Colloquis, previously known as ActiveBuddy and Conversagent, was a company that created conversation-based interactive agents originally distributed via instant messaging platforms. The company had offices in New York, New York, and Sunnyvale, California. == History == Founded in 2000, the company was the brainchild of Robert Hoffer, Timothy Kay, and Peter Levitan. The idea for interactive agents (also known as Internet bots) came from the team's vision to add functionality to increasingly popular instant messaging services. The original implementation took shape as a word-based adventure game but quickly grew to include a wide range of database applications, including access to news, weather, stock information, movie times, Yellow Pages listings, and detailed sports data, as well as a variety of tools (calculators, translator, etc.). These various applications were bundled into one entity and launched as SmarterChild in 2001. SmarterChild acted as a showcase for the quick data access and possibilities for fun conversation that the company planned to turn into customized, niche-specific products. The rapid success of SmarterChild led to targeted promotional products for Radiohead, Austin Powers, The Sporting News, and others. ActiveBuddy sought to strengthen its hold on the interactive agent market for the future by filing for, and receiving, a controversial patent on their creation in 2002. The company also released the BuddyScript SDK, a free developer kit that allow programmers to design and launch their own interactive agents using ActiveBuddy's proprietary scripting language, in 2002. Ultimately, however, the decline in ad spending in 2001 and 2002 led to a shift in corporate strategy towards business focused Automated Service Agents, building products for clients including Cingular, Comcast and Cox Communications. The company subsequently changed its name from ActiveBuddy to Conversagent in 2003, and then again to Colloquis in 2006. Colloquis was purchased by Microsoft in October 2006.
Smoothing
In statistics and image processing, to smooth a data set is to create an approximating function that attempts to capture important patterns in the data, while leaving out noise or other fine-scale structures/rapid phenomena. In smoothing, the data points of a signal are modified so individual points higher than the adjacent points (presumably because of noise) are reduced, and points that are lower than the adjacent points are increased, leading to a smoother signal. Reducing noise by smoothing may aid in data analysis in two notable ways: Help uncover more meaningful information from the underlying data, such as trends. Provide analyses that are both flexible and robust. Many different algorithms are used in smoothing, most commonly binning, kernels, and local weighted regression. == Compared to curve fitting == Smoothing may be distinguished from the related and partially overlapping concept of curve fitting in the following ways: curve fitting often involves the use of an explicit function form for the result, whereas the immediate results from smoothing are the "smoothed" values with no later use made of a functional form if there is one; the aim of smoothing is to give a general idea of relatively slow changes of value with little attention paid to the close matching of data values, while curve fitting concentrates on achieving as close a match as possible. smoothing methods often have an associated tuning parameter which is used to control the extent of smoothing. Curve fitting will adjust any number of parameters of the function to obtain the 'best' fit. == Linear smoothers == In the case that the smoothed values can be written as a linear transformation of the observed values, the smoothing operation is known as a linear smoother; the matrix representing the transformation is known as a smoother matrix or hat matrix. The operation of applying such a matrix transformation is called convolution. Thus the matrix is also called convolution matrix or a convolution kernel. In the case of simple series of data points (rather than a multi-dimensional image), the convolution kernel is a one-dimensional vector. == Algorithms == One of the most common algorithms is the "moving average", often used to try to capture important trends in repeated statistical surveys. In image processing and computer vision, smoothing ideas are used in scale space representations. The simplest smoothing algorithm is the "rectangular" or "unweighted sliding-average smooth". This method replaces each point in the signal with the average of "m" adjacent points, where "m" is a positive integer called the "smooth width". Usually m is an odd number. The triangular smooth is like the rectangular smooth except that it implements a weighted smoothing function. Some specific smoothing and filter types, with their respective uses, pros and cons are:
Timo Honkela
Timo Untamo Honkela (August 4, 1962 – May 9, 2020) was a computer scientist at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University School of Science and Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture. He holds a PhD from Helsinki University of Technology. From 2014 until 2018 he held a fixed-term professorship at the University of Helsinki. Before joining the University of Helsinki he worked as a non-tenured professor in two Schools of the Aalto University, The School of Art, Design and Architecture and the School of Science. He has presented his thoughts on his studies and work in the joint blog 375 Humanists. Timo Honkela conducted research on several areas related to knowledge engineering, cognitive modeling and natural language processing. Honkela was born in Kalajoki. From 1998 to 2000 he worked as a professor in the Aalto Media Lab. To the media Lab Honkela brought his expertise in Kohonen self-organising map (SOM) and worked closely with artist and designers around the topic. In 2001 Honkela collaborated with George Legrady to produce an interactive museum installation, Pockets Full of Memories to the Centre Georges Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The concept, created by Legrady, provided for visitors a possibility to scan their own objects to a database and then organise them by Kohonen Self-Organizing Map algorithm. In 2017 Honkela published a book in Finnish. The book Rauhankone (English: Peace Machine) presents his idea of designing artificial intelligence and machine learning to serve humanity, in practice to help people to live in peace with each other. He died in Helsinki. == Publications == Timo Honkela, Wlodzislaw Duch, Mark Girolami and Samuel Kaski (editors): Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning, Springer, 2011. Jorma Laaksonen and Timo Honkela (editors): Advances in Self-Organizing Maps, Springer, 2011. Timo Honkela: Rauhankone. Gaudeamus, 2017.
Structured prediction
Structured prediction or structured output learning is an umbrella term for supervised machine learning techniques that involves predicting structured objects, rather than discrete or real values. Similar to commonly used supervised learning techniques, structured prediction models are typically trained by means of observed data in which the predicted value is compared to the ground truth, and this is used to adjust the model parameters. Due to the complexity of the model and the interrelations of predicted variables, the processes of model training and inference are often computationally infeasible, so approximate inference and learning methods are used. == Applications == An example application is the problem of translating a natural language sentence into a syntactic representation such as a parse tree. This can be seen as a structured prediction problem in which the structured output domain is the set of all possible parse trees. Structured prediction is used in a wide variety of domains including bioinformatics, natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and computer vision. === Example: sequence tagging === Sequence tagging is a class of problems prevalent in NLP in which input data are often sequential, for instance sentences of text. The sequence tagging problem appears in several guises, such as part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging) and named entity recognition. In POS tagging, for example, each word in a sequence must be 'tagged' with a class label representing the type of word: The main challenge of this problem is to resolve ambiguity: in the above example, the words "sentence" and "tagged" in English can also be verbs. While this problem can be solved by simply performing classification of individual tokens, this approach does not take into account the empirical fact that tags do not occur independently; instead, each tag displays a strong conditional dependence on the tag of the previous word. This fact can be exploited in a sequence model such as a hidden Markov model or conditional random field that predicts the entire tag sequence for a sentence (rather than just individual tags) via the Viterbi algorithm. == Techniques == Probabilistic graphical models form a large class of structured prediction models. In particular, Bayesian networks and random fields are popular. Other algorithms and models for structured prediction include inductive logic programming, case-based reasoning, structured SVMs, Markov logic networks, Probabilistic Soft Logic, and constrained conditional models. The main techniques are: Conditional random fields Structured support vector machines Structured k-nearest neighbours Recurrent neural networks, in particular Elman networks Transformers. === Structured perceptron === One of the easiest ways to understand algorithms for general structured prediction is the structured perceptron by Collins. This algorithm combines the perceptron algorithm for learning linear classifiers with an inference algorithm (classically the Viterbi algorithm when used on sequence data) and can be described abstractly as follows: First, define a function ϕ ( x , y ) {\displaystyle \phi (x,y)} that maps a training sample x {\displaystyle x} and a candidate prediction y {\displaystyle y} to a vector of length n {\displaystyle n} ( x {\displaystyle x} and y {\displaystyle y} may have any structure; n {\displaystyle n} is problem-dependent, but must be fixed for each model). Let G E N {\displaystyle GEN} be a function that generates candidate predictions. Then: Let w {\displaystyle w} be a weight vector of length n {\displaystyle n} For a predetermined number of iterations: For each sample x {\displaystyle x} in the training set with true output t {\displaystyle t} : Make a prediction y ^ {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}} : y ^ = a r g m a x { y ∈ G E N ( x ) } ( w T , ϕ ( x , y ) ) {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}={\operatorname {arg\,max} }\,\{y\in GEN(x)\}\,(w^{T},\phi (x,y))} Update w {\displaystyle w} (from y ^ {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}} towards t {\displaystyle t} ): w = w + c ( − ϕ ( x , y ^ ) + ϕ ( x , t ) ) {\displaystyle w=w+c(-\phi (x,{\hat {y}})+\phi (x,t))} , where c {\displaystyle c} is the learning rate. In practice, finding the argmax over G E N ( x ) {\displaystyle {GEN}({x})} is done using an algorithm such as Viterbi or a max-sum, rather than an exhaustive search through an exponentially large set of candidates. The idea of learning is similar to that for multiclass perceptrons.
Deep Learning Studio
Deep Learning Studio is a software tool that aims to simplify the creation of deep learning models used in artificial intelligence. It is compatible with a number of open-source programming frameworks popularly used in artificial neural networks, including MXNet and Google's TensorFlow. Prior to the release of Deep Learning Studio in January 2017, proficiency in Python, among other programming languages, was essential in developing effective deep learning models. Deep Learning Studio sought to simplify the model creation process through a visual, drag-and-drop interface and the application of pre-trained learning models on available data. Irving, Texas–based Deep Cognition Inc. is the developer behind Deep Learning Studio. In 2017, the software allowed Deep Cognition to become a finalist for Best Innovation in Deep Learning in the Alconics Awards, which are given annually to the best artificial intelligence software. Deep Cognition launched version 2.0 of Deep Learning Studio at NVIDIA's GTC 2018 Conference in San Jose, California. Fremont, California–based computing products supplier Exxact Corp provides desktop computers specifically built to handle Deep Learning Studio workloads. == Features == Source: Deep Learning Studio is available in two versions: Desktop and Cloud, both of which are free software. The Desktop version is available on Windows and Ubuntu. The Cloud version is available in single-user and multi-user configurations. A Deep Cognition account is needed to access the Cloud version. Account registration is free. Deep Learning Studio can import existing Keras models; it also takes a data set as an input. Deep Learning Studio's AutoML feature allows automatic generation of deep learning models. More advanced users may choose to generate their own models using various types of layers and neural networks. Deep Learning Studio also has a library of loss functions and optimizers for use in hyperparameter tuning, a traditionally complicated area in neural network programming. Generated models can be trained using either CPUs or GPUs. Trained models can then be used for predictive analytics.
VoxForge
VoxForge is a free speech corpus and acoustic model repository for open source speech recognition engines. VoxForge was set up to collect transcribed speech to create a free GPL speech corpus in order to be uses with open source speech recognition engines. The speech audio files will be 'compiled' into acoustic models for use with open source speech recognition engines such as Julius, ISIP, and Sphinx and HTK (note: HTK has distribution restrictions). VoxForge has used LibriVox as a source of audio data since 2007.
Top 10 AI Analytics Tools Compared (2026)
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