A confusion network (sometimes called a word confusion network or informally known as a sausage) is a natural language processing method that combines outputs from multiple automatic speech recognition or machine translation systems. Confusion networks are simple linear directed acyclic graphs with the property that each a path from the start node to the end node goes through all the other nodes. The set of words represented by edges between two nodes is called a confusion set. In machine translation, the defining characteristic of confusion networks is that they allow multiple ambiguous inputs, deferring committal translation decisions until later stages of processing. This approach is used in the open source machine translation software Moses and the proprietary translation API in IBM Bluemix Watson.
Control system
A control system manages, commands, directs, or regulates the behavior of other devices or systems using control loops. It can range from a single home heating controller using a thermostat controlling a domestic boiler to large industrial control systems which are used for controlling processes or machines. The control systems are designed via control engineering process. For continuously modulated control, a feedback controller is used to automatically control a process or operation. The control system compares the value or status of the process variable (PV) being controlled with the desired value or setpoint (SP), and applies the difference as a control signal to bring the process variable output of the plant to the same value as the setpoint. For sequential and combinational logic, software logic, such as in a programmable logic controller, is used. == Open-loop and closed-loop control == == Feedback control systems == == Logic control == Logic control systems for industrial and commercial machinery were historically implemented by interconnected electrical relays and cam timers using ladder logic. Today, most such systems are constructed with microcontrollers or more specialized programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The notation of ladder logic is still in use as a programming method for PLCs. Logic controllers may respond to switches and sensors and can cause the machinery to start and stop various operations through the use of actuators. Logic controllers are used to sequence mechanical operations in many applications. Examples include elevators, washing machines and other systems with interrelated operations. An automatic sequential control system may trigger a series of mechanical actuators in the correct sequence to perform a task. For example, various electric and pneumatic transducers may fold and glue a cardboard box, fill it with the product and then seal it in an automatic packaging machine. PLC software can be written in many different ways – ladder diagrams, SFC (sequential function charts) or statement lists. == On–off control == On–off control uses a feedback controller that switches abruptly between two states. A simple bi-metallic domestic thermostat can be described as an on-off controller. When the temperature in the room (PV) goes below the user setting (SP), the heater is switched on. Another example is a pressure switch on an air compressor. When the pressure (PV) drops below the setpoint (SP) the compressor is powered. Refrigerators and vacuum pumps contain similar mechanisms. Simple on–off control systems like these can be cheap and effective. == Linear control == == Fuzzy logic == Fuzzy logic is an attempt to apply the easy design of logic controllers to the control of complex continuously varying systems. Basically, a measurement in a fuzzy logic system can be partly true. The rules of the system are written in natural language and translated into fuzzy logic. For example, the design for a furnace would start with: "If the temperature is too high, reduce the fuel to the furnace. If the temperature is too low, increase the fuel to the furnace." Measurements from the real world (such as the temperature of a furnace) are fuzzified and logic is calculated arithmetic, as opposed to Boolean logic, and the outputs are de-fuzzified to control equipment. When a robust fuzzy design is reduced to a single, quick calculation, it begins to resemble a conventional feedback loop solution and it might appear that the fuzzy design was unnecessary. However, the fuzzy logic paradigm may provide scalability for large control systems where conventional methods become unwieldy or costly to derive. Fuzzy electronics is an electronic technology that uses fuzzy logic instead of the two-value logic more commonly used in digital electronics. == Physical implementation == The range of control system implementation is from compact controllers often with dedicated software for a particular machine or device, to distributed control systems for industrial process control for a large physical plant. Logic systems and feedback controllers are usually implemented with programmable logic controllers. The Broadly Reconfigurable and Expandable Automation Device (BREAD) is a recent framework that provides many open-source hardware devices which can be connected to create more complex data acquisition and control systems.
Computational Intelligence (journal)
Computational Intelligence Journal is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on artificial intelligence and computer science. The journal published novel research as well as innovative applications in a broad range of AI, covering Computational Intelligence is an artificial intelligence journal publishing novel research on a broad range of experimental and theoretical topics in AI and computer science. With a broad scope, the journal covers machine learning, knowledge mining, web intelligence, AI language, and philosophical implications. The journal was established in 1985 and is published by Wiley-Blackwell. Currently, the editors-in-chief is Diane Inkpen. The quality of the journal as an academic publishing venue is evaluated according to public citation impact metrics. in 2022, the Computational Intelligence Journal CiteScore of Scopus was 5.3, while Clarivate's Web of Science gives it 0.39 in the Journal Citation Indicator and 2,8 in the Journal Impact Factor.
John Schulman
John Schulman (born 1987 or 1988) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of OpenAI. In August 2024, he announced he would be joining Anthropic. In February 2025, he announced he was leaving to join Thinking Machines Lab, where he is chief scientist. == Early life and education == Schulman had an interest in science and math from a young age. He enjoyed science fiction, especially the work of Isaac Asimov. When he was in seventh grade, he became deeply interested in the television program BattleBots, which featured combat between remote-controlled robots. In what he said was his first self-directed study, he read extensively in subject areas that would help him design a superior robot, but the robot he and his friends worked on was never built. He attended Great Neck South High School. He was a member of the US Physics olympiad Team in 2005. In 2010, he graduated from Caltech with a degree in physics. He has a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was advised by Pieter Abbeel. == Career == In December 2015, shortly before finishing his PhD, Schulman co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as the co-chairs. There, he led the reinforcement learning team that created ChatGPT. He has been referred to as the "architect" of ChatGPT. In August 2024, Schulman announced he would be joining Anthropic. He stated his move was to allow him to deepen his focus on AI alignment and return to more hands-on technical work. In February 2025, he announced he was leaving to join Thinking Machines Lab, where he is chief scientist. == Awards and honors == In 2025, Schulman received the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni from his alma mater, UC Berkeley.
UMBEL
UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) is a logically organized knowledge graph of 34,000 concepts and entity types that can be used in information science for relating information from disparate sources to one another. It was retired at the end of 2019. UMBEL was first released in July 2008. Version 1.00 was released in February 2011. Its current release is version 1.50. The grounding of this information occurs by common reference to the permanent URIs for the UMBEL concepts; the connections within the UMBEL upper ontology enable concepts from sources at different levels of abstraction or specificity to be logically related. Since UMBEL is an open-source extract of the OpenCyc knowledge base, it can also take advantage of the reasoning capabilities within Cyc. UMBEL has two means to promote the semantic interoperability of information:. It is: An ontology of about 35,000 reference concepts, designed to provide common mapping points for relating different ontologies or schema to one another, and A vocabulary for aiding that ontology mapping, including expressions of likelihood relationships distinct from exact identity or equivalence. This vocabulary is also designed for interoperable domain ontologies. UMBEL is written in the Semantic Web languages of SKOS and OWL 2. It is a class structure used in Linked Data, along with OpenCyc, YAGO, and the DBpedia ontology. Besides data integration, UMBEL has been used to aid concept search, concept definitions, query ranking, ontology integration, and ontology consistency checking. It has also been used to build large ontologies and for online question answering systems. Including OpenCyc, UMBEL has about 65,000 formal mappings to DBpedia, PROTON, GeoNames, and schema.org, and provides linkages to more than 2 million Wikipedia pages (English version). All of its reference concepts and mappings are organized under a hierarchy of 31 different "super types", which are mostly disjoint from one another. Each of these "super types" has its own typology of entity classes to provide flexible tie-ins for external content. 90% of UMBEL is contained in these entity classes.
Scale space
Scale-space theory is a framework for multi-scale signal representation developed by the computer vision, image processing and signal processing communities with complementary motivations from physics and biological vision. It is a formal theory for handling image structures at different scales, by representing an image as a one-parameter family of smoothed images, the scale-space representation, parametrized by the size of the smoothing kernel used for suppressing fine-scale structures. The parameter t {\displaystyle t} in this family is referred to as the scale parameter, with the interpretation that image structures of spatial size smaller than about t {\displaystyle {\sqrt {t}}} have largely been smoothed away in the scale-space level at scale t {\displaystyle t} . The main type of scale space is the linear (Gaussian) scale space, which has wide applicability as well as the attractive property of being possible to derive from a small set of scale-space axioms. The corresponding scale-space framework encompasses a theory for Gaussian derivative operators, which can be used as a basis for expressing a large class of visual operations for computerized systems that process visual information. This framework also allows visual operations to be made scale invariant, which is necessary for dealing with the size variations that may occur in image data, because real-world objects may be of different sizes and in addition the distance between the object and the camera may be unknown and may vary depending on the circumstances. == Definition == The notion of scale space applies to signals of arbitrary numbers of variables. The most common case in the literature applies to two-dimensional images, which is what is presented here. Consider a given image f {\displaystyle f} where f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} is the greyscale value of the pixel at position ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} . The linear (Gaussian) scale-space representation of f {\displaystyle f} is a family of derived signals L ( x , y ; t ) {\displaystyle L(x,y;t)} defined by the convolution of f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} with the two-dimensional Gaussian kernel g ( x , y ; t ) = 1 2 π t e − ( x 2 + y 2 ) / 2 t {\displaystyle g(x,y;t)={\frac {1}{2\pi t}}e^{-(x^{2}+y^{2})/2t}\,} such that L ( ⋅ , ⋅ ; t ) = g ( ⋅ , ⋅ ; t ) ∗ f ( ⋅ , ⋅ ) , {\displaystyle L(\cdot ,\cdot ;t)\ =g(\cdot ,\cdot ;t)f(\cdot ,\cdot ),} where the semicolon in the argument of L {\displaystyle L} implies that the convolution is performed only over the variables x , y {\displaystyle x,y} , while the scale parameter t {\displaystyle t} after the semicolon just indicates which scale level is being defined. This definition of L {\displaystyle L} works for a continuum of scales t ≥ 0 {\displaystyle t\geq 0} , but typically only a finite discrete set of levels in the scale-space representation would be actually considered. The scale parameter t = σ 2 {\displaystyle t=\sigma ^{2}} is the variance of the Gaussian filter and as a limit for t = 0 {\displaystyle t=0} the filter g {\displaystyle g} becomes an impulse function such that L ( x , y ; 0 ) = f ( x , y ) , {\displaystyle L(x,y;0)=f(x,y),} that is, the scale-space representation at scale level t = 0 {\displaystyle t=0} is the image f {\displaystyle f} itself. As t {\displaystyle t} increases, L {\displaystyle L} is the result of smoothing f {\displaystyle f} with a larger and larger filter, thereby removing more and more of the details that the image contains. Since the standard deviation of the filter is σ = t {\displaystyle \sigma ={\sqrt {t}}} , details that are significantly smaller than this value are to a large extent removed from the image at scale parameter t {\displaystyle t} , see the following figures and for graphical illustrations. === Why a Gaussian filter? === When faced with the task of generating a multi-scale representation one may ask: could any filter g of low-pass type and with a parameter t which determines its width be used to generate a scale space? The answer is no, as it is of crucial importance that the smoothing filter does not introduce new spurious structures at coarse scales that do not correspond to simplifications of corresponding structures at finer scales. In the scale-space literature, a number of different ways have been expressed to formulate this criterion in precise mathematical terms. The conclusion from several different axiomatic derivations that have been presented is that the Gaussian scale space constitutes the canonical way to generate a linear scale space, based on the essential requirement that new structures must not be created when going from a fine scale to any coarser scale. Conditions, referred to as scale-space axioms, that have been used for deriving the uniqueness of the Gaussian kernel include linearity, shift invariance, semi-group structure, non-enhancement of local extrema, scale invariance and rotational invariance. In the works, the uniqueness claimed in the arguments based on scale invariance has been criticized, and alternative self-similar scale-space kernels have been proposed. The Gaussian kernel is, however, a unique choice according to the scale-space axiomatics based on causality or non-enhancement of local extrema. === Alternative definition === Equivalently, the scale-space family can be defined as the solution of the diffusion equation (for example in terms of the heat equation), ∂ t L = 1 2 ∇ 2 L , {\displaystyle \partial _{t}L={\frac {1}{2}}\nabla ^{2}L,} with initial condition L ( x , y ; 0 ) = f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle L(x,y;0)=f(x,y)} . This formulation of the scale-space representation L means that it is possible to interpret the intensity values of the image f as a "temperature distribution" in the image plane and that the process that generates the scale-space representation as a function of t corresponds to heat diffusion in the image plane over time t (assuming the thermal conductivity of the material equal to the arbitrarily chosen constant 1/2). Although this connection may appear superficial for a reader not familiar with differential equations, it is indeed the case that the main scale-space formulation in terms of non-enhancement of local extrema is expressed in terms of a sign condition on partial derivatives in the 2+1-D volume generated by the scale space, thus within the framework of partial differential equations. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the discrete case shows that the diffusion equation provides a unifying link between continuous and discrete scale spaces, which also generalizes to nonlinear scale spaces, for example, using anisotropic diffusion. Hence, one may say that the primary way to generate a scale space is by the diffusion equation, and that the Gaussian kernel arises as the Green's function of this specific partial differential equation. == Motivations == The motivation for generating a scale-space representation of a given data set originates from the basic observation that real-world objects are composed of different structures at different scales. This implies that real-world objects, in contrast to idealized mathematical entities such as points or lines, may appear in different ways depending on the scale of observation. For example, the concept of a "tree" is appropriate at the scale of meters, while concepts such as leaves and molecules are more appropriate at finer scales. For a computer vision system analysing an unknown scene, there is no way to know a priori what scales are appropriate for describing the interesting structures in the image data. Hence, the only reasonable approach is to consider descriptions at multiple scales in order to be able to capture the unknown scale variations that may occur. Taken to the limit, a scale-space representation considers representations at all scales. Another motivation to the scale-space concept originates from the process of performing a physical measurement on real-world data. In order to extract any information from a measurement process, one has to apply operators of non-infinitesimal size to the data. In many branches of computer science and applied mathematics, the size of the measurement operator is disregarded in the theoretical modelling of a problem. The scale-space theory on the other hand explicitly incorporates the need for a non-infinitesimal size of the image operators as an integral part of any measurement as well as any other operation that depends on a real-world measurement. There is a close link between scale-space theory and biological vision. Many scale-space operations show a high degree of similarity with receptive field profiles recorded from the mammalian retina and the first stages in the visual cortex. In these respects, the scale-space framework can be seen as a theoretically well-founded paradigm for early vision, which in addition has been thoroughly tested by algorithms and experiments. == Gaussian derivatives == At any scale in scale space, we c
GuideGeek
GuideGeek is an AI-powered travel assistant that was launched by travel publisher Matador Network in April 2023 and is accessed by users through Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to plan itineraries or provide travel tips and recommendations. It uses generative artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI. Matador Network is a San Francisco-based digital media company and online travel publication with millions of monthly visitors and social media followers. == Features == Users message GuideGeek questions about travel and receive customized answers and itineraries that are pulled from ChatGPT in addition to over 1,000 additional travel-specific integrations such as live flight, hotel and vacation rental data. Travelers can specify their budget and needs to generate custom itineraries. GuideGeek is not an app and does not require the user to download anything, instead relying on messaging apps such as Instagram to connect users with the AI. GuideGeek is free to use, doesn't include ads, and doesn't sell user data. Matador Network has a team of staff members monitoring conversations to correct them if the AI makes a false statement; for example, one user incorrectly inputted “Crete Freeze” instead of “Crete, Greece”, and the AI made up a fictional soft serve company. Using a technique known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the accuracy of GuideGeek increased to 98%, according to Matador Network CEO, Ross Borden. == Destination partnerships == Matador Network is monetizing GuideGeek via white-label partnerships with tourism bureaus and destination marketing organizations (DMOs). As of March 2024, it had over a dozen such clients. Estes Park, Colorado, was one of the first DMOs to partner with Matador for a custom version of GuideGeek called “Rocky Mountain Roamer.” For Discover Greece, Matador created Pythia, a custom AI named after the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. As Borden explained to Travel + Leisure, “Visitors to the Discover Greece website will find Pythia in the bottom right corner, and they can converse with the AI like a friend who knows everything about Greece.” Other DMOs who have partnerships with GuideGeek include the Aruba Tourism Authority, Visit Reno Tahoe, Illinois Office of Tourism, and Tourism Richmond. == Awards == In recognition of GuideGeek, Fast Company named Matador Network to its 2024 list of Most Innovative Companies. Following growth driven by the launch of GuideGeek, Matador Network was ranked on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America. The 2024 Skift IDEA Awards recognized Matador Network as a finalist in the category of Best Use of AI for GuideGeek's customized AI for the travel industry. == Michael Motamedi experiment == Travel influencer and chef Michael Motamedi traveled the world with his wife Vanessa Salas and their 2-year-old daughter on a six-month trip (which was later extended to a full year) led by GuideGeek. The family started off in Morocco before heading to Spain and continuing east. The experiment became the basis of a web series called “No Fixed Address.” Motamedi used GuideGeek's AI to select countries the family visited, where they ate, and what sites they saw. Motamedi and Salas first tested out the technology in April 2023 while using the chatbot to plan a date night in Mexico City. GuideGeek provided speakeasy and drink recommendations as well as local history facts.