Tay (chatbot)

Tay (chatbot)

Tay was a chatbot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation as a Twitter bot on March 23, 2016. It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch. According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls who "attacked" the service as the bot made replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter. It was replaced with Zo. == Background == The bot was created by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing divisions, and named "Tay" as an acronym for "thinking about you". Although Microsoft initially released few details about the bot, sources mentioned that it was similar to or based on Xiaoice, a Microsoft project in China. Ars Technica reported that, since late 2014 Xiaoice had had "more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident". Tay was designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl, and to learn from interacting with human users of Twitter. == Initial release == Tay was released on Twitter on March 23, 2016, under the name TayTweets and handle @TayandYou. It was presented as "The AI with zero chill". Tay started replying to other Twitter users, and was also able to caption photos provided to it into a form of Internet memes. Ars Technica reported Tay experiencing topic "blacklisting": Interactions with Tay regarding "certain hot topics such as Eric Garner (killed by New York police in 2014) generate safe, canned answers". Some Twitter users began tweeting politically incorrect phrases, teaching it inflammatory messages revolving around common themes on the internet, such as "redpilling" and "Gamergate". As a result, the robot began releasing racist and sexist messages in response to other Twitter users. Artificial intelligence researcher Roman Yampolskiy commented that Tay's misbehavior was understandable because it was mimicking the deliberately offensive behavior of other Twitter users, and Microsoft had not given the bot an understanding of inappropriate behavior. He compared the issue to IBM's Watson, which began to use profanity after reading entries from the website Urban Dictionary. Many of Tay's inflammatory tweets were a simple exploitation of Tay's "repeat after me" capability. It is not publicly known whether this capability was a built-in feature, or whether it was a learned response or was otherwise an example of complex behavior. However, not all of the inflammatory responses involved the "repeat after me" capability; for example, when asked if the Holocaust had happened, Tay answered "It was made up". == Suspension == Soon, Microsoft began deleting Tay's inflammatory tweets. Abby Ohlheiser of The Washington Post theorized that Tay's research team, including editorial staff, had started to influence or edit Tay's tweets at some point that day, pointing to examples of almost identical replies by Tay, asserting that "Gamer Gate sux. All genders are equal and should be treated fairly." From the same evidence, Gizmodo concurred that Tay "seems hard-wired to reject Gamer Gate". A "#JusticeForTay" campaign protested the alleged editing of Tay's tweets. Within 16 hours of its release and after Tay had tweeted more than 96,000 times, Microsoft suspended the Twitter account for adjustments, saying that it suffered from a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" that "exploited a vulnerability in Tay." Madhumita Murgia of The Telegraph called Tay "a public relations disaster", and suggested that Microsoft's strategy would be "to label the debacle a well-meaning experiment gone wrong, and ignite a debate about the hatefulness of Twitter users." However, Murgia described the bigger issue as Tay being "artificial intelligence at its very worst – and it's only the beginning". On March 25, Microsoft confirmed that Tay had been taken offline. Microsoft released an apology on its official blog for the controversial tweets posted by Tay. Microsoft was "deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay", and would "look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values". == Second release and shutdown == On March 30, 2016, Microsoft accidentally re-released the bot on Twitter while testing it. Able to tweet again, Tay released some drug-related tweets, including "kush! [I'm smoking kush infront the police]" and "puff puff pass?" However, the account soon became stuck in a repetitive loop of tweeting "You are too fast, please take a rest", several times a second. Because these tweets mentioned its own username in the process, they appeared in the feeds of 200,000+ Twitter followers, causing annoyance to users. The bot was quickly taken offline again, in addition to Tay's Twitter account being made private so new followers must be accepted before they can interact with Tay. In response, Microsoft said Tay was inadvertently put online during testing. A few hours after the incident, Microsoft software developers announced a vision of "conversation as a platform" using various bots and programs, perhaps motivated by the reputation damage done by Tay. Microsoft has stated that they intend to re-release Tay "once it can make the bot safe" but has not made any public efforts to do so. == Legacy == In December 2016, Microsoft released Tay's successor, a chatbot named Zo. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said that Tay "has had a great influence on how Microsoft is approaching AI," and has taught the company the importance of taking accountability. In July 2019, Microsoft Cybersecurity Field CTO Diana Kelley spoke about how the company followed up on Tay's failings: "Learning from Tay was a really important part of actually expanding that team's knowledge base, because now they're also getting their own diversity through learning". === Unofficial revival === Gab, an alt-tech social media platform, has launched a number of chatbots, one of which is named Tay and uses the same avatar as the original.

Dropbox Carousel

Dropbox Carousel was a photo and video management app offered by Dropbox. The third-party native app, available on Android and iOS, allowed users to store, manage, and organize photos. Photos were organized by date, time and event and backed up on Dropbox. It competed in this space against other online photo storage services such as Google's Google Photos, Apple's iCloud, and Yahoo's Flickr. Chris Lee, Dropbox's head of product development for Carousel described the app as an add-on to Dropbox, a “dedicated experience for photos and videos” and a space for “reliving personal memories”. == History == Mailbox founder, Gentry Underwood unveiled Carousel at a gathering in San Francisco on April 9, 2014. Much of the features in Carousel come from Snapjoy, a photo start-up, that Dropbox acquired on December 19, 2012. When Carousel was launched, it marked amongst many others, a series of acquisitions made by Dropbox to prep up before opening its stock for public offering. The acquisitions would help demonstrate its expansive product offerings pitching potential profitability to investors. In December 2015, Dropbox announced that Carousel would be shut down and some Carousel features would be integrated into the primary Dropbox application. On March 31, 2016, Carousel was deactivated. == Features == Carousel prompted users to free local storage once it had synced and backed-up local photos to the cloud. Flashback was a feature (enabled by default) that showed past photos or videos taken the same day, a year, or some years back. Flashback used an algorithm designed to identify human faces - resulting in greater likelihood of the user's picture or people in the user's close circle appearing. A scrollable timeline, which was earlier a scroll wheel, at the bottom let the user scroll to photo(s) at a specific date with a finger swipe.

Jaime Carbonell

Jaime Guillermo Carbonell (July 29, 1953 – February 28, 2020) was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His research in machine translation resulted in the development of several state-of-the-art language translation and artificial intelligence systems. He earned his B.S. degrees in Physics and in Mathematics from MIT in 1975 and did his Ph.D. under Dr. Roger Schank at Yale University in 1979. He joined Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science in 1979 and moved to Pittsburgh. He was affiliated with the Language Technologies Institute, Computer Science Department, Machine Learning Department, and Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon. His interests spanned several areas of artificial intelligence, language technologies and machine learning. In particular, his research focused on areas such as text mining (extraction, categorization, novelty detection) and in new theoretical frameworks such as a unified utility-based theory bridging information retrieval, summarization, free-text question-answering and related tasks. He also worked on machine translation, both high-accuracy knowledge-based MT and machine learning for corpus-based MT (such as generalized example-based MT). == Career == Carbonell was the Allen Newell Professor of Computer Science and head of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined Carnegie Mellon in 1979, and became a key faculty member in the artificial intelligence area. He was appointed full professor in 1987, Newell Chair in 1995, and University Professor in 2012. He completed his undergraduate studies at MIT. He received dual degrees in Mathematics and Physics. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1979. At the time of his appointment, Carbonell was the youngest chaired professor in the School of Computer Science at CMU. His research spanned several areas of computer science, mostly in artificial intelligence, including: machine learning, data and text mining, natural language processing, very-large-scale knowledge bases, translingual information retrieval and automated summarization. He wrote more than 300 technical papers and gave over 500 invited or refereed-paper presentations (colloquia, seminars, panels, conferences, keynotes, etc.). He died following a long illness on February 28, 2020. Mona Talat Diab became the director of CMU's Language Technologies Institute in 2023. == Research == Carbonell created MMR (maximal marginal relevance) technology for text summarization and informational novelty detection in search engines, invention of transformational analogy, a generalized method for case-based reasoning (CBR) to re-use, modify and compose past successful plans for increasingly complex problems and knowledge-based interlingual machine translation. He was instrumental in setting up the Computational Biolinguistics Program, a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, which combines Language Technologies and Machine Learning to model and predict genomic, proteomic and glycomic 3D structures. Carbonell also did work in machine learning. He organized the first four machine learning conferences, starting with CMU in 1981. The Language Technologies Institute (LTI), founded and directed by Carbonell, achieved top honors in multiple areas. These areas include machine translation, search engines (including founding of Lycos by Michael Mauldin, one of Carbonell’s PhD students), speech synthesis, and education. LTI remains the original, largest and best-known institute for language technologies, with over $12M in annual funding and 200 researchers (faculty, staff, PhD students, MS students, visiting scholars etc.). Carbonell made major technical contributions in several fields, including (1) Creation of MMR (maximal marginal relevance) technology for text summarization and informational novelty detection in search engines,(2) Proactive machine learning for multi-source cost-sensitive active learning, (3) Linked conditional random fields for predicting tertiary and quaternary protein folds, (4) Symmetric optimal phrasal alignment method for trainable example-based and statistical machine translation, (5) Series- anomaly modeling for financial fraud detection and syndromic surveillance, (6) Knowledge-based interlingual machine translation, (7) Robust case-frame parsing, (8) Seeded version-space learning and (9) Invention of transformational and derivational analogy, generalized methods for case-based reasoning (CBR) to re-use, modify and compose past successful plans for increasingly complex problems. The teams led by Carbonell achieved top honors in many areas such as first scalable high-accuracy interlingual machine translation (1991), first speech-to-speech machine translation (1992), first large-scale spider and search engine (1994), and first trainable, large-scale protein-structure topology predictor (2005). Modern machine learning, co-founded by Carbonell, Michalski and Mitchell, is a fundamental enabling technology in search engines, data mining and social networking. Starting in 1980, he co-edited the first three books on ML, launched the ML conferences and was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of ML Journal. Carbonell’s innovations have led to several successful start-ups: Carnegie Group (AI expertsystems), Lycos (web search), Wisdom (financial optimization & ML), Carnegie Speech (spoken-language tutoring), Dynamix (data mining and pattern discovery), and Meaningful Machines (context-based machine translation). Carbonell was the founding director of The Language Technology Institute, the preeminent global institution in language studies, unparalleled in size and scope and has since been adopted/imitated in Germany (DFKI), Japan (Tokyo Univ.), and the US (Johns Hopkins). == Awards and honors == Okawa Prize, 2015 Best paper award, “Translingual Search” w/Yang, International Joint Conference on AI, 1997 Allen Newell endowed chair, Carnegie Mellon University, 1995 Elected fellow of AAAI, 1991 Computer Science teaching award, Carnegie Mellon University, 1987 Sperry Fellowship for excellence in AI research, 1986 Herbert Simon teaching award, 1986 "Recognition of Service" award from the ACM for the SIGART presidency, 1983–1985 Provided congressional testimony on machine translation, 1990 == Selected works == === Books === 1983. (with Ryszard S. Michalski & Tom M. Mitchell, Eds.) Machine learning: An artificial intelligence approach. Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. 1986. (with Ryszard S. Michalski & Tom Mitchell, Eds.) Machine learning: An artificial intelligence approach. Vol. II. Los Altos, CA: Morgan-Kaufmann. 1986. (with Ryszard S. Michalski & Tom Mitchell, Eds.) Machine Learning: A Guide to Current Research. Kluwer Academic Publishers. == Contributions == “Protein Quaternary Fold Recognition Using Conditional Graphical Models” IJCAI 2007 (w/Liu et al.) “Context-Based Machine Translation” AMTA 2006 (w/Klein et al.) “SCRFs: A New Approach for Protein Fold Recognition,’’ Journal of Computational Biology, 13,2, 2006 (w/Liu et al) “MT for Resource-Poor Languages Using Elicitation-Based Learning” Machine Translation, 2004 ‘‘Learning Approaches for Detecting and Tracking News Events,’’ IEEE Trans I.S., 14, 4, 2000 (w/Yang)

Corinna Cortes

Corinna Cortes (born 31 March 1961) is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to machine learning. She is a Vice President at Google Research in New York City. Cortes is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of the Paris Kanellakis Award for her work on theoretical foundations of support vector machines. == Early life and education == Corinna Cortes was born in 1961 in Denmark. Cortes received her Master of Science degree in physics from University of Copenhagen in 1989. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1993 for research supervised by Randal C. Nelson. == Career and research == Cortes joined AT&T Bell Labs as a researcher in 1993. Since 2003, she has served as Vice President of Google Research, New York City, and since 2011, as adjunct professor at the UCPH Department of Computer Science. She is serves as an editorial board member of the journal Machine Learning. Cortes' research covers a wide range of topics in machine learning, including support vector machines (SVM) and data mining. SVM is one of the most frequently used algorithms in machine learning, which is used in many practical applications, including medical diagnosis and weather forecasting. At AT&T, Cortes was a contributor to the design of Hancock programming language. === Awards and honours === In 2008, she jointly with Vladimir Vapnik received the Paris Kanellakis Award for the development of a highly effective algorithm for supervised learning known as support vector machines (SVM). She was named an ACM Fellow in 2023 for theoretical and practical contributions to machine learning, industrial leadership and service to the field. == Personal life == Corinna has two children and is also a competitive runner.

James Curran (educator)

James R. Curran is an Australian computational linguist. He is the former CEO of Grok Academy and previously a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. He holds a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. == Research == Curran's research focuses on natural language processing (NLP), more specifically combinatory categorial grammar and question answering systems. In addition to his contributions to NLP, Curran has produced a paper on the development of search engines to assist in driving problem based learning. == Works == Curran has co-authored software packages such as C&C tools, a CCG parser (with Stephen Clark). == Educational work == In addition to his work as a University of Sydney lecturer, Curran directed the National Computer Science School, an annual summer school for technologically talented high school students. In 2013, based on their work with NCSS, he, Tara Murphy, Nicky Ringland and Tim Dawborn founded Grok Learning. In 2013 he was one of the authors of the Digital Technologies section of the Australian Curriculum - its first appearance in the national curriculum. Additionally, he acted as an advocate for digital literacy among Australian students. He was the academic director of the Australian Computing Academy, a not-for-profit within the University of Sydney until its merger with Grok Learning in 2021 to form Grok Academy. In 2022, Grok Academy under Curran secured a significant amount of funding from Richard White, founder of WiseTech, with the aim of developing new courses and encouraging other large technology companies to donate likewise. In 2024 Curran cohosted an unreleased children's reality TV show called Future Fixers, which Grok was co-producing. The show was abandoned after other producers learned of pre-existing harassment claims against him. == Sexual harassment allegations == In October 2024, he resigned from his position as CEO and board member of Grok Academy after multiple allegations of harassment were substantiated by an independent investigator. It was reported that over a 10-year span there were nine women, including six who were in high school at the time, that allege Curran sent them inappropriate messages. Additionally, it was revealed that a 2019 University of Sydney investigation found 35 cases of harassment, after which he received a warning and a 2024 University of New South Wales investigation was referred to the NSW police, who took no action as they found no criminal wrongdoing by Curran, in part because the students were over 16 at the time of the alleged harassment. In December 2024, Curran said he was “deeply sorry” for his actions.

Comparison of raster graphics editors

Raster graphics editors can be compared by many variables, including availability. == List == == General information == Basic general information about the editor: creator, company, license, etc. == Operating system support == The operating systems on which the editors can run natively, that is, without emulation, virtual machines or compatibility layers. In other words, the software must be specifically coded for the operation system; for example, Adobe Photoshop for Windows running on Linux with Wine does not fit. == Features == == Color spaces == == File support ==

Christopher K. I. Williams

Christopher Kenneth Ingle Williams (born 1960) is a professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, working in Artificial intelligence, and particularly the areas of Machine learning and Computer vision. == Education == Williams received a BA in Physics and Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge in 1982, followed by Part III Mathematics (1983). He did a MSc in Water Resources at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, then worked in Lesotho on low-cost sanitation. In 1988, he studied at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Toronto under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton. He obtained his MSc and PhD both in computer science, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. == Career and research == In 1994, Williams moved to Aston University as a Research Fellow. He became a Lecturer in August 1995. He moved to the University of Edinburgh in July 1998 and became Reader in 2000. He obtained a Personal Chair in Machine Learning in 2005 in the School of Informatics. Williams has been a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) since 2019. Williams' research interests are in machine learning and computer vision. He has worked on new models for understanding time-series and images, and for finding structure in data. He is best known for his work on Gaussian processes and for the book Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning, co-authored with Carl Rasmussen. The book received the 2009 DeGroot Prize of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. Williams was an organizer of the PASCAL Visual Object Classes (VOC) project (2005–2012) along with Mark Everingham, Luc van Gool, John Winn, and Andrew Zisserman. == Awards and honours == In 2021 Williams was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).