ACROSS is a Singular Strategic R&D Project led by Treelogic funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade activities in the field of Robotics and Cognitive Computing over an execution time-frame from 2009 to 2011. ACROSS project involves a number higher than 100 researchers from 13 Spanish entities. == ACROSS project objectives == ACROSS modifies the design of social robotics, blocked in providing predefined services, going further by means of intelligent systems. These systems are able to self-reconfigure and modify their behavior autonomously through the capacity for understanding, learning and software remote access. In order to provide an open framework for collaboration between universities, research centers and the Administration, ACROSS develops Open Source Services available to everybody. == Three application domains == ACROSS works in three application domains: Autonomous living: robots are used as technological tools to help handicapped person into daily tasks. Psycho-Affective Disorders (autism): robots are used to mitigate cognitive disorders. Marketing: robots are used to interact with humans in a recreational approach. == Consortium == Treelogic Alimerka Bizintek Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya University of Deusto European Centre for Soft Computing Fatronik - Tecnalia Fundació Hospital Comarcal Sant Antoni Abat Fundación Pública Andaluza para la Gestión de la Investigación en Salud de Sevilla, "Virgen del Rocío" University Hospitals m-BOT Omicron Electronic Universidad de Extremadura - RoboLab Verbio Technologies
Pixelmator Pro
Pixelmator Pro is a photo, video, and vector graphic editor developed by Apple for macOS and iPadOS as part of its Pixelmator and pro apps platforms and as a part of their Apple Creator Studio suite of applications. Pixelmator Pro relies heavily on technologies from Apple platforms such as Metal, CoreML, Core Image, AVFoundation, GCD, and SwiftUI. == Features == GPU accelerated with Metal 50+ standard image editing tools Layer-based image editor Video editing support Vector graphic support (including SVG support) AI-powered editing features such as background removal ML Super Resolution and Smart Replace Supports a variety of media formats (JPEG, RAW, Apple ProRAW, PSD, PNG, GIF, MP4, HEIF, etc) == Reception == Pixelmator Pro was generally well-received by reviewers who praised its deep use of machine learning, fully macOS-native design, and relatively affordable one-time purchase compared to subscription software such as Adobe Photoshop. Some reviewers criticized that some features are hard to find or hard to use. It was awarded Apple's Mac App of the Year in 2018. Pixelmator Pro does not have support for panorama stitching. == Acquisition by Apple == On November 1, 2024, the Pixelmator Team announced that they were to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. Their site promises "There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time." The acquisition was completed in February 2025. On January 13, 2026, Apple announced that a new version of Pixelmator Pro with AI features would be included in its new Apple Creator Studio subscription, the app would be brought to the iPad and the Mac app would be redesigned with Liquid Glass. == Version history == == Applescript == In 2020 Pixelmator Pro added the ability to leverage Apple's automation language 'AppleScript' to automate many tasks in version 1.8 (Lynx). This enabled simple and advanced automation activities such as image resize, crop, color adjustments, format change, moving layers around, and more advanced actions like removing background, Gaussian blur, text replacement, shadows, color replacement, etc.
Public First Action
Public First Action is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization focused on United States public policy related to artificial intelligence. Public First Action is a bipartisan group that advocates for AI transparency, safeguards, and export controls on advanced AI chips. The organization is aligned with the political action committees Jobs and Democracy, Defending Our Values and Public First. == History == Public First Action was formed in 2025 by former Congressmen Brad Carson, a Democrat, and Chris Stewart, a Republican, to advocate for federal, state, and local regulations related to AI. The group's formation followed the founding of a super PAC network, Leading the Future, which advocates for deregulation of the AI industry and faster development of the new technology. Public First Action supports measures that would increase transparency at frontier AI companies and impose export controls on advanced AI chips, in addition to opposing the preemption of state-level AI laws. In February 2026, Public First Action received $20 million from the AI company Anthropic. That same month, the group announced plans to support 30 to 50 Democrats and Republicans in state and federal races, with Public First Action and aligned super PACs launching advertisements in Nebraska, Tennessee, and other states. In one ad, Public First Action touted Senator Marsha Blackburn for her work on child online safety. As of 2026, the group plans to raise between $50 and $75 million for public oversight of AI and related reforms. == Organization == === Leadership and funding === Public First Action is led by Carson and Stewart. The group has raised nearly $50 million in funding with a goal of raising $75 million during the 2026 midterms. Anthropic has contributed $20 million to the group. === Structure === Public First Action is aligned with three political action committees: "Jobs and Democracy", which supports Democratic candidates; "Defending Our Values", which supports Republican candidates; and "Public First", which supports both Republicans and Democrats.
HTK (software)
HTK (Hidden Markov Model Toolkit) is a proprietary software toolkit for handling HMMs. It is mainly intended for speech recognition, but has been used in many other pattern recognition applications that employ HMMs, including speech synthesis, character recognition and DNA sequencing. Originally developed at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory (formerly known as the Speech Vision and Robotics Group) of the Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED), HTK is now being widely used among researchers who are working on HMMs.
Attribute–value system
An attribute–value system is a basic knowledge representation framework comprising a table with columns designating "attributes" (also known as "properties", "predicates", "features", "dimensions", "characteristics", "fields", "headers" or "independent variables" depending on the context) and "rows" designating "objects" (also known as "entities", "instances", "exemplars", "elements", "records" or "dependent variables"). Each table cell therefore designates the value (also known as "state") of a particular attribute of a particular object. == Example of attribute–value system == Below is a sample attribute–value system. It represents 10 objects (rows) and five features (columns). In this example, the table contains only integer values. In general, an attribute–value system may contain any kind of data, numeric or otherwise. An attribute–value system is distinguished from a simple "feature list" representation in that each feature in an attribute–value system may possess a range of values (e.g., feature P1 below, which has domain of {0,1,2}), rather than simply being present or absent (Barsalou & Hale 1993). == Other terms used for "attribute–value system" == Attribute–value systems are pervasive throughout many different literatures, and have been discussed under many different names: Flat data Spreadsheet Attribute–value system (Ziarko & Shan 1996) Information system (Pawlak 1981) Classification system (Ziarko 1998) Knowledge representation system (Wong & Ziarko 1986) Information table (Yao & Yao 2002)
Desktop Window Manager
Desktop Window Manager (DWM, previously Desktop Compositing Engine or DCE in builds of pre-reset Windows Longhorn) is the compositing window manager in Microsoft Windows since Windows Vista that enables the use of hardware acceleration to render the graphical user interface of Windows. It was originally created to enable portions of the new "Windows Aero" user experience, which allowed for effects such as transparency, 3D window switching and more. It is also included with Windows Server 2008, but requires the "Desktop Experience" feature and compatible graphics drivers to be installed. == Architecture == The Desktop Window Manager is a compositing window manager, meaning that each program has a buffer that it writes data to; DWM then composites each program's buffer into a final image. By comparison, the stacking window manager in Windows XP and earlier (and also Windows Vista and Windows 7 with Windows Aero disabled) comprises a single display buffer to which all programs write. DWM works in different ways depending on the operating system (Windows 7 or Windows Vista) and on the version of the graphics drivers it uses (WDDM 1.0 or 1.1). Under Windows 7 and with WDDM 1.1 drivers, DWM only writes the program's buffer to the video RAM, even if it is a graphics device interface (GDI) program. This is because Windows 7 supports (limited) hardware acceleration for GDI and in doing so does not need to keep a copy of the buffer in system RAM so that the CPU can write to it. Because the compositor has access to the graphics of all applications, it easily allows visual effects that string together visuals from multiple applications, such as transparency. DWM uses DirectX to perform the function of compositing and rendering in the GPU, freeing the CPU of the task of managing the rendering from the off-screen buffers to the display. However, it does not affect applications painting to the off-screen buffers – depending on the technologies used for that, this might still be CPU-bound. DWM-agnostic rendering techniques like GDI are redirected to the buffers by rendering the user interface (UI) as bitmaps. DWM-aware rendering technologies like WPF directly make the internal data structures available in a DWM-compatible format. The window contents in the buffers are then converted to DirectX textures. The desktop itself is a full-screen Direct3D surface, with windows being represented as a mesh consisting of two adjacent (and mutually inverted) triangles, which are transformed to represent a 2D rectangle. The texture, representing the UI chrome, is then mapped onto these rectangles. Window transitions are implemented as transformations of the meshes, using shader programs. With Windows Vista, the transitions are limited to the set of built-in shaders that implement the transformations. Greg Schechter, a developer at Microsoft has suggested that this might be opened up for developers and users to plug in their own effects in a future release. DWM only maps the primary desktop object as a 3D surface; other desktop objects, including virtual desktops as well as the secure desktop used by User Account Control are not. Because all applications render to an off-screen buffer, they can be read off the buffer embedded in other applications as well. Since the off-screen buffer is constantly updated by the application, the embedded rendering will be a dynamic representation of the application window and not a static rendering. This is how the live thumbnail previews and Windows Flip work in Windows Vista and Windows 7. DWM exposes a public API that allows applications to access these thumbnail representations. The size of the thumbnail is not fixed; applications can request the thumbnails at any size - smaller than the original window, at the same size or even larger - and DWM will scale them properly before returning. Aero Flip does not use the public thumbnail APIs as they do not allow for directly accessing the Direct3D textures. Instead, Aero Flip is implemented directly in the DWM engine. The Desktop Window Manager uses Media Integration Layer (MIL), the unmanaged compositor which it shares with Windows Presentation Foundation, to represent the windows as composition nodes in a composition tree. The composition tree represents the desktop and all the windows hosted in it, which are then rendered by MIL from the back of the scene to the front. Since all the windows contribute to the final image, the color of a resultant pixel can be decided by more than one window. This is used to implement effects such as per-pixel transparency. DWM allows custom shaders to be invoked to control how pixels from multiple applications are used to create the displayed pixel. The DWM includes built-in Pixel Shader 2.0 programs which compute the color of a pixel in a window by averaging the color of the pixel as determined by the window behind it and its neighboring pixels. These shaders are used by DWM to achieve the blur effect in the window borders of windows managed by DWM, and optionally for the areas where it is requested by the application. Since MIL provides a retained mode graphics system by caching the composition trees, the job of repainting and refreshing the screen when windows are moved is handled by DWM and MIL, freeing the application of the responsibility. The background data is already in the composition tree and the off-screen buffers and is directly used to render the background. In pre-Vista Windows OSs, background applications had to be requested to re-render themselves by sending them the WM_PAINT message. DWM uses double-buffered graphics to prevent flickering and tearing when moving windows. The compositing engine uses optimizations such as culling to improve performance, as well as not redrawing areas that have not changed. Because the compositor is multi-monitor aware, DWM natively supports this too. During full-screen applications, such as games, DWM does not perform window compositing and therefore performance will not appreciably decrease. On Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, DWM is used at all times and cannot be disabled, due to the new "start screen experience" implemented. Since the DWM process is usually required to run at all times on Windows 8, users experiencing an issue with the process are seeing memory usage decrease after a system reboot. This is often the first step in a long list of troubleshooting tasks that can help. It is possible to prevent DWM from restarting temporarily in Windows 8, which causes the desktop to turn black, the taskbar grey, and break the start screen/modern apps, but desktop apps will continue to function and appear just like Windows 7 and Vista's Basic theme, based on the single-buffer renderer used by XP. They also use Windows 8's centered title bar, visible within Windows PreInstallation Environment. Starting up Windows without DWM will not work because the default lock screen requires DWM unlike the fallback lockscreen that appears as a command line interface program when Windows.UI.Logon.dll isn't present on Windows versions such as 1507 and later, so it can only be done on the fly, and does not have any practical purposes. Starting with Windows 10, disabling DWM in such a way will cause the entire compositing engine to break, even traditional desktop apps, due to Universal App implementations in the taskbar and new start menu. Windows can still be partially usable without the presence of DWM but requires Sihost.exe to not be present due to it relying on DWM. Most of the applications in Windows 11 require DWM to render UI elements and transparency, Windows 11's new task manager requires dwm to render menus unlike the fallback -d version. Unlike its predecessors, Windows 8 supports basic display adapters through Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP), which uses software rendering and the CPU to render the interface rather than the graphics card. This allows DWM to function without compatible drivers, but not at the same level of performance as with a normal graphics card. DWM on Windows 8 also adds support for stereoscopic 3D. == Redirection == For rendering techniques that are not DWM-aware, output must be redirected to the DWM buffers. With Windows, either GDI or DirectX can be used for rendering. To make these two work with DWM, redirection techniques for both are provided. With GDI, which is the most used UI rendering technique in Microsoft Windows, each application window is notified when it or a part of it comes in view and it is the job of the application to render itself. Without DWM, the rendering rasterizes the UI in a buffer in video memory, from where it is rendered to the screen. Under DWM, GDI calls are redirected to use the Canonical Display Driver (cdd.dll), a software renderer. A buffer equal to the size of the window is allocated in system memory and CDD.DLL outputs to this buffer rather than the video memory. Another buffer is allocated in the video memory to represent t
Turing test
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic). The test was introduced by Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" while working at the University of Manchester. It opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'." Because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words". Turing describes the new form of the problem in terms of a three-person party game called the "imitation game", in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players. Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" This question, Turing believed, was one that could actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think". Since Turing introduced his test, it has been highly influential in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, resulting in substantial discussion and controversy, as well as criticism from philosophers like John Searle, who argue against the test's ability to detect consciousness. == History == === Philosophical background === The question of whether it is possible for machines to think has a long history, which is firmly entrenched in the distinction between dualist and materialist views of the mind. René Descartes prefigures aspects of the Turing test in his 1637 Discourse on the Method when he writes: [H]ow many different automata or moving machines could be made by the industry of man ... For we can easily understand a machine's being constituted so that it can utter words, and even emit some responses to action on it of a corporeal kind, which brings about a change in its organs; for instance, if touched in a particular part it may ask what we wish to say to it; if in another part it may exclaim that it is being hurt, and so on. But it never happens that it arranges its speech in various ways, in order to reply appropriately to everything that may be said in its presence, as even the lowest type of man can do. Here Descartes notes that automata are capable of responding to human interactions but argues that such automata cannot respond appropriately to things said in their presence in the way that any human can. Descartes therefore prefigures the Turing test by defining the insufficiency of appropriate linguistic response as that which separates the human from the automaton. Descartes fails to consider the possibility that future automata might be able to overcome such insufficiency, and so does not propose the Turing test as such, even if he prefigures its conceptual framework and criterion. Denis Diderot formulates in his 1746 book Pensées philosophiques a Turing-test criterion, though with the important implicit limiting assumption maintained, of the participants being natural living beings, rather than considering created artifacts: If they find a parrot who could answer to everything, I would claim it to be an intelligent being without hesitation. This does not mean he agrees with this, but that it was already a common argument of materialists at that time. According to dualism, the mind is non-physical (or, at the very least, has non-physical properties) and, therefore, cannot be explained in purely physical terms. According to materialism, the mind can be explained physically, which leaves open the possibility of minds that are produced artificially. In 1936, philosopher Alfred Ayer considered the standard philosophical question of other minds: how do we know that other people have the same conscious experiences that we do? In his book, Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer suggested a protocol to distinguish between a conscious man and an unconscious machine: "The only ground I can have for asserting that an object which appears to be conscious is not really a conscious being, but only a dummy or a machine, is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined". (This suggestion is very similar to the Turing test, but it is not certain that Ayer's popular philosophical classic was familiar to Turing.) In other words, a thing is not conscious if it fails the consciousness test. === Cultural background === A rudimentary idea of the Turing test appears in the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. When Gulliver is brought before the king of Brobdingnag, the king thinks at first that Gulliver might be a "a piece of clock-work (which is in that country arrived to a very great perfection) contrived by some ingenious artist". Even when he hears Gulliver speaking, the king still doubts whether Gulliver was taught "a set of words" to make him "sell at a better price". Gulliver tells that only after "he put several other questions to me, and still received rational answers" the king became satisfied that Gulliver was not a machine. Tests where a human judges whether a computer or an alien is intelligent were an established convention in science fiction by the 1940s, and it is likely that Turing would have been aware of these. Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" (1934) provides an example of how nuanced such tests could be. Earlier examples of machines or automatons attempting to pass as human include the Ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion who creates a sculpture of a woman that is animated by Aphrodite, Carlo Collodi's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, about a puppet who wants to become a real boy, and E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 story "The Sandman," where the protagonist falls in love with an automaton. In all these examples, people are fooled by artificial beings that—up to a point—pass as human. === Alan Turing and the imitation game === Researchers in the United Kingdom had been exploring "machine intelligence" for up to ten years prior to the founding of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research in 1956. It was a common topic among the members of the Ratio Club, an informal group of British cybernetics and electronics researchers that included Alan Turing. Turing, in particular, had been running the notion of machine intelligence since at least 1941 and one of the earliest-known mentions of "computer intelligence" was made by him in 1947. In Turing's report, "Intelligent Machinery," he investigated "the question of whether or not it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour" and, as part of that investigation, proposed what may be considered the forerunner to his later tests: It is not difficult to devise a paper machine which will play a not very bad game of chess. Now get three men A, B and C as subjects for the experiment. A and C are to be rather poor chess players, B is the operator who works the paper machine. ... Two rooms are used with some arrangement for communicating moves, and a game is played between C and either A or the paper machine. C may find it quite difficult to tell which he is playing. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950) was the first published paper by Turing to focus exclusively on machine intelligence. Turing begins the 1950 paper with the claim, "I propose to consider the question 'Can machines think?'" As he highlights, the traditional approach to such a question is to start with definitions, defining both the terms "machine" and "think". Turing chooses not to do so; instead, he replaces the question with a new one, "which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words". In essence he proposes to change the question from "Can machines think?" to "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" The advantage of the new question, Turing argues, is that it draws "a fairly sharp line between the physical and intellectual capacities of a man". To demonstrate this approach Turing proposes a test inspired by a party game, known as the "imitation game", in which a man and a woman go into separate rooms and guests try to tell them apart by writing a series of questions and reading the typewritten answers sent back. In this game, both the man and the woman aim to convince the guests that they ar