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Machine vision

Machine vision is the technology and methods used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision refers to many technologies, software and hardware products, integrated systems, actions, methods and expertise. Machine vision as a systems engineering discipline can be considered distinct from computer vision, a form of computer science. It attempts to integrate existing technologies in new ways and apply them to solve real world problems. The term is the prevalent one for these functions in industrial automation environments but is also used for these functions in other environment vehicle guidance. The overall machine vision process includes planning the details of the requirements and project, and then creating a solution. During run-time, the process starts with imaging, followed by automated analysis of the image and extraction of the required information. == Definition == Definitions of the term "Machine vision" vary, but all include the technology and methods used to extract information from an image on an automated basis, as opposed to image processing, where the output is another image. The information extracted can be a simple good-part/bad-part signal, or more a complex set of data such as the identity, position and orientation of each object in an image. The information can be used for such applications as automatic inspection and robot and process guidance in industry, for security monitoring and vehicle guidance. This field encompasses a large number of technologies, software and hardware products, integrated systems, actions, methods and expertise. Machine vision is practically the only term used for these functions in industrial automation applications; the term is less universal for these functions in other environments such as security and vehicle guidance. Machine vision as a systems engineering discipline can be considered distinct from computer vision, a form of basic computer science; machine vision attempts to integrate existing technologies in new ways and apply them to solve real world problems in a way that meets the requirements of industrial automation and similar application areas. The term is also used in a broader sense by trade shows and trade groups such as the Automated Imaging Association and the European Machine Vision Association. This broader definition also encompasses products and applications most often associated with image processing. The primary uses for machine vision are automatic inspection and industrial robot/process guidance. In more recent times the terms computer vision and machine vision have converged to a greater degree. See glossary of machine vision. == Imaging based automatic inspection and sorting == The primary uses for machine vision are imaging-based automatic inspection and sorting and robot guidance.; in this section the former is abbreviated as "automatic inspection". The overall process includes planning the details of the requirements and project, and then creating a solution. This section describes the technical process that occurs during the operation of the solution. === Methods and sequence of operation === The first step in the automatic inspection sequence of operation is acquisition of an image, typically using cameras, lenses, and lighting that has been designed to provide the differentiation required by subsequent processing. MV software packages and programs developed in them then employ various digital image processing techniques to extract the required information, and often make decisions (such as pass/fail) based on the extracted information. === Equipment === The components of an automatic inspection system usually include lighting, a camera or other imager, a processor, software, and output devices. === Imaging === The imaging device (e.g. camera) can either be separate from the main image processing unit or combined with it in which case the combination is generally called a smart camera or smart sensor. Inclusion of the full processing function into the same enclosure as the camera is often referred to as embedded processing. When separated, the connection may be made to specialized intermediate hardware, a custom processing appliance, or a frame grabber within a computer using either an analog or standardized digital interface (Camera Link, CoaXPress). MV implementations also use digital cameras capable of direct connections (without a framegrabber) to a computer via FireWire, USB or Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. While conventional (2D visible light) imaging is most commonly used in MV, alternatives include multispectral imaging, hyperspectral imaging, imaging various infrared bands, line scan imaging, 3D imaging of surfaces and X-ray imaging. Key differentiations within MV 2D visible light imaging are monochromatic vs. color, frame rate, resolution, and whether or not the imaging process is simultaneous over the entire image, making it suitable for moving processes. Though the vast majority of machine vision applications are solved using two-dimensional imaging, machine vision applications utilizing 3D imaging are a growing niche within the industry. The most commonly used method for 3D imaging is scanning based triangulation which utilizes motion of the product or image during the imaging process. A laser is projected onto the surfaces of an object. In machine vision this is accomplished with a scanning motion, either by moving the workpiece, or by moving the camera & laser imaging system. The line is viewed by a camera from a different angle; the deviation of the line represents shape variations. Lines from multiple scans are assembled into a depth map or point cloud. Stereoscopic vision is used in special cases involving unique features present in both views of a pair of cameras. Other 3D methods used for machine vision are time of flight and grid based. One method is grid array based systems using pseudorandom structured light system as employed by the Microsoft Kinect system circa 2012. === Image processing === After an image is acquired, it is processed. Central processing functions are generally done by a CPU, a GPU, a FPGA or a combination of these. Deep learning training and inference impose higher processing performance requirements. Multiple stages of processing are generally used in a sequence that ends up as a desired result. A typical sequence might start with tools such as filters which modify the image, followed by extraction of objects, then extraction (e.g. measurements, reading of codes) of data from those objects, followed by communicating that data, or comparing it against target values to create and communicate "pass/fail" results. Machine vision image processing methods include; Stitching/Registration: Combining of adjacent 2D or 3D images. Filtering (e.g. morphological filtering) Thresholding: Thresholding starts with setting or determining a gray value that will be useful for the following steps. The value is then used to separate portions of the image, and sometimes to transform each portion of the image to simply black and white based on whether it is below or above that grayscale value. Pixel counting: counts the number of light or dark pixels Segmentation: Partitioning a digital image into multiple segments to simplify and/or change the representation of an image into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyze. Edge detection: finding object edges Color Analysis: Identify parts, products and items using color, assess quality from color, and isolate features using color. Blob detection and extraction: inspecting an image for discrete blobs of connected pixels (e.g. a black hole in a grey object) as image landmarks. Neural network / deep learning / machine learning processing: weighted and self-training multi-variable decision making Circa 2019 there is a large expansion of this, using deep learning and machine learning to significantly expand machine vision capabilities. The most common result of such processing is classification. Examples of classification are object identification,"pass fail" classification of identified objects and OCR. Pattern recognition including template matching. Finding, matching, and/or counting specific patterns. This may include location of an object that may be rotated, partially hidden by another object, or varying in size. Barcode, Data Matrix and "2D barcode" reading Optical character recognition: automated reading of text such as serial numbers Gauging/Metrology: measurement of object dimensions (e.g. in pixels, inches or millimeters) Comparison against target values to determine a "pass or fail" or "go/no go" result. For example, with code or bar code verification, the read value is compared to the stored target value. For gauging, a measurement is compared against the proper value and tolerances. For verification of alpha-numberic codes, the
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Beauty.AI

Beauty.AI is a mobile beauty pageant for humans and a contest for programmers developing algorithms for evaluating human appearance. The mobile app and website created by Youth Laboratories that uses artificial intelligence technology to evaluate people's external appearance through certain algorithms, such as symmetry, facial blemishes, wrinkles, estimated age and age appearance, and comparisons to actors and models. The Beauty.AI 2.0 contest caused great concern over important ethical issues with deep neural networks such as age, race and gender bias and lead to the creation of the Diversity.AI think tank dedicated to developing new methods for uncovering and managing bias in artificially intelligent systems. Beauty.AI was also an attempt to find approaches on how machines can perceive human face through evaluating particular features, commonly associated with health and beauty. == Concept == The Beauty.AI app was created by Youth Laboratories, a company based out of Russia and Hong Kong that focuses on facial skin analytics. The bioinformation company Insilico Medicine assists in the Beauty.AI app by testing its deep learning techniques to the app. One goal of the app is to reduce the need for human and animal testing as well as improving people's overall health. Its first contest was started in December 2016, and the results were announced in August 2016. More than 60,000 people submitted entries into the contest. The mobile app uses artificial intelligence technology to inspect photographs for certain facial features in order to both determine a person's beauty through artificial means by multiple robots. Part of the Beauty.AI app's purpose is to collect visual and anecdotal data to improve its creator's Youth Laboratories skin analyst skills. == Accusations of racism == There were a total of 44 individuals from different age groups and genders judged as the most attractive, with 37 white entrants, six Asian entrants, and one dark-skinned entrant. The app has received criticism from social justice advocates and computer science professionals. However, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, chief science officer of Youth Laboratories and chief technology officer Konstantin Kiselev, both for Youth Laboratories, noted that a lack of data may have contributed to these results. Also, Kiselev added that another issue was that approximately 75% of entrants were white Europeans, whereas only 7% and 1% were from India and Africa, respectively. Kiselev stated that they would work on doing more and better outreach to these areas to improve in this area. Despite this, it was said by Dr. Zhavoronkov that the AI would discard photos of dark-skinned people if the lighting is too poor. Dr. Zhavoronkov vowed to weed out the issues for the next beauty pageant and to try to avoid a similar controversy in the future.
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Eaze

Eaze is an American company based in San Francisco, California that launched a medical cannabis delivery app of the same name in 2014. == History == Eaze was launched in 2014 by Keith McCarty to deliver medical marijuana to patients in California. McCarty started the company in his San Francisco apartment with four employees. The company provides a mobile app to connect users with cannabis dispensaries, but does not grow or sell marijuana itself, and has been nicknamed “the Uber of Weed”. As of 2017, the company operates in more than 100 cities within California. In 2017, Eaze reported 300 percent growth over the previous year. It has 81 employees, and performs 120,000 deliveries per month to 250,000 users. A survey of Eaze users revealed that 66% are male, 57% are between 22 and 34, just over half have a bachelor's degree, and 49% have an annual income over $75,000. The company's vaporizer cartridge sales reached $1 million in sales in 4 months, and 31% of customers had ordered a vaporizer by the end of 2016. In 2016, Eaze founder Keith McCarty stepped down from his position as CEO and was replaced by Jim Patterson, who served as the company's chief product and technology officer. == EazeMD == EazeMD is a service that helps people acquire a medical marijuana card. It is a California-based telemedicine service in which physicians assess patients through an online video chat. It is California's largest telemedicine service for marijuana referrals. In June 2017, a former employee of one of these physicians accessed patient data in the physician's records system, causing a security breach. However, there was no evidence that Eaze data was accessed. == Eaze Insights == Eaze Insights conducts surveys of their users and compiles data into reports on cannabis use. Statistics from their reports have been cited in Seattle Weekly, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Fortune, and other general interest publications. == Financing == The company announced its $10 million Series A funding in April 2015 by multiple venture capital firms, including the Snoop Dogg-backed Casa Verde Capital. In October 2016, Eaze announced its series B funding in the amount of $13 million from five investors, making the company "the highest-funded startup in the history of the cannabis industry, as well as its fastest-growing one". In September 2017, the company raised another $27 million in venture funding. The Series B funding was led by Bailey Capital, joined by DCM Ventures, Kaya Ventures, and FJ Labs. According to the company' officials in 2017, Eaze managed to raise more than $52 million since its inception in 2014.
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Enterprise resource planning

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of business management software—typically a suite of integrated applications—that an organization can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities. The finance module in particular is essential to a suite of applications meeting the definition of an ERP system. The finance module provides the system of record for the organisation; recording the commercial impact of the business operations in the General Ledger. ERP systems can be local-based or cloud-based. Cloud-based applications have grown rapidly since the early 2010s due to the increased efficiencies arising from information being readily available from any location with Internet access. However, ERP differs from integrated business management systems by including planning all resources that are required in the future to meet business objectives. This includes plans for getting suitable staff and manufacturing capabilities for future needs. ERP provides an integrated and continuously updated view of core business processes, typically using a shared database managed by a database management system. ERP systems track business resources—cash, raw materials, production capacity—and the status of business commitments: orders, purchase orders, and payroll. The applications that make up the system share data across various departments (manufacturing, purchasing, sales, accounting, etc.) that provide the data. ERP facilitates information flow between all business functions and manages connections to outside stakeholders. Estimates of the size of the global ERP market range between USD $78 and $81 billion in 2026 . Though early ERP systems focused on large enterprises, smaller enterprises increasingly use ERP systems. The ERP system integrates varied organizational systems and facilitates error-free transactions and production, thereby enhancing the organization's efficiency. However, developing an ERP system differs from traditional system development. ERP systems run on a variety of computer hardware and network configurations, typically using a database as an information repository. == Origin == Business and technology research and advisory firm Gartner is credited for first using the acronym ERP in the 1990s. The term captured a functional extension of two manufacturing-based concepts, material requirements planning (MRP) and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II). Without replacing these terms, ERP came to represent a larger whole that reflected the evolution of application integration beyond manufacturing. Not all ERP packages are developed from a manufacturing core; ERP vendors variously began assembling their packages with finance-and-accounting, maintenance, and human-resource components. By the mid-1990s ERP systems addressed all core enterprise functions. Governments and non–profit organizations also began to use ERP systems. An "ERP system selection methodology" is a formal process for selecting an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Existing methodologies include: Kuiper's funnel method, Dobrin's three-dimensional (3D) web-based decision support tool, and the Clarkston Potomac methodology. == Expansion == ERP systems experienced rapid growth in the 1990s. Because of the year 2000 problem many companies took the opportunity to replace their old systems with ERP. ERP systems initially focused on automating back office functions that did not directly affect customers and the public. Front office functions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), dealt directly with customers, or e-business systems such as e-commerce and e-government—or supplier relationship management (SRM) became integrated later, when the internet simplified communicating with external parties. "ERP II" was coined in 2000 in an article by Gartner Publications entitled ERP Is Dead—Long Live ERP II. It describes web–based software that provides real–time access to ERP systems to employees and partners (such as suppliers and customers). The ERP II role expands traditional ERP resource optimization and transaction processing. Rather than just manage buying, selling, etc.—ERP II leverages information in the resources under its management to help the enterprise collaborate with other enterprises. ERP II is more flexible than the first generation ERP. Rather than confine ERP system capabilities within the organization, it goes beyond the corporate walls to interact with other systems. Enterprise application suite is an alternate name for such systems. ERP II systems are typically used to enable collaborative initiatives such as supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) among business partner organizations through the use of various electronic business technologies. The large proportion of companies are pursuing a strong managerial targets in ERP system instead of acquire an ERP company. Developers now make more effort to integrate mobile devices with the ERP system. ERP vendors are extending ERP to these devices, along with other business applications, so that businesses don't have to rely on third-party applications. As an example, the e-commerce platform Shopify was able to make ERP tools from Microsoft and Oracle available on its app in October 2021. Technical stakes of modern ERP concern integration—hardware, applications, networking, supply chains. ERP now covers more functions and roles—including decision making, stakeholders' relationships, standardization, transparency, globalization, etc. == Functional areas == An ERP system covers the following common functional areas. In many ERP systems, these are called and grouped together as ERP modules: Financial accounting: general ledger, fixed assets, payables including vouchering, matching and payment, receivables and collections, cash management, financial consolidation Management accounting: budgeting, costing, cost management, activity based costing, billing, invoicing (optional) Human resources: recruiting, training, rostering, payroll, benefits, retirement and pension plans, diversity management, retirement, separation Manufacturing: engineering, bill of materials, work orders, scheduling, capacity, workflow management, quality control, manufacturing process, manufacturing projects, manufacturing flow, product life cycle management Order processing: order to cash, order entry, credit checking, pricing, available to promise, inventory, shipping, sales analysis and reporting, sales commissioning Supply chain management: supply chain planning, supplier scheduling, product configurator, order to cash, purchasing, inventory, claim processing, warehousing (receiving, putaway, picking and packing) Project management: project planning, resource planning, project costing, work breakdown structure, billing, time and expense, performance units, activity management Customer relationship management (CRM): sales and marketing, commissions, service, customer contact, call center support – CRM systems are not always considered part of ERP systems but rather business support systems (BSS) Supplier relationship management (SRM): suppliers, orders, payments. Data services: various "self-service" interfaces for customers, suppliers or employees Management of school and educational institutes. Contract management: creating, monitoring, and managing contracts, reducing administrative burdens and minimising legal risks. These modules often feature contract templates, electronic signature capabilities, automated alerts for contract milestones, and advanced search functionality. === GRP – ERP use in government === Government resource planning (GRP) is the equivalent of an ERP for the public sector and an integrated office automation system for government bodies. The software structure, modularization, core algorithms and main interfaces do not differ from other ERPs, and ERP software suppliers manage to adapt their systems to government agencies. Both system implementations, in private and public organizations, are adopted to improve productivity and overall business performance in organizations, but comparisons (private vs. public) of implementations shows that the main factors influencing ERP implementation success in the public sector are cultural. == Best practices == Most ERP systems incorporate best practices. This means the software reflects the vendor's interpretation of the most effective way to perform each business process. Systems vary in how conveniently the customer can modify these practices. Use of best practices eases compliance with requirements such as International Financial Reporting Standards, Sarbanes–Oxley, or Basel II. They can also help comply with de facto industry standards, such as electronic funds transfer. This is because the procedure can be readily
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SemEval

SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems; it evolved from the Senseval word sense evaluation series. The evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language. While meaning is intuitive to humans, transferring those intuitions to computational analysis has proved elusive. This series of evaluations provides a mechanism to characterize in more precise terms exactly what is necessary to compute in meaning. As such, the evaluations provide an emergent mechanism to identify the problems and solutions for computations with meaning. These exercises have evolved to articulate more of the dimensions that are involved in our use of language. They began with apparently simple attempts to identify word senses computationally. They have evolved to investigate the interrelationships among the elements in a sentence (e.g., semantic role labeling), relations between sentences (e.g., coreference), and the nature of what we are saying (semantic relations and sentiment analysis). The purpose of the SemEval and Senseval exercises is to evaluate semantic analysis systems. "Semantic Analysis" refers to a formal analysis of meaning, and "computational" refer to approaches that in principle support effective implementation. The first three evaluations, Senseval-1 through Senseval-3, were focused on word sense disambiguation (WSD), each time growing in the number of languages offered in the tasks and in the number of participating teams. Beginning with the fourth workshop, SemEval-2007 (SemEval-1), the nature of the tasks evolved to include semantic analysis tasks outside of word sense disambiguation. Triggered by the conception of the SEM conference, the SemEval community had decided to hold the evaluation workshops yearly in association with the SEM conference. It was also the decision that not every evaluation task will be run every year, e.g. none of the WSD tasks were included in the SemEval-2012 workshop. == History == === Early evaluation of algorithms for word sense disambiguation === From the earliest days, assessing the quality of word sense disambiguation algorithms had been primarily a matter of intrinsic evaluation, and “almost no attempts had been made to evaluate embedded WSD components”. Only very recently (2006) had extrinsic evaluations begun to provide some evidence for the value of WSD in end-user applications. Until 1990 or so, discussions of the sense disambiguation task focused mainly on illustrative examples rather than comprehensive evaluation. The early 1990s saw the beginnings of more systematic and rigorous intrinsic evaluations, including more formal experimentation on small sets of ambiguous words. === Senseval to SemEval === In April 1997, Martha Palmer and Marc Light organized a workshop entitled Tagging with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How? in conjunction with the Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing. At the time, there was a clear recognition that manually annotated corpora had revolutionized other areas of NLP, such as part-of-speech tagging and parsing, and that corpus-driven approaches had the potential to revolutionize automatic semantic analysis as well. Kilgarriff recalled that there was "a high degree of consensus that the field needed evaluation", and several practical proposals by Resnik and Yarowsky kicked off a discussion that led to the creation of the Senseval evaluation exercises. === SemEval's 3, 2 or 1 year(s) cycle === After SemEval-2010, many participants feel that the 3-year cycle is a long wait. Many other shared tasks such as Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) and Recognizing Textual Entailments (RTE) run annually. For this reason, the SemEval coordinators gave the opportunity for task organizers to choose between a 2-year or a 3-year cycle. The SemEval community favored the 3-year cycle. Although the votes within the SemEval community favored a 3-year cycle, organizers and coordinators had settled to split the SemEval task into 2 evaluation workshops. This was triggered by the introduction of the new SEM conference. The SemEval organizers thought it would be appropriate to associate our event with the SEM conference and collocate the SemEval workshop with the SEM conference. The organizers got very positive responses (from the task coordinators/organizers and participants) about the association with the yearly SEM, and 8 tasks were willing to switch to 2012. Thus was born SemEval-2012 and SemEval-2013. The current plan is to switch to a yearly SemEval schedule to associate it with the SEM conference but not every task needs to run every year. ==== List of Senseval and SemEval Workshops ==== Senseval-1 took place in the summer of 1998 for English, French, and Italian, culminating in a workshop held at Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex, England on September 2–4. Senseval-2 took place in the summer of 2001, and was followed by a workshop held in July 2001 in Toulouse, in conjunction with ACL 2001. Senseval-2 included tasks for Basque, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Swedish. Senseval-3 took place in March–April 2004, followed by a workshop held in July 2004 in Barcelona, in conjunction with ACL 2004. Senseval-3 included 14 different tasks for core word sense disambiguation, as well as identification of semantic roles, multilingual annotations, logic forms, subcategorization acquisition. SemEval-2007 (Senseval-4) took place in 2007, followed by a workshop held in conjunction with ACL in Prague. SemEval-2007 included 18 different tasks targeting the evaluation of systems for the semantic analysis of text. A special issue of Language Resources and Evaluation is devoted to the result. SemEval-2010 took place in 2010, followed by a workshop held in conjunction with ACL in Uppsala. SemEval-2010 included 18 different tasks targeting the evaluation of semantic analysis systems. SemEval-2012 took place in 2012; it was associated with the new SEM, First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, and co-located with NAACL, Montreal, Canada. SemEval-2012 included 8 different tasks targeting at evaluating computational semantic systems. However, there was no WSD task involved in SemEval-2012, the WSD related tasks were scheduled in the upcoming SemEval-2013. SemEval-2013 was associated with NAACL 2013, North American Association of Computational Linguistics, Georgia, USA and took place in 2013. It included 13 different tasks targeting at evaluating computational semantic systems. SemEval-2014 took place in 2014. It was co-located with COLING 2014, 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and SEM 2014, Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, Dublin, Ireland. There were 10 different tasks in SemEval-2014 evaluating various computational semantic systems. SemEval-2015 took place in 2015. It was co-located with NAACL-HLT 2015, 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies and SEM 2015, Third Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, Denver, USA. There were 17 different tasks in SemEval-2015 evaluating various computational semantic systems. == SemEval Workshop framework == The framework of the SemEval/Senseval evaluation workshops emulates the Message Understanding Conferences (MUCs) and other evaluation workshops ran by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)). Stages of SemEval/Senseval evaluation workshops Firstly, all likely participants were invited to express their interest and participate in the exercise design. A timetable towards a final workshop was worked out. A plan for selecting evaluation materials was agreed. 'Gold standards' for the individual tasks were acquired, often human annotators were considered as a gold standard to measure precision and recall scores of computer systems. These 'gold standards' are what the computational systems strive towards. In WSD tasks, human annotators were set on the task of generating a set of correct WSD answers (i.e. the correct sense for a given word in a given context) The gold standard materials, without answers, were released to participants, who then had a short time to run their programs over them and return their sets of answers to the organizers. The organizers then scored the answers and the scores were announced and discussed at a workshop. == Semantic evaluation tasks == Senseval-1 & Senseval-2 focused on evaluation WSD systems on major languages that were available corpus and computerized dictionary. Senseval-3 looked beyond the lexemes and started to evaluate systems that looked into wider areas of semantics, such as Semantic Roles (technically known as Theta roles in formal semantics), Logic Form Transformation (commonly semantics of phrases, clauses or sentences were represented
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Cumulus (software)

Cumulus is a digital asset management software designed for client/server system which is developed by Canto Software. The product makes use of metadata for indexing, organizing, and searching. == History == Cumulus was first released as a Macintosh application in 1992, and was named by Apple Computer as the "Most Innovative Product of 1992". Cumulus introduced search capabilities beyond those available in the Macintosh at the time, particularly relating to thumbnails. Cumulus 1.0 was a single-user product with no network capabilities. Among the main features of Cumulus 1.0, the search function automatically generated previews and contained support for the included AppleTalk – Peer-to-Peer – network. Cumulus 2.5 was available in five different languages and received the 1993 MacUser magazine Eddy award for "Best Publishing & Graphics Utility". In 1995, Canto introduced the scanner software "Cirrus" to focus on the development of Cumulus. Cumulus 3, released in 1996, introduced a server version for the first time and contained the possibility to spread files over the Internet via the "Web Publisher". Since Apple offered Cumulus 3 with its "Workgroup Server" as a bundle, Cumulus became one of the leading digital asset management systems. Cumulus 4 was the first version that was network-ready, and was available for Macintosh, Windows and UNIX operating systems allowing for cross-platform file sharing. Released in 1998, the support of Solaris was discounted later. Cumulus 5 modified the software core to use an open architecture providing an API to external systems and databases. The open architecture of Cumulus 5 also enabled a more functional bridge between Cumulus and the Internet. Cumulus 6 introduced Embedded Java Plugin (EJP) which allowed system integrators to build custom Java plug-ins in order to extend the functionality of the Cumulus client. Cumulus 6.5 marked the end of the Cumulus Single User Edition product, which was licensed to MediaDex for further development and distribution. Cumulus 7 was introduced summer of 2006. Cumulus 8 was released in June 2009, with new indexing capabilities taking advantage of multicore/multiprocessor systems, and ability to manage a wider variety of file formats. Cumulus 8.5 was released in May 2011. Support was added for multilingual metadata, sometimes referred to as "World Metadata." Cumulus Sites was updated to support metadata editing and file uploads. Cumulus 8.6 was released in July 2012, and contains an updated user interface for the administration of Cumulus Sites and additional features for web-based administration of Cumulus. Other additions include features for collaboration links, multi-language support and automated version control. Cumulus 9 was released in September 2013 and introduced a new Web Client User Interface and the Cumulus Video Cloud. The Cumulus Web Client UI was redesigned to provide users with a modern, easy-to-use interface to support and guide the user while addressing modern business needs. The Cumulus Video Cloud extends the Cumulus video handling capabilities to add conversion and global streaming. Cumulus 9 also saw the addition of upload collection links which allow external collaborators to drag and drop files directly into Cumulus without needing a Cumulus account. Cumulus 9.1 was released in May 2014 and introduced the Adobe Drive Adapter for Cumulus which allows users to browse and search digital assets in Cumulus directly from Adobe work environments such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premier and other Adobe applications. Cumulus 10 (Cumulus X) was released July 2015 and introduced two mobile-friendly products: the Cumulus app and Portals. The Cumulus app on iOS was designed to allow users to collaborate either on an iPhone or iPad. Portals is the read-only version of the Cumulus Web Client where users can work with assets that admins allow. Cumulus 10.1 was introduced in January 2016 and included the InDesign Client integration where users can work with Adobe InDesign while accessing their assets from Cumulus. Cumulus 10.2 was introduced in September 2016 and brought the Media Delivery Cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows users to manage their media rendition in a single source and distribute media files globally across different channels and devices. Cumulus 10.2.3 was released in February 2017 and came with a "crop and customize photos" feature for Portals and the Web Client. == Product overview == The cataloging of the file via upload into the archive is where Cumulus transfers maximum information about the file from the metadata. For image or photo files, this is typically Exif and IPTC data. The metadata is mainly used to search the archive. The use of embargo data supports license management for copyrighted material. The managed files can be cataloged and their usage can be set. The indexing is based on a predefined taxonomy, which is governed by the internal rules of the organization or by industry standards. You can specify whether files can only be used for specific purposes or only by certain groups of people. The production management system includes version management for files. Via the publication function, the files can be distributed directly via links or e-mails. It's also possible to access from the outside via the Cumulus Portals web interface, which allows a read access to released content from the catalog. There are different variants, starting with the "Workgroup archive server" up to the "Enterprise Business Server" for large companies. Both server and client are extensible through a Java-based plug-in architecture. Since version 7.0, there is a web application based on Ajax with a separate user interface. For access to the Cumulus catalog on mobile, there has been an application for Apple devices based on iOS since 2010. == Miscellaneous == In 2015, Cumulus developer Canto established the first Canto digital asset management (DAM) event. The event is held annually in Berlin. The Henry Stewart team has been hosting DAM conferences since 2006.
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Speech recognition

Speech recognition (automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition, or speech-to-text (STT)) is a sub-field of computational linguistics concerned with methods and technologies that translate spoken language into text or other interpretable forms. Speech recognition applications include voice user interfaces, where the user speaks to a device, which "listens" and processes the audio. Common voice applications include interpreting commands for calling, call routing, home automation, and aircraft control. These applications are called direct voice input. Productivity applications include searching audio recordings, creating transcripts, and dictation. Speech recognition can be used to analyse speaker characteristics, such as identifying native language using pronunciation assessment. Voice recognition (speaker identification) refers to identifying the speaker, rather than speech contents. Recognizing the speaker can simplify the task of translating speech in systems trained on a specific person's voice. It can also be used to authenticate the speaker as part of a security process. == History == Applications for speech recognition developed over many decades, with progress accelerated due to advances in deep learning and the use of big data. These advances are reflected in an increase in academic papers, and greater system adoption. Key areas of growth include vocabulary size, more accurate recognition for unfamiliar speakers (speaker independence), and faster processing speed. === Pre-1970 === 1952 – Bell Labs researchers, Stephen Balashek, R. Biddulph, and K. H. Davis, built Audrey for single-speaker digit recognition. Their system located the formants in the power spectrum of each utterance. 1960 – Gunnar Fant developed and published the source–filter model of speech production. 1962 – IBM's 16-word "Shoebox" machine's speech recognition debuted at the 1962 World's Fair. 1966 – Linear predictive coding, a speech coding method, was proposed by Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. 1969 – Funding at Bell Labs came to a halt for several years after the company's head engineer, John R. Pierce, wrote an open letter criticizing speech recognition research. This defunding lasted until Pierce retired and James L. Flanagan took over. Raj Reddy was the first person to work on continuous speech recognition, as a graduate student at Stanford University in the late 1960s. Previous systems required users to pause after each word. Reddy's system issued spoken commands for playing chess. Around this time, Soviet researchers invented the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm and used it to create a recognizer capable of operating on a 200-word vocabulary. DTW processed speech by dividing it into short frames (e.g. 10 ms segments) and treating each frame as a unit. Speaker independence, however, remained unsolved. === 1970–1990 === 1971 – DARPA funded a five-year speech recognition research project, Speech Understanding Research, seeking a minimum vocabulary size of 1,000 words. The project considered speech understanding a key to achieving progress in speech recognition, which was later disproved. BBN, IBM, Carnegie Mellon (CMU), and Stanford Research Institute participated. 1972 – The IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing group held a conference in Newton, Massachusetts. 1976 – The first ICASSP was held in Philadelphia, which became a major venue for publishing on speech recognition. During the late 1960s, Leonard Baum developed the mathematics of Markov chains at the Institute for Defense Analysis. A decade later, at CMU, Raj Reddy's students James Baker and Janet M. Baker began using the hidden Markov model (HMM) for speech recognition. James Baker had learned about HMMs while at the Institute for Defense Analysis. HMMs enabled researchers to combine sources of knowledge, such as acoustics, language, and syntax, in a unified probabilistic model. By the mid-1980s, Fred Jelinek's team at IBM created a voice-activated typewriter called Tangora, which could handle a 20,000-word vocabulary. Jelinek's statistical approach placed less emphasis on emulating human brain processes in favor of statistical modelling. (Jelinek's group independently discovered the application of HMMs to speech.) This was controversial among linguists since HMMs are too simplistic to account for many features of human languages. However, the HMM proved to be a highly useful way for modelling speech and replaced dynamic time warping as the dominant speech recognition algorithm in the 1980s. 1982 – Dragon Systems, founded by James and Janet M. Baker, was one of IBM's few competitors. === Practical speech recognition === The 1980s also saw the introduction of the n-gram language model. 1987 – The back-off model enabled language models to use multiple-length n-grams, and CSELT used HMM to recognize languages (in software and hardware, e.g. RIPAC). At the end of the DARPA program in 1976, the best computer available to researchers was the PDP-10 with 4 MB of RAM. It could take up to 100 minutes to decode 30 seconds of speech. Practical products included: 1984 – the Apricot Portable was released with up to 4096 words support, of which only 64 could be held in RAM at a time. 1987 – a recognizer from Kurzweil Applied Intelligence 1990 – Dragon Dictate, a consumer product released in 1990. AT&T deployed the Voice Recognition Call Processing service in 1992 to route telephone calls without a human operator. The technology was developed by Lawrence Rabiner and others at Bell Labs. By the early 1990s, the vocabulary of the typical commercial speech recognition system had exceeded the average human vocabulary. Reddy's former student, Xuedong Huang, developed the Sphinx-II system at CMU. Sphinx-II was the first to do speaker-independent, large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition, and it won DARPA's 1992 evaluation. Handling continuous speech with a large vocabulary was a major milestone. Huang later founded the speech recognition group at Microsoft in 1993. Reddy's student Kai-Fu Lee joined Apple, where, in 1992, he helped develop the Casper speech interface prototype. Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgium-based speech recognition company, acquired other companies, including Kurzweil Applied Intelligence in 1997 and Dragon Systems in 2000. L&H was used in Windows XP. L&H was an industry leader until an accounting scandal destroyed it in 2001. L&H speech technology was bought by ScanSoft, which became Nuance in 2005. Apple licensed Nuance software for its digital assistant Siri. ==== 2000s ==== In the 2000s, DARPA sponsored two speech recognition programs: Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-Text (EARS) in 2002, followed by Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) in 2005. Four teams participated in EARS: IBM; a team led by BBN with LIMSI and the University of Pittsburgh; Cambridge University; and a team composed of ICSI, SRI, and the University of Washington. EARS funded the collection of the Switchboard telephone speech corpus, which contained 260 hours of recorded conversations from over 500 speakers. The GALE program focused on Arabic and Mandarin broadcast news. Google's first effort at speech recognition came in 2007 after recruiting Nuance researchers. Its first product, GOOG-411, was a telephone-based directory service. Since at least 2006, the U.S. National Security Agency has employed keyword spotting, allowing analysts to index large volumes of recorded conversations and identify speech containing "interesting" keywords. Other government research programs focused on intelligence applications, such as DARPA's EARS program and IARPA's Babel program. In the early 2000s, speech recognition was dominated by hidden Markov models combined with feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANN). Later, speech recognition was taken over by long short-term memory (LSTM), a recurrent neural network (RNN) published by Sepp Hochreiter & Jürgen Schmidhuber in 1997. LSTM RNNs avoid the vanishing gradient problem and can learn "Very Deep Learning" tasks that require memories of events that happened thousands of discrete time steps earlier, which is important for speech. Around 2007, LSTMs trained with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) began to outperform. In 2015, Google reported a 49 percent error‑rate reduction in its speech recognition via CTC‑trained LSTM. Transformers, a type of neural network based solely on attention, were adopted in computer vision and language modelling, and then to speech recognition. Deep feed-forward (non-recurrent) networks for acoustic modelling were introduced in 2009 by Geoffrey Hinton and his students at the University of Toronto, and by Li Deng and colleagues at Microsoft Research. In contrast to the prioer incremental improvements, deep learning decreased error rates by 30%. Both shallow and deep forms (e.g., recurrent nets) of ANNs had been explored since the 1980s. Howev
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Sub-pixel resolution

In digital image processing, sub-pixel resolution can be obtained in images constructed from sources with information exceeding the nominal pixel resolution of said images. == Example == For example, if the image of a ship of length 50 metres (160 ft), viewed side-on, is 500 pixels long, the nominal resolution (pixel size) on the side of the ship facing the camera is 0.1 metres (3.9 in). Now sub-pixel resolution of well resolved features can measure ship movements which are an order of magnitude (10×) smaller. Movement is specifically mentioned here because measuring absolute positions requires an accurate lens model and known reference points within the image to achieve sub-pixel position accuracy. Small movements can however be measured (down to 1 cm) with simple calibration procedures. Specific fit functions often suffer specific bias with respect to image pixel boundaries. Users should therefore take care to avoid these "pixel locking" (or "peak locking") effects. == Determining feasibility == Whether features in a digital image are sharp enough to achieve sub-pixel resolution can be quantified by measuring the point spread function (PSF) of an isolated point in the image. If the image does not contain isolated points, similar methods can be applied to edges in the image. It is also important when attempting sub-pixel resolution to keep image noise to a minimum. This, in the case of a stationary scene, can be measured from a time series of images. Appropriate pixel averaging, through both time (for stationary images) and space (for uniform regions of the image) is often used to prepare the image for sub-pixel resolution measurements.
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Expectation propagation

Expectation propagation (EP) is a technique in Bayesian machine learning. EP finds approximations to a probability distribution. It uses an iterative approach that uses the factorization structure of the target distribution. It differs from other Bayesian approximation approaches such as variational Bayesian methods. More specifically, suppose we wish to approximate an intractable probability distribution p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} with a tractable distribution q ( x ) {\displaystyle q(\mathbf {x} )} . Expectation propagation achieves this approximation by minimizing the Kullback–Leibler divergence K L ( p | | q ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (p||q)} . Variational Bayesian methods minimize K L ( q | | p ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (q||p)} instead. If q ( x ) {\displaystyle q(\mathbf {x} )} is a Gaussian N ( x | μ , Σ ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {N}}(\mathbf {x} |\mu ,\Sigma )} , then K L ( p | | q ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {KL} (p||q)} is minimized with μ {\displaystyle \mu } and Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } being equal to the mean of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} and the covariance of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(\mathbf {x} )} , respectively; this is called moment matching. == Applications == Expectation propagation via moment matching plays a vital role in approximation for indicator functions that appear when deriving the message passing equations for TrueSkill.
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Autonomous things

Autonomous things, abbreviated AuT, or the Internet of autonomous things, abbreviated as IoAT, is an emerging term for the technological developments that are expected to bring computers into the physical environment as autonomous entities without human direction, freely moving and interacting with humans and other objects. Self-navigating drones are the first AuT technology in (limited) deployment. It is expected that the first mass-deployment of AuT technologies will be the autonomous car, generally expected to be available around 2020. Other currently expected AuT technologies include home robotics (e.g., machines that provide care for the elderly, infirm or young), and military robots (air, land or sea autonomous machines with information-collection or target-attack capabilities). AuT technologies share many common traits, which justify the common notation. They are all based on recent breakthroughs in the domains of (deep) machine learning and artificial intelligence. They all require extensive and prompt regulatory developments to specify the requirements from them and to license and manage their deployment (see the further reading below). And they all require unprecedented levels of safety (e.g., automobile safety) and security, to overcome concerns about the potential negative impact of the new technology. As an example, the autonomous car both addresses the main existing safety issues and creates new issues. It is expected to be much safer than existing vehicles, by eliminating the single most dangerous element – the driver. The US's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 94 percent of US accidents were the result of human error and poor decision-making, including speeding and impaired driving, and the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School claims that "Some ninety percent of motor vehicle crashes are caused at least in part by human error". So while safety standards like the ISO 26262 specify the required safety, there is still a burden on the industry to demonstrate acceptable safety. While car accidents claim every year 35,000 lives in the US, and 1.25 million worldwide, some believe that even "a car that's 10 times as safe, which means 3,500 people die on the roads each year [in the US alone]" would not be accepted by the public. The acceptable level may be closer to the current figures on aviation accidents and incidents, with under a thousand worldwide deaths in most years – three orders of magnitude lower than cars. This underscores the unprecedented nature of the safety requirements that will need to be met for cars, with similar levels of safety expected for other Autonomous Things.
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Biorobotics

Biorobotics is an interdisciplinary science that combines the fields of biomedical engineering, cybernetics, and robotics to develop new technologies that integrate biology with mechanical systems to develop more efficient communication, alter genetic information, and create machines that imitate biological systems. == Cybernetics == Cybernetics focuses on the communication and system of living organisms and machines that can be applied and combined with multiple fields of study such as biology, mathematics, computer science, engineering, and much more. This discipline falls under the branch of biorobotics because of its combined field of study between biological bodies and mechanical systems. Studying these two systems allows for advanced analysis on the functions and processes of each system as well as the interactions between them. === History === Cybernetic theory is a concept that has existed for centuries, dating back to the era of Plato where he applied the term to refer to the "governance of people". The term cybernetique is seen in the mid-1800s used by physicist André-Marie Ampère. The term cybernetics was popularized in the late 1940s to refer to a discipline that touched on, but was separate, from established disciplines, such as electrical engineering, mathematics, and biology. === Science === Cybernetics is often misunderstood because of the breadth of disciplines it covers. In the early 20th century, it was coined as an interdisciplinary field of study that combines biology, science, network theory, and engineering. Today, it covers all scientific fields with system related processes. The goal of cybernetics is to analyze systems and processes of any system or systems in an attempt to make them more efficient and effective. === Applications === Cybernetics is used as an umbrella term so applications extend to all systems related scientific fields such as biology, mathematics, computer science, engineering, management, psychology, sociology, art, and more. Cybernetics is used amongst several fields to discover principles of systems, adaptation of organisms, information analysis and much more. == Genetic engineering == Genetic engineering is a field that uses advances in technology to modify biological organisms. Through different methods, scientists are able to alter the genetic material of microorganisms, plants and animals to provide them with desirable traits. For example, making plants grow bigger, better, and faster. Genetic engineering is included in biorobotics because it uses new technologies to alter biology and change an organism's DNA for their and society's benefit. === History === Although humans have modified genetic material of animals and plants through artificial selection for millennia (such as the genetic mutations that developed teosinte into corn and wolves into dogs), genetic engineering refers to the deliberate alteration or insertion of specific genes to an organism's DNA. The first successful case of genetic engineering occurred in 1973 when Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen were able to transfer a gene with antibiotic resistance to a bacterium. === Science === There are three main techniques used in genetic engineering: The plasmid method, the vector method and the biolistic method. ==== Plasmid method ==== This technique is used mainly for microorganisms such as bacteria. Through this method, DNA molecules called plasmids are extracted from bacteria and placed in a lab where restriction enzymes break them down. As the enzymes do this, some develop a rough edge that resembles that of a staircase which is considered 'sticky' and capable of reconnecting. These 'sticky' molecules are inserted into another bacteria where they will connect to the DNA rings with the altered genetic material. ==== Vector method ==== The vector method is considered a more precise technique than the plasmid method as it involves the transfer of a specific gene instead of a whole sequence. In the vector method, a specific gene from a DNA strand is isolated through restriction enzymes in a laboratory and is inserted into a vector. Once the vector accepts the genetic code, it is inserted into the host cell where the DNA will be transferred. ==== Biolistic method ==== The biolistic method is typically used to alter the genetic material of plants. This method embeds the desired DNA with a metallic particle such as gold or tungsten in a high speed gun. The particle is then bombarded into the plant. Due to the high velocities and the vacuum generated during bombardment, the particle is able to penetrate the cell wall and inserts the new DNA into the cell. === Applications === Genetic engineering has many uses in the fields of medicine, research and agriculture. In the medical field, genetically modified bacteria are used to produce drugs such as insulin, human growth hormones and vaccines. In research, scientists genetically modify organisms to observe physical and behavioral changes to understand the function of specific genes. In agriculture, genetic engineering is extremely important as it is used by farmers to grow crops that are resistant to herbicides and to insects such as BTCorn. == Bionics == Bionics is a medical engineering field and a branch of biorobotics consisting of electrical and mechanical systems that imitate biological systems, such as prosthetics and hearing aids. It's a portmanteau that combines biology and electronics. === History === The history of bionics goes as far back in time as ancient Egypt. A prosthetic toe made out of wood and leather was found on the foot of a mummy. The time period of the mummy corpse was estimated to be from around the fifteenth century B.C. Bionics can also be witnessed in ancient Greece and Rome. Prosthetic legs and arms were made for amputee soldiers. In the early 16th century, a French military surgeon by the name of Ambroise Pare became a pioneer in the field of bionics. He was known for making various types of upper and lower prosthetics. One of his most famous prosthetics, Le Petit Lorrain, was a mechanical hand operated by catches and springs. During the early 19th century, Alessandro Volta further progressed bionics. He set the foundation for the creation of hearing aids with his experiments. He found that electrical stimulation could restore hearing by inserting an electrical implant to the saccular nerve of a patient's ear. In 1945, the National Academy of Sciences created the Artificial Limb Program, which focused on improving prosthetics since there were a large number of World War II amputee soldiers. Since this creation, prosthetic materials, computer design methods, and surgical procedures have improved, creating modern-day bionics. === Science === ==== Prosthetics ==== The important components that make up modern-day prosthetics are the pylon, the socket, and the suspension system. The pylon is the internal frame of the prosthetic that is made up of metal rods or carbon-fiber composites. The socket is the part of the prosthetic that connects the prosthetic to the person's missing limb. The socket consists of a soft liner that makes the fit comfortable, but also snug enough to stay on the limb. The suspension system is important in keeping the prosthetic on the limb. The suspension system is usually a harness system made up of straps, belts or sleeves that are used to keep the limb attached. The operation of a prosthetic could be designed in various ways. The prosthetic could be body-powered, externally-powered, or myoelectrically powered. Body-powered prosthetics consist of cables attached to a strap or harness, which is placed on the person's functional shoulder, allowing the person to manipulate and control the prosthetic as he or she deems fit. Externally-powered prosthetics consist of motors to power the prosthetic and buttons and switches to control the prosthetic. Myoelectrically powered prosthetics are new, advanced forms of prosthetics where electrodes are placed on the muscles above the limb. The electrodes will detect the muscle contractions and send electrical signals to the prosthetic to move the prosthetic. The downside to this type of prosthetic is that if the sensors are not placed correctly on the limb then the electrical impulses will fail to move the prosthetic. TrueLimb is a specific brand of prosthetics that uses myoelectrical sensors which enable a person to have control of their bionic limb. ==== Hearing aids ==== Four major components make up the hearing aid: the microphone, the amplifier, the receiver, and the battery. The microphone takes in outside sound, turns that sound to electrical signals, and sends those signals to the amplifier. The amplifier increases the sound and sends that sound to the receiver. The receiver changes the electrical signal back into sound and sends the sound into the ear. Hair cells in the ear will sense the vibrations from the sound, convert the vibrations into nerve signals, and send it to the brain so
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Oculus Medium

Oculus Medium is a digital sculpting software that works with virtual reality headsets and 6DoF motion controllers. It is used to create and paint digital sculptures. Medium works only on Oculus Rift. It was released on December 5, 2016, following with a major update in 2018 introducing new features and a revamped UI. On December 9, 2019, Oculus Medium was acquired by Adobe and re-named to "Medium by Adobe".
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Apache Parquet

Apache Parquet is a free and open-source column-oriented data storage format in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem inspired by Google Dremel interactive ad-hoc query system for analysis of read-only nested data. It is similar to RCFile and ORC, the other columnar-storage file formats in Hadoop, and is compatible with most of the data processing frameworks around Hadoop. It provides data compression and encoding schemes with enhanced performance to handle complex data in bulk. == History == The open-source project to build Apache Parquet began as a joint effort between Twitter and Cloudera using the record shredding and assembly algorithm as described in Google's Dremel. Parquet was designed as an improvement on the Trevni columnar storage format created by Doug Cutting, the creator of Hadoop. The name 'parquet' (lit. 'small compartment') refers to a style of decorative flooring and was chosen to "evoke the bottom layer of a database with an interesting layout". The first version, Apache Parquet 1.0, was released in July 2013. Since April 27, 2015, Apache Parquet has been a top-level Apache Software Foundation (ASF)-sponsored project. == Features == Apache Parquet is implemented using the record-shredding and assembly algorithm, which accommodates the complex data structures that can be used to store data. The values in each column are stored in contiguous memory locations, providing the following benefits: Column-wise compression is efficient in storage space Encoding and compression techniques specific to the type of data in each column can be used Queries that fetch specific column values need not read the entire row, thus improving performance Apache Parquet is implemented using the Apache Thrift framework, which increases its flexibility; it can work with a number of programming languages like C++, Java, Python, PHP, etc. As of August 2015, Parquet supports the big-data-processing frameworks including Apache Hive, Apache Drill, Apache Impala, Apache Crunch, Apache Pig, Cascading, Presto and Apache Spark. It is one of the external data formats used by the pandas Python data manipulation and analysis library. == Compression and encoding == In Parquet, compression is performed column by column, which enables different encoding schemes to be used for text and integer data. This strategy also keeps the door open for newer and better encoding schemes to be implemented as they are invented. Parquet supports various compression formats: snappy, gzip, LZO, brotli, zstd, and LZ4. === Dictionary encoding === Parquet has an automatic dictionary encoding enabled dynamically for data with a small number of unique values (i.e. below 105) that enables significant compression and boosts processing speed. === Bit packing === Storage of integers is usually done with dedicated 32 or 64 bits per integer. For small integers, packing multiple integers into the same space makes storage more efficient. === Run-length encoding (RLE) === To optimize storage of multiple occurrences of the same value, run-length encoding is used, which is where a single value is stored once along with the number of occurrences. Parquet implements a hybrid of bit packing and RLE, in which the encoding switches based on which produces the best compression results. This strategy works well for certain types of integer data and combines well with dictionary encoding. == Cloud Storage and Data Lakes == Parquet is widely used as the underlying file format in modern cloud-based data lake architectures. Cloud storage systems such as Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Google Cloud Storage commonly store data in Parquet format due to its efficient columnar representation and retrieval capabilities. Data lakehouse frameworks—including Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Hudi —build an additional metadata layer on top of Parquet files to support features such as schema evolution, time-travel queries, and ACID-compliant transactions. In these architectures, Parquet files serve as the immutable storage layer while the table formats manage data versioning and transactional integrity. == Comparison == Apache Parquet is comparable to RCFile and Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) file formats — all three fall under the category of columnar data storage within the Hadoop ecosystem. They all have better compression and encoding with improved read performance at the cost of slower writes. In addition to these features, Apache Parquet supports limited schema evolution, i.e., the schema can be modified according to the changes in the data. It also provides the ability to add new columns and merge schemas that do not conflict. Apache Arrow is designed as an in-memory complement to on-disk columnar formats like Parquet and ORC. The Arrow and Parquet projects include libraries that allow for reading and writing between the two formats. == Implementations == Known implementations of Parquet include:
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OpenPipeline

openPipeline is an open-source plug-in for Autodesk Maya that is designed to assist in a Production Pipeline structure and Computer animation. == Development == Created in Maya Embedded Language, openPipeline was initiated at Eyebeam Atelier and further developed at Pratt Institute in the Digital Arts Lab. The initial release date was December 28, 2006. == Contributors == Rob O'Neill (Creator) Paris Mavroidis Meng-Han Ho
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Adobe GoLive

Adobe GoLive was a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web site management application from Adobe Systems. It replaced Adobe PageMill as Adobe's primary HTML editor and was itself discontinued in favor of Dreamweaver. The last version of GoLive that Adobe released was GoLive 9. == History == GoLive originated as the flagship product of a company named GoNet Communication, Inc. then based in Menlo Park, California, and the development company GoNet Communications GmbH in Hamburg, Germany, in 1996. Later GoNet changed its name to GoLive Systems, Inc, and the name of its product to GoLive CyberStudio. Adobe acquired GoLive in 1999 and re-branded the GoLive CyberStudio product to what became Adobe GoLive. Adobe took over the Hamburg office as an Adobe development site to continue to develop the product. At the time of the acquisition, CyberStudio was a Macintosh-only application. In the spring of 1999 Adobe released Adobe GoLive for both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. The first versions of Dreamweaver and CyberStudio were released in a similar timeframe. However, Dreamweaver eventually became the dominant WYSIWYG HTML editor in market share. After the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia (the company that had owned Dreamweaver), GoLive was progressively re-targeted toward Adobe's traditional design market, and the product became better integrated with Adobe's existing suite of design-oriented software products and less focused on the professional web development market. The Adobe CS2 Premium suite contained GoLive CS2. With the release of Creative Suite 3, Adobe integrated Dreamweaver as a replacement for GoLive and released GoLive 9 as a standalone product. In April 2008, Adobe announced that sales and development of GoLive would cease in favor of Dreamweaver. == General description and distinctive aspects == GoLive incorporated a largely modeless workflow that relied heavily on drag-and-drop. Most user interaction was done via a contextual inspector rather than the modal workflow found in Dreamweaver. Among its features were a separate editor for tables that supported nesting, and a two-dimensional panel for applying CSS styles to elements. GoLive supported drag-and-drop of native Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files via what the company called "Smart Objects", which then automatically guided the user through saving those files in web-supported formats. Updates to the original Photoshop or Illustrator assets were automatically tracked by GoLive. It also implemented a tool called "Components" which allowed updates to interface elements throughout a site to be updated globally by changing one single file. As a website management tool, GoLive allowed users to transfer and publish content directly from within the application, and allowed individual files to be excluded from uploading. == Features == One of the new features of GoLive version 5 was Dynamic Link, which was a method of creating dynamic, database-driven web content without the need to know a server-side language and with full WYSIWYG support in the GoLive user interface. GoLive had a powerful set of extensibility API which could be used to add additional functionality to the product. The GoLive SDK provided interfaces which allowed developers to use a combination of XML, JavaScript and C/C++ to create plugins for the product. The extensibility API allowed developers access to custom drawing and event handling using JavaScript, as well as a full JavaScript debugger and command line interpreter. This allowed intermediate-level developers using interpreted JavaScript to create sophisticated user interfaces. == Language and framework structure == Adobe GoLive is coded in the C++ programming language. It uses a custom C++ framework called SCL (Simple Class Library) which was initially built from scratch by the engineers at GoLive Systems Inc. The SCL framework was also used in the short-lived Adobe Atmosphere 3D software. == Release history == As the final version, GoLive 9 was discontinued in April 2008.
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