Jubatus is an open-source online machine learning and distributed computing framework developed at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and Preferred Infrastructure. Its features include classification, recommendation, regression, anomaly detection and graph mining. It supports many client languages, including C++, Java, Ruby and Python. It uses Iterative Parameter Mixture for distributed machine learning. == Notable Features == Jubatus supports: Multi-classification algorithms: Perceptron Passive Aggressive Confidence Weighted Adaptive Regularization of Weight Vectors Normal Herd Recommendation algorithms using: Inverted index Minhash Locality-sensitive hashing Regression algorithms: Passive Aggressive feature extraction method for natural language: n-gram Text segmentation
SmarterChild
SmarterChild was a chatbot available on AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live Messenger (previously MSN Messenger) networks. == History == SmarterChild was an apparently intelligent agent or "bot" developed by ActiveBuddy, Inc., with offices in New York and Sunnyvale. It was widely distributed across global instant messaging networks. SmarterChild became very popular, attracting over 30 million Instant Messenger "buddies" on AIM (AOL), MSN and Yahoo Messenger over the course of its lifetime. Founded in 2000, ActiveBuddy was the brainchild of Robert Hoffer and Timothy Kay, who later brought seasoned advertising executive Peter Levitan on board as CEO. The concept for conversational instant messaging bots came from the founder's vision to add natural language comprehension functionality to the increasingly popular AIM instant messaging application. The original implementation took shape as a demo that Kay programmed in Perl in his Los Altos garage to connect a single buddy name, "ActiveBuddy", to look up stock symbols, and later allow AIM users to play Colossal Cave Adventure, a word-based adventure game, and MIT's Boris Katz Start Question Answering System but quickly grew to include a wide range of database applications the company called 'knowledge domains' including instant access to news, weather, stock information, movie times, yellow pages listings, and detailed sports data, as well as a variety of tools (personal assistant, calculators, translator, etc.). None of the individual domains which the company had named “stocksBuddy”, “sportsBuddy”, etc. ever launched publicly. When Stephen Klein came on board as COO — and eventually CEO — he insisted that all of the disparate test “buddies” be launched together with the company’s highly-developed colloquial chat domain. He suggested using “SmarterChild”, a username coined by Tim Kay which Tim was using to test various things. The bundled domains were launched publicly as SmarterChild (on AIM initially) in June 2001. SmarterChild provided information wrapped in fun and quirky conversation. The company generated no revenue from SmarterChild, but used it as a demonstration of the power of what Klein called “conversational computing”. The company subsequently marketed Automated Service Agents—delivering immediate answers to customer service inquiries—-to large corporations, like Comcast, Cingular, TimeWarner Cable, etc. SmarterChild's popularity spawned targeted marketing-oriented bots for Radiohead, Austin Powers, Intel, Keebler, The Sporting News and others. ActiveBuddy co-founders, Kay and Hoffer, as co-inventors, were issued two controversial U.S. patents in 2002. ActiveBuddy changed its name to Colloquis (briefly Conversagent) and targeted development of consumer-facing enterprise customer service agents, which the company marketed as Automated Service Agents. Microsoft acquired Colloquis in October 2006 and proceeded to de-commission SmarterChild and kill off the Automated Service Agent business as well. Robert Hoffer, ActiveBuddy co-founder, licensed the technology from Microsoft after Microsoft abandoned the Colloquis technology.
Digital video effect
Digital video effects (DVEs) are visual effects that provide comprehensive live video image manipulation, in the same form as optical printer effects in film. DVEs differ from standard video switcher effects (often referred to as analog effects) such as wipes or dissolves, in that they deal primarily with resizing, distortion or movement of the image. Modern video switchers often contain internal DVE functionality. Modern DVE devices are incorporated in high-end broadcast video switchers. Early examples of DVE devices found in the broadcast post-production industry include the Ampex Digital Optics (ADO), Quantel DPE-5000, Vital Squeezoom, NEC E-Flex and the Abekas A5x series of DVEs. By 1988, Grass Valley Group caught up with the competition with their Kaleidoscope, which integrated ADO-type effects with their widely used line of broadcast switching gear. DVEs are used by the broadcast television industry in live television production environments like television studios and outside broadcasts. They are commonly used in video post-production.
View synthesis
In computer graphics, view synthesis, or novel view synthesis, is a task which consists of generating images of a specific subject or scene from a specific point of view, when the only available information is pictures taken from different points of view. This task was only recently (late 2010s – early 2020s) tackled with significant success, mostly as a result of advances in machine learning. Notable successful methods are Neural radiance fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting. Applications of view synthesis are numerous, one of them being Free view point television. The technique has also been applied to real-estate marketing, where novel views of a listing's interior are generated from a limited set of photographs for use in virtual home staging.
Display list
A display list, also called a command list in Direct3D 12 and a command buffer in Vulkan, is a series of graphics commands or instructions that are run when the list is executed. Systems that make use of display list functionality are called retained mode systems, while systems that do not are as opposed to immediate mode systems. In OpenGL, display lists are useful to redraw the same geometry or apply a set of state changes multiple times. This benefit is also used with Direct3D 12's bundle command lists. In Direct3D 12 and Vulkan, display lists are regularly used for per-frame recording and execution. == Origins in vector displays == The vector monitors or calligraphic displays of the 1960s and 1970s used electron beam deflection to draw line segments, points, and sometimes curves directly on a CRT screen. Because the image would immediately fade, it needed to be redrawn many times a second (storage tube CRTs retained the image until blanked, but they were unsuitable for interactive graphics). To refresh the display, a dedicated CPU called a Display Processor or Display Processing Unit (DPU) was used, which had a memory buffer for a "display list", "display file", or "display program" containing line segment coordinates and other information. Advanced Display Processors also supported control flow instructions, which were useful for drawing repetitive graphics such as text, and some could perform coordinate transformations such as 3D projection. == Home computer display list functionality == One of the earliest systems with a true display list was the Atari 8-bit computers. The display list (actually called so in Atari terminology) is a series of instructions for ANTIC, the video co-processor used in these machines. This program, stored in the computer's memory and executed by ANTIC in real-time, can specify blank lines, any of six text modes and eight graphics modes, which sections of the screen can be horizontally or vertically fine-scrolled, and trigger Display List Interrupts (called raster interrupts or HBI on other systems). The Amstrad PCW family contains a Display List function called the 'Roller RAM'. This is a 512-byte RAM area consisting of 256 16-bit pointers in RAM, one for each line of the 720 × 256 pixel display. Each pointer identifies the location of 90 bytes of monochrome pixels that hold the line's 720 pixel states. The 90 bytes of 8 pixel states are spaced at 8-byte intervals, so there are 7 unused bytes between each byte of pixel data. This suits how the text-orientated PCW constructs a typical screen buffer in RAM, where the first character's 8 rows are stored in the first 8 bytes, the second character's rows in the next 8 bytes, and so on. The Roller RAM was implemented to speed up display scrolling as it would have been unacceptably slow for its 3.4 MHz Z80 to move up the 23 KB display buffer 'by hand' i.e. in software. The Roller RAM starting entry used at the beginning of a screen refresh is controlled by a Z80-writable I/O register. Therefore, the screen can be scrolled simply by changing this I/O register. Another system using a Display List-like feature in hardware is the Amiga, which, not coincidentally, was also designed by some of the same people who developed the custom hardware for the Atari 8-bit computers. Once directed to produce a display mode, it would continue to do so automatically for every following scan line. The computer also included a dedicated co-processor, called "Copper", which ran a simple program or 'Copper List' intended for modifying hardware registers in sync with the display. The Copper List instructions could direct the Copper to wait for the display to reach a specific position on the screen, and then change the contents of hardware registers. In effect, it was a processor dedicated to servicing raster interrupts. The Copper was used by Workbench to mix multiple display modes (multiple resolutions and color palettes on the monitor at the same time), and by numerous programs to create rainbow and gradient effects on the screen. The Amiga Copper was also capable of reconfiguring the sprite engine mid-frame, with only one scanline of delay. This allowed the Amiga to draw more than its 8 hardware sprites, so long as the additional sprites did not share scanlines (or the one scanline gap) with more than 7 other sprites. i.e., so long as at least one sprite had finished drawing, another sprite could be added below it on the screen. Additionally, the later 32-bit AGA chipset allowed the drawing of bigger sprites (more pixels per row) while retaining the same multiplexing. The Amiga also had dedicated block-shifter ("blitter") hardware, which could draw larger objects into a framebuffer. This was often used in place of, or in addition to, sprites. In more primitive systems, the results of a display list can be simulated, though at the cost of CPU-intensive writes to certain display modes, color control, or other visual effect registers in the video device, rather than a series of rendering commands executed by the device. Thus, one must create the displayed image using some other rendering process, either before or while the CPU-driven display generation executes. In many cases, the image is also modified or re-rendered between frames. The image is then displayed in various ways, depending on the exact way in which the CPU-driven display code is implemented. Examples of the results possible on these older machines requiring CPU-driven video include effects such as Commodore 64/128's FLI mode, or Rainbow Processing on the ZX Spectrum. == Usage in OpenGL == To delimit a display list, the glNewList and glEndList functions are used, and to execute the list, the glCallList function is used. Almost all rendering commands that occur between the function calls are stored in the display list. Commands that affect the client state are not stored in display lists. Display lists are named with an integer value, and creating a display list with the same name as one already created overrides the first. The glNewList function expects two arguments: an integer representing the name of the list, and an enumeration for the compilation mode. The two modes include GL_COMPILE_AND_EXECUTE, which compiles and immediately executes, and GL_COMPILE, which only compiles the list. Display lists enable the use of the retained mode rendering pattern, which is a system in which graphics commands are recorded (retained) to execute in succession at a later time. This is contrary to immediate mode, where graphics commands are immediately executed on client calls. == Usage in Direct3D 12 == Command lists are created using the ID3D12Device::CreateCommandList function. Command lists may be created in several types: direct, bundle, compute, copy, video decode, video process, and video encoding. Direct command lists specify that a command list the GPU can execute, and doesn't inherit any GPU state. Bundles, are best used for storing and executing small sets of commands any number of times. This is used differently than regular command lists, where commands stored in a command list are typically executed only once. Compute command lists are used for general computations, with a common use being calculating mipmaps. A copy command list is strictly for copying and the video decode and video process command lists are for video decoding and processing respectively. Upon creation, command lists are in the recording state. Command lists may be re-used by calling the ID3D12GraphicsCommandList::Reset function. After recording commands, the command list must be transitioned out of the recording state by calling ID3D12GraphicsCommandList::Close. The command list is then executed by calling ID3D12CommandQueue::ExecuteCommandLists.
Vujak
VuJak is an early video sampler, a VJ remix and mashup tool created in 1992 by Brian Kane, Lisa Eisenpresser, and Jay Haynes. The original name of the project was Mideo, but it was later changed to VuJak. VuJak was based on MIDI control of video in real-time. It was created with MAX from Opcode Systems, and utilized the newly released QuickTime 1.0 movie object. The first working version of the program was built on a Mac IIfx with 8 megs of ram, and could jump in real-time across a 160 x 120 pixel QuickTime movie via a midi keyboard. Later versions could manipulate full screen video, included the first real-time video scratch feature, had looping, vari-speed, and random play features, and allowed for recording and editing of video sequences within the application. VuJak also had networking capabilities which allowed artists to "jam" in real time across standard phone lines. The first public exhibition of VuJak was at the Digital Hollywood conference in Beverly Hills in 1993, where it was promoted by Timothy Leary. VuJak was featured in Mondo 2000, CBS Evening News, Wired Magazine, Electronic Musician, Billboard Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and it was used to create promotional videos for MTV. In 1994, VuJak was a featured interactive exhibition at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Development of VuJak ceased in 1995.
Elasticity (data store)
The elasticity of a data store relates to the flexibility of its data model and clustering capabilities. The greater the number of data model changes that can be tolerated, and the more easily the clustering can be managed, the more elastic the data store is considered to be. == Types == === Clustering elasticity === Clustering elasticity is the ease of adding or removing nodes from the distributed data store. Usually, this is a difficult and delicate task to be done by an expert in a relational database system. Some NoSQL data stores, like Apache Cassandra have an easy solution, and a node can be added/removed with a few changes in the properties and by adding specifying at least one seed. === Data-modelling elasticity === Relational databases are most often very inelastic, as they have a predefined data model that can only be adapted through redesign. Most NoSQL data stores, however, do not have a fixed schema. Each row can have a different number and even different type of columns. Concerning the data store, modifications in the schema are no problem. This makes this kind of data stores more elastic concerning the data model. The drawback is that the programmer has to take into account that the data model may change over time.