Aarogya Setu (lit. 'The bridge to health') is an Indian COVID-19 "contact tracing, syndromic mapping and self-assessment" digital service, primarily a mobile app, developed by the National Informatics Centre under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). The app reached more than 100 million installs in 40 days. On 26 May, amid growing privacy and security concerns, the source code of the app was made public. == Full view == The stated purpose of this app is to spread awareness of COVID-19 and to connect essential COVID-19-related health services to the people of India. This app augments the initiatives of the Department of Health to contain COVID-19 and shares best practices and advisories. It is a tracking app which uses the smartphone's GPS and Bluetooth features to track COVID-19 cases. The app is available for Android and iOS mobile operating systems. With Bluetooth, it tries to determine the risk if one has been near (within six feet of) a COVID-19-infected person, by scanning through a database of known cases across India. Using location information, it determines whether the location one is in belongs to one of the infected areas based on the data available. This app is an updated version of an earlier app called Corona Kavach (now discontinued) which was released earlier by the Government of India. == Features and tools == Aarogya Setu has four sections: User Status (tells the risk of getting COVID-19 for the user) Self Assess (helps the users identify COVID-19 symptoms and their risk profile) COVID-19 Updates (gives updates on local and national COVID-19 cases) E-pass integration (if applied for E-pass, it will be available) See Recent Contacts option (allows the users to assess the risk level of their Bluetooth contacts) It tells how many COVID-19 positive cases are likely in a radius of 500 m, 1 km, 2 km, 5 km and 10 km from the user. The app is built on a platform that can provide an application programming interface (API) so that other computer programs, mobile applications, and web services can make use of the features and data available in Aarogya Setu. == Response == Aarogya Setu crossed five million downloads within three days of its launch, making it one of the most popular government apps in India. It became the world's fastest-growing mobile app, beating Pokémon Go, with more than 50 million installs 13 days after launching in India on 2 April 2020. It reached 100 million installs by 13 May 2020, that is in 40 days since its launch. In an order on 29 April 2020 the central government made it mandatory for all employees to download the app and use it – "Before starting for office, they must review their status on Aarogya Setu and commute only when the app shows safe or low risk". The Union Home Ministry also said that the application is mandatory for all living in the COVID-19 containment zone. The government gave the announcement along with the nationwide lockdown extension by two weeks from the 4 May with certain relaxations. On 21 May 2020, the Airport Authority of India issued a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) stating that all departing passengers must compulsorily be registered with the Aarogya Setu app. It added that the app would not be mandatory for children below 14 years. However, the next day, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri clarified that the app would not be mandatory for any passengers. On 26 May 2020, the Aarogya Setu app code was made open to developers across the globe to help other countries manage contact tracing in their fight against COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2021, Co-WIN portal was integrated with the app. This allowed users to schedule an appointment through the app for COVID-19 vaccine by registering their phone number and providing relevant documents. == Effectiveness == NITI Aayog CEO revealed that "the app has been able to identify more than 3,000 hotspots in 3–17 days ahead of time." However, users and experts in India and around the world say the app raises huge data security concerns. The app collects name, number, gender, travel history, and uses a phone's Bluetooth and location data to let users know if they have been near a person with COVID-19 by scanning a database of known cases of infection, and also share it with the government simultaneously. This is the major area of concern as the app's constant access to a phone's Bluetooth imposes a form of security threat. But it stood to clarify itself that the informations received are not going to be made public. Amidst all these, the app hits a record of about one-hundred million downloads. == Reception == Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Congress party, termed the Aarogya Setu application a "sophisticated surveillance system" after the government announced that downloading the app would be mandatory for both government and private employees. Following this, others raised the same concerns about the Aarogya Setu app. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) responded to these concerns by asserting that Gandhi's claims were false, and that the app was being appreciated internationally. On 5 May, French ethical hacker Robert Baptiste, who goes by the name Elliot Alderson on Twitter, claimed that there were security issues with the app. The Indian government, as well as the app developers, responded to this claim by thanking the hacker for his attention, but dismissed his concerns. The developers of the app stated that the fetching of location data is a documented feature of the app, rather than a flaw, since the app is designed to track the distribution of the virus-infected population. They also asserted that no personal information of any user has been proven to be at risk. On 6 May, Robert Baptiste tweeted that security vulnerabilities in Aarogya Setu allowed hackers to "know who is infected, unwell, [or] made a self assessment in the area of his choice". He also gave details of how many people were unwell and infected at the Prime Minister's Office, the Indian Parliament and the Home Office. The Economic Times pointed out that a clause in the app's Terms and Conditions stated that the user "agrees and acknowledges that the Government of India will not be liable for ... any unauthorised access to your information or modification thereof". In response, several software developers called for the source code to be made public. On 12 May, former Supreme Court Judge Justice B.N. Srikrishna termed the government's push mandating the use of Aarogya Setu app "utterly illegal". He said so far it is not backed by any law and questioned "under what law, government is mandating it on anyone". MIT Technology Review gave 2 out of 5 stars to Aarogya Setu app after analyzing the COVID contact tracing apps launched in 25 countries. The app got stars only for the policy which suggests that data collected is deleted after a period of time and that the data collection, as far as user inputs go, is minimal. It also highlighted that India is the only democracy making its app mandatory for millions of people. The rating was further downgraded from 2 to 1 for collecting more information than the app needs to function. Following this, the MeitY made the source code of the Android app public on GitHub on 26 May, which will be followed by iOS and API documentation. Further, the Government has also launched a "bug bounty program". This was done to "promote transparency and ensure security and integrity of the app". However, experts stated that the server-side code had not yet been publicly released, which meant that public opinion on security and privacy was yet to be completely assuaged. Following this, ZDNet noted that the source code seemed to confirm the government's claim that user location data, if collected, would be anonymised and would be deleted after 45 days, or 60 days for high-risk individuals.
Per-pixel lighting
In computer graphics, per-pixel lighting refers to any technique for lighting an image or scene that calculates illumination for each pixel on a rendered image. This is in contrast to other popular methods of lighting such as vertex lighting, which calculates illumination at each vertex of a 3D model and then interpolates the resulting values over the model's faces to calculate the final per-pixel color values. Per-pixel lighting is commonly used with techniques, such as blending, alpha blending, alpha to coverage, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, clipping, hidden-surface determination, Z-buffering, stencil buffering, shading, mipmapping, normal mapping, bump mapping, displacement mapping, parallax mapping, shadow mapping, specular mapping, shadow volumes, high-dynamic-range rendering, ambient occlusion (screen space ambient occlusion, screen space directional occlusion, ray-traced ambient occlusion), ray tracing, global illumination, and tessellation. Each of these techniques provides some additional data about the surface being lit or the scene and light sources that contributes to the final look and feel of the surface. Most modern video game engines implement lighting using per-pixel techniques instead of vertex lighting to achieve increased detail and realism. The id Tech 4 engine, used to develop such games as Brink and Doom 3, was one of the first game engines to implement a completely per-pixel shading engine. All versions of the CryENGINE, Frostbite Engine, and Unreal Engine, among others, also implement per-pixel shading techniques. Deferred shading is a recent development in per-pixel lighting notable for its use in the Frostbite Engine and Battlefield 3. Deferred shading techniques are capable of rendering potentially large numbers of small lights inexpensively (other per-pixel lighting approaches require full-screen calculations for each light in a scene, regardless of size). == History == While only recently have personal computers and video hardware become powerful enough to perform full per-pixel shading in real-time applications such as games, many of the core concepts used in per-pixel lighting models have existed for decades. Frank Crow published a paper describing the theory of shadow volumes in 1977. This technique uses the stencil buffer to specify areas of the screen that correspond to surfaces that lie in a "shadow volume", or a shape representing a volume of space eclipsed from a light source by some object. These shadowed areas are typically shaded after the scene is rendered to buffers by storing shadowed areas with the stencil buffer. Jim Blinn first introduced the idea of normal mapping in a 1978 SIGGRAPH paper. Blinn pointed out that the earlier idea of unlit texture mapping proposed by Edwin Catmull was unrealistic for simulating rough surfaces. Instead of mapping a texture onto an object to simulate roughness, Blinn proposed a method of calculating the degree of lighting a point on a surface should receive based on an established "perturbation" of the normals across the surface. == Hardware rendering == Real-time applications, such as video games, usually implement per-pixel lighting through the use of pixel shaders, allowing the GPU hardware to process the effect. The scene to be rendered is first rasterized onto a number of buffers storing different types of data to be used in rendering the scene, such as depth, normal direction, and diffuse color. Then, the data is passed into a shader and used to compute the final appearance of the scene, pixel-by-pixel. Deferred shading is a per-pixel shading technique that has recently become feasible for games. With deferred shading, a "g-buffer" is used to store all terms needed to shade a final scene on the pixel level. The format of this data varies from application to application depending on the desired effect, and can include normal data, positional data, specular data, diffuse data, emissive maps and albedo, among others. Using multiple render targets, all of this data can be rendered to the g-buffer with a single pass, and a shader can calculate the final color of each pixel based on the data from the g-buffer in a final "deferred pass". Because deferred shading assumes only one visible fragment per pixel sample, transparent objects are generally handled in a separate forward pass. == Software rendering == Per-pixel lighting is also performed in software on many high-end commercial rendering applications which typically do not render at interactive framerates. This is called offline rendering or software rendering. NVidia's mental ray rendering software, which is integrated with such suites as Autodesk's Softimage is a well-known example.
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Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by text corpus (plural corpora). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a given linguistic variety. Today, corpora are generally machine-readable data collections. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. Large collections of text, though corpora may also be small in terms of running words, allow linguists to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts that may be difficult to test in a qualitative manner. The text-corpus method uses the body of texts in any natural language to derive the set of abstract rules which govern that language. Those results can be used to explore the relationships between that subject language and other languages which have undergone a similar analysis. The first such corpora were manually derived from source texts, but now that work is automated. Corpora have not only been used for linguistics research, they have been increasingly used to compile dictionaries (starting with The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language in 1969) and reference grammars, with A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, published in 1985, as a first. Experts in the field have differing views about the annotation of a corpus. These views range from John McHardy Sinclair, who advocates minimal annotation so texts speak for themselves, to the Survey of English Usage team (University College, London), who advocate annotation as allowing greater linguistic understanding through rigorous recording. == History == Some of the earliest efforts at grammatical description were based at least in part on corpora of particular religious or cultural significance. For example, Prātiśākhya literature described the sound patterns of Sanskrit as found in the Vedas, and Pāṇini's grammar of classical Sanskrit was based at least in part on analysis of that same corpus. Similarly, the early Arabic grammarians paid particular attention to the language of the Quran. In the Western European tradition, scholars prepared concordances to allow detailed study of the language of the Bible and other canonical texts. === English corpora === A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication of Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English in 1967. Written by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis, the work was based on an analysis of the Brown Corpus, which is a structured and balanced corpus of one million words of American English from the year 1961. The corpus comprises 2000 text samples, from a variety of genres. The Brown Corpus was the first computerized corpus designed for linguistic research. Kučera and Francis subjected the Brown Corpus to a variety of computational analyses and then combined elements of linguistics, language teaching, psychology, statistics, and sociology to create a rich and variegated opus. A further key publication was Randolph Quirk's "Towards a description of English Usage" in 1960 in which he introduced the Survey of English Usage. Quirk's corpus was the first modern corpus to be built with the purpose of representing the whole language. Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kučera to supply a million-word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary, the first dictionary compiled using corpus linguistics. The AHD took the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language should be used) with descriptive information (how it actually is used). Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' COBUILD monolingual learner's dictionary, designed for users learning English as a foreign language, was compiled using the Bank of English. The Survey of English Usage Corpus was used in the development of one of the most important Corpus-based Grammars, which was written by Quirk et al. and published in 1985 as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. The Brown Corpus has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the LOB Corpus (1960s British English), Kolhapur (Indian English), Wellington (New Zealand English), Australian Corpus of English (Australian English), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s American English), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many languages, varieties and modes, and include the International Corpus of English, and the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities (Oxford and Lancaster) and the British Library. For contemporary American English, work has stalled on the American National Corpus, but the 400+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–present) is now available through a web interface. The first computerized corpus of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project, containing one million words, which inspired Shana Poplack's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area. === Multilingual corpora === In the 1990s, many of the notable early successes on statistical methods in natural-language programming (NLP) occurred in the field of machine translation, due especially to work at IBM Research. These systems were able to take advantage of existing multilingual textual corpora that had been produced by the Parliament of Canada and the European Union as a result of laws calling for the translation of all governmental proceedings into all official languages of the corresponding systems of government. There are corpora in non-European languages as well. For example, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Japan has built a number of corpora of spoken and written Japanese. Sign language corpora have also been created using video data. === Ancient languages corpora === Besides these corpora of living languages, computerized corpora have also been made of collections of texts in ancient languages. An example is the Andersen-Forbes database of the Hebrew Bible, developed since the 1970s, in which every clause is parsed using graphs representing up to seven levels of syntax, and every segment tagged with seven fields of information. The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated corpus for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran. This is a recent project with multiple layers of annotation including morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar. The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS) is a "Sandhi-split corpus of Sanskrit texts with full morphological and lexical analysis... designed for text-historical research in Sanskrit linguistics and philology." === Corpora from specific fields === Besides pure linguistic inquiry, researchers had begun to apply corpus linguistics to other academic and professional fields, such as the emerging sub-discipline of Law and Corpus Linguistics, which seeks to understand legal texts using corpus data and tools. The DBLP Discovery Dataset concentrates on computer science, containing relevant computer science publications with sentient metadata such as author affiliations, citations, or study fields. A more focused dataset was introduced by NLP Scholar, a combination of papers of the ACL Anthology and Google Scholar metadata. Corpora can also aid in translation efforts or in teaching foreign languages. == Methods == Corpus linguistics has generated a number of research methods, which attempt to trace a path from data to theory. Wallis and Nelson (2001) first introduced what they called the 3A perspective: Annotation, Abstraction and Analysis. Annotation consists of the application of a scheme to texts. Annotations may include structural markup, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and numerous other representations. Abstraction consists of the translation (mapping) of terms in the scheme to terms in a theoretically motivated model or dataset. Abstraction typically includes linguist-directed search but may include e.g., rule-learning for parsers. Analysis consists of statistically probing, manipulating and generalising from the dataset. Analysis might include statistical evaluations, optimisation of rule-bases or knowledge discovery methods. Most lexical corpora today are part-of-speech-tagged (POS-tagged). However even corpus linguists who work with 'unannotated plain text' inevitably apply some method to isolate salient terms. In such situations annotation and abstraction are combined in a lexical search. The advantage of publishing an annotated corpus is that other users can then perform experiments on the corpus (through corpus managers). Linguists with other interests and differing perspectives than the originators' can exploit this work. By sharing data
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Artbreeder
Artbreeder, formerly known as Ganbreeder, is a collaborative, machine learning-based art website. Using the models StyleGAN and BigGAN, the website allows users to generate and modify images of faces, landscapes, and paintings, among other categories. == Overview == On Artbreeder, users mainly interact through the remixing - referred to as 'breeding' - of other users' images found in the publicly accessible database of images. The creation of new variations can be done by tweaking sliders on an image's page, known as "genes", which in the "Portraits" model can range from color balance to gender, facial hair, and glasses. Additionally, any image can be "crossbred" with other publicly viewable images from the database, using a slider to control how much of each image should influence the resulting "child". The site also allows for uploading new images, which the model will attempt to convert into the latent space of the network. == Notable usages == The similarly AI-driven text adventure game AI Dungeon uses Artbreeder to generate profile pictures for its users, and The Static Age's Andrew Paley has used Artbreeder to create the visuals for his music videos. Artbreeder has been used to create portraits of characters from popular novels such as Harry Potter and Twilight. They have also been used to add realistic features to ancient portraits. Artbreeder was used to create characters in the sequel to Ben Drowned with the titular villain, an AI-construct itself, created entirely using the website. == Changes to Artbreeder == ArtBreeder underwent an overhaul, introducing several features to enhance the user experience. Among these updates is the integration SD-XL, developed by stability.ai. Additionally, ArtBreeder also added a functionality known as ControlNet, which enables users to create images based on specific poses. With ControlNet, users can incorporate various poses into their AI Artworks. More features that were introduced into Artbreeder, are Pattern, which creates AI Pattern Images, Outpainting or Uncropping was also an added feature to Artbreeder, that allows the user to expand the image beyond the normal dimensions of the image. == Reception == The artwork generated by users of the website has been described as "beautiful" and "surreal," drawing comparisons to "weird, incomprehensible dreams" that "somehow touch the deep, unconscious parts of [the] mind". However, the generated faces were noted as "creepy and 'off'", and still nowhere near the quality attained by actual digital artists. Additionally, the site faced criticism for perceived confusing aspects of the AI's behavior. Jonathan Bartlett of Mind Matters News noted that "As is always the case with AI, sometimes the [gene] knobs don't work as expected and sometimes the results are... strange," while conceding that Artbreeder was still "probably the start of a new future of made-to-order stock images." Writers from Hyperallergic also took issue with perceived racial biases in the Portraits model, citing a comment from a user who faced difficulty from the neural network while attempting to darken the skin of a portrait to match a source image.
Karsten Borgwardt
Karsten Borgwardt (born 1980) is a German computer scientist and biologist specializing in machine learning and computational biology. Since February 2023, he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, where he leads the Department of Machine Learning and Systems Biology. == Education and career == Borgwardt was born in Kaiserslautern. He obtained a Diplom (equivalent to a master’s degree) in computer science from LMU Munich in 2004 and a Master of Science in biology from the University of Oxford in 2003. In 2007, he obtained his PhD from LMU Munich in computer science. Following a postdoctoral position at the University of Cambridge, he became a research group leader for machine learning and computational biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the former Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 2008. In 2011, Borgwardt was appointed professor of data mining in the life sciences at the University of Tübingen. In 2014, he joined ETH Zurich as an associate professor in the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) and was promoted to full professor in 2017. During his tenure at ETH Zurich, he coordinated significant research programs, including two Marie Curie Innovative Training Networks and the Personalized Swiss Sepsis Study, focusing on the prediction of sepsis using machine learning. In 2023, he was appointed as Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and as Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried. == Research contributions == Borgwardt’s research integrates big data analysis with biomedical research. He develops novel machine learning algorithms to detect patterns and statistical dependencies in large biological and medical datasets. His work aims to enable the automatic generation of new knowledge from big data and to understand the relationship between the function of biological systems and their molecular properties, which is fundamental for personalized medicine. == Awards and honors == During his studies, he was a scholar of the Stiftung Maximilianeum, and the Bavarian Foundation for the Promotion of the Gifted. Borgwardt received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes in 2002 and 2007. His PhD dissertation received the Heinz Schwärtzel Dissertation Award for Foundations of Computer Science in 2007. As a professor in Tübingen, he was awarded the Alfried-Krupp-Förderpreis for Young Professors in 2013. In 2015, he received an SNSF Starting Grant. In 2014, 2015 and 2016, he was listed in “Top 40 under 40” in Germany rankings selected by Capital magazine. In 2018, Borgwardt was named among “25 individuals who have the potential to shape the next 25 years” by Focus magazine. In 2023, Borgwardt received an honorary professorship from LMU Munich by the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy. Publications from Borgwardt's group have received the Outstanding Student Paper Award in NIPS in 2009, the SIB Graduate Paper Award in 2020 and SIB Remarkable Output Awards in 2020 and 2021 from the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). == Selected publications == Weisfeiler-Lehman Graph Kernels (’‘Journal of Machine Learning Research’’, 2011): Introduced an efficient graph kernel based on the Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm. “Direct antimicrobial resistance prediction from clinical MALDI-TOF mass spectra using machine learning” (’‘Nature Medicine’’, 2022): showcased the feasibility of predicting antimicrobial resistance from readily collected mass spectrometry data in the hospital. The new method is able to identify antibiotic resistance 24 hours earlier than previous methods.