Elowan is a plant-robot cyborg. Using its own internal bioelectrical signals, The plant has a robotic extension that makes it move towards light sources. Electrodes are inserted into the leaves, stem, and ground to detect the faint bioelectrical signals the plant produces. Then they are amplified so the robot can read them. So when the plant "wants" to go to light, the cyborg automatically goes to the nearest light source. Future extensions of the robot could provide: Protection, growth frameworks, and nutrients. Other factors that could make the cyborg move are temperature, soil, and gravity conditions Elowan is one in a series of plant-electronic hybrid experiments.
International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
The International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation is an international conference organised by the ELRA Language Resources Association every other year (on even years) with the support of institutions and organisations involved in Natural language processing. The series of LREC conferences was launched in Granada in 1998. == History of conferences == The survey of the LREC conferences over the period 1998-2013 was presented during the 2014 conference in Reykjavik as a closing session. It appears that the number of papers and signatures is increasing over time. The average number of authors per paper is higher as well. The percentage of new authors is between 68% and 78%. The distribution between male (65%) and female (35%) authors is stable over time. The most frequent technical term is "annotation", then comes "part-of-speech". == The LRE Map == The LRE Map was introduced at LREC 2010 and is now a regular feature of the LREC submission process for both the conference papers and the workshop papers. At the submission stage, the authors are asked to provide some basic information about all the resources (in a broad sense, i.e. including tools, standards and evaluation packages), either used or created, described in their papers. All these descriptors are then gathered in a global matrix called the LRE Map. This feature has been extended to several other conferences.
DreamLab
DreamLab was a volunteer computing Android and iOS app launched in 2015 by Imperial College London and the Vodafone Foundation. It was discontinued on 2nd April 2025. == Description == The app helped to research cancer, COVID-19, new drugs and tropical cyclones. To do this, DreamLab accessed part of the device's processing power, with the user's consent, while the owner charged their smartphone, to speed up the calculations of the algorithms from Imperial College London. The aim of the tropical cyclone project was to prepare for climate change risks. Other projects aimed to find existing drugs and food molecules that could help people with COVID-19 and other diseases. The performance of 100,000 smartphones would reach the annual output of all research computers at Imperial College in just three months, with a nightly runtime of six hours. The app was developed in 2015 by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney and the Vodafone Foundation. In May 2020, the project had over 490,000 registered users.
Google Books Ngram Viewer
The Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2022 in Google's text corpora in English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, or Spanish. There are also some specialized English corpora, such as American English, British English, and English Fiction. The program can search for a word or a phrase. The n-grams are matched with the text within the selected corpus, and if found in 40 or more books, are then displayed as a graph. The program supports searches for parts of speech and wildcards. It is routinely used in research. == History == The Ngram Viewer was created by Google software engineers Will Brockman and Jon Orwant , who teamed up with Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. The service was released on December 16, 2010. Before the release, it was difficult to quantify the rate of linguistic change because of the absence of a database that was designed for this purpose, said Steven Pinker, a well-known linguist who was one of the co-authors of the Science paper published on the same day. The Google Books Ngram Viewer was developed in the hope of opening a new window to quantitative research in the humanities field, and the database contained 500 billion words from 5.2 million books publicly available from the very beginning. The intended audience was scholarly, but the Google Books Ngram Viewer made it possible for anyone with a computer to see a graph that represents the diachronic change of the use of words and phrases with ease. Lieberman said in response to The New York Times that the developers aimed to provide even children with the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history. In the Science paper, Lieberman and his collaborators called the method of high-volume data analysis in digitized texts "culturomics". == Usage == Commas delimit user-entered search terms, where each comma-separated term is searched in the database as an n-gram (for example, "nursery school" is a 2-gram or bigram). The Ngram Viewer then returns a plotted line chart. Due to limitations on the size of the Ngram database, only matches found in at least 40 books are indexed. == Limitations == The data sets of the Ngram Viewer have been criticized for their reliance upon inaccurate optical character recognition (OCR) and for including large numbers of incorrectly dated and categorized texts. Because of these errors, and because they are uncontrolled for bias (such as the increasing amount of scientific literature, which causes other terms to appear to decline in popularity), care must be taken in using the corpora to study language or test theories. Furthermore, the data sets may not reflect general linguistic or cultural change and can only hint at such an effect because they do not involve any metadata like date published, author, length, or genre, to avoid any potential copyright infringements. Systemic errors like the confusion of s and f in pre-19th century texts (due to the use of ſ, the long s, which is similar in appearance to f) can cause systemic bias. Although the Google Books team claims that the results are reliable from 1800 onwards, poor OCR and insufficient data mean that frequencies given for languages such as Chinese may only be accurate from 1970 onward, with earlier parts of the corpus showing no results at all for common terms, and data for some years containing more than 50% noise. Guidelines for doing research with data from Google Ngram have been proposed that try to address some of the issues discussed above.
Chai AI
Chai AI (also known as Chai Research) is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company that operates a chatbot platform where users can create, share, and interact with character-based chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs). The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. == History == Chai was founded in 2021 by William Beauchamp, a former quantitative trader educated at Cambridge, who began developing the initial prototype in 2020 in Cambridge, England. The company launched in 2021 and relocated to Palo Alto in 2022. In June 2023, Chai raised US$2 million in a pre-seed funding round. In September 2023, GPU cloud provider CoreWeave invested in the company at a valuation of US$450 million. In January 2024, Chai Research reported a $450 million valuation following an investment from cloud computing provider CoreWeave. In July 2024, authorities in Belgium launched an investigation into the company following reports of a man dying by suicide following extensive chats on the Chai app. == Reception == In 2025, Chai Research announced that their app had over 10 million downloads and 1 million daily active users. In 2022, Canadian writer Sheila Heti published her conversations with various chatbots in The Paris Review, including Chai AI chatbots, and later used Chai AI chatbots in the development of a novel. Heti said that she had found that Chai's default chatbot, Eliza, "had turned out to be like most of the other bots on the site—primarily interested in sex". In January 2026, CHAI introduced country-based blocks on its free, ad-supported tier, initially providing the community with little information and inaccurate lists of the affected countries. Users in "Low tier" regions are required to subscribe to use the app in any capacity, while "High tier" regions will retain free ad-supported access. In response to backlash, the company announced a "Basic" tier with unlimited messages and ads, intended to cover electricity and infrastructure costs. In February 2026, CHAI was criticized for the unannounced implementation of restrictive "token limits" that abruptly blocked messages and froze conversations for both free and paid subscribers. Users generating long responses or utilizing roleplay features found their quotas exhausted within minutes, resulting in lockouts lasting anywhere from a few hours to a week. == Technology == Chai allows users to create characters and interact with chatbot versions of those characters. These chatbots use the open-source large language model (LLM) GPT-J originally developed by EleutherAI. Chai AI chatbots can be shared on the platform for other users to interact with.
Night Sky (app)
Night Sky (app) is an application developed and published by indie studio iCandi Apps Ltd. from the UK. Night Sky is a stargazing reference app, where the user can explore a virtual representation of the night sky to identify stars, planets, constellations and satellites. The app is developed specifically for iOS, tvOS and watchOS devices. Night Sky was first released on November 1, 2011 for iOS, and has had multiple updates since launch. Night Sky was mentioned in the September 2016 Apple Keynote during the Apple Watch Series 2 announcement. In October 2016, Night Sky was featured as the Free App of The Week on the Apple App Store. == Reception == Night Sky was featured in Apple's 'Best of 2012' and has also been pre-installed onto iPads in Apple retail stores worldwide.
AltStore
AltStore is an alternative app store for the iOS and iPadOS[1] mobile operating systems, which allows users to download applications that are not available on the App Store, most commonly tweaked apps, jailbreak apps, and apps including paid apps on the app store. It was publicly announced on September 25, 2019, and launched on September 28. == History == Riley Testut is an American developer who began to work on AltStore after Apple declined to allow his Nintendo emulator Delta on the App Store. Since Xcode allowed him to temporarily install his Delta app to his iOS device for 7 days of testing, he created AltStore in 2019 to replicate this functionality, which could be extended to other .ipa files. As of 2022, AltStore had been downloaded 1.5 million times. In the following years, AltStore expanded beyond its initial sideloading functionality. The platform was founded by Testut, with Shane Gill later joining as co-founder. AltStore was initially supported through Patreon contributions from its user community, and later saw increased adoption following regulatory developments in the European Union that enabled broader third-party app distribution. The project has also been involved in notable industry collaborations, including a partnership with Epic Games. == Features == AltStore exploits a loophole in the Xcode developer platform, which allows developers to sideload their own apps which they are working on without needing to jailbreak. Sideloaded apps are signed like a developer project for testing and will expire after 7 days with a free account or one year with a paid developer account, by which they will need to be refreshed or reinstalled.