), with e.g. the JuliaC.jl compiler. Julia programs can reuse libraries from other languages, and vice versa. Julia has interoperability with C, C++, Fortran, Rust, Python, and R. Additionally, some Julia packages have bindings to be used from Python and R as libraries. Julia is supported by programmer tools like IDEs (see below) and by notebooks like Pluto.jl, Jupyter, and since 2025, Google Colab officially supports Julia natively. Julia is sometimes used in embedded systems (e.g. has been used in a satellite in space on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4; 64-bit Pis work best with Julia, and Julia is supported in Raspbian). == History == Work on Julia began in 2009, when Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, and Alan Edelman set out to create a free language that was both high-level and fast. On 14 February 2012, the team launched a website with a blog post explaining the language's mission. In an interview with InfoWorld in April 2012, Karpinski said about the name of the language, Julia: "There's no good reason, really. It just seemed like a pretty name." Bezanson said he chose the name on the recommendation of a friend, then years later wrote: Maybe julia stands for "Jeff's uncommon lisp is automated"? Julia's syntax is stable, since version 1.0 in 2018, and Julia has a backward compatibility guarantee for 1.x and also a stability promise for the documented (stable) API, while in the years before in the early development prior to 0.7 the syntax (and semantics) was changed in new versions. All of the (registered package) ecosystem uses the new and improved syntax, and in most cases relies on new APIs that have been added regularly, and in some cases minor additional syntax added in a forward compatible way e.g. in Julia 1.7. In the 10 years since the 2012 launch of pre-1.0 Julia, the community has grown. The Julia package ecosystem has over 11.8 million lines of code (including docs and tests). The JuliaCon academic conference for Julia users and developers has been held annually since 2014 with JuliaCon2020 welcoming over 28,900 unique viewers, and then JuliaCon2021 breaking all previous records (with more than 300 JuliaCon2021 presentations available for free on YouTube, up from 162 the year before), and 43,000 unique viewers during the conference. Three of the Julia co-creators are the recipients of the 2019 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software (awarded every four years) "for the creation of Julia, an innovative environment for the creation of high-performance tools that enable the analysis and solution of computational science problems." Also, Alan Edelman, professor of applied mathematics at MIT, has been selected to receive the 2019 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award "for outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, and computational science and for contributions to the Julia programming language." Version 0.3 was released in August 2014. Both Julia 0.7 and version 1.0 were released on 8 August 2018. Julia 1.4 added syntax for generic array indexing to handle e.g. 0-based arrays. The memory model was also changed. Julia 1.5 released in August 2020 added record and replay debugging support, for Mozilla's rr tool. The release changed the behavior in the REPL (to soft scope) to the one used in Jupyter, but keeps full compatible with non-REPL code (that retains hard scope). Julia 1.6 was the largest release since 1.0, and it was the long-term support (LTS) version for the longest time. Since Julia 1.7 development is back to time-based releases, and it was released in November 2021 with e.g. a new default random-number generator and Julia 1.7.3 fixed at least one security issue. Julia 1.8 added options for hiding source code when compiling Julia source code to executables. Julia 1.9 has added the ability to precompile packages to native machine code, done automatically; to improve precompilation of packages a new package PrecompileTools.jl was introduced, for use by package developers. Julia 1.10 was released on 25 December 2023 with new features such as parallel garbage collection. Julia 1.11 was released on 7 October 2024, and with it 1.10.5 became the next long-term support (LTS) version (i.e. those became the only two supported versions), since replaced by 1.10.10 released on 27 June, and 1.6 is no longer an LTS version. Julia 1.11 adds e.g. the new public keyword to signal safe public API (Julia users are advised to use such API, not internals, of Julia or packages, and package authors advised to use the keyword, generally indirectly, e.g. prefixed with the @compat macro, from Compat.jl, to also support older Julia versions, at least the LTS version). Julia 1.12 was released on 7 October 2025 (and 1.12.5 on 9 February 2026), and with it a JuliaC.jl package including the juliac compiler that works with it, for making rather small binary executables (much smaller than was possible before; through the use of new so-called trimming feature). Julia 1.10 LTS is an officially still-supported branch, but the 1.11 branch has also been maintained after 1.12 release, with 1.11.8 released and then 1.11.9 released on 8 February 2026. === JuliaCon === Since 2014, the Julia Community has hosted an annual Julia Conference focused on developers and users. The first JuliaCon took place in Chicago and kickstarted the annual occurrence of the conference. Since 2014, the conference has taken place across a number of locations including MIT and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The event audience has grown from a few dozen people to over 28,900 unique attendees during JuliaCon 2020, which took place virtually. JuliaCon 2021 also took place virtually with keynote addresses from professors William Kahan, the primary architect of the IEEE 754 floating-point standard (which virtually all CPUs and languages, including Julia, use), Jan Vitek, Xiaoye Sherry Li, and Soumith Chintala, a co-creator of PyTorch. JuliaCon grew to 43,000 unique attendees and more than 300 presentations (still freely accessible, plus for older years). JuliaCon 2022 will also be virtual held between July 27 and July 29, 2022, for the first time in several languages, not just in English. === Sponsors === The Julia language became a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project in 2014 in an effort to ensure the project's long-term sustainability. Jeremy Kepner at MIT Lincoln Laboratory was the founding sponsor of the Julia project in its early days. In addition, funds from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Intel, and agencies such as NSF, DARPA, NIH, NASA, and FAA have been essential to the development of Julia. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox web browser, with its research grants for H1 2019, sponsored "a member of the official Julia team" for the project "Bringing Julia to the Browser", meaning to Firefox and other web browsers. The Julia language is also supported by individual donors on GitHub. === The Julia company === JuliaHub, Inc. was founded in 2015 as Julia Computing, Inc. by Viral B. Shah, Deepak Vinchhi, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski and Keno Fischer. In June 2017, Julia Computing raised US$4.6 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Founder Collective, the same month was "granted $910,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support open-source Julia development, including $160,000 to promote diversity in the Julia community", and in December 2019 the company got $1.1 million funding from the US government to "develop a neural component machine learning tool to reduce the total energy consumption of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings". In July 2021, Julia Computing announced they raised a $24 million Series A round led by Dorilton Ventures, which also owns Formula One team Williams Racing, that partnered with Julia Computing. Williams' Commercial Director said: "Investing in companies building best-in-class cloud technology is a strategic focus for Dorilton and Julia's versatile platform, with revolutionary capabilities in simulation and modelling, is hugely relevant to our business. We look forward to embedding Julia Computing in the world's most technologically advanced sport". In June 2023, JuliaHub received (again, now

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  Information Harvesting

  Information Harvesting (IH) was an early data mining product from the 1990s. It was invented by Ralphe Wiggins and produced by the Ryan Corp, later Information Harvesting Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wiggins had a background in genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic. IH sought to infer rules from sets of data. It did this first by classifying various input variables into one of a number of bins, thereby putting some structure on the continuous variables in the input. IH then proceeds to generate rules, trading off generalization against memorization, that will infer the value of the prediction variable, possibly creating many levels of rules in the process. It included strategies for checking if overfitting took place and, if so, correcting for it. Because of its strategies for correcting for overfitting by considering more data, and refining the rules based on that data, IH might also be considered to be a form of machine learning. The advantage of IH, as compared with other data mining products of its time and even later, was that it provided a mechanism for finding multiple rules that would classify the data and determining, according to set criteria, the best rules to use.

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  Jubatus

  Jubatus is an open-source online machine learning and distributed computing framework developed at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and Preferred Infrastructure. Its features include classification, recommendation, regression, anomaly detection and graph mining. It supports many client languages, including C++, Java, Ruby and Python. It uses Iterative Parameter Mixture for distributed machine learning. == Notable Features == Jubatus supports: Multi-classification algorithms: Perceptron Passive Aggressive Confidence Weighted Adaptive Regularization of Weight Vectors Normal Herd Recommendation algorithms using: Inverted index Minhash Locality-sensitive hashing Regression algorithms: Passive Aggressive feature extraction method for natural language: n-gram Text segmentation

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  JotterPad

  JotterPad is a text editor app for Android, developed by Two App Studio. It is proprietary software that uses the freemium pricing strategy. == Features == Jotterpad supports the markdown and fountain markup languages. Among its features are themes, synchronisation with Google Drive and Dropbox, dictionary and thesaurus, and snapshots. JotterPad uses a freemium pricing model, which means that a restricted version of the app is offered for free, while access to additional functionality requires payment. About half of the features are available in the free version. The synchronisation feature was originally limited to one account, and in Jotterpad 12 the option to synchronise using multiple accounts was added as a monthly subscription service.

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  Amazon Rekognition

  Amazon Rekognition is a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) computer vision platform that was launched in 2016. It has been sold to, and used by, a number of United States government agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Orlando, Florida police, as well as private entities. == Capabilities == Rekognition provides a number of computer vision capabilities, which can be divided into two categories: Algorithms that are pre-trained on data collected by Amazon or its partners, and algorithms that a user can train on a custom dataset. As of July 2019, Rekognition provides the following computer vision capabilities. === Pre-trained algorithms === Celebrity recognition in images Facial attribute detection in images, including gender, age range, emotions (e.g. happy, calm, disgusted), whether the face has a beard or mustache, whether the face has eyeglasses or sunglasses, whether the eyes are open, whether the mouth is open, whether the person is smiling, and the location of several markers such as the pupils and jaw line. People Pathing enables tracking of people through a video. An advertised use-case of this capability is to track sports players for post-game analysis. Text detection and classification in images Unsafe visual content detection === Algorithms that a user can train on a custom dataset === SearchFaces enables users to import a database of images with pre-labeled faces, to train a machine learning model on this database, and to expose the model as a cloud service with an API. Then, the user can post new images to the API and receive information about the faces in the image. The API can be used to expose a number of capabilities, including identifying faces of known people, comparing faces, and finding similar faces in a database. Face-based user verification == History and use == === 2017 === In late 2017, the Washington County, Oregon Sheriff's Office began using Rekognition to identify suspects' faces. Rekognition was marketed as a general-purpose computer vision tool, and an engineer working for Washington County decided to use the tool for facial analysis of suspects. Rekognition was offered to the department for free, and Washington County became the first US law enforcement agency known to use Rekognition. In 2018, the agency logged over 1,000 facial searches. The county, according to the Washington Post, by 2019 was paying about $7 a month for all of its searches. The relationship was unknown to the public until May 2018. In 2018, Rekognition was also used to help identify celebrities during a royal wedding telecast. === 2018 === In April 2018, it was reported that FamilySearch was using Rekognition to enable their users to "see which of their ancestors they most resemble based on family photographs". In early 2018, the FBI also began using it as a pilot program for analyzing video surveillance. In May 2018, it was reported by the ACLU that Orlando, Florida was running a pilot using Rekognition for facial analysis in law enforcement, with that pilot ending in July 2019. After the report, on June 22, 2018, Gizmodo reported that Amazon workers had written a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos requesting he cease selling Rekognition to US law enforcement, particularly ICE and Homeland Security. A letter was also sent to Bezos by the ACLU. On June 26, 2018, it was reported that the Orlando police force had ceased using Rekognition after their trial contract expired, reserving the right to use it in the future. The Orlando Police Department said that they had "never gotten to the point to test images" due to old infrastructure and low bandwidth. In July 2018, the ACLU released a test showing that Rekognition had falsely matched 28 members of Congress with mugshot photos, particularly Congresspeople of color. 25 House members afterwards sent a letter to Bezos, expressing concern about Rekognition. Amazon responded saying the Rekognition test had generated 80 percent confidence, while it recommended law enforcement only use matches rated at 99 percent confidence. The Washington Post states that Oregon instead has officers pick a "best of five" result, instead of adhering to the recommendation. In September 2018, it was reported that Mapillary was using Rekognition to read the text on parking signs (e.g. no stopping, no parking, or specific parking hours) in cities. In October 2018, it was reported that Amazon had earlier that year pitched Rekognition to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Amazon defended government use of Rekognition. On December 1, 2018, it was reported that 8 Democratic lawmakers had said in a letter that Amazon had "failed to provide sufficient answers" about Rekognition, writing that they had "serious concerns that this type of product has significant accuracy issues, places disproportionate burdens on communities of color, and could stifle Americans' willingness to exercise their First Amendment rights in public." === 2019 === In January 2019, MIT researchers published a peer-reviewed study asserting that Rekognition had more difficulty in identifying dark-skinned females than competitors such as IBM and Microsoft. In the study, Rekognition misidentified darker-skinned women as men 31% of the time, but made no mistakes for light-skinned men. Amazon called the report "misinterpreted results" of the research with an improper "default confidence threshold." In January 2019, Amazon's shareholders "urged Amazon to stop selling Rekognition software to law enforcement agencies." Amazon in response defended its use of Rekognition, but supported new federal oversight and guidelines to "make sure facial recognition technology cannot be used to discriminate." In February 2019, it was reported that Amazon was collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on developing standardized tests to improve accuracy and remove bias with facial recognition. In March 2019, an open letter regarding Rekognition was sent by a group of prominent AI researchers to Amazon, criticizing its sale to law enforcement with around 50 signatures. In April 2019, Amazon was told by the Securities and Exchange Commission that they had to vote on two shareholder proposals seeking to limit Rekognition. Amazon argued that the proposals were an "insignificant public policy issue for the Company" not related to Amazon's ordinary business, but their appeal was denied. The vote was set for May. The first proposal was tabled by shareholders. On May 24, 2019, 2.4% of shareholders voted to stop selling Rekognition to government agencies, while a second proposal calling for a study into Rekognition and civil rights had 27.5% support. In August 2019, the ACLU again used Rekognition on members of government, with 26 of 120 lawmakers in California flagged as matches to mugshots. Amazon stated the ACLU was "misusing" the software in the tests, by not dismissing results that did not meet Amazon's recommended accuracy threshold of 99%. By August 2019, there had been protests against ICE's use of Rekognition to surveil immigrants. In March 2019, Amazon announced a Rekognition update that would improve emotional detection, and in August 2019, "fear" was added to emotions that Rekognition could detect. === 2020 === In June 2020, Amazon announced it was implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition, in response to the George Floyd protests. === 2024 === The Department of Justice disclosed that the FBI is initiating the use of Amazon Rekognition. The DOJ's AI inventory revealed the FBI's "Project Tyr" aims to customize Rekognition to identify nudity, weapons, explosives, and other information from lawfully acquired media. === 2025 === In late 2025, the New York Times reported that scientist, Dr. Jürgen Matthäus, retired from as the head of research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., used Amazon Rekognition to identify the shooter in the Holocaust photograph known as The Last Jew in Vinnitsa "with more than 99 percent certainty" — as Jakobus Onnen (1906–1943), a teacher from Tichelwarf near Weener in East Frisia who had been a member of the SS since 1934 and was later killed in action near Zhitomir in 1943. The photographer and victim remain unidentified. == Controversy regarding facial analysis == === Racial and gender bias === In 2018, MIT researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru published a study called Gender Shades. In this study, a set of images was collected, and faces in the images were labeled with face position, gender, and skin tone information. The images were run through SaaS facial recognition platforms from Face++, IBM, and Microsoft. In all three of these platforms, the classifiers performed best on male faces (with error rates on female faces being 8.1% to 20.6% higher than error rates on male faces), and they performed worst on dark female faces (with error rates ranging from 20.8% to 30.4%). The authors hypothesized that this discr

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  BookCorpus

  BookCorpus (also sometimes referred to as the Toronto Book Corpus) is a dataset consisting of the text of around 7,000 self-published books scraped from the indie ebook distribution website Smashwords. It was the main corpus used to train the initial GPT model by OpenAI, and has been used as training data for other early large language models including Google's BERT. The dataset consists of around 985 million words, and the books that comprise it span a range of genres, including romance, science fiction, and fantasy. The corpus was introduced in a 2015 paper by researchers from the University of Toronto and MIT titled "Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books". The authors described it as consisting of "free books written by yet unpublished authors," yet this is factually incorrect. These books were published by self-published ("indie") authors who priced them at free; the books were downloaded without the consent or permission of Smashwords or Smashwords authors and in violation of the Smashwords Terms of Service. The dataset was initially hosted on a University of Toronto webpage. An official version of the original dataset is no longer publicly available, though at least one substitute, BookCorpusOpen, has been created. Though not documented in the original 2015 paper, the site from which the corpus's books were scraped is now known to be Smashwords.

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