Adam Tauman Kalai is an American computer scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence and works at OpenAI. == Education and career == Kalai graduated from Harvard University in 1996 with a BA in computer science and received a MA and PhD, both in computer science, from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. His doctoral advisor was Avrim Blum. After graduation, Kalai did his postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Santosh Vempala until 2003. Kalai became a faculty member at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago from 2003 to 2006, followed by a stint as an assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2008. He joined Microsoft Research in 2008 and subsequently moved to OpenAI in 2023. == Contributions == Kalai is known for his algorithm for generating random factored numbers (see Bach's algorithm), for co-inventing the cooperative-competitive value (coco value), for efficiently learning learning mixtures of Gaussians, for the Blum-Kalai-Wasserman algorithm for learning parity with noise, and for the intractability of the folk theorem in game theory. More recently, Kalai is known for identifying and reducing gender bias in word embeddings, which are a representation of words commonly used in AI systems. In 2026, he coauthored a Nature paper on hallucinations in large language models. == Personal life == Kalai is the son of game theorist Ehud Kalai and is married to cryptographer Yael Tauman Kalai.
Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing
Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA) is a form of spatial anti-aliasing developed by Nvidia. DLAA depends on and requires Tensor Cores available in Nvidia RTX cards. DLAA is similar to Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) in its anti-aliasing method, with one important differentiation being that the goal of DLSS is to increase performance at the cost of image quality, whereas the main priority of DLAA is improving image quality at the cost of performance (irrelevant of resolution upscaling or downscaling). DLAA is similar to temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in that they are both spatial anti-aliasing solutions relying on past frame data. Compared to TAA, DLAA is substantially better when it comes to shimmering, flickering, and handling small meshes like wires. == Technical overview == DLAA collects game rendering data including raw low-resolution input, motion vectors, depth buffers, and exposure information. This information feeds into a convolutional neural network that processes the image to reduce aliasing while preserving fine detail. The neural network architecture employs an auto-encoder design trained on high-quality reference images. The training dataset includes diverse scenarios focusing on challenging cases like sub-pixel details, high-contrast edges, and transparent surfaces. The network then processes frames in real-time. Unlike traditional anti-aliasing solutions that rely on manually written heuristics, such as TAA, DLAA uses its neural network to preserve fine details while eliminating unwanted visual artifacts. == History == DLAA was initially called and marketed by Nvidia as DLSS 2x. The first game that added support for DLAA was The Elder Scrolls Online, which implemented the feature in 2021. By June 2022, DLAA was only available in six games. This number rose to 17 by February 2023. In June 2023, TechPowerUp reported that "DLAA is seeing sluggish adoption among game developers", and that Nvidia was working on adding DLAA to the quality presets of DLSS to boost adoption. By December 2023, DLAA was supported in 41 games. In early 2025, an update for the Nvidia App added a driver-based DLSS override feature that enables users to activate DLAA even in games that do not support it natively. == Differences between TAA and DLAA == TAA is used in many modern video games and game engines; however, all previous implementations have used some form of manually written heuristics to prevent temporal artifacts such as ghosting and flickering. One example of this is neighborhood clamping which forcefully prevents samples collected in previous frames from deviating too much compared to nearby pixels in newer frames. This helps to identify and fix many temporal artifacts, but deliberately removing fine details in this way is analogous to applying a blur filter, and thus the final image can appear blurry when using this method. DLAA uses an auto-encoder convolutional neural network trained to identify and fix temporal artifacts, instead of manually programmed heuristics as mentioned above. Because of this, DLAA can generally resolve detail better than other TAA and TAAU implementations, while also removing most temporal artifacts. == Differences between DLSS and DLAA == While DLSS handles upscaling with a focus on performance, DLAA handles anti-aliasing with a focus on visual quality. DLAA runs at the given screen resolution with no upscaling or downscaling functionality provided by DLAA. DLSS and DLAA share the same AI-driven anti-aliasing method. As such, DLAA functions like DLSS without the upscaling part. Both are made by Nvidia and require Tensor Cores. However, DLSS and DLAA cannot be enabled at the same time, only one can be selected depending on whether performance or image quality is prioritized. == Reception == TechPowerUp found that "[c]ompared to TAA and DLSS, DLAA is clearly producing the best image quality, especially at lower resolutions", arguing that, while "DLSS was already doing a better job than TAA at reconstructing small objects", "DLAA does an even better job". In a Cyberpunk 2077 performance test, IGN stated that "DLAA provided somewhat similar results [FPS wise] to the normal raster mode in most cases but got significant performance boost with the help of frame generation", a feature not available when using native resolution. Rock Paper Shotgun noted that, while DLAA is "not a completely perfect form of anti-aliasing, as the occasional jaggies are present", it "looks a lot sharper overall [than TAA], and especially in motion." According to PC World, "DLAA offers very good anti-aliasing without losing visual information — alternatives like TAA tend to struggle during motion-filled scenes, where DLAA doesn’t. Furthermore, DLAA’s loss of performance is lower than with conventional anti-aliasing methods."
Representational harm
Systems cause representational harm when they misrepresent a group of people in a negative manner. Representational harms include perpetuating harmful stereotypes about or minimizing the existence of a social group, such as a racial, ethnic, gender, or religious group. Machine learning algorithms often commit representational harm when they learn patterns from data that have algorithmic bias, and this has been shown to be the case with large language models. While preventing representational harm in models is essential to prevent harmful biases, researchers often lack precise definitions of representational harm and conflate it with allocative harm, an unequal distribution of resources among social groups, which is more widely studied and easier to measure. However, recognition of representational harms is growing and preventing them has become an active research area. Researchers have recently developed methods to effectively quantify representational harm in algorithms, making progress on preventing this harm in the future. == Types == Three prominent types of representational harm include stereotyping, denigration, and misrecognition. These subcategories present many dangers to individuals and groups. Stereotypes are oversimplified and usually undesirable representations of a specific group of people, usually by race and gender. This often leads to the denial of educational, employment, housing, and other opportunities. For example, the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans as highly intelligent and good at mathematics can be damaging professionally and academically. Representational harm happens when the representation of details teams improves damaging stereotypes, developing social exclusion and prejudice. This experience is particularly noticeable in the depiction of marginalised groups, containing people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, and people with handicaps. Media depictions of these groups generally stop working to catch their array and intricacy. Instead, they are typically reduced to one-dimensional caricatures, which ultimately continue social prejudices. These organised depictions contribute to the help of hazardous stereotypes and the marginalisation of these locations. Denigration is the action of unfairly criticizing individuals. This frequently happens when the demeaning of social groups occurs. For example, when searching for "Black-sounding" names versus "white-sounding" ones, some retrieval systems bolster the false perception of criminality by displaying ads for bail-bonding businesses. A system may shift the representation of a group to be of lower social status, often resulting in a disregard from society. Research shows that hazardous depictions in the media can have substantial emotional and social impacts on both individuals and areas. Lawrence Bobo examined the issue of Ethnic stereotype in film, tv, and marketing. African Americans are commonly received duties specified by features such as "violent tendencies," "laziness," or being "merely for contentment features." While these representations might appear varied externally, they stay to boost underlying frameworks of white prominence and racial inequality. As a circumstances, Black individuals are frequently represented as law offenders or in secondary roles, which adds to the support of Ethnic stereotype and Institutional racism. Misrecognition, or incorrect recognition, can display in many forms, including, but not limited to, erasing and alienating social groups, and denying people the right to self-identify. Erasing and alienating social groups involves the unequal visibility of certain social groups; specifically, systematic ineligibility in algorithmic systems perpetuates inequality by contributing to the underrepresentation of social groups. Not allowing people to self-identify is closely related as people's identities can be 'erased' or 'alienated' in these algorithms. Misrecognition causes more than surface-level harm to individuals: psychological harm, social isolation, and emotional insecurity can emerge from this subcategory of representational harm. == Quantification == As the dangers of representational harm have become better understood, some researchers have developed methods to measure representational harm in algorithms. Modeling stereotyping is one way to identify representational harm. Representational stereotyping can be quantified by comparing the predicted outcomes for one social group with the ground-truth outcomes for that group observed in real data. For example, if individuals from group A achieve an outcome with a probability of 60%, stereotyping would be observed if it predicted individuals to achieve that outcome with a probability greater than 60%. The group modeled stereotyping in the context of classification, regression, and clustering problems, and developed a set of rules to quantitatively determine if the model predictions exhibit stereotyping in each of these cases. Other attempts to measure representational harms have focused on applications of algorithms in specific domains such as image captioning, the act of an algorithm generating a short description of an image. In a study on image captioning, researchers measured five types of representational harm. To quantify stereotyping, they measured the number of incorrect words included in the model-generated image caption when compared to a gold-standard caption. They manually reviewed each of the incorrectly included words, determining whether the incorrect word reflected a stereotype associated with the image or whether it was an unrelated error, which allowed them to have a proxy measure of the amount of stereotyping occurring in this caption generation. These researchers also attempted to measure demeaning representational harm. To measure this, they analyzed the frequency with which humans in the image were mentioned in the generated caption. It was hypothesized that if the individuals were not mentioned in the caption, then this was a form of dehumanization. == Examples == One of the most notorious examples of representational harm was committed by Google in 2015 when an algorithm in Google Photos classified Black people as gorillas. Developers at Google said that the problem was caused because there were not enough faces of Black people in the training dataset for the algorithm to learn the difference between Black people and gorillas. Google issued an apology and fixed the issue by blocking its algorithms from classifying anything as a primate. In 2023, Google's photos algorithm was still blocked from identifying gorillas in photos. Another prevalent example of representational harm is the possibility of stereotypes being encoded in word embeddings, which are trained using a wide range of text. These word embeddings are the representation of a word as an array of numbers in vector space, which allows an individual to calculate the relationships and similarities between words. However, recent studies have shown that these word embeddings may commonly encode harmful stereotypes, such as the common example that the phrase "computer programmer" is oftentimes more closely related to "man" than it is to "women" in vector space. This could be interpreted as a misrepresentation of computer programming as a profession that is better performed by men, which would be an example of representational harm. == Addressing representational harm == Initiatives to minimise representational harm include advertising for even more inclusive and accurate portrayals of marginalised teams in the media. Scholars and protestors recommend that the method to reducing representational injury depends on raising the selection of voices both behind and before the digital video camera. When marginalized groups are provided the chance to represent themselves, they can check traditional stereotypes and present their experiences additional authentically. Over the last few years, efforts to increase representation of people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people in conventional media have made some progression. Films such as Selma, routed by Ava DuVernay, and tv series like Pose, developed by Ryan Murphy, have actually been extensively applauded for their nuanced and respectful representations of marginalised communities. These tasks existing complex individualities and stories that move past streamlined stereotypes. Self-representation is one more crucial method to addressing representational harm. By equipping marginalised locations to create their really own tales, media designers can effectively reduce the perpetuation of hazardous stereotypes. This procedure consists of both the manufacturing of media product by participants of these communities and proactively difficult typical media structures that have actually historically omitted them.
Group concept mapping
Group concept mapping is a structured methodology for organizing the ideas of a group on any topic of interest and representing those ideas visually in a series of interrelated maps. It is a type of integrative mixed method, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis. Group concept mapping allows for a collaborative group process with groups of any size, including a broad and diverse array of participants. Since its development in the late 1980s by William M.K. Trochim at Cornell University, it has been applied to various fields and contexts, including community and public health, social work, health care, human services,, instructional interventions, and biomedical research and evaluation. == Overview == Group concept mapping integrates qualitative group processes with multivariate analysis to help a group organize and visually represent its ideas on any topic of interest through a series of related maps. It combines the ideas of diverse participants to show what the group thinks and values in relation to the specific topic of interest. It is a type of structured conceptualization used by groups to develop a conceptual framework, often to help guide evaluation and planning efforts. Group concept mapping is participatory in nature, allowing participants to have an equal voice and to contribute through various methods. A group concept map visually represents all the ideas of a group and how they relate to each other, and depending on the scale, which ideas are more relevant, important, or feasible. == Process == Group concept mapping involves a structured multi-step process, including brainstorming, sorting and rating, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, and the generation and interpretation of multiple maps. The first step requires participants to brainstorm a large set of statements relevant to the topic of interest, usually in response to a focus prompt. Participants are then asked to individually sort those statements into categories based on their perceived similarity and rate each statement on one or more scales, such as importance or feasibility. The data is then analyzed using The Concept System software, which creates a series of interrelated maps using multidimensional scaling (MDS) of the sort data, hierarchical clustering of the MDS coordinates applying Ward's method, and the computation of average ratings for each statement and cluster of statements. The resulting maps display the individual statements in two-dimensional space with more similar statements located closer to each other, and grouped into clusters that partition the space on the map. The Concept System software also creates other maps that show the statements in each cluster rated on one or more scales, and absolute or relative cluster ratings between two cluster sets. As a last step in the process, participants are led through a structured interpretation session to better understand and label all the maps. == History == Group concept mapping was developed as a methodology in the late 1980s by William M.K. Trochim at Cornell University. Trochim is considered to be a leading evaluation expert, and he has taught evaluation and research methods at Cornell since 1980. Originally called "concept mapping", the methodology has evolved since its inception with the maturation of the field and the continued advancement of the software, which is now a Web application. == Uses == Group concept mapping can be used with any group for any topic of interest. It is often used by government agencies, academic institutions, national associations, not-for-profit and community-based organizations, and private businesses to help turn the ideas of the group into measurable actions. This includes in the areas of organizational development, strategic planning, needs assessment, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. Group concept mapping is well-documented, well-established methodology, and it has been used in hundreds of published papers. == Versus concept mapping and mind mapping == More generally, concept mapping is any process used for visually representing relationships between ideas in pictures or diagrams. A concept map is typically a diagram of multiple ideas, often represented as boxes or circles, linked in a graph (network) structure through arrows and words where each idea is connected to another. The technique was originally developed in the 1970s by Joseph D. Novak at Cornell University. Concept mapping may be done by an individual or a group. A mind map is a diagram used to visually represent information, centering on one word or idea with categories and sub-categories radiating off of it in a tree structure. Popularized by Tony Buzan in the 1970s, mind mapping is often a spontaneous exercise done by an individual or group to gather information about what they think around a single topic. Unlike Novak's concept maps and Buzan's mind maps, group concept mapping has a structured mathematical process (sorting and rating, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis) for organizing and visually representing multiple ideas of a group through a series of specific steps. In other words, in group concept mapping, the resulting visual representations are mathematically generated from mixed (qualitative and quantitative) data collected from a group of research subjects, whereas in Novak's concept maps and Buzan's mind maps the visual representations are drawn directly by the subjects resulting in diagrams that are qualitative data and final product at the same time.
OntoWiki
OntoWiki was a free and open-source semantic wiki application, meant to serve as an ontology editor and a knowledge acquisition system. It is a web-based application written in PHP and using either a MySQL database or a Virtuoso triple store. OntoWiki is form-based rather than syntax-based, and thus tries to hide as much of the complexity of knowledge representation formalisms from users as possible. OntoWiki is mainly being developed by the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) research group at the University of Leipzig, a group also known for the DBpedia project among others, in collaboration with volunteers around the world. In 2009 the AKSW research group got a budget of €425,000 from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany for the development of the OntoWiki. In 2010 OntoWiki became part of the technology stack supporting the LOD2 (linked open data) project. Leipzig University is one of the consortium members of the project, which is funded by a €6.5m EU grant. The development ended in 2016 due to the lack of capacity migrating from PHP 5 to 7 including the required Zend Framework from version 1 to 2.
IDMS
The Integrated Database Management System (IDMS) is a network model (CODASYL) database management system for mainframes. It was first developed at BFGoodrich and later marketed by Cullinane Database Systems (renamed Cullinet in 1983). Since 1989 the product has been owned by Computer Associates (now CA Technologies), who renamed it Advantage CA-IDMS and later simply to CA IDMS. In 2018 Broadcom acquired CA Technologies, renaming it back to IDMS. == History == The roots of IDMS go back to the pioneering database management system called Integrated Data Store (IDS), developed at General Electric by a team led by Charles Bachman and first released in 1964. In the early 1960s IDS was taken from its original form, by the computer group of the BFGoodrich Chemical Division, and re-written in a language called Intermediate System Language (ISL). ISL was designed as a portable system programming language able to produce code for a variety of target machines. Since ISL was actually written in ISL, it was able to be ported to other machine architectures with relative ease, and then to produce code that would execute on them. The Chemical Division computer group had given some thought to selling copies of IDMS to other companies, but was told by management that they were not in the software products business. Eventually, a deal was struck with John Cullinane to buy the rights and market the product. Because Cullinane was required to remit royalties back to B.F. Goodrich, all add-on products were listed and billed as separate products – even if they were mandatory for the core IDMS product to work. This sometimes confused customers. The original platforms were the GE 235 computer and GE DATANET-30 message switching computer: later the product was ported to IBM mainframes and to DEC and ICL hardware. The IBM-ported version runs on IBM mainframe systems (System/360, System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z9). In the mid-1980s, it was claimed that some 2,500 IDMS licenses had been sold. Users included the Strategic Air Command, Ford of Canada, Ford of Europe, Jaguar Cars, Clarks Shoes UK, Axa/PPP, MAPFRE, Royal Insurance, Tesco, Manulife, Hudson's Bay Company, Cleveland Clinic, Bank of Canada, General Electric, Aetna and BT in the UK. A version for use on the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 series of computers was sold to DEC and was marketed as DBMS-11. In 1976 the source code was licensed to ICL, who ported the software to run on their 2900 series mainframes, and subsequently also on the older 1900 range. ICL continued development of the software independently of Cullinane, selling the original ported product under the name ICL 2900 IDMS and an enhanced version as IDMSX. In this form it was used by many large UK users, an example being the Pay-As-You-Earn system operated by Inland Revenue. Many of these IDMSX systems for UK Government were still running in 2013. In the early to mid-1980s, relational database management systems started to become more popular, encouraged by increasing hardware power and the move to minicomputers and client–server architecture. Relational databases offered improved development productivity over CODASYL systems, and the traditional objections based on poor performance were slowly diminishing. Cullinet attempted to continue competing against IBM's DB2 and other relational databases by developing a relational front-end and a range of productivity tools. These included Automatic System Facility (ASF), which made use of a pre-existing IDMS feature called LRF (Logical Record Facility). ASF was a fill-in-the-blanks database generator that would also develop a mini-application to maintain the tables. It is difficult to judge whether such features may have been successful in extending the selling life of the product, but they made little impact in the long term. Those users who stayed with IDMS were primarily interested in its high performance, not in its relational capabilities. It was widely recognized (helped by a high-profile campaign by E. F. Codd, the father of the relational model) that there was a significant difference between a relational database and a network database with a relational veneer. In 1989 Computer Associates continued after Cullinet acquisition with the development and released Release 12.0 with full SQL in 1992–93. CA Technologies continued to market and support the CA IDMS and enhanced IDMS in subsequent releases by TCP/IP support, two phase commit support, XML publishing, zIIP specialty processor support, Web-enabled access in combination with CA IDMS Server, SQL Option and GUI database administration via CA IDMS Visual DBA tool. CA-IDMS systems are today still running businesses worldwide. Many customers have opted to web-enable their applications via the CA-IDMS SQL Option which is part of CA Technologies' Dual Database Strategy. == Integrated Data Dictionary == One of the sophisticated features of IDMS was its built-in Integrated data dictionary (IDD). The IDD was primarily developed to maintain database definitions. It was itself an IDMS database. DBAs (database administrators) and other users interfaced with the IDD using a language called Data Dictionary Definition Language (DDDL). IDD was also used to store definitions and code for other products in the IDMS family such as ADS/Online and IDMS-DC. IDD's power was that it was extensible and could be used to create definitions of just about anything. Some companies used it to develop in-house documentation. == Overview == === Logical Data Model === The data model offered to users is the CODASYL network model. The main structuring concepts in this model are records and sets. Records essentially follow the COBOL pattern, consisting of fields of different types: this allows complex internal structure such as repeating items and repeating groups. The most distinctive structuring concept in the Codasyl model is the set. Not to be confused with a mathematical set, a Codasyl set represents a one-to-many relationship between records: one owner, many members. The fact that a record can be a member in many different sets is the key factor that distinguishes the network model from the earlier hierarchical model. As with records, each set belongs to a named set type (different set types model different logical relationships). Sets are in fact ordered, and the sequence of records in a set can be used to convey information. A record can participate as an owner and member of any number of sets. Records have identity, the identity being represented by a value known as a database key. In IDMS, as in most other Codasyl implementations, the database key is directly related to the physical address of the record on disk. Database keys are also used as pointers to implement sets in the form of linked lists and trees. This close correspondence between the logical model and the physical implementation (which is not a strictly necessary part of the Codasyl model, but was a characteristic of all successful implementations) is responsible for the efficiency of database retrieval, but also makes operations such as database loading and restructuring rather expensive. Records can be accessed directly by database key, by following set relationships, or by direct access using key values. Initially the only direct access was through hashing, a mechanism known in the Codasyl model as CALC access. In IDMS, CALC access is implemented through an internal set, linking all records that share the same hash value to an owner record that occupies the first few bytes of every disk page. In subsequent years, some versions of IDMS added the ability to access records using BTree-like indexes. === Storage === IDMS organizes its databases as a series of files. These files are mapped and pre-formatted into so-called areas. The areas are subdivided into pages which correspond to physical blocks on the disk. The database records are stored within these blocks. The DBA allocates a fixed number of pages in a file for each area. The DBA then defines which records are to be stored in each area, and details of how they are to be stored. IDMS intersperses special space-allocation pages throughout the database. These pages are used to keep track of the free space available in each page in the database. To reduce I/O requirements, the free space is only tracked for all pages when the free space for the area falls below 30%. Four methods are available for storing records in an IDMS database: Direct, Sequential, CALC, and VIA. The Fujitsu/ICL IDMSX version extends this with two more methods, Page Direct, and Random. In direct mode the target database key is specified by the user and is stored as close as possible to that DB key, with the actual DB key on which the record is stored being returned to the application program. Sequential placement (not to be confused with indexed sequential), simply places each new record at the end of the area. This option is rarely used. CALC uses a hashing algo
Agent Communications Language
Agent Communication Language (ACL) consists of computer communication protocols that are intended for AI agents to communicate with each other. In 2007, protocols of this nature were proposed which include: FIPA-ACL (by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, a standardization consortium) KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language) After the surge in Generative AI with the use of Transformers and Large language models, the definition of agent has shifted away from physical agents to signify software systems built using the principles of Agentic AI. A new protocol to emerge in this area is Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP). NLIP is an application-level communication protocol defined between AI Agents or between a human and an AI agent. Ecma International; a standards body which develops and publishes international standards for the information and communication industry; published on 10 December 2025 five new standards and one technical report defining the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP). As a result, we can define agent communication protocols into two categories: ontology based agent communication protocols and generative AI based agent communication protocols. Ontology based agent communication protocols use a common ontology to be used between agents. An ontology is a part of the agent's knowledge base that describes what kind of things an agent can deal with and how they are related to each other. FIPA-ACL and KQML are examples of such protocols. These protocols rely on speech act theory developed by Searle in the 1960s and enhanced by Winograd and Flores in the 1970s. They define a set of performatives, also called Communicative Acts, and their meaning (e.g. ask-one). The content of the performative is not standardized, but varies from system to system. Implementation support of FIPA-ACL is included in FIPA-OS and Jade. Generative AI based agent communication protocols such as NLIP do not require a shared ontology among communicating agents. In its stead, they use generative AI models to translate natural language text, images, videos or other modalities of data into a local ontology. This provides for hot-extensibility where the same protocol can be used for multiple communication needs, and simplifies version control since different agents can use different versions of a shared ontology. NLIP has been designed with security considerations in mind. The specification and standards comprising NLIP are developed and maintained by Ecma Technical Community 56.