Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has made significant contributions to natural language processing, multimodal processing, computational social science, and AI for Social Good. With Paul Tarau, she invented the TextRank Algorithm, which is a classic algorithm widely used for text summarization. == Career == Mihalcea has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Southern Methodist University (2001) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics, Oxford University (2010). In 2017 she was named Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at University of Michigan, Computer Science and Engineering. In 2018, Mihalcea was elected as vice president for the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). In 2021, she was elected the president for ACL. She is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she also leads the Language and Information Technologies (LIT) Lab. Before joining UofM, she was a professor at North Texas University between 2002-2013. A prolific researcher, Mihalcea has authored or coauthored over 500 articles since 1998 on topics ranging from semantic analysis of text to lie detection. Her work has been cited over 50,000 times on Google Scholar, which made her one of the most cited scholars in Multimodal Interaction and Computational Social Science. In 2008, Mihalcea received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) She is an ACM Fellow (since 2019), AAAI Fellow (since 2021), and ACL Fellow (since 2025). Mihalcea is an outspoken promoter of diversity in computer science. She also supports an expansion of the traditional analysis of educational success, which tends to focus on academic behaviour, to include student life, personality and background outside of the classroom. Mihalcea leads Girls Encoded, a program designed to develop the pipeline of women in computer science as well as to retain the women who have entered into the program. == Awards == Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2026 ACL Fellow, 2025 "for significant contributions to graph-based language processing, computational social science, and the advancement of NLP for social good." AAAI Fellow, 2021 "for significant contributions to natural language processing and computational social science". ACM Fellow, 2019 "for contributions to natural language processing, with innovations in data-driven and graph-based language processing". Sarah Goddard Power Award, 2019. Carol Hollenshead Award, 2018. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2009. Awarded by President Barack Obama. == Research == Mihalcea is known for her research in natural language processing, multimodal processing, computational social sciences. In a collaboration she leads at the University of Michigan, Mihalcea has created software that can detect human lying. In a study of video clips of high profile court cases, a computer was more accurate at detecting deception than human judges. Mihalcea's lie-detection software uses machine learning techniques to analyze video clips of actual trials. In her 2015 study, the team used clips from The Innocence Project, a national organization that works to reexamine cases where individuals were tried without the benefit of DNA testing with the aim of exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals. After identifying common human gestures, they transcribed the audio from the video clips of trials and analyzed how often subjects labeled deceptive used various words and phrases. The system was 75% accurate in identifying which subjects were deceptive among 120 videos. That puts Mihalcea's algorithm on par with the most commonly accepted form of lie detection, polygraph tests, which are roughly 85 percent accurate when testing guilty people and 56 percent accurate when testing the innocent. She notes there are still improvements to be made — in particular to account for cultural and demographic differences. A possibly unique advantage of Mihalcea's study was the real world, high stakes nature of the footage analyzed in the study. In laboratory experiments, it is difficult to create a setting that motivates people to truly lie. In 2018, Mihalcea and her collaborators worked on an algorithm-based system that identifies linguistic cues in fake news stories. It successfully found fakes up to 76% of the time, compared to a human success rate of 70%. == Publications == === Books === Rada Mihalcea and Dragomir Radev, Graph-based Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval, Cambridge U. Press, 2011. Gabe Ignatow and Rada Mihalcea, Text Mining: A Guidebook for the Social Sciences, SAGE, 2016. Gabe Ignatow and Rada Mihalcea, An Introduction to Text Mining: Research Design, Data Collection, and Analysis, SAGE, 2017. === Journals and conferences === Textrank: Bringing order into text. R. Mihalcea, P. Tarau. Proceedings of the 2004 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing. 2004 Corpus-based and knowledge-based measures of text semantic similarity. R. Mihalcea, C. Corley, C. Strapparava. AAAI 6, 775-780. 2006 Wikify!: linking documents to encyclopedic knowledge. R. Mihalcea, A. Csomai. Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and information management. 2007 Learning to identify emotions in text. C. Strapparava, R. Mihalcea. Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing, 1556-1560. 2008 Semeval-2007 task 14: Affective text. C. Strapparava, R. Mihalcea. Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations. 2007 Learning multilingual subjective language via cross-lingual projections. R. Mihalcea, C. Banea, J. Wiebe. Proceedings of the 45th annual meeting of the association of computational linguistics. 2007 Graph-based ranking algorithms for sentence extraction, applied to text summarization. R. Mihalcea. Proceedings of the ACL Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions. 2004 Falcon: Boosting knowledge for answer engines. S. Harabagiu, D. Moldovan, M. Pasca, R. Mihalcea, M. Surdeanu, Razvan Bunescu, Roxana Girju, Vasile Rus, Paul Morarescu. TREC 9, 479-488. 2000 Measuring the semantic similarity of texts. C. Corley, R. Mihalcea. Proceedings of the ACL workshop on empirical modeling of semantic equivalence and entailment. 2005 R Mihalcea (2007). "Using wikipedia for automatic word-sense disambiguation". Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Proceedings of the Main Conference. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.74.3561. - see also Word-sense disambiguation Unsupervised graph-based word sense disambiguation using measures of word semantic similarity. R. Sinha, R. Mihalcea. International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2007), 363-369. 2007 == Personal life == Mihalcea was born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she attended the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. She can speak Romanian, English, Italian, and French. Mihalcea has two children - Zara (b. 2009) and Caius (b. 2013). They were both born in Dallas, Texas. She is married to an associate professor of engineering at the University of Michigan–Flint - Mihai Burzo. They met while they were both completing Ph.D.s at Southern Methodist University in 2001 and have often collaborated on research, such as the 2015 study on lie detection.
Color moments
Color moments are measures that characterise color distribution in an image in the same way that central moments uniquely describe a probability distribution. Color moments are mainly used for color indexing purposes as features in image retrieval applications in order to compare how similar two images are based on color. Usually one image is compared to a database of digital images with pre-computed features in order to find and retrieve a similar Image. Each comparison between images results in a similarity score, and the lower this score is the more identical the two images are supposed to be. == Overview == Color moments are scaling and rotation invariant. It is usually the case that only the first three color moments are used as features in image retrieval applications as most of the color distribution information is contained in the low-order moments. Since color moments encode both shape and color information they are a good feature to use under changing lighting conditions, but they cannot handle occlusion very successfully. Color moments can be computed for any color model. Three color moments are computed per channel (e.g. 9 moments if the color model is RGB and 12 moments if the color model is CMYK). Computing color moments is done in the same way as computing moments of a probability distribution. === Mean === The first color moment can be interpreted as the average color in the image, and it can be calculated by using the following formula E i = ∑ j = 1 N 1 N p i j {\displaystyle E_{i}=\textstyle \sum _{j=1}^{N}{\frac {1}{N}}p_{ij}} where N is the number of pixels in the image and p i j {\displaystyle p_{ij}} is the value of the j-th pixel of the image at the i-th color channel. === Standard Deviation === The second color moment is the standard deviation, which is obtained by taking the square root of the variance of the color distribution. σ i = ( 1 N ∑ j = 1 N ( p i j − E i ) 2 ) {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}={\sqrt {({\frac {1}{N}}\textstyle \sum _{j=1}^{N}(p_{ij}-E_{i})^{2})}}} where E i {\displaystyle E_{i}} is the mean value, or first color moment, for the i-th color channel of the image. === Skewness === The third color moment is the skewness. It measures how asymmetric the color distribution is, and thus it gives information about the shape of the color distribution. Skewness can be computed with the following formula: s i = ( 1 N ∑ j = 1 N ( p i j − E i ) 3 ) 3 σ i {\displaystyle s_{i}={\frac {\sqrt[{3}]{\left({\frac {1}{N}}\textstyle \sum _{j=1}^{N}(p_{ij}-E_{i})^{3}\right)}}{\sigma _{i}}}} === Kurtosis === Kurtosis is the fourth color moment, and, similarly to skewness, it provides information about the shape of the color distribution. More specifically, kurtosis is a measure of how extreme the tails are in comparison to the normal distribution. === Higher-order color moments === Higher-order color moments are usually not part of the color moments feature set in image retrieval tasks as they require more data in order to obtain a good estimate of their value, and also the lower-order moments generally provide enough information. == Applications == Color moments have significant applications in image retrieval. They can be used in order to compare how similar two images are. This is a relatively new approach to color indexing. The greatest advantage of using color moments comes from the fact that there is no need to store the complete color distribution. This greatly speeds up image retrieval since there are less features to compare. In addition, the first three color moments have the same units, which allows for comparison between them. === Color indexing === Color indexing is the main application of color moments. Images can be indexed, and the index will contain the computed color moments. Then, if someone has a particular image and wants to find similar images in the database, the color moments of the image of interest will also be computed. After that the following function will be used in order to compute a similarity score between the image of interest and all the images in the database: d m o m ( H , I ) = ∑ i = 1 r w i 1 | E i 1 − E i 2 | + w i 2 | σ i 1 − σ i 2 | + w i 3 | s i 1 − s i 2 | {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)=\textstyle \sum _{i=1}^{r}w_{i1}|E_{i}^{1}-E_{i}^{2}|+w_{i2}|\sigma _{i}^{1}-\sigma _{i}^{2}|+w_{i3}|s_{i}^{1}-s_{i}^{2}|} where: H and I are the color distributions of the two images that are being compared i is the channel index and r is the total number of channels E i 1 {\displaystyle E_{i}^{1}} and E i 2 {\displaystyle E_{i}^{2}} are the first order moments computed for the image distributions. σ i 1 {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}^{1}} and σ i 2 {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}^{2}} are the second order moments computed for the image distributions. s_i^1 and s_i^2 are the third order moments computed for the image distributions. w i 1 {\displaystyle w_{i1}} , w i 2 {\displaystyle w_{i2}} , and w i 3 {\displaystyle w_{i3}} are weights, specified by the user, for each of the three color moments used. Finally, the images in the database will be ranked according to the computed similarity score with the image of interest, and the database images with the lowest d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} value should be retrieved. "A retrieval based on d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} may produce false positives because the index contains no information about the correlation between the color channels". == Example == A simple and concise example of the use of color moments for image retrieval tasks is illustrated in. Consider having several test images in a database and a "New Image". The goal is to retrieve images from the database that are similar to the "New Image". The first three color moments are used as features. There are several steps in this computation. Image preprocessing (Optional) - The image preprocessing step of the computation process is optional. For example, in this step all images could be modified to be the same size (in terms of pixels). However, since color moments are invariant to scaling, it is not necessary to make all images the same width and height. Computing the features - Use the color moments formulae in order to compute the first three moments for each of the color channels in the image. For example, if the HSV color space is used, this means that for each of the images, 9 features in total will be computed (the first three order moments for the Hue, Saturation, and Value channels). Calculating the similarity score - After computing the color moments the weights for each of the moments in the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} function should be determined by the user. The weights have to be adjusted each time in accordance with the application or condition and quality of the images. Following that the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} function is used to calculate a similarity score for the "New Image" and each of the images in the database. Ranking and image retrieval - From the previous step the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} values were obtained. Now a comparison of these values can be made in order to decide which of the images in the database are more similar to the "New Image", and thus rank the database images accordingly. The smaller the d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} value is the more similar the two color distributions are supposed to be. Finally, some of the top ranked images (the ones with the smallest d m o m ( H , I ) {\displaystyle d_{mom}(H,I)} value) from the database are retrieved.
OntoWiki
OntoWiki was a free and open-source semantic wiki application, meant to serve as an ontology editor and a knowledge acquisition system. It is a web-based application written in PHP and using either a MySQL database or a Virtuoso triple store. OntoWiki is form-based rather than syntax-based, and thus tries to hide as much of the complexity of knowledge representation formalisms from users as possible. OntoWiki is mainly being developed by the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) research group at the University of Leipzig, a group also known for the DBpedia project among others, in collaboration with volunteers around the world. In 2009 the AKSW research group got a budget of €425,000 from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany for the development of the OntoWiki. In 2010 OntoWiki became part of the technology stack supporting the LOD2 (linked open data) project. Leipzig University is one of the consortium members of the project, which is funded by a €6.5m EU grant. The development ended in 2016 due to the lack of capacity migrating from PHP 5 to 7 including the required Zend Framework from version 1 to 2.
Spark NLP
Spark NLP is an open-source text processing library for advanced natural language processing for the Python, Java and Scala programming languages. The library is built on top of Apache Spark and its Spark ML library. Its purpose is to provide an API for natural language processing pipelines that implement recent academic research results as production-grade, scalable, and trainable software. The library offers pre-trained neural network models, pipelines, and embeddings, as well as support for training custom models. == Features == The design of the library makes use of the concept of a pipeline which is an ordered set of text annotators. Out of the box annotators include, tokenizer, normalizer, stemming, lemmatizer, regular expression, TextMatcher, chunker, DateMatcher, SentenceDetector, DeepSentenceDetector, POS tagger, ViveknSentimentDetector, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, conditional random field annotator, deep learning annotator, spell checking and correction, dependency parser, typed dependency parser, document classification, and language detection. The Models Hub is a platform for sharing open-source as well as licensed pre-trained models and pipelines. It includes pre-trained pipelines with tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition that exist for more than thirteen languages; word embeddings including GloVe, ELMo, BERT, ALBERT, XLNet, Small BERT, and ELECTRA; sentence embeddings including Universal Sentence Embeddings (USE) and Language Agnostic BERT Sentence Embeddings (LaBSE). It also includes resources and pre-trained models for more than two hundred languages. Spark NLP base code includes support for East Asian languages such as tokenizers for Chinese, Japanese, Korean; for right-to-left languages such as Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew and pre-trained multilingual word and sentence embeddings such as LaUSE and a translation annotator. == Usage in healthcare == Spark NLP for Healthcare is a commercial extension of Spark NLP for clinical and biomedical text mining. It provides healthcare-specific annotators, pipelines, models, and embeddings for clinical entity recognition, clinical entity linking, entity normalization, assertion status detection, de-identification, relation extraction, and spell checking and correction. The library offers access to several clinical and biomedical transformers: JSL-BERT-Clinical, BioBERT, ClinicalBERT, GloVe-Med, GloVe-ICD-O. It also includes over 50 pre-trained healthcare models, that can recognize the entities such as clinical, drugs, risk factors, anatomy, demographics, and sensitive data. == Spark OCR == Spark OCR is another commercial extension of Spark NLP for optical character recognition (OCR) from images, scanned PDF documents, and DICOM files. It is a software library built on top of Apache Spark. It provides several image pre-processing features for improving text recognition results such as adaptive thresholding and denoising, skew detection & correction, adaptive scaling, layout analysis and region detection, image cropping, removing background objects. Due to the tight coupling between Spark OCR and Spark NLP, users can combine NLP and OCR pipelines for tasks such as extracting text from images, extracting data from tables, recognizing and highlighting named entities in PDF documents or masking sensitive text in order to de-identify images. Several output formats are supported by Spark OCR such as PDF, images, or DICOM files with annotated or masked entities, digital text for downstream processing in Spark NLP or other libraries, structured data formats (JSON and CSV), as files or Spark data frames. Users can also distribute the OCR jobs across multiple nodes in a Spark cluster. == License and availability == Spark NLP is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. The source code is publicly available on GitHub as well as documentation and a tutorial. Prebuilt versions of Spark NLP are available in PyPi and Anaconda Repository for Python development, in Maven Central for Java & Scala development, and in Spark Packages for Spark development. == Award == In March 2019, Spark NLP received Open Source Award for its contributions in natural language processing in Python, Java, and Scala.
Lisp machine
Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations. Despite being modest in number (perhaps 7,000 units total as of 1988) Lisp machines commercially pioneered some now-commonplace technologies, including networking innovations such as Chaosnet, and effective garbage collection. Several firms built and sold Lisp machines in the 1980s: Symbolics (3600, 3640, XL1200, MacIvory, and other models), Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI Lambda), Texas Instruments (Explorer, MicroExplorer), and Xerox (Interlisp-D workstations). The operating systems were written in Lisp Machine Lisp, Interlisp (Xerox), and later partly in Common Lisp. == History == === Historical context === Artificial intelligence (AI) computer programs of the 1960s and 1970s intrinsically required what was then considered a huge amount of computer power, as measured in processor time and memory space. The power requirements of AI research were exacerbated by the Lisp symbolic programming language, when commercial hardware was designed and optimized for assembly- and Fortran-like programming languages. At first, the cost of such computer hardware meant that it had to be shared among many users. As integrated circuit technology shrank the size and cost of computers in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the memory needs of AI programs began to exceed the address space of the most common research computer, the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10, researchers considered a new approach: a computer designed specifically to develop and run large artificial intelligence programs, and tailored to the semantics of the Lisp language. To provide consistent performance for interactive programs, these machines would often not be shared, but would be dedicated to a single user at a time. === Initial development === In 1973, Richard Greenblatt and Thomas Knight, programmers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), began what would become the MIT Lisp Machine Project when they first began building a computer hardwired to run certain basic Lisp operations, rather than run them in software, in a 24-bit tagged architecture. The machine also did incremental (or Arena) garbage collection. More specifically, since Lisp variables are typed at runtime rather than compile time, a simple addition of two variables could take five times as long on conventional hardware, due to test and branch instructions. Lisp Machines ran the tests in parallel with the more conventional single instruction additions. If the simultaneous tests failed, then the result was discarded and recomputed; this meant in many cases a speed increase by several factors. This simultaneous checking approach was used as well in testing the bounds of arrays when referenced, and other memory management necessities (not merely garbage collection or arrays). Type checking was further improved and automated when the conventional byte word of 32 bits was lengthened to 36 bits for Symbolics 3600-model Lisp machines and eventually to 40 bits or more (usually, the excess bits not accounted for by the following were used for error-correcting codes). The first group of extra bits were used to hold type data, making the machine a tagged architecture, and the remaining bits were used to implement compressed data representation (CDR) coding (wherein the usual linked list elements are compressed to occupy roughly half the space), aiding garbage collection by reportedly an order of magnitude. A further improvement was two microcode instructions which specifically supported Lisp functions, reducing the cost of calling a function to as little as 20 clock cycles, in some Symbolics implementations. The first machine was called the CONS machine (named after the list construction operator cons in Lisp). Often it was affectionately referred to as the Knight machine, perhaps since Knight wrote his master's thesis on the subject; it was extremely well received. It was subsequently improved into a version called CADR (a pun; in Lisp, the cadr function, which returns the second item of a list, is pronounced /ˈkeɪ.dəɹ/ or /ˈkɑ.dəɹ/, as some pronounce the word "cadre") which was based on essentially the same architecture. About 25 of what were essentially prototype CADRs were sold within and without MIT for ~$50,000; it quickly became the favorite machine for hacking – many of the most favored software tools were quickly ported to it (e.g. Emacs was ported from ITS in 1975). It was so well received at an AI conference held at MIT in 1978 that Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began funding its development. === Commercializing MIT Lisp machine technology === In 1979, Russell Noftsker, being convinced that Lisp machines had a bright commercial future due to the strength of the Lisp language and the enabling factor of hardware acceleration, proposed to Greenblatt that they commercialize the technology. In a counter-intuitive move for an AI Lab hacker, Greenblatt acquiesced, hoping perhaps that he could recreate the informal and productive atmosphere of the Lab in a real business. These ideas and goals were considerably different from those of Noftsker. The two negotiated at length, but neither would compromise. As the proposed firm could succeed only with the full and undivided assistance of the AI Lab hackers as a group, Noftsker and Greenblatt decided that the fate of the enterprise was up to them, and so the choice should be left to the hackers. The ensuing discussions of the choice divided the lab into two factions. In February 1979, matters came to a head. The hackers sided with Noftsker, believing that a commercial venture-fund-backed firm had a better chance of surviving and commercializing Lisp machines than Greenblatt's proposed self-sustaining start-up. Greenblatt lost the battle. It was at this juncture that Symbolics, Noftsker's enterprise, slowly came together. While Noftsker was paying his staff a salary, he had no building or any equipment for the hackers to work on. He bargained with Patrick Winston that, in exchange for allowing Symbolics' staff to keep working out of MIT, Symbolics would let MIT use internally and freely all the software Symbolics developed. A consultant from CDC, who was trying to put together a natural language computer application with a group of West-coast programmers, came to Greenblatt, seeking a Lisp machine for his group to work with, about eight months after the disastrous conference with Noftsker. Greenblatt had decided to start his own rival Lisp machine firm, but he had done nothing. The consultant, Alexander Jacobson, decided that the only way Greenblatt was going to start the firm and build the Lisp machines that Jacobson desperately needed was if Jacobson pushed and otherwise helped Greenblatt launch the firm. Jacobson pulled together business plans, a board, a partner for Greenblatt (one F. Stephen Wyle). The newfound firm was named LISP Machine, Inc. (LMI), and was funded by CDC orders, via Jacobson. Around this time Symbolics (Noftsker's firm) began operating. It had been hindered by Noftsker's promise to give Greenblatt a year's head start, and by severe delays in procuring venture capital. Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics. Two AI Lab people were not hired by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky. Stallman, however, blamed Symbolics for the decline of the hacker community that had centered around the AI lab. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers. Regardless, after a series of internal battles, Symbolics did get off the ground in 1980/1981, selling the CADR as the LM-2, while Lisp Machines, Inc. sold it as the LMI-CADR. Symbolics did not intend to produce many LM-2s, since the 3600 family of Lisp machines was supposed to ship quickly, but the 3600s were repeatedly delayed, and Symbolics ended up producing ~100 LM-2s, each of which sold for $70,000. Both firms developed second-generation products based on the CADR: the Symbolics 3600 and the LMI-LAMBDA (of which LMI managed to sell ~200). The 3600, which shipped a year late, expanded on the CADR by widening the machine word to 36-bits, expanding the address space to 28-bits, and adding hardware to accelerate certain common functions that were implemented in microcode on the CADR. The LMI-LAMBDA, which came out a year after the 3600, in 1983, was compatible with the CADR (it could run CADR microcode), but hardware differences existed. Texas Instruments (TI) joined the fray whe
Instance (computer science)
In computer science, an instance or token (from metalogic and metamathematics) is a specific occurrence of a software element that is based on a type definition. When created, an occurrence is said to have been instantiated, and both the creation process and the result of creation are called instantiation. == Examples == Chat AI instance In chat-based AI systems, an assistant can be invoked across many independent conversation sessions (often called a thread), each with its own message history. A specific execution of the assistant over that session may be represented as a run (an execution on a thread). Class instance In object-oriented programming, an object created from a class type. Each instance of a class shares the class-defined structure and behavior but has its own identity and state. Procedural instance In some contexts (including Simula), each procedure call can be viewed as an instance of that procedure—an activation with its own parameters and local variables. Computer instance In cloud computing and virtualization, an instance commonly refers to a provisioned virtual machine or virtual server with an allocated combination of compute, memory, network, and storage resources. Polygonal model In computer graphics, a model may be instanced so it can be drawn multiple times with different transforms and parameters, improving performance by reusing shared geometry data. Program instance In a POSIX-oriented operating system, a running process is an instance of a program. It can be instantiated via system calls such as fork() and exec(). Each executing process is an instance of a program it has been instantiated from.
Sense Networks
Sense Networks is a New York City based company with a focus on applications that analyze big data from mobile phones, carrier networks, and taxicabs, particularly by using machine learning technology to make sense of large amounts of location (latitude/longitude) data. In 2009, Sense was named one of "The 25 Most Intriguing Startups in the World" by Bloomberg Businessweek and was called "The Next Google" on the cover of Newsweek. In 2014, Sense Networks was acquired by YP, "the local search and advertising company owned by Cerberus Capital Management and AT&T." It was subsequently sold off to Verve in 2017 == History == Sense Networks was founded by Greg Skibiski in February 2006 (2003?) near his home in Northampton, Massachusetts. After establishing an office in NoHo, New York City near Silicon Alley, Skibiski recruited Alex Pentland, Director of Human Dynamics Research and former Academic Head of the MIT Media Lab, Tony Jebara, Associate Professor and Head of the Machine Learning Laboratory at Columbia University, and Christine Lemke, who would later become co-founders. Sense Networks investors include Intel Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, and Kenan Altunis. Founder Greg Skibiski was pushed out by lead investor Intel Capital in November 2009 following the company's B round of financing. During the same week, the company won the Emerging Communications Conference "Company to Watch" Award. The company has three published patent applications for analyzing sensor data streams: System and Method of Performing Location Analytics (US 20090307263), Comparing Spatial-Temporal Trails in Location Analytics (US 20100079336), and Anomaly Detection in Sensor Analytics (US 20100082301). The company was acquired by the Yellow Pages in 2014. This is a marketing conglomerate under AT&T and Cerberus Capital Management. == Products and services == The Citysense consumer application that shows hotspots of human activity in real-time from mobile phone location and taxicab GPS data was named by ReadWriteWeb (in The New York Times) as "Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009". The Cabsense consumer application that shows the best place to catch a New York City taxicab based on GPS data from the vehicle was launched in March 2010. The Macrosense platform is for mobile application providers and mobile phone carriers to analyze billions of customer location data points for predictive analytics in advertising and churn management applications. == Privacy and data ownership == The company allows users to opt-out of their service through their website, and users may monitor their profile through their application. The company does not collect identifiable data (such as phone numbers or names); it collects data received from cellphone to construct anonymous profiles of consumers. This anonymous data/profiles may then be sold to third parties. The company's privacy and data ownership policies are based on The New Deal on Data, as advocated by Alex "Sandy" Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics group at MIT.