Maia and Marco are artificial intelligence used by GMA Network. Unveiled in 2023, they are used to fulfill the role of sports newscasters. == Background == Maia and Marco are artificial intelligence (AI) which take the form of three-dimensional human avatars. Maia makes use of a female avatar while Marco uses a male likeness. They have aesthetic features that are typical to Filipino showbusiness personalities. Among the technologies used in making and operating the AI include image generation, text-to-speech AI voice synthesis/generation, and deep learning face animation. They are also demonstrated to be bilingual, being able to speak in English and Tagalog (Filipino). == Use == The AI pair was unveiled by GMA Network on September 24, 2023, for their coverage of Season 99 of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Fulfilling the role of sports newscasters, Maia and Marco would join GMA's courtside human reporters. The AI pair are scheduled to appear four times a month on GMA's digital media platforms. They will not appear in traditional television broadcast. == Reception == The launch of the Maia and Marco was met with strong reactions. Various journalists and other personalities across the Philippine media industry expressed concern that their employment be at risk with the introduction of AI. The quality of the AI ability to emulate human behavior was characterized by critics as "soulless". GMA responding to concerns has stated that the AI would complement rather than replace its live human journalists including sportscasters. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines urged dialogue among its peers in the newsroom on policy on how to use AI, which the group acknowledge as "inevitable".
Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc., is an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides a range of internet services, including content delivery network (CDN) services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration. The company's services act primarily as a reverse proxy between website visitors and a customer's hosting provider, improving performance and protecting against malicious traffic. Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 under the ticker symbol NET. Cloudflare has since expanded its offerings to include edge computing through its Workers platform, a public DNS resolver (1.1.1.1), and a VPN-like service known as WARP. In recent years, the company has integrated artificial intelligence into its infrastructure, acquiring companies such as Replicate and launching tools to manage AI bots and scrapers. According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by approximately 21.3% of all websites on the Internet as of January 2026. The company has been the subject of controversy regarding its policy of content neutrality. While Cloudflare executives have historically advocated for remaining a neutral infrastructure provider, the company has terminated services for specific high-profile websites associated with hate speech and violence, including The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms, following significant public pressure. Cloudflare has also faced criticism and litigation regarding copyright infringement by websites using its services, notably losing a lawsuit against Japanese publishers in 2025. The company experienced significant global outages in late 2025 which disrupted services for major platforms internationally. == History == Cloudflare was founded on July 26, 2009, by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. Prince and Holloway had previously collaborated on Project Honey Pot, a product of Unspam Technologies that partly inspired the basis of Cloudflare. In 2009, the company was venture-capital funded. On August 15, 2019, Cloudflare submitted its S-1 filing for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker NET. It opened for public trading on September 13, 2019, at $15 per share. According to the company, the name 'Cloudflare' was chosen, over the initial 'WebWall', because it best described what they were trying to do: build a "firewall in the cloud." In 2020, Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn was named president. Cloudflare has acquired web-services and security companies, including StopTheHacker (February 2014), CryptoSeal (June 2014), Eager Platform Co. (December 2016), Neumob (November 2017), S2 Systems (January 2020), Linc (December 2020), Zaraz (December 2021), Vectrix (February 2022), Area 1 Security (February 2022), Nefeli Networks (March 2024), BastionZero (May 2024), and Kivera (October 2024). Replicate (November 2025), and Human Native (January 2026). Since at least 2017, Cloudflare has used a wall of lava lamps at its San Francisco headquarters as a source of randomness for encryption keys, alongside double pendulums at its London offices and a Geiger counter at its Singapore offices. The lava lamp installation implements the Lavarand method, where a camera transforms the unpredictable shapes of the "lava" blobs into a digital image. In Q4 2022, Cloudflare provided paid services to 162,086 customers. In October 2024, Cloudflare won a lawsuit against patent troll Sable Networks. Sable paid Cloudflare $225,000, granted it a royalty-free license to its patent portfolio, and dedicated its patents to the public by abandoning its patent rights. In November 2025, it was announced Cloudflare had agreed to acquire Replicate, a San Francisco–based platform that enables software developers to run, fine-tune, and deploy open-source machine-learning models via an API without managing infrastructure. In January 2026, Cloudflare released an analysis regarding BGP routing leaks observed from the Venezuelan state-owned ISP CANTV (AS8048), which occurred on January 2 coincides with the arrest of Nicolás Maduro. While some security researchers had speculated that the outages were linked to U.S. cyber operations, Cloudflare's data indicated that the anomalies were consistent with a pattern of "insufficient routing export and import policies" by the ISP rather than malicious external interference. In January 2026, Cloudflare acquired Human Native, an AI data marketplace that brokers transactions between developers and content creators, for an undisclosed amount. On January 16, 2026, Cloudflare acquired The Astro Technology Company, the developers behind the open-source web framework Astro. In May 2026, Cloudflare announced the elimination of approximately 1,100 positions, around 20 percent of its workforce, in a restructuring the company attributed to the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence tools. The announcement coincided with the company's first-quarter 2026 earnings, which reported a record $639.8 million in quarterly revenue, a 34 percent year-over-year increase. CEO Matthew Prince stated the cuts were not driven by performance concerns but reflected roles made obsolete by AI, and that Cloudflare expected to employ more people by the end of 2027 than at any point during 2026. == Products == Cloudflare provides network and security products for consumers and businesses, utilizing edge computing, reverse proxies for web traffic, data center interconnects, and a content distribution network to serve content across its network of servers. It supports transport layer protocols TCP, UDP, QUIC, and many application layer protocols such as DNS over HTTPS, SMTP, and HTTP/2 with support for HTTP/2 Server Push. As of 2023, Cloudflare handles an average of 45 million HTTP requests per second. As of 2024, Cloudflare servers are powered by AMD EPYC 9684X processors. Cloudflare also provides analysis and reports on large-scale outages, including Verizon's October 2024 outage. === Artificial intelligence === In 2023, Cloudflare launched "Workers AI", a framework allowing for use of Nvidia GPU's within Cloudflare's network. In 2024, Cloudflare launched a tool that prevents bots from scraping websites. To build automatic bot detector models, the company analyzed "AI" bots and crawler traffic. The company also launched an "AI" assistant to generate charts based on queries by leveraging "Workers AI". Cloudflare announced plans in September 2024 to launch a marketplace where website owners can sell "AI" model providers access to scrape their site's content. In March 2025, Cloudflare announced a new feature called "AI Labyrinth", which combats unauthorized "AI" data scraping by serving fake "AI"-generated content to LLM bots. In July, the company rolled out a permission-based setting to allow websites to automatically block online bots from scraping data and content. Cloudflare released AutoRAG into beta in 2025. AutoRAG (retrieval augmented generation) creates a vector database of a website's unstructured content to identify relationships between concepts. It is part of an initiative with Microsoft, alongside their NLWeb standard, to make websites easier for people and automated systems to query. Cloudflare and GoDaddy partnered in April 2026 to enable AI Crawl Control features on GoDaddy hosted websites. This would allow site owners to decide how AI bot crawlers interact with their content. === DDoS mitigation === Cloudflare provides free and paid DDoS mitigation services that protect customers from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Cloudflare received media attention in June 2011 for providing DDoS mitigation for the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group. In March 2013, The Spamhaus Project was targeted by a DDoS attack that Cloudflare reported exceeded 300 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). Patrick Gilmore, of Akamai, stated that at the time it was "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet". While trying to defend Spamhaus against the DDoS attacks, Cloudflare ended up being attacked as well; Google and other companies eventually came to Spamhaus' defense and helped it to absorb the unprecedented amount of attack traffic. In 2014, Cloudflare began providing free DDoS mitigation for artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups under the name "Project Galileo". In 2017, it extended the service to electoral infrastructure and political campaigns under the name "Athenian Project". By 2025, more than 2,900 users and organizations were participating in Project Galileo, including 31 US states. In February 2014, Cloudflare claimed to have mitigated an NTP reflection attack against an unnamed European customer, which it stated peaked at 400 Gbit/s. In November 2014, it reported a 500 Gbit/s DDoS attack in Hong Kong. In July 2021, the company claimed to have absorbed a DDoS atta
Perceptual robotics
Perceptual robotics is an interdisciplinary science linking Robotics and Neuroscience. It investigates biologically motivated robot control strategies, concentrating on perceptual rather than cognitive processes and thereby sides with J. J. Gibson's view against the Poverty of the stimulus theory. As a working definition, the following quote from Chapter 64 by H. Bülthoff, C. Wallraven and M. Giese from The Springer Handbook of Robotics, edited by Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib, published by Springer in 2007, could be used: In the following we will apply the term Perceptual Robotics to signify the design of robots based on principles that are derived from human perception on all three levels in the sense of Marr. This includes a realization in terms of specific neural circuits as well as the transfer of more abstract biologically-inspired strategies for the solution of relevant computational problems.
Conduit (company)
Conduit Ltd. is an international software company. From its founding in 2005 to 2013, its most well-known product was the Conduit toolbar, which was widely-described as malware. In 2013, it spun off its toolbar business; today, its main product is a mobile development platform that allows users to create native and web mobile applications for smartphones. == Products == From 2005 to 2013, the company's most well-known product was the Conduit toolbar, which is flagged by most antivirus software as potentially unwanted and adware. Conduit's toolbar software is often downloaded by malware packages from other publishers. The company spun off the toolbar division that manages the Conduit toolbar in 2013. Today, the company's main product is a mobile development platform that allows users to create native and web mobile applications for smartphones. App creation for its App Gallery is free, but it charges a monthly subscription fee to place apps on the App Store or Google Play. == History == Conduit was founded in 2005 by Shilo, Dror Erez, and Gaby Bilcyzk. Between years 2005 and 2013, it ran a successful but controversial toolbar platform business. Conduit was part of the so-called Download Valley companies monetizing free software and downloads by bundling adware. The toolbars were criticized by some as being very difficult to uninstall. The toolbar software was referred to as a "potentially unwanted program" by some in the computer industry because it could be used to change browser settings. The company had more than 400 employees in 2013. In September same year, Conduit spun off its entire website toolbar business division, which combined with Perion Network. After the deal, Conduit shareholders owned 81% of Perion's existing shares and both Perion and Conduit remained independent companies. The substantial size of the Conduit user base allowed Perion to immediately surpass AOL in U.S. searches. In 2015, Conduit announced it would purchase Keeprz, a mobile customer loyalty platform, for $45 million.
Echo Lake (software)
Echo Lake (AKA Family Album Creator) was the most notable multimedia software product produced by Delrina, which debuted in June 1995. It was touted internally as a "cross [of] Quark Xpress and Myst". It featured an immersive 3D environment where a user could go to a virtual desktop in a virtual office and assemble video and audio clips along with images, and then print them out as either a virtual book other users of the program could use, or for print. It was a highly innovative product for its time, and ultimately was hampered by the inability of many users able to input their own multimedia content easily into a computer from that period. Creative Wonders bought the rights to the Echo Lake multimedia product, which was re-shaped as an introductory program on multimedia and re-released as Family Album Creator in 1996.
List of COBOL software and tools
This is a list of software and programming tools for the COBOL programming language, which includes compilers, IDEs, build tools, testing, frameworks, and related projects. == Compilers and runtimes == Fujitsu NetCOBOL — COBOL compiler for Windows, Linux, and mainframes GnuCOBOL — open-source COBOL compiler translating COBOL to C and then compiling with GCC IBM COBOL — mainframe COBOL compiler for IBM z/OS and IBM i platforms Micro Focus COBOL — commercial COBOL compiler and runtime for enterprise systems FairCom RTG – A commercial real-time database and runtime solution developed by FairCom Corporation. It provides integration with COBOL applications for transaction processing and modernization projects, and is used in enterprise environments requiring high-performance data management. == Integrated development environments == Eclipse IDE — with COBOL plugin support, Micro Focus or Bitlang extensions. IBM Developer for z/OS — IDE for COBOL and PL/I mainframe development Micro Focus Visual COBOL — IDE integration for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Eclipse OpenCOBOLIDE — open-source lightweight IDE for GnuCOBOL Visual Studio Code — with COBOL extensions via Bitlang COBOL and GnuCOBOL Language Server == Frameworks, libraries, and APIs == ACUCOBOL-GT — runtime and API library suite from Micro Focus CICS — IBM middleware for transaction processing in COBOL applications DB2 and IMS APIs — database access libraries commonly used with COBOL applications == Build tools and package managers == Apache Ant — scripting and build automation for COBOL/Java hybrid systems GNU Make — common build tool for compiling COBOL via GnuCOBOL Jenkins — used for CI/CD automation with COBOL builds == Testing and quality assurance == COBOL Check — open-source unit testing framework for COBOL IBM Rational Performance Tester — automated performance testing of web and server-based applications from the Rational Software division of IBM Micro Focus Unit Testing Framework — integrated COBOL unit testing tool == Debugging and profiling tools == GnuCOBOL debug mode — command-line debugging integrated in GnuCOBOL compiler IBM Debug Tool for z/OS — mainframe debugging for COBOL and PL/I Micro Focus Animator — step-through debugger for COBOL code
Optical granulometry
Optical granulometry is the process of measuring the different grain sizes in a granular material, based on a photograph. Technology has been created to analyze a photograph and create statistics based on what the picture portrays. This information is vital in maintaining machinery in various trades worldwide. Mining companies can use optical granulometry to analyze inactive or moving rock to quantify the size of these fragments. Forestry companies can zero in on wood chip sizes without stopping the production process, and minimize sizing errors. With more photoanalysis technologies being produced, mining companies have shown an increased interest in these types of systems because of their ability to maintain efficiency throughout the mining process. Companies are saving millions of dollars annually because of this new technology, and are cutting back on maintenance costs on equipment. In order for optical granulometry to be completely successful, an accurate photo must be taken – under sufficient lighting, and using proper technology – to obtain quantified results. If these requirements are met, an image analysis system can be implemented. == The process == Software uses four basic steps in determining the average size of material: See the Wikipedia article on Photoanalysis to see how mining, forestry and agricultural companies are using this technology to improve quality control techniques. == Smartphone-based, segmentation-free estimation of grain size distribution == Recently, a methodology has emerged by which soil grain size distribution can be inferred from optical images acquired with commodity smartphones by training convolutional neural networks to predict parameters of the distribution curve directly from the image, without explicit image segmentation . In this approach, a standardized image of a soil surface is captured under controlled conditions, preprocessed to reduce device-specific variability, and passed to a regression model that outputs the parameters of a cumulative distribution function e.g., a two-parameter Weibull curve. The resulting distribution can be used to derive geotechnical descriptors and class boundaries.