Trello is a web-based, kanban-style list-making application developed by Atlassian. Created in 2011 by Fog Creek Software, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in New York City in 2014 and sold to Atlassian in January 2017. == History == The name Trello is derived from the word trellis, which had been a code name for the project at its early stages. Trello was released at a TechCrunch event by Fog Creek founder Joel Spolsky. In September 2011 Wired magazine named the application one of "The 7 Coolest Startups You Haven't Heard of Yet". Lifehacker said "it makes project collaboration simple and kind of enjoyable". In 2014, it raised US$10.3 million in funding from Index Ventures and Spark Capital. Prior to its acquisition, Trello had sold 22% of its shares to investors, with the remaining shares held by founders Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky. In May 2016, Trello claimed it had more than 1.1 million daily active users and 14 million total signups. In May 2015, Trello expanded internationally with localized interfaces for Brazil, Germany, and Spain. In 2016 Trello launched the Power-Up platform, allowing 3rd party developers to build and distribute extensions known as Power-Ups to Trello. Initial integrations included Zendesk, SurveyMonkey and Giphy. By January 2022 there were a total of 247 power-ups listed in the Power-Up directory. On 9 January 2017, Atlassian announced its intent to acquire Trello for $425 million. The transaction was made with $360 million in cash and $65 million in shares and options. In December 2018, Trello announced its acquisition of Butler, a company that developed a leading power-up for automating tasks within a Trello board. Trello announced 35 million users in March 2019 and 50 million users in October 2019. In 2020 Craig Jones, then cybersecurity operations director at Sophos, found that the company exposed the personally identifiable information (PII) data of its users, exposed through public Trello boards; the researcher first tweeted about this issue in the year 2018. On 16 January 2024 Trello suffered a data breach containing over 15 million unique email addresses, names and usernames, when the data was posted on a popular hacking forum. The data was obtained by enumerating a publicly accessible resource using email addresses from previous breach corpuses; it was then added on 22 January 2024 to the famous website collecting data breaches "Have I Been Pwned?". == Uses == Users can create task boards with different columns and move the tasks between them. Typically columns include task statuses such as To Do, In Progress, Done. The tool can be used for personal and business purposes including real estate management, software project management, school bulletin boards, lesson planning, accounting, web design, gaming, and law office case management. == Architecture == According to a Fog Creek blog post in January 2012, the client was a thin web layer which downloads the main app, written in CoffeeScript and compiled to minified JavaScript, using Backbone.js, HTML5 .pushState(), and the Mustache templating language. The server was built on top of MongoDB, Node.js and a modified version of Socket.io. == Reception == On 26 January 2017, PC Magazine gave Trello a 3.5 / 5 rating, calling it "flexible" and saying that "you can get rather creative", while noting that "it may require some experimentation to figure out how to best use it for your team and the workload you manage."
Color gradient
In color science, a color gradient (also known as a color ramp or a color progression) specifies a range of position-dependent colors, usually used to fill a region. In assigning colors to a set of values, a gradient is a continuous colormap, a type of color scheme. In computer graphics, the term swatch has come to mean a palette of active colors. == Definitions == Color gradient is a set of colors arranged in a linear order (ordered) A continuous colormap is a curve through a colorspace === Strict definition === A colormap is a function which associate a real value r with point c in color space C {\displaystyle C} f : [ r m i n , r m a x ] ⊂ R → C {\displaystyle f:[r_{min},r_{max}]\subset \mathbf {R} \to C} which is defined by: a colorspace C an increasing sequence of sampling points r 0 < . . . < r m ∈ [ r m i n , r m a x ] {\displaystyle r_{0}<... "The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly; and in the anthologies in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). While he also considered it one of his best works, "The Last Question" was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy. The story blends science fiction, theology, and philosophy. It has been recognized as a counterpoint to Fredric Brown's short short story "Answer", published two years earlier. == History == In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov "privately" concluded that the story was his best science fiction yet written. He placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" (September 1958) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976). The story asks the question of humanity's fate, and human existence as a whole, highlighting Asimov's focus on important aspects of our future like population growth and environmental issues. "The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" (1941) as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. He wrote in 1973 that he appreciated how easy the story was to write after he had the idea. He was so often approached by fans who remembered the story but not the title, that in one instance he gave the answer, correctly, before the fan had even described the story. == Plot summary == By the year 2061, Multivac, a self-adjusting and self-correcting computer, has allowed mankind to reach beyond the planetary confines of Earth and harness solar energy. Two technicians, Adell and Lupov, celebrate Multivac's role in this development. Over drinks, they discuss that the sun will expire due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy inevitably increases. When Adell asks Multivac whether this can be reversed, the computer responds that it has insufficient data to answer. In several episodes over ten trillion years, increasingly advanced humans pose the same question to the computers of their time. Each time the computer gives the same response. At the heat death of the universe, the last disembodied consciousness of Man asks the question a final time of a computer that resides in hyperspace before merging with it. After collecting the last data from the dead universe, the computer continues to process it alone and finds an answer to the last question. Having no one to tell it to, it proceeds to demonstrate by saying "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" == Themes == === Philosophy === Although science and religion are frequently presented as having an oppositional relationship, "The Last Question" explores some biblical contexts ("Let there be light"). In Asimov's story, aspects like the great meaning of existence are culminated through both technology and human knowledge. The evolution from Multivac to AC also emulates a sort of cycle of existence. === Dystopian happy ending === Multivac's purpose was conceptualized with a desire for knowledge, promoting the idea that more knowledge will lead to a better and more fruitful future for humanity. However, the computer's answers regarding the future suggest an inevitable exhaustion of the Sun, and this thirst for knowledge becomes an obsession with the future. The story's end displays a dichotomy between annihilation and peace. == Dramatic adaptations == === Planetarium shows === "The Last Question" was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University (in 1966), featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt (1980). It was adapted for the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York (in 1969), under the direction of Ian C. McLennan. It was adapted for the Edmonton Space Sciences Centre in Edmonton, Alberta (early 1970s), under the direction of John Hault. It was adapted for the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Natural History in 1973 under the direction of Mark B. Peterson It subsequently played at the: Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1973 Planetarium of the Reading School District in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1974 Buhl Planetarium, Pittsburgh in 1974 The Space Transit Planetarium of the Museum of Science in Miami during 1977 Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport New York, in 1978, read by singer-songwriter and Long Island resident Harry Chapin. Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah (in 1980 and 1989) A reading of the story was played on BBC Radio 7 in 2008 and 2009. Gates Planetarium in Denver, Colorado (in early 2020) In 1989 Asimov updated the star show adaptation to add in quasars and black holes. The story was adapted as a comic book by Don Thompson and drawn by John Estes in the third issue of ORBiT. Deepfakes (a portmanteau of 'deep learning' and 'fake') are images, videos, or audio that have been edited or generated using artificial intelligence, AI-based tools or audio-video editing software. They may depict real or fictional people and are considered a form of synthetic media, that is media that is usually created by artificial intelligence systems by combining various media elements into a new media artifact. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes uniquely leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, including facial recognition algorithms and artificial neural networks such as variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks (GANs). In turn, the field of image forensics has worked to develop techniques to detect manipulated images. Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their potential use in creating child sexual abuse material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, bullying, and financial fraud. Academics have raised concerns about the potential for deepfakes to promote disinformation and hate speech, as well as interfere with elections. In response, the information technology industry and governments have proposed recommendations and methods to detect and mitigate their use. Academic research has also delved deeper into the factors driving deepfake engagement online as well as potential countermeasures to malicious application of deepfakes. From traditional entertainment to gaming, deepfake technology has evolved to be increasingly convincing and available to the public, allowing for the disruption of the entertainment and media industries. == History == Photo manipulation was developed in the 19th century and soon applied to motion pictures. Technology steadily improved during the 20th century, and more quickly with the advent of digital video. Deepfake technology has been developed by researchers at academic institutions beginning in the 1990s, and later by amateurs in online communities. More recently, the methods have been adopted by industry. The development of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the mid-2010s represented a key technical turning point in the evolution of deepfakes. GANs allowed for the creation of highly realistic fake images and videos by training competing neural networks, achieving a much improved visual fidelity over previous methods of creating the content using rules or by using autoencoders, and formed the basis for modern deepfake methods. === Academic research === Academic research related to deepfakes is split between the field of computer vision, a sub-field of computer science, which develops techniques for creating and identifying deepfakes, and humanities and social science approaches that study the social, ethical, aesthetic implications as well as journalistic and informational implications of deepfakes. As deepfakes have risen in prominence in popularity with innovations provided by AI tools, significant research has gone into detection methods and defining the factors driving engagement with deepfakes on the internet. Deepfakes have been shown to appear on social media platforms and other parts of the internet for purposes ranging from entertainment and education related to deepfakes to misinformation to elicit strong reactions. There are gaps in research related to the propagation of deepfakes on social media. Negativity and emotional response are the primary driving factors for users sharing deepfakes. === Social science and humanities approaches to deepfakes === In cinema studies, deepfakes illustrate how "the human face is emerging as a central object of ambivalence in the digital age". Video artists have used deepfakes to "playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers". Film scholar Christopher Holliday analyses how altering the gender and race of performers in familiar movie scenes destabilizes gender classifications and categories. The concept of "queering" deepfakes is also discussed in Oliver M. Gingrich's discussion of media artworks that use deepfakes to reframe gender, including British artist Jake Elwes' Zizi: Queering the Dataset, an artwork that uses deepfakes of drag queens to intentionally play with gender. The aesthetic potentials of deepfakes are also beginning to be explored. Theatre historian John Fletcher notes that early demonstrations of deepfakes are presented as performances, and situates these in the context of theater, discussing "some of the more troubling paradigm shifts" that deepfakes represent as a performance genre. While most English-language academic studies of deepfakes focus on the Western anxieties about disinformation and pornography, digital anthropologist Gabriele de Seta has analyzed the Chinese reception of deepfakes, which are known as huanlian, which translates to "changing faces". The Chinese term does not contain the "fake" of the English deepfake, and de Seta argues that this cultural context may explain why the Chinese response has centered on practical regulatory measures to "fraud risks, image rights, economic profit, and ethical imbalances". === Computer science research on deepfakes === A landmark early project was the "Video Rewrite" program, published in 1997. The program modified existing video footage of a person speaking to depict that person mouthing the words from a different audio track. It was the first system to fully automate this kind of facial reanimation, and it did so using machine learning techniques to make connections between the sounds produced by a video's subject and the shape of the subject's face. Contemporary academic projects have focused on creating more realistic videos and improving deepfake techniques. The "Synthesizing Obama" program, published in 2017, modifies video footage of former president Barack Obama to depict him mouthing the words contained in a separate audio track. The project lists as a main research contribution to its photorealistic technique for synthesizing mouth shapes from audio. The "Face2Face" program, published in 2016, modifies video footage of a person's face to depict them mimicking another person's facial expressions. The project highlights its primary research contribution as the development of the first method for re-enacting facial expressions in real time using a camera that does not capture depth, enabling the technique to work with common consumer cameras. Researchers have also shown that deepfakes are expanding into other domains such as medical imagery. In this work, it was shown how an attacker can automatically inject or remove lung cancer in a patient's 3D CT scan. The result was so convincing that it fooled three radiologists and a state-of-the-art lung cancer detection AI. To demonstrate the threat, the authors successfully performed the attack on a hospital in a White hat penetration test. A survey of deepfakes, published in May 2020, provides a timeline of how the creation and detection of deepfakes have advanced over the last few years. The survey identifies that researchers have been focusing on resolving the following challenges of deepfake creation: Generalization. High-quality deepfakes are often achieved by training on hours of footage of the target. This challenge is to minimize the amount of training data and the time to train the model required to produce quality images and to enable the execution of trained models on new identities (unseen during training). Paired Training. Training a supervised model can produce high-quality results, but requires data pairing. This is the process of finding examples of inputs and their desired outputs for the model to learn from. Data pairing is laborious and impractical when training on multiple identities and facial behaviors. Some solutions include self-supervised training (using frames from the same video), the use of unpaired networks such as Cycle-GAN, or the manipulation of network embeddings. Identity leakage. This is where the identity of the driver (i.e., the actor controlling the face in a reenactment) is partially transferred to the generated face. Some solutions proposed include attention mechanisms, few-shot learning, disentanglement, boundary conversions, and skip connections. Occlusions. When part of the face is obstructed with a hand, hair, glasses, or any other item then artifacts can occur. A common occlusion is a closed mouth which hides the inside of the mouth and the teeth. Some solutions include image segmentation during training and in-painting. Temporal coherence. In videos containing deepfakes, artifacts such as flickering and jitter can occur because the network has no context of the preceding frames. Some researchers provide this context or use novel temporal coherence losses to help improve realism. As the technology improves, the interference is diminishing. Overall, deepfakes are expected to have several implications in media and society, med The Orion's Arm Universe Project (OA) is a multi-authored online hard science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kazlev, Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn, Bernd Helfert and Anders Sandberg and further co-authored by many people since. Anyone can contribute articles, stories, artwork, or music to the website. The first published Orion's Arm book, a collection of five novellas set within the OA universe, called Against a Diamond Sky, was released in September 2009. == Canon == The fictional setting of Orion's Arm takes place about 10,000 years in the future, where an interstellar civilization spread across thousands of light-years, with inhabited planets and space habitats. Its inhabitants range from humans to extensively modified human beings, including superhumans with advanced augmentations and internal AI systems, while most people exist as softwares. Engineered wormholes are used for interstellar travel and transport, although not for time travel. The setting also includes several alien civilizations and evidence of more advanced alien societies in the past. At its highest levels, directed human evolution has produced vast godlike beings linked across interstellar distances, capable of understanding and creating technologies beyond ordinary minds. == Reception == Orion's Arm has been reviewed in the role-playing magazine Knights of the Dinner Table, as well as on Boing Boing by transhumanist science fiction author Cory Doctorow. References to the Encyclopaedia Galactica have been made in a book on overcoming Librarian stereotypes. The Orion's Arm website has also been recommended in a children's teaching guide. Word error rate (WER) is a common metric of the performance of a speech recognition or machine translation system. The WER metric typically ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 indicates that the compared pieces of text are exactly identical, and 1 (or larger) indicates that they are completely different with no similarity. This way, a WER of 0.8 means that there is an 80% error rate for compared sentences. The general difficulty of measuring performance lies in the fact that the recognized word sequence can have a different length from the reference word sequence (supposedly the correct one). The WER is derived from the Levenshtein distance, working at the word level instead of the phoneme level. The WER is a valuable tool for comparing different systems as well as for evaluating improvements within one system. This kind of measurement, however, provides no details on the nature of translation errors and further work is therefore required to identify the main source(s) of error and to focus any research effort. This problem is solved by first aligning the recognized word sequence with the reference (spoken) word sequence using dynamic string alignment. Examination of this issue is seen through a theory called the power law that states the correlation between perplexity and word error rate. Word error rate can then be computed as: W E R = S + D + I N = S + D + I S + D + C {\displaystyle {\mathit {WER}}={\frac {S+D+I}{N}}={\frac {S+D+I}{S+D+C}}} where S is the number of substitutions, D is the number of deletions, I is the number of insertions, C is the number of correct words, N is the number of words in the reference (N=S+D+C) The intuition behind 'deletion' and 'insertion' is how to get from the reference to the hypothesis. So if we have the reference "This is wikipedia" and hypothesis "This _ wikipedia", we call it a deletion. Note that since N is the number of words in the reference, the word error rate can be larger than 1.0, namely if the number of insertions I is larger than the number of correct words C. When reporting the performance of a speech recognition system, sometimes word accuracy (WAcc) is used instead: W A c c = 1 − W E R = N − S − D − I N = C − I N {\displaystyle {\mathit {WAcc}}=1-{\mathit {WER}}={\frac {N-S-D-I}{N}}={\frac {C-I}{N}}} Since the WER can be larger than 1.0, the word accuracy can be smaller than 0.0. == Experiments == It is commonly believed that a lower word error rate shows superior accuracy in recognition of speech, compared with a higher word error rate. However, at least one study has shown that this may not be true. In a Microsoft Research experiment, it was shown that, if people were trained under "that matches the optimization objective for understanding", (Wang, Acero and Chelba, 2003) they would show a higher accuracy in understanding of language than other people who demonstrated a lower word error rate, showing that true understanding of spoken language relies on more than just high word recognition accuracy. == Other metrics == One problem with using a generic formula such as the one above, however, is that no account is taken of the effect that different types of error may have on the likelihood of successful outcome, e.g. some errors may be more disruptive than others and some may be corrected more easily than others. These factors are likely to be specific to the syntax being tested. A further problem is that, even with the best alignment, the formula cannot distinguish a substitution error from a combined deletion plus insertion error. Hunt (1990) has proposed the use of a weighted measure of performance accuracy where errors of substitution are weighted at unity but errors of deletion and insertion are both weighted only at 0.5, thus: W E R = S + 0.5 D + 0.5 I N {\displaystyle {\mathit {WER}}={\frac {S+0.5D+0.5I}{N}}} There is some debate, however, as to whether Hunt's formula may properly be used to assess the performance of a single system, as it was developed as a means of comparing more fairly competing candidate systems. A further complication is added by whether a given syntax allows for error correction and, if it does, how easy that process is for the user. There is thus some merit to the argument that performance metrics should be developed to suit the particular system being measured. Whichever metric is used, however, one major theoretical problem in assessing the performance of a system is deciding whether a word has been “mis-pronounced,” i.e. does the fault lie with the user or with the recogniser. This may be particularly relevant in a system which is designed to cope with non-native speakers of a given language or with strong regional accents. The pace at which words should be spoken during the measurement process is also a source of variability between subjects, as is the need for subjects to rest or take a breath. All such factors may need to be controlled in some way. For text dictation it is generally agreed that performance accuracy at a rate below 95% is not acceptable, but this again may be syntax and/or domain specific, e.g. whether there is time pressure on users to complete the task, whether there are alternative methods of completion, and so on. The term "Single Word Error Rate" is sometimes referred to as the percentage of incorrect recognitions for each different word in the system vocabulary. == Edit distance == The word error rate may also be referred to as the length normalized edit distance. The normalized edit distance between X and Y, d( X, Y ) is defined as the minimum of W( P ) / L ( P ), where P is an editing path between X and Y, W ( P ) is the sum of the weights of the elementary edit operations of P, and L(P) is the number of these operations (length of P). Galatea is an interactive fiction video game by Emily Short featuring a modern rendition of the Greek myth of Galatea, the sculpture of a woman that gained life. It took "Best of Show" in the 2000 IF Art Show and won a XYZZY Award for Best non-player character. The game displays an unusually rich approach to non-player character dialogue and diverts from the typical puzzle-solving in interactive fiction: gameplay consists entirely of interacting with a single character in a single room. Galatea is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 US license. == Gameplay == Galatea alters the typical interactive fiction game mechanics by concentrating instead on the player's interactions with a single non-player character (NPC), the eponymous Galatea. Much of the interest of the piece derives from the ambiguous nature of the player–NPC dialogue: the form of the conversation and, indeed, the nature of Galatea herself shift depending on the focus the player places on certain aspects of the character's personality. Numerous endings are possible. Gameplay centers around the developing dialogue between Galatea and the player when asking about topics in the previous conversation. Two commands, "think about" and "recap", are provided to keep track of what has already been said; the former is also used to advance the storyline, as the player character draws conclusions about the story as it has unfolded to that point. The game also encourages using sensory commands ("touch", "listen to", "look at"), adding immersion to the experience. == Plot == Galatea is loosely based on the myth of Pygmalion, who carved the sculpture of a woman. In the myth, he falls in love with the statue, named Galatea or Elise in different versions, and the goddess Venus brings her to life. The story begins at the opening of an exhibition of artificial intelligences. The player, alone, discovers Galatea displayed on a pedestal with a small information placard. She is illuminated by a spotlight and wears an emerald dress. Seeing the player about to turn away, Galatea says, "They told me you were coming." From this point, the story may proceed in a number of ways depending on the player's words and actions. === Multilinear interactive fiction === Short describes this as "multilinear interactive fiction": while interactive fiction in general allows the player to find their own way through the story, this leads in most cases to a single ending (or at least a single desired 'correct' ending). With Galatea, Short presents a story with around 70 different endings and hundreds of possible ways of reaching them. The plot is thus designed to appear open-ended with the development of the story entirely dependent on what the player decides to talk or ask about or what actions they choose to perform. Thus the original author and the player share in the creation of a work of fiction. == Development == In interviews, Emily Short has explained that Galatea arose out of her efforts to develop advanced dialog coding for interactive fiction engines. Although code for simple conversational programs like ELIZA have existed since the 1960s, and limited dialog options have existed in interactive fiction since the 1970s, Short's efforts to develop chatterbot-like dialog required her to produce a simple test case scenario to test NPC interaction. Thus the single-room, single-occupant Galatea was a natural result. Development of the game progressed organically with Short engaging in test runs and drafting new dialog options for every conversational dead-end that arose. The game's multiple endings also arose in a similar fashion although Short had intended that there be multiple endings from the start. Although the nature of the game's development as well as its minimalist final form has led to questions regarding whether it is really a game and not just an experimental conversational program, Short has suggested that to her the definition of interactive fiction requires nothing more than a world model and a parser, and "anything you can cook up with those features counts as IF." Short has acknowledged the helpful influence of the close-knit IF community and the "atmosphere in which experimentation is valued" as leading to the success of her works like Galatea. == Reception == Galatea was well received, achieving critical acclaim from interactive fiction reviewers and literary scholars. The game is considered to aspire to a new level of art in interactive fiction, and thereby to have revolutionized the genre, establishing its author, Emily Short, as one of the key figures in the modern interactive fiction scene. Fellow award-winning IF author, Adam Cadre has called Galatea "the best NPC ever"—a view that was echoed by Joystiq's John Bardinelli. Cadre also describes the game as an example of an alternative kind of puzzle where "interactivity comes in deciding where to go, what to see, what to say. Rather than having to open gates along a path, you discover that they're all open at first, but stepping through one causes others to close." Galatea was described in 2007 by Indiegames.com as a "fascinating journey." In a 2009 article, Rock, Paper, Shotgun praised the depth and detail of the game, the complexities of the character design and its "masterful balance between intricacy and simplicity", and "Galatea's emotional turmoil" that is "encoded sweetly into the subtext of what's going on. By simply interacting in a logical manner, you learn more about this character than any cut-scene or info-dump could ever hope to convey." This was reiterated in a 2010 1UP.com article that listed Galatea as #2 in its "Top 5 Introductory Interactive Fiction Games" feature, describing it as intriguingly replayable, and as a "surprisingly rich game for its apparent minimalism". In 2011, PC Gamer highlighted Galatea as an example of the artistic and literary aspects of the interactive fiction genre. The titular character, Galatea, has been compared to the 2007 Portal character GLaDOS due to similarities in the personalities of the characters.The Last Question
Deepfake
Orion's Arm
Word error rate
Galatea (video game)