Mortimer Alan Rogoff (May 2, 1921 – August 1, 2008) was an American inventor, businessman, and author as well as an amateur photographer and radio operator. He is recognized for his work in spread spectrum technology which is the technology that modern cell phones and GPS systems are based on. He is also considered the grandfather of the electronic navigation chart. == Early life == Rogoff was born in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his B.S.E.E. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1943 and his M.S.E.E. from Columbia University in 1948. While at Rensselaer he was a member of Kappa Nu fraternity and the Features Editor for the student newspaper. During World War II, he enlisted in the United States Navy and worked on developing radio communication and aerial navigation systems. One of the techniques he developed was undetectable by Axis forces because its power was below that of the background noise and its frequency varied in random ways. This secure transmission was the beginning of spread spectrum technology which would become the basis for GPS and CDMA cellular telephone systems. Although he was never able to patent the technology because it was a military secret he did get some recognition for it almost forty years later when he received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Pioneer Award in 1981. == Career == Rogoff worked for twenty-two years (1946 to 1968) for ITT Laboratories in New Jersey. In 1958, he became their deputy director of Engineering. He was Vice President of ITT Laboratories from 1962 to 1963. From 1963 to 1968, he was promoted to the corporate staff where he became head of European operations. In 1968 he left ITT to work for the Diebold Group where he became an Executive Vice President. After leaving the Diebold Group he founded several technology and automation businesses, including his own consulting firm, and Teletext Communications Corporation. Later in the 1970s, he was a Principal with Booz Allen Hamilton. In 1979, his book ‘’Calculator Navigation’’ was published. This book demonstrated practical methods for calculating precise ship locations using radio navigation with a consumer calculator. In 1981, he founded a new company, Navigation Sciences Inc., in Bethesda, Maryland. With this company he patented a method for marine navigation that combined radar maps with electronic charts in 1986. This was a major advancement in field. Today, this system is known as the Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS). Rogoff had seen the need for a new charting system in 1968 from his apartment at 180 East End Avenue in New York City. From there, he saw a boating accident where a life was lost and decided there had to be a way to automate navigation. Rogoff then became of member of the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) sub-committee on Safety of Navigation, a representative to the International Electrotechnical Commission, and became the chairman of the Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services Special Committee 109 on Electronic Charts. He was able to use his influence on these boards to push through a proposal of ECDIS standards in 1989 where none has been before. As his friend Giuseppe Carnevali said, “Although nobody could argue against the need for a standard, no one was ready to endorse one; however, nobody was brave enough to oppose it.” A Test Bed project on these proposals was conducted by the United States Coast Guard. The amended standards were accepted by the IMO in November, 1995. In 2000, he was named as a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation. He was also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. During this time, he was also president of the Navigational Electronic Charts System Association. == Personal == In 1979, he moved to Washington, D.C. and bought a home in Nantucket, Massachusetts. He married Sheila Zunser in 1943 and they were together for sixty-five years. They had three daughters: Louisa Thompson, Alice Rogoff, and Julia Peach. His sister was sociologist Natalie Rogoff Ramsøy of the University of Oslo. He was a member of the Cosmos Club and President of The Navigational Electronic Chart System Association (NECSA). He was a very good amateur photographer and liked amateur radio (call sign W2EE). He died in Nantucket from bladder cancer. == Patents == Patent number: 4176316 – Secure Communication System – November 27, 1979 With Louis A. DeRosa Patent number: 4590569 – Electronic Navigation System – May 20, 1986 With Peter M. Winkler and John N. Ackley Patent number: RE34004 – Secure Communication System – July 21, 1992 With Louis A. DeRosa == Publications == Rogoff, Mortimer September 1957. Automatic Analysis of Infrared Spectra. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences; vol. 69: no. 1: 27–37. Gen. P.C. Sandretto and Mortimer Rogoff. 1958 “A Novel Concept for Application to the Control of Airways Traffic.” NAVIGATION: Journal of The Institute of Navigation; vol. 6: no. 2: 102–107 Rogoff, Mortimer 1979. Calculator Navigation; ISBN 0-393-03192-6. Published by W.W. Norton & Company (New York and London). Rogoff, Mortimer December 1985. Electronic Charting. Yachting; vol. 158: no. 6: 54–57. Rogoff, Mortimer Winter 1990. Electronic Charts in the Nineties. NAVIGATION: Journal of The Institute of Navigation; vol. 37: no. 4: 305–318.
Flektor
Flektor was a web application that allowed users the ability to create and "mashup" their own content (photos, videos, music, etc.) and share it via email, on social networking websites MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Digg, eBay or on personal blogs. The company's website (Flektor.com) launched on April 2, 2007, and over 40,000 people began utilizing its features just one month later. Flektor closed down in January 2009. Flektor offered tools and widgets that included audio, video, photos, text, and approximately 100 effects, transitions and filters to be used with media. Users could create personalized slideshows, polls, postcards, and streaming video projects which the website calls "fleks". Flektor also offered Chat (used as a MySpace addon) and Movie Editor, which provided the ability to edit content and assets together. Users of Flektor could import media from websites like Photobucket and Google's YouTube, and then edit their content with the site's editing tools. Flektor's erstwhile competitors include Slide.com (founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin), RockYou!, Yahoo's JumpCut and Brightcove. == History == Flektor was created by Jason Rubin, Andy Gavin and former HBO executive Jason R. Kay. Both Rubin and Gavin spent most of their careers in the video game industry developing games for publishers like Electronic Arts, Universal Interactive Studios and Sony Computer Entertainment America. They founded a successful game development studio called Naughty Dog and were responsible for games such as Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter. After selling Naughty Dog to Sony, Rubin focused on a comic book series called Iron and the Maiden before teaming up again with Gavin to venture into the web industry with Flektor. Jason Kay spent four years at Home Box Office, working as a consultant to the EVP of Business Development. They recruited former employee and then Naughty Dog Lead Programmer Scott Shumaker to lead the technology team along with Gavin. Ryan Evans joined shortly thereafter, spearheading product development. Flektor is based in Culver City, California. In May 2007, the company was sold to Fox Interactive Media, which is a division of News Corp., for more than $20 million. The deal coincided with Fox's acquisition of Photobucket, an image-hosting and sharing website. Fox Interactive Media already holds possession of MySpace, IGN Entertainment, FOXSports.com, AmericanIdol.com and Rotten Tomatoes. After the acquisition, Rubin, Gavin and Kay departed, leaving the studio in the hands of Shumaker and Evans. In the fall of 2007, Flektor partnered with its sister company, MySpace, and MTV to provide instant audience feedback via polls for the interactive MySpace/ MTV Presidential Dialogues series with presidential candidates Senator Barack Obama, Senator John McCain and John Edwards. Use of Flektor's polling system, enabled hosts John McLaughlin and Geoffrey Garin to cater their questions towards subjects of voter-interest. In the fall of 2008, Flektor built the official site for the 2008 Presidential debates, hosted at MyDebates. In January 2009, due to a company directive to focus on the core MySpace property, Fox Interactive announced that Flektor would be shut down, with some of its technology being incorporated into MySpace.
AGROVOC
AGROVOC is a multilingual controlled vocabulary covering areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), aiming to promote the visibility of research produced among FAO members. By March 2024, AGROVOC consisted of over 42 000 concepts and up to 1 000 000 terms in more than 42 different languages. It is a collaborative effort, the outcome of consensus among a community of experts coordinated by FAO. == History == FAO first published AGROVOC at the beginning of the 1980s in English, Spanish and French to serve as a controlled vocabulary to index publications in agricultural science and technology, especially for the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology (AGRIS). In the 1990s, AGROVOC shifted from paper printing to a digital format opting for data storage handled by a relational database. In 2004, preliminary experiments with expressing AGROVOC into the Web Ontology Language (OWL) took place. At the same time a web based editing tool was developed, then called WorkBench, nowadays VocBench. In 2009 AGROVOC became an SKOS resource. == Usage == Today, AGROVOC is available in different languages. It is employed for tagging resources, allowing searches in a specific language while providing results in many others, enhancing their visibility worldwide. Additionally, it serves for organizing knowledge to facilitate subsequent data retrieval, tagging website content for search engine discovery, standardizing agricultural information data and acting as a reference for translations. Moreover, it finds applications in fields such as data mining, big data, or artificial intelligence. Updated AGROVOC content is released once a month and is available for public use. == Maintenance == FAO coordinates the editorial activities related to the maintenance of AGROVOC. Content curation is carried out by a community of editors and institutions responsible for each of the language versions. VocBench, is the tool used to edit and maintain AGROVOC in a distributed way. FAO also facilitates the technical maintenance of AGROVOC. == Copyright and license == Copyright for AGROVOC content in FAO languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese) is held by FAO, while content in other languages stays with the institutions that authored it. AGROVOC thesaurus content in English, Russian, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese is licensed under the international Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-4.0).
Diffbot
Diffbot is a developer of machine learning and computer vision algorithms and public APIs for extracting data from web pages / web scraping to create a knowledge base. == Overview == The company has gained interest from its application of computer vision technology to web pages, wherein it visually parses a web page for important elements and returns them in a structured format. In 2015 Diffbot announced it was working on its version of an automated "knowledge graph" by crawling the web and using its automatic web page extraction to build a large database of structured web data. In 2019 Diffbot released their Knowledge Graph which has since grown to include over two billion entities (corporations, people, articles, products, discussions, and more), and ten trillion "facts." == Features == The company's products allow software developers to analyze web home pages and article pages, and extract the "important information" while ignoring elements deemed not core to the primary content. In August 2012 the company released its Page Classifier API, which automatically categorizes web pages into specific "page types". As part of this, Diffbot analyzed 750,000 web pages shared on the social media service Twitter and revealed that photos, followed by articles and videos, are the predominant web media shared on the social network. In September 2020 the company released a Natural Language Processing API for automatically building Knowledge Graphs from text. The company raised $2 million in funding in May 2012 from investors including Andy Bechtolsheim and Sky Dayton. Diffbot's customers include Adobe, AOL, Cisco, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Instapaper, Microsoft, Onswipe and Springpad.
Alliance for Secure AI
The Alliance for Secure AI is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization which educates the public about the risks of advanced artificial intelligence (AI). Politico has described the Alliance as a "bipartisan nonprofit trying to push a middle-ground approach to AI guardrails." == History == In June 2025, the Alliance was launched as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit watchdog in Washington, D.C. That same month, the organization rolled out a six-figure advertising campaign featuring bipartisan warnings about advanced AI. The ad campaign presented different messages for different political audiences. The Alliance opposed the idea of a moratorium on state AI laws as part of the July 2025 budget bill, in addition to President Donald Trump's December 2025 executive order on the issue. The group has also criticized AI companies like Meta and OpenAI for what it says are failures to prevent harms to children. In addition, the Alliance has criticized OpenAI for subpoenaing nonprofit organizations in the AI safety space. In March 2026, the Alliance launched JobLoss.ai, a website that tracks the jobs that have been eliminated with AI cited as a contributing factor. As of April 2026, JobLoss.ai has tracked more than 127,000 lost jobs. == Leadership == Brendan Steinhauser, a longtime political and communications strategist, is the founder and CEO of the Alliance. He was an early Tea Party movement organizer, and ran campaigns for multiple members of Congress, including Sen. John Cornyn, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Rep. Michael McCaul. Peyton Hornberger is the group's communications director. In July 2025, Hornberger criticized Palantir for its use of AI in a USA Today op-ed column.
Content Disarm and Reconstruction
Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) is a computer security technology for removing potentially malicious code from files. Unlike malware analysis, CDR technology does not determine or detect malware's functionality but removes all file components that are not approved within the system's definitions and policies. It is used to prevent cyber security threats from entering a corporate network perimeter. Channels that CDR can be used to protect include email and website traffic. Advanced solutions can also provide similar protection on computer endpoints, or cloud email and file sharing services. There are three levels of CDR; 1) flattening and converting the original file to a PDF, 2) stripping active content while keeping the original file type, and 3) eliminating all file-borne risk while maintaining file type, integrity and active content. Beyond these three levels, there are also more advanced forms of CDR that is able to perform "soft conversion" and "hard conversion", based on the user's preference in balancing usability and security. == Applications == CDR works by processing all incoming files of an enterprise network, deconstructing them, and removing the elements that do not match the file type's standards or set policies. CDR technology then rebuilds the files into clean versions that can be sent on to end users as intended. Because CDR removes all potentially malicious code, it can be effective against zero-day vulnerabilities that rely on being an unknown threat that other security technologies would need to patch against to maintain protection. CDR can be used to prevent cyber threats from variety of sources: Email Data Diodes Web Browsers Endpoints File Servers FTP Cloud email or webmail programs SMB/CIFS Removable media scanning (CDR Kiosk) CDR can be applied to a variety of file formats including: Images Office documents PDF Audio/video file formats Archives HTML == Open source implementations == DocBleach ExeFilter
R2ML
The REWERSE Rule Markup Language (R2ML) is developed by the REWERSE Working Group I1 for the purpose of rules interchange between different systems and tools. == Scope == An XML based rule language; Support for: integrity rules, derivation rules, production rules and reaction rules; Integrate functional languages (such as OCL) with Datalog languages (such as SWRL); Serialization and interchange of rules by specific software tools; Integrating rule reasoning with actual server side technologies; Deploying, publishing and communicating rules in a network. == Design principles == Modeled using MDA; Rule concepts defined with the help of MOF/UML; Required to accommodate: Web naming concepts, such as URIs and XML namespaces; The ontological distinction between objects and data values; The datatype concepts of RDF and user-defined datatypes; Actions (following OMG PRR submission); Events; EBNF abstract syntax; XML based concrete syntax validated by an XML Schema; Allowing different semantics for rules.