Trazzler is a travel destination app that specializes in unique and local destinations. The initial concept was developed by Adam Rugel and Biz Stone in 2006 at Twitter's original offices under the name "71 miles". More than 10,000 writers and photographers have contributed and more than $350,000 in freelance contracts have been issued as a result of Trazzeler's weekly writing and photography contests. Investors in the company include SV Angel, AOL Founder Steve Case, and the Twitter founders, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. The company's partners are the City of Chicago, Hawaii Tourism Authority, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Salon.com, and Air New Zealand. Trazzler is designed for use on the iOS, Android, and Facebook.
G'MIC
G'MIC (GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) is a free and open-source framework for image processing. It defines a script language that allows the creation of complex macros. Originally usable only through a command line interface, it is currently mostly popular as a GIMP plugin, and is also included in Krita. G'MIC is dual-licensed under CECILL-2.1 or CECILL-C. == Features == G'MIC's graphical interface is notable for its noise removal filters, which came from an earlier project called GREYCstoration by the same authors. G'MIC offers many built-in commands for image processing, including basic mathematical manipulations, look up tables, and filtering operations. More complex macros and pipelines built out of those commands are defined in its library files. == Interpreters == === Command line === G'MIC is primarily a script language callable from a shell. For example, to display an image: This command displays the image contained in the file image.jpg and allows zooming in to examine values. Several filters can be applied in succession. For example, to crop and resize an image: === Graphical interface === G'MIC comes with a Qt-based graphical interface, which may be integrated as a Gimp or Krita plugin. It contains several hundred filters written in the G'MIC language, dynamically updated through an internet feed. The interface provides a preview and setting sliders for each filter. G'MIC is one of the most popular Gimp plugins. === G'MIC Online === Most of the filters available for the graphical interface are also available online. === ZArt === ZArt is a graphical interface for real-time manipulation of webcam images. === libgmic === Libgmic is a C++ library that can be linked to third-party applications. It sees integration in Flowblade and Veejay.
Pax Silica
Pax Silica is a United States-led international initiative focused on strengthening and coordinating "trusted" supply chains for advanced technologies—especially semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, logistics, and associated energy and data infrastructure. The initiative is coordinated by the US Department of State and was launched in December 2025 alongside the signing of the non-binding Pax Silica Declaration by an initial group of partner countries. The initiative describes itself as a "positive-sum" partnership intended to reduce "coercive dependencies" and improve resilience across the full technology stack, from mineral extraction and processing through chip manufacturing and computing infrastructure. US officials described Pax Silica as a framework for coordinating flagship projects and policy alignment across partner countries, including supply-chain mapping, investment and co-investment initiatives, and protection of critical infrastructure and sensitive technologies. Reuters reported discussions of projects linked to trade and logistics routes and an industrial park initiative in Israel. Gulf countries, such as the UAE and Qatar, are betting on attracting AI companies with cheap energy. Moreover, the UAE's potential to invest in Pax Silica's activities has been noted as a fundamental asset for the initiative. In early 2026, the U.S. announced plans to contribute $250M toward an investmest consortium that's intended to strengthen energy and critical mineral supply chains. == Launch and background == During the 2020s, governments increasingly treated supply-chain resilience in semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI-related computing infrastructure as a national-security priority, amid export controls, industrial policy measures, and geopolitical competition over the technologies underpinning advanced manufacturing and AI. Pax Silica was presented by US officials as an economic-security framework aimed at aligning policies and investment among "trusted partners" that host major technology firms and key industrial capacity. Pacific Forum's analyst Akhil Ramesh, writing for the National Interest magazine, described the initiative as understanding that: "economic security today is inseparable from control over energy, critical minerals, high-end manufacturing, and advanced models." On December 11, 2025, the US Department of State announced the inaugural Pax Silica Summit and a planned signing of the Pax Silica Declaration, describing Pax Silica as the Department's flagship effort on AI and supply-chain security. The initial summit was held in Washington, D.C. on December 12, 2025. The State Department fact sheet described cooperation areas including connectivity and data infrastructure, compute and semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, logistics, mineral refining and processing, and energy. == Membership == Pax Silica participation has been discussed in terms of (1) countries that have signed the declaration and (2) countries invited to summit discussions or publicly reported as prospective signatories but which had not (as of mid-January 2026) signed the declaration. === Countries that signed the Pax Silica Declaration === Seven countries signed the declaration at the December 12, 2025, summit in Washington, D.C.: Australia Israel Japan South Korea Singapore United Kingdom United States Some countries who attended the initial conversations did not immediately sign, while additional countries were invited to join after the discussions concluded. The following are the later signatory countries on the declaration: Greece Netherlands (joined December 17, 2025; "non-signing partner") Qatar (joined January 13, 2026) United Arab Emirates (joined January 14, 2026) India (joined February 20, 2026) Sweden (signed March 17, 2026) Finland (signed April 16, 2026) Philippines (signed April 17, 2026) Norway (signed May 6, 2026) === Countries invited / participating, but not yet signed === At launch, US materials and contemporaneous reporting described additional invited participants and observers, including: Canada – observer/participant in related discussions, per US briefing materials; not listed among signatories. Taiwan – participated in summit sessions according to a State Department briefing; not listed among signatories. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Union were also noted by US officials as present in an observer capacity, but are not countries.
Xcon
The R1, internally called XCON (Expert Configurer), program was a production-rule-based system written in OPS5 by John P. McDermott of Carnegie Mellon University in 1978 to assist in the ordering of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) VAX computer systems by automatically selecting the computer system components based on the customer's requirements. == Overview == In developing the system, McDermott made use of experts from both DEC's PDP/11 and VAX computer systems groups. These experts sometimes even disagreed amongst themselves as to an optimal configuration. The resultant "sorting it out" had an additional benefit in terms of the quality of VAX systems delivered. XCON first went into use in 1980 in DEC's plant in Salem, New Hampshire, US. It eventually had about 2500 rules. By 1986, it had processed 80,000 orders, and achieved 95–98% accuracy. It was estimated to be saving DEC $25M a year by reducing the need to give customers free components when technicians made errors, by speeding the assembly process, and by increasing customer satisfaction. Before XCON, when ordering a VAX from DEC, every cable, connection, and bit of software had to be ordered separately. (Computers and peripherals were not sold complete in boxes as they are today.) The sales people were not always very technically expert, so customers would find that they had hardware without the correct cables, printers without the correct drivers, a processor without the correct language chip, and so on. This meant delays and caused a lot of customer dissatisfaction and resultant legal action. XCON interacted with the sales person, asking critical questions before printing out a coherent and workable system specification/order slip. XCON's success led DEC to rewrite XCON as XSEL—a version of XCON intended for use by DEC's salesforce to aid a customer in properly configuring their VAX (so they would not, say, choose a computer too large to fit through their doorway or choose too few cabinets for the components to fit in). Location problems and configuration were handled by yet another expert system, XSITE. McDermott's 1980 paper on R1 won the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Classic Paper Award in 1999. Footnote 2 gave a humorous explanation for the name "R1" as "Four years ago I couldn't even say "knowledge engineer", now I ... [are one.]".
Common Crawl
The Common Crawl Foundation (Common Crawl) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public. Common Crawl was founded by Gil Elbaz. The data had mostly been primarily used by researchers and some startups until the 2020s, when AI companies started training large language models using the data. In November 2025, an investigation by The Atlantic revealed that Common Crawl misled publishers when it claimed it respected paywalls in its scraping and it was not honoring requests from publishers to have their content removed from its databases. == History == Common Crawl was founded in 2007 in San Francisco. It began publishing its crawls in 2011. By 2013, sites like TinEye were building their products off of Common Crawl. The crawl reduces the reliance of companies and researchers on Google, which has the biggest dataset. Common Crawl was designed to have more and fresher data that was more efficient to analyze and utilize than the Wayback Machine created by the Internet Archive. By 2015, 1.8 billion webpages were on the Common Crawl, which started by crawling a list of URLs donated by the search engine Blekko. They use Amazon Web Services, which provides some of its services for free, allowing computing costs to average $2-4000/month. The Common Crawl website listed 30 studies based on Common Crawl data. Before 2023, Common Crawl was not very well known outside of academic researchers who utilize the data. Common Crawl received its first requests to redact information in 2023 and increasingly started seeing its crawler, CCBot, blocked. In 2023, it began receiving significant financial support from AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which donated $250,000. It was also used to train Google DeepMind's large language model Gemini. By April 2023, Common Crawl was capturing 3.1 billion webpages, with an estimated 5% of pages before 2021 containing hate speech or slurs. As of 2024, Common Crawl had been cited in more than 10,000 academic studies. By 2024, The Pile and Common Crawl had been the two main training datasets being used to train AI models. In November 2025, an investigation by technology journalist Alex Reisner for The Atlantic revealed that Common Crawl misled publishers when it claimed it respected paywalls in its scraping and when it said that it was honoring requests from publishers to have their content removed from its databases. It included misleading results in the public search function on its website that showed no entries for websites that had requested their archives be removed, when in fact those sites were still included in its scrapes used by AI companies. As of 2025, Reisner found that CCBot was the most widely-blocked bot by the top 1000 websites. A 2026 article in LWN.net discussed an advantage to services like Common Crawl being that it can limit the scraping costs to websites by allowing companies and researchers to download the data from Common Crawl instead of scraping it themselves. In April 2026, Common Crawl experimentally began to distribute its data through Hugging Face Storage Bucket, in addition to its standard storage on Amazon S3. == Organization == Peter Norvig and Joi Ito have served on the advisory board. Rich Skrenta is the executive director. It has received funding almost exclusively from the Elbaz Family Foundation Trust until 2023 when it started receiving donations from the AI industry. == Refined versions == A number of organizations take raw Common Crawl data and refine it into datasets that exclude edgy content or are otherwise higher-quality for their purposes, such as FineWeb, DCLM and C4. === Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus === Google version of the Common Crawl is called the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, or C4 for short. It was constructed for the training of the T5 language model series in 2019. As of 2023, there were some concerns over copyrighted content in the C4 as well as racist content. A 2024 study found that 45% of content was explicitly restricted by websites' terms of service to be used for purposes like AI training by for-profit companies.
Automaton
An automaton ( ; pl.: automata or automatons) is a relatively self-operating machine or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations or respond to predetermined instructions. Some automata, such as bellstrikers in mechanical clocks, are designed to give the illusion to the casual observer that they are operating under their own power or will, like a mechanical robot. The term has long been commonly associated with automated puppets that resemble moving humans or animals, built to impress and/or to entertain people. Animatronics are a modern type of automata with electronics, often used for the portrayal of characters or creatures in films and in theme park attractions. == Etymology == The word automaton is the latinization of the Ancient Greek automaton (αὐτόματον), which means "acting of one's own will". It was first used by Homer to describe an automatic door opening, or automatic movement of wheeled tripods. It is more often used to describe non-electronic moving machines, especially those that have been made to resemble human or animal actions, such as the jacks on old public striking clocks, or the cuckoo and any other animated figures on a cuckoo clock. == History == === Ancient === There are many examples of automata in Greek mythology: Hephaestus created automata for his workshop; Talos was an artificial man of bronze; King Alkinous of the Phaiakians employed gold and silver watchdogs. According to Aristotle, Daedalus used quicksilver to make his wooden statue of Aphrodite move. In other Greek legends he used quicksilver to install voice in his moving statues. The automata in the Hellenistic world were intended as tools, toys, religious spectacles, or prototypes for demonstrating basic scientific principles. Numerous water-powered automata were built by Ktesibios, a Greek inventor and the first head of the Great Library of Alexandria; for example, he "used water to sound a whistle and make a model owl move. He had invented the world's first 'cuckoo clock'". This tradition continued in Alexandria with inventors such as the Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria (sometimes known as Heron), whose writings on hydraulics, pneumatics, and mechanics described siphons, a fire engine, a water organ, the aeolipile, and a programmable cart. Philo of Byzantium was famous for his inventions. Complex mechanical devices are known to have existed in Hellenistic Greece, though the only surviving example is the Antikythera mechanism, the earliest known analog computer. The clockwork is thought to have come originally from Rhodes, where there was apparently a tradition of mechanical engineering; the island was renowned for its automata; to quote Pindar's seventh Olympic Ode: The animated figures stand Adorning every public street And seem to breathe in stone, or move their marble feet. However, the information gleaned from recent scans of the fragments indicate that it may have come from the colonies of Corinth in Sicily and implies a connection with Archimedes. According to Jewish legend, King Solomon used his wisdom to design a throne with mechanical animals which hailed him as king when he ascended it; upon sitting down an eagle would place a crown upon his head, and a dove would bring him a Torah scroll. It is also said that when King Solomon stepped upon the throne, a mechanism was set in motion. As soon as he stepped upon the first step, a golden ox and a golden lion each stretched out one foot to support him and help him rise to the next step. On each side, the animals helped the King up until he was comfortably seated upon the throne. In ancient China, a curious account of automata is found in the Lie Zi text, believed to have originated around 400 BCE and compiled around the fourth century CE. Within it there is a description of a much earlier encounter between King Mu of Zhou (1023–957 BCE) and a mechanical engineer known as Yan Shi, an 'artificer'. The latter proudly presented the king with a very realistic and detailed life-size, human-shaped figure of his mechanical handiwork: The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time...As the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would have had Yen Shih [Yan Shi] executed on the spot had not the latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him see what it really was. And, indeed, it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue and lacquer, variously coloured white, black, red and blue. Examining it closely, the king found all the internal organs complete—liver, gall, heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, stomach and intestines; and over these again, muscles, bones and limbs with their joints, skin, teeth and hair, all of them artificial...The king tried the effect of taking away the heart, and found that the mouth could no longer speak; he took away the liver and the eyes could no longer see; he took away the kidneys and the legs lost their power of locomotion. The king was delighted. Other notable examples of automata include Archytas' dove, mentioned by Aulus Gellius. Similar Chinese accounts of flying automata are written of the 5th century BC Mohist philosopher Mozi and his contemporary Lu Ban, who made artificial wooden birds (ma yuan) that could successfully fly according to the Han Fei Zi and other texts. === Medieval === The manufacturing tradition of automata continued in the Greek world well into the Middle Ages. On his visit to Constantinople in 949 ambassador Liutprand of Cremona described automata in the emperor Theophilos' palace, including "lions, made either of bronze or wood covered with gold, which struck the ground with their tails and roared with open mouth and quivering tongue," "a tree of gilded bronze, its branches filled with birds, likewise made of bronze gilded over, and these emitted cries appropriate to their species" and "the emperor's throne" itself, which "was made in such a cunning manner that at one moment it was down on the ground, while at another it rose higher and was to be seen up in the air." Similar automata in the throne room (singing birds, roaring and moving lions) were described by Luitprand's contemporary the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in his book De Ceremoniis (Perì tês Basileíou Tákseōs). In the mid-8th century, the first wind powered automata were built: "statues that turned with the wind over the domes of the four gates and the palace complex of the Round City of Baghdad". The "public spectacle of wind-powered statues had its private counterpart in the 'Abbasid palaces where automata of various types were predominantly displayed." Also in the 8th century, the Muslim alchemist, Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber), included recipes for constructing artificial snakes, scorpions, and humans that would be subject to their creator's control in his coded Book of Stones. In 827, Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun had a silver and golden tree in his palace in Baghdad, which had the features of an automatic machine. There were metal birds that sang automatically on the swinging branches of this tree built by Muslim inventors and engineers. The Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir also had a silver and golden tree in his palace in Baghdad in 917, with birds on it flapping their wings and singing. In the 9th century, the Banū Mūsā brothers invented a programmable automatic flute player and which they described in their Book of Ingenious Devices. Al-Jazari described complex programmable humanoid automata amongst other machines he designed and constructed in the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206. His automaton was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. His mechanism had a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and drum patterns if the pegs were moved around. Al-Jazari constructed a hand washing automaton first employing the flush mechanism now used in modern toilets. It features a female automaton standing by a basin filled with water. When the user pulls the lever, the water drains and the automaton refills the basin. His "peacock fountain" was another more sophisticated hand washing device featuring humanoid automata as servants who offer soap and towels. Mark E. Rosheim describes it as follows: "Pulling a plug on the peacock's tail releases water out of the beak; as the dirty water from the basin fills the hollow base a float rises and actuates a linkage which makes a servant figure appear from behind a door under the peacock and offer soap.
RuleML
RuleML is a global initiative, led by a non-profit organization RuleML Inc., that is devoted to advancing research and industry standards design activities in the technical area of rules that are semantic and highly inter-operable. The standards design takes the form primarily of a markup language, also known as RuleML. The research activities include an annual research conference, the RuleML Symposium, also known as RuleML for short. Founded in fall 2000 by Harold Boley, Benjamin Grosof, and Said Tabet, RuleML was originally devoted purely to standards design, but then quickly branched out into the related activities of coordinating research and organizing an annual research conference starting in 2002. The M in RuleML is sometimes interpreted as standing for Markup and Modeling. The markup language was developed to express both forward (bottom-up) and backward (top-down) rules in XML for deduction, rewriting, and further inferential-transformational tasks. It is defined by the Rule Markup Initiative, an open network of individuals and groups from both industry and academia that was formed to develop a canonical Web language for rules using XML markup and transformations from and to other rule standards/systems. Markup standards and initiatives related to RuleML include: Rule Interchange Format (RIF): The design and overall purpose of W3C's Rule Interchange Format (RIF) industry standard is based primarily on the RuleML industry standards design. Like RuleML, RIF embraces a multiplicity of potentially useful rule dialects that nevertheless share common characteristics. RuleML Technical Committee from Oasis-Open: An industry standards effort devoted to legal automation utilizing RuleML. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL): An industry standards design, based primarily on an early version of RuleML, whose development was funded in part by the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) research program. Semantic Web Services Framework, particularly its Semantic Web Services Language: An industry standards design, based primarily on a medium-mature version of RuleML, whose development was funded in part by the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) research program and the WSMO research effort of the EU. Mathematical Markup Language (MathML): However, MathML's Content Markup is better suited for defining functions rather than relations or general rules Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML): With this XML-based language one can define and share various models for data-mining results, including association rules Attribute Grammars in XML (AG-markup): For AG's semantic rules, there are various possible XML markups that are similar to Horn-rule markup Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT): This is a restricted term-rewriting system of rules, written in XML, for transforming XML documents into other text documents