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  Crackme

  A crackme is a small computer program designed to test a programmer's reverse engineering skills. Crackmes are made as a legal way to crack software, since no intellectual property is being infringed. == Description == Crackmes often incorporate protection schemes and algorithms similar to those used in proprietary software. However, they can sometimes be more challenging because they may use advanced packing or protection techniques, making the underlying algorithm harder to analyze and modify. == Keygenme == A keygenme is specifically designed for the reverser to not only identify the protection algorithm used in the application but also create a small key generator (keygen) in the programming language of their choice. Most keygenmes, when properly manipulated, can be made self-keygenning. For example, during validation, they might generate the correct key internally and compare it to the user's input. This allows the key generation algorithm to be easily replicated. Anti-debugging and anti-disassembly routines are often used to confuse debuggers or render disassembly output useless. Code obfuscation is also used to further complicate reverse engineering.

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  Dr.Fill

  Dr.Fill is a computer program that solves American-style crossword puzzles. It was developed by Matt Ginsberg and described by Ginsberg in an article in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Ginsberg claims in that article that Dr.Fill is among the top fifty crossword solvers in the world. == History == Dr.Fill participated in the 2012 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, finishing 141st of approximately 650 entrants with a total score of just over 10,000 points. The appearance led to a variety of descriptions of Dr.Fill in the popular press, including The Economist, the San Francisco Chronicle and Gizmodo. A description of Dr.Fill appeared on the front page of the March 17, 2012 New York Times. Dr.Fill's score in 2013 improved to 10,550, which would have earned it 92nd place. Videos of the program solving the problems from the tournament are available on YouTube. The score in 2014 improved further to 10,790, which would have tied for 67th place. A video of the program solving the first six puzzles from that tournament, together with a talk given by Ginsberg describing its performance, can be found on YouTube. Dr.Fill has largely continued to improve since the 2014 event. In 2015, it scored 10,920 points and finished in 55th place. In 2016, it scored 11,205 points and finished in 41st place. In 2017, it scored 11,795 and finished in 11th place. In 2018, it scored 10,740 points, dropping to 78th place. Dr.Fill returned to "form" in 2019, once again scoring 11,795 and finishing in 14th place. The 2020 ACPT was cancelled due to COVID-19, and Dr.Fill participated as a non-competitor in the Boswords tournament instead. The program outperformed the humans, scoring 11,218 points (fast solves with a total of one mistake) while the best scoring human scored 10,994 points (slower solves but no mistakes). The 2021 ACPT was virtual, again due to COVID-19. The Dr.Fill effort was joined by the Berkeley NLP Group, creating a hybrid system named Berkeley Crossword Solver, and Dr.Fill won the main event, scoring 12,825 points with Erik Agard, the highest scoring human, scoring 12,810 points. The tournament was won by Tyler Hinman (12,760 points), who completed the championship puzzle perfectly in three minutes. Dr.Fill also completed that puzzle perfectly, but in 49 seconds. After winning the tournament, Ginsberg announced on August 8, 2021, that both he and Dr.Fill would be retiring from crosswords. == Algorithm == As described by Ginsberg, Dr.Fill works by converting a crossword to a weighted constraint satisfaction problem and then attempting to maximize the probability that the fill is correct. Probabilities for individual words or phrases in the puzzle are computed using relatively simple statistical techniques based on features such as previous appearances of the clue, number of Google hits for the fill, and so on. In doing this, Dr.Fill is attempting to solve a problem similar to that tackled by the Jeopardy!-playing program Watson; Dr.Fill runs on a laptop instead of a supercomputer and Ginsberg remarks that Watson is far more effective than Dr.Fill at solving this portion of the problem. Instead of computational horsepower, Dr.Fill relies on the constraints provided by crossing words to refine its answers. A variety of techniques from artificial intelligence are applied to attempt to find the most likely fill. These include a small amount of lookahead, limited discrepancy search, and postprocessing. Ginsberg remarks that postprocessing was chosen over branch and bound because the two techniques are mutually incompatible and postprocessing was found to be more effective in this domain.

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  Learning rule

  An artificial neural network's learning rule or learning process is a method, mathematical logic or algorithm which improves the network's performance and/or training time. Usually, this rule is applied repeatedly over the network. It is done by updating the weight and bias levels of a network when it is simulated in a specific data environment. A learning rule may accept existing conditions (weights and biases) of the network, and will compare the expected result and actual result of the network to give new and improved values for the weights and biases. Depending on the complexity of the model being simulated, the learning rule of the network can be as simple as an XOR gate or mean squared error, or as complex as the result of a system of differential equations. The learning rule is one of the factors which decides how fast or how accurately the neural network can be developed. Depending on the process to develop the network, there are three main paradigms of machine learning: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. == Background == A lot of the learning methods in machine learning work similar to each other, and are based on each other, which makes it difficult to classify them in clear categories. But they can be broadly understood in 4 categories of learning methods, though these categories don't have clear boundaries and they tend to belong to multiple categories of learning methods - Hebbian - Neocognitron, Brain-state-in-a-box Gradient Descent - ADALINE, Hopfield Network, Recurrent Neural Network Competitive - Learning Vector Quantisation, Self-Organising Feature Map, Adaptive Resonance Theory Stochastic - Boltzmann Machine, Cauchy Machine Though these learning rules might appear to be based on similar ideas, they do have subtle differences, as they are a generalisation or application over the previous rule, and hence it makes sense to study them separately based on their origins and intents. === Hebbian Learning === Developed by Donald Hebb in 1949 to describe biological neuron firing. In the mid-1950s it was also applied to computer simulations of neural networks. Δ w i = η x i y {\displaystyle \Delta w_{i}=\eta x_{i}y} Where η {\displaystyle \eta } represents the learning rate, x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} represents the input of neuron i, and y is the output of the neuron. It has been shown that Hebb's rule in its basic form is unstable. Oja's Rule, BCM Theory are other learning rules built on top of or alongside Hebb's Rule in the study of biological neurons. ==== Perceptron Learning Rule (PLR) ==== The perceptron learning rule originates from the Hebbian assumption, and was used by Frank Rosenblatt in his perceptron in 1958. The net is passed to the activation (transfer) function and the function's output is used for adjusting the weights. The learning signal is the difference between the desired response and the actual response of a neuron. The step function is often used as an activation function, and the outputs are generally restricted to -1, 0, or 1. The weights are updated with w new = w old + η ( t − o ) x i {\displaystyle w_{\text{new}}=w_{\text{old}}+\eta (t-o)x_{i}} where "t" is the target value and "o" is the output of the perceptron, and η {\displaystyle \eta } is called the learning rate. The algorithm converges to the correct classification if: the training data is linearly separable η {\displaystyle \eta } is sufficiently small (though smaller η {\displaystyle \eta } generally means a longer learning time and more epochs) It should also be noted that a single layer perceptron with this learning rule is incapable of working on linearly non-separable inputs, and hence the XOR problem cannot be solved using this rule alone === Backpropagation === Seppo Linnainmaa in 1970 is said to have developed the Backpropagation Algorithm but the origins of the algorithm go back to the 1960s with many contributors. It is a generalisation of the least mean squares algorithm in the linear perceptron and the Delta Learning Rule. It implements gradient descent search through the space possible network weights, iteratively reducing the error, between the target values and the network outputs. ==== Widrow-Hoff Learning (Delta Learning Rule) ==== Similar to the perceptron learning rule but with different origin. It was developed for use in the ADALINE network, which differs from the Perceptron mainly in terms of the training. The weights are adjusted according to the weighted sum of the inputs (the net), whereas in perceptron the sign of the weighted sum was useful for determining the output as the threshold was set to 0, -1, or +1. This makes ADALINE different from the normal perceptron. Delta rule (DR) is similar to the Perceptron Learning Rule (PLR), with some differences: Error (δ) in DR is not restricted to having values of 0, 1, or -1 (as in PLR), but may have any value DR can be derived for any differentiable output/activation function f, whereas in PLR only works for threshold output function Sometimes only when the Widrow-Hoff is applied to binary targets specifically, it is referred to as Delta Rule, but the terms seem to be used often interchangeably. The delta rule is considered to a special case of the back-propagation algorithm. Delta rule also closely resembles the Rescorla-Wagner model under which Pavlovian conditioning occurs. === Competitive Learning === Competitive learning is considered a variant of Hebbian learning, but it is special enough to be discussed separately. Competitive learning works by increasing the specialization of each node in the network. It is well suited to finding clusters within data. Models and algorithms based on the principle of competitive learning include vector quantization and self-organizing maps (Kohonen maps).

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  Ebert test

  The Ebert test gauges whether a computer-based synthesized voice can tell a joke with sufficient skill to cause people to laugh. It was proposed by film critic Roger Ebert at the 2011 TED conference as a challenge to software developers to have a computerized voice master the inflections, delivery, timing, and intonations of human speech. The test is similar to the Turing test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a way to gauge a computer's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior by generating performance indistinguishable from a human being. If the computer can successfully tell a joke, and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want. Ebert lost his voice in 2006 after undergoing surgery to treat thyroid cancer. He employed a Scottish company called CereProc, which custom-tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers who record their voices at length before losing them, and mined tapes and DVD commentaries featuring Ebert to create a voice that sounded more like his own voice. He first publicly used the voice they devised for him in his March 2, 2010, appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The audience of Ebert's 2011 TED talk about joke delivery by synthesized voices erupted with laughter when a synthesized voice delivered the following joke: "A guy goes into a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, 'You’re crazy.' The guy says, 'I want a second opinion.' The psychiatrist says, 'All right, you’re ugly, too.'"

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  ACL Data Collection Initiative

  The ACL Data Collection Initiative (ACL/DCI) was a project established in 1989 by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) to create and distribute large text and speech corpora for computational linguistics research. The initiative aimed to address the growing need for substantial text databases that could support research in areas such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computational linguistics. By 1993, the initiative’s activities had effectively ceased, with its functions and datasets absorbed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), which was founded in 1992. == Objectives == The ACL/DCI had several key objectives: To acquire a large and diverse text corpus from various sources To transform the collected texts into a common format based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) To make the corpus available for scientific research at low cost with minimal restrictions To provide a common database that would allow researchers to replicate or extend published results To reduce duplication of effort among researchers in obtaining and preparing text data These objectives were designed to address the growing demand for very large amounts of text arising from applications in recognition and analysis of text and speech. Its core objective was to "oversee the acquisition and preparation of a large text corpus to be made available for scientific research at cost and without royalties". == History == By the late 1980s, researchers in computational linguistics and speech recognition faced a significant problem: the lack of large-scale, accessible text corpora for developing statistical models and testing algorithms. Existing generally available text databases were too small to meet the needs of developing applications in text and speech recognition. The initiative was formed to meet this need by collecting, standardizing, and distributing large quantities of text data with minimal restrictions for scientific research. As stated by Liberman (1990), "research workers have been severely hampered by the lack of appropriate materials, and specially by the lack of a large enough body of text on which published results can be replicated or extended by others." The ACL/DCI committee was established in February 1989. The committee included members from academic and industrial research laboratories in the United States and Europe. The initiative was chaired by Mark Liberman from the University of Pennsylvania (formerly of AT&T Bell Laboratories). Other committee members included representatives from organizations such as Bellcore, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Cambridge University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania, SRI International, MCC, Xerox PARC, ISSCO, and University of Pisa. The project operated initially without dedicated funding, relying on volunteer efforts from committee members and their affiliated institutions. Key supporters included AT&T Bell Labs, Bellcore, IBM, Xerox, and the University of Pennsylvania, which allowed the use of their computing facilities for ACL/DCI-related work. Previously running on volunteer effort pro bono, in 1991, it obtained funding from General Electric and the National Science Foundation (IRI-9113530). == Data == As of 1990, the ACL/DCI had collected hundreds of millions of words of diverse text. The collection included: Wall Street Journal articles (25 to 50 million words); Canadian Hansard (parliamentary records) in parallel English and French versions: cleaned-up English Hansard donated by the IBM alignment models group (100 million words), and original Bilingual Hansard (from a different time period) obtained directly (200 million words). Collins English Dictionary (1979 edition), both as fulltext (3 million words) and as various "database" versions, constructed using "typographers' tape" donated by Collins, which were computer tapes containing the structured digital data used to typeset and print the 1979 edition of the dictionary; Emails from ARPANET newsletters for the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval Forum (IRLIST) and AIList Digest issues distributed over the ARPANET (AILIST) (5 million words), both collected by Edward A. Fox at VIPSU; Articles on networking (2 million words); U.S. Department of Agriculture Extension Service Fact Sheets (>1 million words); 200,000 scientific abstracts of about 1,500 words each from the Department of Energy (25 million words); Archives of the Challenger Investigation Commission, including transcripts of depositions and hearings (2.5 million words); Books from the Library of America, including works by Mark Twain, Eugene O'Neill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, W.E.B. DuBois, Willa Cather, and Benjamin Franklin (130 books, 20 million words); Public domain books like the King James Bible, Tristram Shandy, The Federalist Papers; Several million words of transcribed radiologists' reports, donated by Francis Ganong at Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc (about 5 million words); The Child Language Data Exchange corpus of child language acquisition transcripts; U.S. Department of Justice Justice Retrieval and Inquiry System (JURIS) materials; The Swiss Civil Code in parallel German, French and Italian; Economic reports from the Union Bank of Switzerland, in parallel English, German, French and Italian; About 12K words of administrative policy manuals and 14K words of administrative memos, contributed by Geoff Pullum of U.C.S.C.; Material from various ACM journals and the ACL journal Computational Linguistics; The CSLI publications series: 50-100 reports (8K words each) and 5-10 books (80K words each). The initiative started with North American English text but expanded to include Canadian French and planned to include Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian languages. At least 5 million words from the collection were tagged under the Penn Treebank project, and those tags were distributed by DCI as well. After DCI was absorbed by the LDC, the datasets were curated under LDC. == Format == The ACL/DCI corpus was coded in a standard form based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879), consistent with the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), of which the DCI was an affiliated project. The TEI was a joint project of the ACL, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, aiming to provide a common interchange format for literary and linguistic data. The initiative planned to add annotations reflecting consensually approved linguistic features like part of speech and various aspects of syntactic and semantic structure over time. == Examples == As an example of the use of ACL/DCI, consider the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus for speech recognition research. The WSJ corpus was used as the basis for the DARPA Spoken Language System (SLS) community's Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR) Corpus. The WSJ corpus became a standard benchmark for evaluating speech recognition systems and has been used in numerous research papers. The WSJ CSR Corpus provided DARPA with its first general-purpose English, large vocabulary, natural language, high perplexity corpus containing speech (400 hours) and text (47 million words) during 1987–89. The text corpus was 313 MB in size. The text was preprocessed to remove ambiguity in the word sequence that a reader might choose, ensuring that the unread text used to train language models was representative of the spoken test material. The preprocessing included converting numbers into orthographics, expanding abbreviations, resolving apostrophes and quotation marks, and marking punctuation. As another example, the Yarowsky algorithm used bitext data from DCI to train a simple word-sense disambiguation model that was competitive with advanced models trained on smaller datasets. == Distribution == Materials from the ACL/DCI collection were distributed to research groups on a non-commercial basis. By 1990, about 25 research groups and individual researchers had received tapes containing various portions of the collected material. To obtain the data, researchers had to sign an agreement not to redistribute the data or make direct commercial use of it. However, commercial application of "analytical materials" derived from the text, such as statistical tables or grammar rules, was explicitly permitted. The initiative first distributed data via 12-inch reels of 9-track tape, then via CD-ROMs. Each such tape could contain 30 million words compressed via the Lempel-Ziv algorithms. The first CD-ROM distribution was in 1991, funded by Dragon Systems Inc. It contained Collins English Dictionary, WSJ, scientific abstracts provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Penn Treebank.

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  Utah Artificial Intelligence Policy Act

  The Utah Artificial Intelligence Policy Act (SB-149) was signed into law in Utah in 2024 and amended in 2025. The first state law in the United States specifically regulating generative AI, it went into effect on May 1, 2024. The law requires companies to disclose if their customers interact with AI instead of a human. It also established an Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. Amendments to the Act went into effect on May 7, 2025. While the 2024 Act requires companies to disclose generative AI use when asked by customers, the amendments introduced stricter requirements for higher-risk interactions. SB 226 mandates disclosure of AI use in high-risk interactions involving health, financial, and biometric data, or when providing consumers with advice on financial, legal, or healthcare matters.

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  Spatial–temporal reasoning

  Spatial–temporal reasoning is an area of artificial intelligence that draws from the fields of computer science, cognitive science, and cognitive psychology. The theoretic goal—on the cognitive side—involves representing and reasoning spatial-temporal knowledge in mind. The applied goal—on the computing side—involves developing high-level control systems of automata for navigating and understanding time and space. == Influence from cognitive psychology == A convergent result in cognitive psychology is that the connection relation is the first spatial relation that human babies acquire, followed by understanding orientation relations and distance relations. Internal relations among the three kinds of spatial relations can be computationally and systematically explained within the theory of cognitive prism as follows: the connection relation is primitive; an orientation relation is a distance comparison relation: you being in front of me can be interpreted as you are nearer to my front side than my other sides; a distance relation is a connection relation using a third object: you being one meter away from me can be interpreted as a one-meter-long object connected with you and me simultaneously. == Fragmentary representations of temporal calculi == Without addressing internal relations among spatial relations, AI researchers contributed many fragmentary representations. Examples of temporal calculi include Allen's interval algebra, and Vilain's & Kautz's point algebra. The most prominent spatial calculi are mereotopological calculi, Frank's cardinal direction calculus, Freksa's double cross calculus, Egenhofer and Franzosa's 4- and 9-intersection calculi, Ligozat's flip-flop calculus, various region connection calculi (RCC), and the Oriented Point Relation Algebra. Recently, spatio-temporal calculi have been designed that combine spatial and temporal information. For example, the spatiotemporal constraint calculus (STCC) by Gerevini and Nebel combines Allen's interval algebra with RCC-8. Moreover, the qualitative trajectory calculus (QTC) allows for reasoning about moving objects. == Quantitative abstraction == An emphasis in the literature has been on qualitative spatial-temporal reasoning which is based on qualitative abstractions of temporal and spatial aspects of the common-sense background knowledge on which our human perspective of physical reality is based. Methodologically, qualitative constraint calculi restrict the vocabulary of rich mathematical theories dealing with temporal or spatial entities such that specific aspects of these theories can be treated within decidable fragments with simple qualitative (non-metric) languages. Contrary to mathematical or physical theories about space and time, qualitative constraint calculi allow for rather inexpensive reasoning about entities located in space and time. For this reason, the limited expressiveness of qualitative representation formalism calculi is a benefit if such reasoning tasks need to be integrated in applications. For example, some of these calculi may be implemented for handling spatial GIS queries efficiently and some may be used for navigating, and communicating with, a mobile robot. == Relation algebra == Most of these calculi can be formalized as abstract relation algebras, such that reasoning can be carried out at a symbolic level. For computing solutions of a constraint network, the path-consistency algorithm is an important tool. == Software == GQR, constraint network solver for calculi like RCC-5, RCC-8, Allen's interval algebra, point algebra, cardinal direction calculus, etc. qualreas is a Python framework for qualitative reasoning over networks of relation algebras, such as RCC-8, Allen's interval algebra, and Allen's algebra integrated with Time Points and situated in either Left- or Right-Branching Time.

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  PauseAI

  PauseAI is a global political movement founded in the Netherlands with the stated aim of achieving global coordination to stop the development of more powerful general artificial intelligence systems, at least until it is known how to build them safely, and keep them under democratic control. The movement was established in Utrecht in May 2023 by software entrepreneur Joep Meindertsma. == Proposal == PauseAI's stated goal is to "implement a temporary pause on the training of the most powerful general AI systems". Their website lists some proposed steps to achieve this goal: Set up an international AI safety agency, similar to the IAEA. Only allow training of general AI systems if their safety can be guaranteed. Only allow deployment of models after no dangerous capabilities are present. == Background == During the late 2010s and early 2020s, a rapid improvement in the capabilities of artificial intelligence models known as the AI boom was underway, which included the release of large language model GPT-3, its more powerful successor GPT-4, and image generation models Midjourney and DALL-E. This led to an increased concern about the risks of advanced AI, causing the Future of Life Institute to release an open letter calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4". The letter was signed by thousands of AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, and Elon Musk. == History == Founder Joep Meindertsma first became worried about the existential risk from artificial intelligence after reading philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. He founded PauseAI in May 2023, putting his job as the CEO of a software firm on hold. Meindertsma claimed the rate of progress in AI alignment research is lagging behind the progress in AI capabilities, and said "there is a chance that we are facing extinction in a short frame of time". As such, he felt an urge to organise people to act. PauseAI's first public action was to protest in front of Microsoft's Brussels lobbying office in May 2023 during an event on artificial intelligence. In November of the same year, they protested outside the inaugural AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. The Bletchley Declaration that was signed at the summit, which acknowledged the potential for catastrophic risks stemming from AI, was perceived by Meindertsma to be a small first step. But, he argued "binding international treaties" are needed. He mentioned the Montreal Protocol and treaties banning blinding laser weapons as examples of previous successful global agreements. In February 2024, members of PauseAI gathered outside OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco, in part due to OpenAI changing its usage policy that prohibited the use of its models for military purposes. On 13 May 2024, protests were held across thirteen countries before the AI Seoul Summit, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Australia, and Norway. Meindertserma said that those attending the summit "need to realize that they are the only ones who have the power to stop this race". Protesters in San Francisco held signs reading "When in doubt, pause", and "Quit your job at OpenAI. Trust your conscience". Jan Leike, head of the "superalignment" team at OpenAI, resigned two days later due to his belief that "safety culture and processes [had] taken a backseat to shiny products".

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  Egocentric vision

  Egocentric vision or first-person vision is a sub-field of computer vision that entails analyzing images and videos captured by a wearable camera, which is typically worn on the head or on the chest and naturally approximates the visual field of the camera wearer. Consequently, visual data capture the part of the scene on which the user focuses to carry out the task at hand and offer a valuable perspective to understand the user's activities and their context in a naturalistic setting. The wearable camera looking forwards is often supplemented with a camera looking inward at the user's eye and able to measure a user's eye gaze, which is useful to reveal attention and to better understand the user's activity and intentions. == History == The idea of using a wearable camera to gather visual data from a first-person perspective dates back to the 70s, when Steve Mann invented "Digital Eye Glass", a device that, when worn, causes the human eye itself to effectively become both an electronic camera and a television display. Subsequently, wearable cameras were used for health-related applications in the context of Humanistic Intelligence and Wearable AI. Egocentric vision is best done from the point-of-eye, but may also be done by way of a neck-worn camera when eyeglasses would be in-the-way. This neck-worn variant was popularized by way of the Microsoft SenseCam in 2006 for experimental health research works. The interest of the computer vision community into the egocentric paradigm has been arising slowly entering the 2010s and it is rapidly growing in recent years, boosted by both the impressive advances in the field of wearable technology and by the increasing number of potential applications. The prototypical first-person vision system described by Kanade and Hebert, in 2012 is composed by three basic components: a localization component able to estimate the surrounding, a recognition component able to identify object and people, and an activity recognition component, able to provide information about the current activity of the user. Together, these three components provide a complete situational awareness of the user, which in turn can be used to provide assistance to the user or to the caregiver. Following this idea, the first computational techniques for egocentric analysis focused on hand-related activity recognition and social interaction analysis. Also, given the unconstrained nature of the video and the huge amount of data generated, temporal segmentation and summarization were among the first problems addressed. After almost ten years of egocentric vision (2007–2017), the field is still undergoing diversification. Emerging research topics include: Social saliency estimation Multi-agent egocentric vision systems Privacy preserving techniques and applications Attention-based activity analysis Social interaction analysis Hand pose analysis Ego graphical User Interfaces (EUI) Understanding social dynamics and attention Revisiting robotic vision and machine vision as egocentric sensing Activity forecasting Gaze prediction == Technical challenges == Today's wearable cameras are small and lightweight digital recording devices that can acquire images and videos automatically, without the user intervention, with different resolutions and frame rates, and from a first-person point of view. Therefore, wearable cameras are naturally primed to gather visual information from our everyday interactions since they offer an intimate perspective of the visual field of the camera wearer. Depending on the frame rate, it is common to distinguish between photo-cameras (also called lifelogging cameras) and video-cameras. The former (e.g., Narrative Clip and Microsoft SenseCam), are commonly worn on the chest, and are characterized by a very low frame rate (up to 2fpm) that allows to capture images over a long period of time without the need of recharging the battery. Consequently, they offer considerable potential for inferring knowledge about e.g. behaviour patterns, habits or lifestyle of the user. However, due to the low frame-rate and the free motion of the camera, temporally adjacent images typically present abrupt appearance changes so that motion features cannot be reliably estimated. The latter (e.g., Google Glass, GoPro), are commonly mounted on the head, and capture conventional video (around 35fps) that allows to capture fine temporal details of interactions. Consequently, they offer potential for in-depth analysis of daily or special activities. However, since the camera is moving with the wearer head, it becomes more difficult to estimate the global motion of the wearer and in the case of abrupt movements, the images can result blurred. In both cases, since the camera is worn in a naturalistic setting, visual data present a huge variability in terms of illumination conditions and object appearance. Moreover, the camera wearer is not visible in the image and what he/she is doing has to be inferred from the information in the visual field of the camera, implying that important information about the wearer, such for instance as pose or facial expression estimation, is not available. == Applications == A collection of studies published in a special theme issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has demonstrated the potential of lifelogs captured through wearable cameras from a number of viewpoints. In particular, it has been shown that used as a tool for understanding and tracking lifestyle behaviour, lifelogs would enable the prevention of noncommunicable diseases associated to unhealthy trends and risky profiles (such as obesity and depression). In addition, used as a tool of re-memory cognitive training, lifelogs would enable the prevention of cognitive and functional decline in elderly people. More recently, egocentric cameras have been used to study human and animal cognition, human-human social interaction, human-robot interaction, human expertise in complex tasks. Other applications include navigation/assistive technologies for the blind, monitoring and assistance of industrial workflows, and augmented reality interfaces.

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  GOFAI

  In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, GOFAI (good old-fashioned artificial intelligence) is classical symbolic AI, as opposed to other approaches, such as neural networks, situated robotics, narrow symbolic AI or neuro-symbolic AI. The term was coined by philosopher John Haugeland in his 1985 book Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Haugeland coined the term to address two questions: Can GOFAI produce human-level artificial intelligence in a machine? Is GOFAI the primary method that brains use to display intelligence? AI founder Herbert A. Simon speculated in 1963 that the answers to both these questions was "yes". His evidence was the performance of programs he had co-written, such as Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver, and his psychological research on human problem solving. AI research in the 1950s and 60s had an enormous influence on intellectual history: it inspired the cognitive revolution, led to the founding of the academic field of cognitive science, and was the essential example in the philosophical theories of computationalism, functionalism and cognitivism in ethics and the psychological theories of cognitivism and cognitive psychology. The specific aspect of AI research that led to this revolution was what Haugeland called "GOFAI". In AI development and technology, GOFAI is used to refer to programs that are built with deliberate, explicit instructions for a single task. This is in contrast to approaches that use machine learning. Examples of GOFAI applications include AlphaGo and Apple's initial Siri design. == Western rationalism == Haugeland places GOFAI within the rationalist tradition in western philosophy, which holds that abstract reason is the "highest" faculty, that it is what separates man from the animals, and that it is the most essential part of our intelligence. This assumption is present in Plato and Aristotle, in Shakespeare, Hobbes, Hume and Locke, it was central to the Enlightenment, to the logical positivists of the 1930s, and to the computationalists and cognitivists of the 1960s. As Shakespeare wrote: What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty ... In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. Symbolic AI in the 1960s was able to successfully simulate the process of high-level reasoning, including logical deduction, algebra, geometry, spatial reasoning and means-ends analysis, all of them in precise English sentences, just like the ones humans used when they reasoned. Many observers, including philosophers, psychologists and the AI researchers themselves became convinced that they had captured the essential features of intelligence. This was not just hubris or speculation -- this was entailed by rationalism. If it was not true, then it brings into question a large part of the entire Western philosophical tradition. Continental philosophy, which included Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and others, rejected rationalism and argued that our high-level reasoning was limited and prone to error, and that most of our abilities come from our intuitions, culture, and instinctive feel for the situation. Philosophers who were familiar with this tradition were the first to criticize GOFAI and the assertion that it was sufficient for intelligence, such as Hubert Dreyfus and Haugeland. == Haugeland's GOFAI == Critics and supporters of Haugeland's position, from philosophy, psychology, or AI research have found it difficult to define "GOFAI" precisely, and thus the literature contains a variety of interpretations. Drew McDermott, for example, finds Haugeland's description of GOFAI "incoherent" and argues that GOFAI is a "myth". Haugeland coined the term GOFAI in order to examine the philosophical implications of “the claims essential to all GOFAI theories”, which he listed as: 1. our ability to deal with things intelligently is due to our capacity to think about them reasonably (including sub-conscious thinking); and 2. our capacity to think about things reasonably amounts to a faculty for internal “automatic” symbol manipulation This is very similar to the sufficient side of the physical symbol systems hypothesis proposed by Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell in 1963: "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action." It is also similar to Hubert Dreyfus' "psychological assumption": "The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits of information according to formal rules. " Haugeland's description of GOFAI refers to symbol manipulation governed by a set of instructions for manipulating the symbols. The "symbols" he refers to are discrete physical things that are assigned a definite semantics -- like and . They do not refer to signals, or unidentified numbers, or matrixes of unidentified numbers, or the zeros and ones of digital machinery. Thus, Haugeland's GOFAI does not include "good old fashioned" techniques such as cybernetics, perceptrons, dynamic programming or control theory or modern techniques such as neural networks or support vector machines. These questions ask if GOFAI is sufficient for general intelligence -- they ask if there is nothing else required to create fully intelligent machines. Thus GOFAI, for Haugeland, does not include systems that combine symbolic AI with other techniques, such as neuro-symbolic AI, and also does not include narrow symbolic AI systems that are designed only to solve a specific problem and are not expected to exhibit general intelligence. == Replies == === Replies from AI scientists === Russell and Norvig wrote, in reference to Dreyfus and Haugeland:The technology they criticized came to be called Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI). GOFAI corresponds to the simplest logical agent design ... and we saw ... that it is indeed difficult to capture every contingency of appropriate behavior in a set of necessary and sufficient logical rules; we called that the qualification problem. Later symbolic AI work after the 1980's incorporated more robust approaches to open-ended domains such as probabilistic reasoning, non-monotonic reasoning, and machine learning. Currently, most AI researchers believe deep learning, and more likely, a synthesis of neural and symbolic approaches (neuro-symbolic AI), will be required for general intelligence.

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  Infomax

  Infomax', or the principle of maximum information preservation, is an optimization principle for artificial neural networks and other information processing systems. It prescribes that a function that maps a set of input values x {\displaystyle x} to a set of output values z ( x ) {\displaystyle z(x)} should be chosen or learned so as to maximize the average Shannon mutual information between x {\displaystyle x} and z ( x ) {\displaystyle z(x)} , subject to a set of specified constraints and/or noise processes. Infomax algorithms are learning algorithms that perform this optimization process. The principle was described by Linsker in 1988. The objective function is called the InfoMax objective. As the InfoMax objective is difficult to compute exactly, a related notion uses two models giving two outputs z 1 ( x ) , z 2 ( x ) {\displaystyle z_{1}(x),z_{2}(x)} , and maximizes the mutual information between these. This contrastive InfoMax objective is a lower bound to the InfoMax objective. Infomax, in its zero-noise limit, is related to the principle of redundancy reduction proposed for biological sensory processing by Horace Barlow in 1961, and applied quantitatively to retinal processing by Atick and Redlich. == Applications == (Becker and Hinton, 1992) showed that the contrastive InfoMax objective allows a neural network to learn to identify surfaces in random dot stereograms (in one dimension). One of the applications of infomax has been to an independent component analysis algorithm that finds independent signals by maximizing entropy. Infomax-based ICA was described by (Bell and Sejnowski, 1995), and (Nadal and Parga, 1995).

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  Executive Order 14110

  Executive Order 14110, titled Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (sometimes referred to as "Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence") was the 126th executive order signed by former U.S. President Joe Biden. Signed on October 30, 2023, the order defines the administration's policy goals regarding artificial intelligence (AI), and orders executive agencies to take actions pursuant to these goals. The order is considered to be the most comprehensive piece of governance by the United States regarding AI. It was rescinded by U.S. President Donald Trump within hours of his assuming office on January 20, 2025. Policy goals outlined in the executive order pertain to promoting competition in the AI industry, preventing AI-enabled threats to civil liberties and national security, and ensuring U.S. global competitiveness in the AI field. The executive order required a number of major federal agencies to create dedicated "chief artificial intelligence officer" positions within their organizations. == Background == The drafting of the order was motivated by the rapid pace of development in generative AI models in the 2020s, including the release of large language model ChatGPT. Executive Order 14110 is the third executive order dealing explicitly with AI, with two AI-related executive orders being signed by then-President Donald Trump. The development of AI models without policy safeguards has raised a variety of concerns among experts and commentators. These range from future existential risk from advanced AI models to immediate concerns surrounding current technologies' ability to disseminate misinformation, enable discrimination, and undermine national security. In August 2023, Arati Prabhakar, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, indicated that the White House was expediting its work on executive action on AI. A week prior to the executive order's unveiling, Prabhakar indicated that Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance on the order would be released "soon" after. == Policy goals and provisions == The order has been characterized as an effort for the United States to capture potential benefits from AI while mitigating risks associated with AI technologies. Upon signing the order, Biden stated that AI technologies were being developed at "warp speed", and argued that to "realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology". Policy goals outlined by the order include the following: Promoting competition and innovation in the AI industry Upholding civil and labor rights and protecting consumers and their privacy from AI-enabled harms Specifying federal policies governing procurement and use of AI Developing watermarking systems for AI-generated content and warding off intellectual property theft stemming from the use of generative models Maintaining the nation's place as a global leader in AI == Impact on agencies == === Creation of chief AI officer positions === The executive order required a number of large federal agencies to appoint a chief artificial intelligence officer, with a number of departments having already appointed a relevant officer prior to the order. In the days following the order, news publication FedScoop confirmed that the General Services Administration (GSA) and the United States Department of Education appointed relevant chief AI officers. The National Science Foundation (NSF) also confirmed it had elevated an official to serve as its chief AI officer. === Department responsibilities === Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was responsible for developing AI-related security guidelines, including cybersecurity-related matters. The DHS will also work with private sector firms in sectors including the energy industry and other "critical infrastructure" to coordinate responses to AI-enabled security threats. Executive Order 14110 mandated the Department of Veterans Affairs to launch an AI technology competition aimed at reducing occupational burnout among healthcare workers through AI-assisted tools for routine tasks. The order also mandated the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a generative artificial intelligence-focused resource to supplement the existing AI Risk Management Framework. == Analysis == The executive order has been described as the most comprehensive piece of governance by the United States government pertaining to AI. Earlier in 2023 prior to the signing of the order, the Biden administration had announced a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, and had secured non-binding AI safety commitments from major tech companies. The issuing of the executive order comes at a time in which lawmakers including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have pushed for legislation to regulate AI in the 118th United States Congress. According to Axios, despite the wide scope of the executive order, it notably does not touch upon a number of AI-related policy proposals. This includes proposals for a "licensing regime" to government advanced AI models, which has received support from industry leaders including Sam Altman. Additionally, the executive order does not seek to prohibit 'high-risk' uses of AI technology, and does not aim to mandate that tech companies release information surrounding AI systems' training data and models. == Reception == === Political and media reception === The editorial board of the Houston Chronicle described the order as a "first step toward protecting humanity". The issuing of the order received praise from Democratic members of Congress, including Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA). Representative Don Beyer (D-VA), who leads the House AI Caucus, praised the order as a "comprehensive strategy for responsible innovation", while arguing that Congress must take initiative to pass legislation on AI. The draft of the order received criticism from Republican Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who described it as creating "barriers to innovation disguised as safety measures". === Public reception === Polling from the AI Policy Institute showed that 69% of all voters support the executive order, while 15% oppose it. Breaking it down by party, support was at 78% for Democrats, 65% for independents, and 64% for Republicans. === Industry reception === The executive order received strong criticism from the Chamber of Commerce as well as tech industry groups including NetChoice and the Software and Information Industry Association, all of which count "Big Tech" companies Amazon, Meta, and Google as members. Representatives from the organizations argued that the executive order threatens to hinder private sector innovation. === Civil society reception === According to CNBC, a number of leaders advocacy organizations praised the executive order for its provisions on "AI fairness", while simultaneously urging congressional action to strengthen regulation. Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, praised the order while urging Congress to take initiative to "ensure that innovation makes us more fair, just, and prosperous, rather than surveilled, silenced, and stereotyped". A representative from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) praised provisions of the order centered on combating AI-enabled discrimination, while also voiced concern over sections of the order focused on law enforcement and national security. === Second Trump administration === Hours after his inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump rescinded the order, labeling it, among several other of Biden's executive orders and actions, as "unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices".

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  TiDB

  TiDB (; "Ti" stands for Titanium) is an open-source NewSQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. Designed to be MySQL compatible, it is developed and supported primarily by PingCAP and licensed under Apache 2.0. It is also available as a paid product. TiDB drew its initial design inspiration from Google's Spanner and F1 papers. == Release history == See all TiDB release notes. On December 19, 2024, TiDB 8.5 GA was released. On May 24, 2024, TiDB 8.1 GA was released. On December 1, 2023, TiDB 7.5 GA was released. On May 31, 2023, TiDB 7.1 GA was released. On April 7, 2022, TiDB 6.0 GA was released. On April 7, 2021 TiDB 5.0 GA was released. On May 28, 2020, TiDB 4.0 GA was released. On June 28, 2019, TiDB 3.0 GA was released. On April 27, 2018, TiDB 2.0 GA was released. On October 16, 2017, TiDB 1.0 GA was released. == Main features == === Horizontal scalability === TiDB can expand both SQL processing and storage capacity by adding new nodes. === MySQL compatibility === TiDB acts like it is a MySQL 8.0 server to applications. A user can continue to use all of the existing MySQL client libraries. Because TiDB's SQL processing layer is built from scratch, it is not a MySQL fork. === Distributed transactions with strong consistency === TiDB internally shards a table into small range-based chunks that are referred to as "Regions". Each Region defaults to approximately 100 MB in size, and TiDB uses a two-phase commit internally to ensure that regions are maintained in a transactionally consistent way. === Cloud native === TiDB is designed to work in the cloud. The storage layer of TiDB, called TiKV, became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) member project in August 2018, as a Sandbox level project, and became an incubation-level hosted project in May 2019. TiKV graduated from CNCF in September 2020. === Real-time HTAP === TiDB can support both online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads. TiDB has two storage engines: TiKV, a rowstore, and TiFlash, a columnstore. === High availability === TiDB uses the Raft consensus algorithm to ensure that data is available and replicated throughout storage in Raft groups. In the event of failure, a Raft group will automatically elect a new leader for the failed member, and self-heal the TiDB cluster. === Vector Search === TiDB has a vector data type and vector indexes. This allows TiDB to be used as Vector database in AI Retrieval-augmented generation applications. == Deployment methods == === Kubernetes with Operator === TiDB can be deployed in a Kubernetes-enabled cloud environment by using TiDB Operator. An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application. It is designed for running stateful workloads and was first introduced by CoreOS in 2016. TiDB Operator was originally developed by PingCAP and open-sourced in August, 2018. TiDB Operator can be used to deploy TiDB on a laptop, Google Cloud Platform’s Google Kubernetes Engine, and Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes. === TiUP === TiDB 4.0 introduces TiUP, a cluster operation and maintenance tool. It helps users quickly install and configure a TiDB cluster with a few commands. == Tools == TiDB has a series of open-source tools built around it to help with data replication and migration for existing MySQL and MariaDB users. === TiDB Data Migration (DM) === TiDB Data Migration (DM) is suited for replicating data from already sharded MySQL or MariaDB tables to TiDB. A common use case of DM is to connect MySQL or MariaDB tables to TiDB, treating TiDB almost as a slave, then directly run analytical workloads on this TiDB cluster in near real-time. === Backup & Restore === Backup & Restore (BR) is a distributed backup and restore tool for TiDB cluster data. === Dumpling === Dumpling is a data export tool that exports data stored in TiDB or MySQL. It lets users make logical full backups or full dumps from TiDB or MySQL. === TiDB Lightning === TiDB Lightning is a tool that supports high speed full-import of a large MySQL dump into a new TiDB cluster. This tool is used to populate an initially empty TiDB cluster with much data, in order to speed up testing or production migration. The import speed improvement is achieved by parsing SQL statements into key-value pairs, then directly generate Sorted String Table (SST) files to RocksDB. === TiCDC === TiCDC is a change data capture tool which streams data from TiDB to other systems like Apache Kafka.

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  Noam Shazeer

  Noam Shazeer (born 1975 or 1976) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning, particularly in the development of transformer models and natural language processing. He lives in Palo Alto, California. == Career == Noam Shazeer joined Google in 2000. One of his first major achievements was improving the spelling corrector of Google's search engine. In 2017, Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. At Google, Shazeer and his colleague Daniel de Freitas built a chatbot named Meena. Following the refusal of Google to release the chatbot to the public, Shazeer and Freitas left the company in 2021 to found Character.AI. In September 2023, Time Magazine chose Shazeer as one of the 100 most influential people in the AI world. In August 2024, it was reported that Shazeer would be returning to Google to co-lead the Gemini AI project. Shazeer was appointed as technical lead on Gemini, along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. It was part of a $2.7 billion deal for Google to license Character's technology. Since he owns 30-40% of the company, it is estimated he netted $750 million-$1 billion. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. == Views == Shazeer said about artificial general intelligence that he doesn't "particularly care about AGI in the sense of wanting something that can do absolutely everything a person can do”. When asked in 2023 if he is afraid that AGI will destroy the world, he said: "No. Not yet. [...] We’re going to work on it as the technology improves". When asked why do large language models work he answered: "My best guess is divine benevolence [...] Nobody really understands what’s going on. This is a very experimental science [...] It’s more like alchemy or whatever chemistry was in the Middle Ages.” Shazeer has stated, "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender... I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children." == Personal life == Shazeer is an orthodox Jew. His grandparents escaped the Holocaust into the Soviet Union and later lived some time in Israel before emigrating to the USA. His father, Dov Shazeer, was a math teacher who became an engineer and his mother was a homemaker. His sister was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College. Shazeer was born in Philadelphia, attended grade school at Cohen Hillel Academy in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and attended Swampscott High School in Swampscott, Massachusetts. He won a gold medal with perfect score at International Mathematical Olympiad 1994 as a member of the USA team. He went on to study math and computer science at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina from 1994 to 1998. At Duke he was a recipient of the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship, and, as part of the Duke math team, won prizes in several math tournaments. He started studying in a graduate program in Berkeley but did not finish it. He is a father of three and is married to Yael Shacham Shazeer

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  CoDi

  CoDi is a cellular automaton (CA) model for spiking neural networks (SNNs). CoDi is an acronym for Collect and Distribute, referring to the signals and spikes in a neural network. CoDi uses a von Neumann neighborhood modified for a three-dimensional space; each cell looks at the states of its six orthogonal neighbors and its own state. In a growth phase a neural network is grown in the CA-space based on an underlying chromosome. There are four types of cells: neuron body, axon, dendrite and blank. The growth phase is followed by a signaling- or processing-phase. Signals are distributed from the neuron bodies via their axon tree and collected from connection dendrites. These two basic interactions cover every case, and they can be expressed simply, using a small number of rules. == Cell interaction during signaling == The neuron body cells collect neural signals from the surrounding dendritic cells and apply an internally defined function to the collected data. In the CoDi model the neurons sum the incoming signal values and fire after a threshold is reached. This behavior of the neuron bodies can be modified easily to suit a given problem. The output of the neuron bodies is passed on to its surrounding axon cells. Axonal cells distribute data originating from the neuron body. Dendritic cells collect data and eventually pass it to the neuron body. These two types of cell-to-cell interaction cover all kinds of cell encounters. Every cell has a gate, which is interpreted differently depending on the type of the cell. A neuron cell uses this gate to store its orientation, i.e. the direction in which the axon is pointing. In an axon cell, the gate points to the neighbor from which the neural signals are received. An axon cell accepts input only from this neighbor, but makes its own output available to all its neighbors. In this way axon cells distribute information. The source of information is always a neuron cell. Dendritic cells collect information by accepting information from any neighbor. They give their output, (e.g. a Boolean OR operation on the binary inputs) only to the neighbor specified by their own gate. In this way, dendritic cells collect and sum neural signals, until the final sum of collected neural signals reaches the neuron cell. Each axonal and dendritic cell belongs to exactly one neuron cell. This configuration of the CA-space is guaranteed by the preceding growth phase. == Synapses == The CoDi model does not use explicit synapses, because dendrite cells that are in contact with an axonal trail (i.e. have an axon cell as neighbor) collect the neural signals directly from the axonal trail. This results from the behavior of axon cells, which distribute to every neighbor, and from the behavior of the dendrite cells, which collect from any neighbor. The strength of a neuron-neuron connection (a synapse) is represented by the number of their neighboring axon and dendrite cells. The exact structure of the network and the position of the axon-dendrite neighbor pairs determine the time delay and strength (weight) of a neuron-neuron connection. This principle infers that a single neuron-neuron connection can consist of several synapse with different time delays with independent weights. == Genetic encoding and growth of the network == The chromosome is initially distributed throughout the CA-space, so that every cell in the CA-space contains one instruction of the chromosome, i.e. one growth instruction, so that the chromosome belongs to the network as a whole. The distributed chromosome technique of the CoDi model makes maximum use of the available CA-space and enables the growth of any type of network connectivity. The local connection of the grown circuitry to its chromosome, allows local learning to be combined with the evolution of grown neural networks. Growth signals are passed to the direct neighbors of the neuron cell according to its chromosome information. The blank neighbors, which receive a neural growth signal, turn into either an axon cell or a dendrite cell. The growth signals include information containing the cell type of the cell that is to be grown from the signal. To decide in which directions axonal or dendritic trails should grow, the grown cells consult their chromosome information which encodes the growth instructions. These growth instructions can have an absolute or a relative directional encoding. An absolute encoding masks the six neighbors (i.e. directions) of a 3D cell with six bits. After a cell is grown, it accepts growth signals only from the direction from which it received its first signal. This reception direction information is stored in the gate position of each cell's state. == Implementation as a partitioned CA == The states of our CAs have two parts, which are treated in different ways. The first part of the cell-state contains the cell's type and activity level and the second part serves as an interface to the cell's neighborhood by containing the input signals from the neighbors. Characteristic of our CA is that only part of the state of a cell is passed to its neighbors, namely the signal and then only to those neighbors specified in the fixed part of the cell state. This CA is called partitioned, because the state is partitioned into two parts, the first being fixed and the second is variable for each cell. The advantage of this partitioning-technique is that the amount of information that defines the new state of a CA cell is kept to a minimum, due to its avoidance of redundant information exchange. == Implementation in hardware == Since CAs are only locally connected, they are ideal for implementation on purely parallel hardware. When designing the CoDi CA-based neural networks model, the objective was to implement them directly in hardware (FPGAs). Therefore, the CA was kept as simple as possible, by having a small number of bits to specify the state, keeping the CA rules few in number, and having few cellular neighbors. The CoDi model was implemented in the FPGA based CAM-Brain Machine (CBM) by Korkin. == History == CoDi was introduced by Gers et al. in 1998. A specialized parallel machine based on FPGA Hardware (CAM) to run the CoDi model on a large scale was developed by Korkin et al. De Garis conducted a series of experiments on the CAM-machine evaluating the CoDi model. The original model, where learning is based on evolutionary algorithms, has been augmented with a local learning rule via feedback from dendritic spikes by Schwarzer.

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