AI App That Can Edit Photos

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Textual entailment

In natural language processing, textual entailment (TE), also known as natural language inference (NLI), is a directional relation between text fragments. The relation holds whenever the truth of one text fragment follows from another text. == Definition == In the TE framework, the entailing and entailed texts are termed text (t) and hypothesis (h), respectively. Textual entailment is not the same as pure logical entailment – it has a more relaxed definition: "t entails h" (t ⇒ h) if, typically, a human reading t would infer that h is most likely true. (Alternatively: t ⇒ h if and only if, typically, a human reading t would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by h from the proposition expressed by t.) The relation is directional because even if "t entails h", the reverse "h entails t" is much less certain. Determining whether this relationship holds is an informal task, one which sometimes overlaps with the formal tasks of formal semantics (satisfying a strict condition will usually imply satisfaction of a less strict conditioned); additionally, textual entailment partially subsumes word entailment. == Examples == Textual entailment can be illustrated with examples of three different relations: An example of a positive TE (text entails hypothesis) is: text: If you help the needy, God will reward you. hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has good consequences. An example of a negative TE (text contradicts hypothesis) is: text: If you help the needy, God will reward you. hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has no consequences. An example of a non-TE (text does not entail nor contradict) is: text: If you help the needy, God will reward you. hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man will make you a better person. == Ambiguity of natural language == A characteristic of natural language is that there are many different ways to state what one wants to say: several meanings can be contained in a single text and the same meaning can be expressed by different texts. This variability of semantic expression can be seen as the dual problem of language ambiguity. Together, they result in a many-to-many mapping between language expressions and meanings. The task of paraphrasing involves recognizing when two texts have the same meaning and creating a similar or shorter text that conveys almost the same information. Textual entailment is similar but weakens the relationship to be unidirectional. Mathematical solutions to establish textual entailment can be based on the directional property of this relation, by making a comparison between some directional similarities of the texts involved. == Approaches == Textual entailment measures natural language understanding as it asks for a semantic interpretation of the text, and due to its generality remains an active area of research. Many approaches and refinements of approaches have been considered, such as word embedding, logical models, graphical models, rule systems, contextual focusing, and machine learning. Practical or large-scale solutions avoid these complex methods and instead use only surface syntax or lexical relationships, but are correspondingly less accurate. As of 2005, state-of-the-art systems are far from human performance; a study found humans to agree on the dataset 95.25% of the time. Algorithms from 2016 had not yet achieved 90%. == Applications == Many natural language processing applications, like question answering, information extraction, summarization, multi-document summarization, and evaluation of machine translation systems, need to recognize that a particular target meaning can be inferred from different text variants. Typically entailment is used as part of a larger system, for example in a prediction system to filter out trivial or obvious predictions. Textual entailment also has applications in adversarial stylometry, which has the objective of removing textual style without changing the overall meaning of communication. == Datasets == Some of available English NLI datasets include: SNLI MultiNLI SciTail SICK MedNLI QA-NLI In addition, there are several non-English NLI datasets, as follows: XNLI DACCORD, RTE3-FR, SICK-FR for French FarsTail for Farsi OCNLI for Chinese SICK-NL for Dutch IndoNLI for Indonesian
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Margin (machine learning)

In machine learning, the margin of a single data point is defined to be the distance from the data point to a decision boundary. Note that there are many distances and decision boundaries that may be appropriate for certain datasets and goals. A margin classifier is a classification model that utilizes the margin of each example to learn such classification. There are theoretical justifications (based on the VC dimension) as to why maximizing the margin (under some suitable constraints) may be beneficial for machine learning and statistical inference algorithms. For a given dataset, there may be many hyperplanes that could classify it. One reasonable choice as the best hyperplane is the one that represents the largest separation, or margin, between the classes. Hence, one should choose the hyperplane such that the distance from it to the nearest data point on each side is maximized. If such a hyperplane exists, it is known as the maximum-margin hyperplane, and the linear classifier it defines is known as a maximum margin classifier (or, equivalently, the perceptron of optimal stability).
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Maike Osborne

Maike Osborne (born Michael Osborne, 1982) is an Australian academic and scientist who serves as a professor of machine learning at University of Oxford in the Machine Learning Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science. In 2016 she co-founded Mind Foundry, an artificial intelligence company, along with fellow professor Stephen Roberts. == Education == She has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and a BSc in both Pure Mathematics and Physics from the University of Western Australia. She has a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Oxford. == Career == Osborne has contributed to over 100 publications, and her work has received over 24,000 citations with an h-index of 46 according to Google Scholar. and has acted as principal or co-investigator for £10.6M of research funding. Her career has focused in particular on Bayesian approaches to AI and machine learning, named after the famous British statistician Thomas Bayes. Osborne's work has contributed to Probabilistic numerics, with Osborne co-authoring the first textbook on the subject. In 2013, Osborne co-authored a paper alongside Swedish-German economist Carl Benedikt Frey called "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?". The paper has received over 13,000 citations and extensive media coverage. In 2023 Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on the subject of the "Governance of Artificial Intelligence". Her testimony received significant coverage around her warnings of the threat of "rogue AI". == Honors == She is also an Official Fellow of Exeter College, and St Peter's College, Oxford, a Fellow of the ELLIS society, and a Faculty Member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. She joined the Oxford Martin School as Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment in 2015. She is a Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems.
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Karen Spärck Jones

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer and information scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in computer science, her slogan being, "Computing is too important to be left to men." In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recognise her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded annually to a recipient for outstanding research in one or both of her fields. == Early life and education == Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her parents were Alfred Owen Jones, a chemistry lecturer, and Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who worked for the Norwegian government while in exile in London during World War II. Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school in Huddersfield and then from 1953 to 1956 at Girton College, Cambridge, studying history, with an additional final year in Moral Sciences (philosophy). While at Cambridge, Spärck Jones joined the organisation known as the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) and met the head of CLRU Margaret Masterman, who would inspire her to go into computer science. While working at the CLRU, Spärck Jones began pursuing her PhD. At the time of submission, her PhD thesis was cast aside as uninspired and lacking original thought, but was later published in its entirety as a book. She briefly became a school teacher before moving into computer science. Spärck Jones married fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham in 1958. Spärck Jones's mother, Ida Spärck, had fled Norway on one of the last boats out after the German invasion in April 1940, going on to serve the Norwegian government in exile in London throughout the war. This background of displacement and resilience shaped the household in which Spärck Jones grew up. She later kept her mother's Norwegian surname professionally after marrying, stating that "it maintains a permanent existence of your own." Spärck Jones described her entry into computing as almost accidental. She had been working as a schoolteacher when she began visiting the CLRU out of curiosity about her husband's work. It was Margaret Masterman — whom she later described as "a very strange and interesting woman" — who offered her a research position and drew her fully into the field. == Career == Spärck Jones worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s, then at Cambridge University Computer Laboratory from 1974 until her retirement in 2002. From 1999, she held the post of Professor of Computers and Information. She had been given a permanent position only in 1993, and earlier in her career had been employed on a series of short-term contracts. She continued to work in the Computer Laboratory until shortly before her death. Her publications include nine books and numerous papers. A full list of her publications is available from the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Spärck Jones' main research interests, since the late 1950s, were natural language processing and information retrieval. In 1964, Spärck Jones published "Synonymy and Semantic Classification", which is now seen as a foundational paper in the field of natural language processing. One of her most important contributions was the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, which she introduced in a 1972 paper. IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) weighting scheme. In the 1980s, Spärck Jones began her work on early speech recognition systems. In 1982 she became involved in the Alvey Programme which was an initiative to motivate more computer science research across the country. == Significance of inverse document frequency == At the time Spärck Jones was working, most computer scientists were focused on making people adapt to machines — learning precise codes and commands to retrieve information. Spärck Jones was working in the opposite direction: teaching computers to understand human language as it is actually used. Her 1972 paper introduced the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) by observing that not all words carry equal informational value. A word like "the" appears in virtually every document and tells a retrieval system almost nothing about what any specific document is about. A rare word like "photosynthesis," by contrast, is highly specific and informative. IDF assigns each word a statistical weight based on how rarely it occurs across a document collection — the rarer the word, the higher its weight. When combined with term frequency (TF), which measures how often a word appears within a single document, the resulting TF–IDF score gives every word a relevance rating that can be used to rank documents in response to a search query. By 2007, Spärck Jones noted that "pretty much every web engine uses those principles." Her colleague John Tait remarked that "a lot of the stuff she was working on until five or ten years ago seemed like mad nonsense, and now we take it for granted." The 1972 paper remains among the most cited works in information retrieval research, with over 4,500 citations recorded in Google Scholar at the time of her death. The conceptual foundation of TF–IDF — that word meaning is statistical and contextual — has also informed later developments in machine learning and natural language processing, including transformer-based language models such as BERT. == Impact on artificial intelligence == Even though Spärck Jones' views on artificial intelligence (AI) were rather pessimistic in regard to the perceived limitations of AI in information retrieval, her work in natural language processing, information retrieval, and introducing the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) contributed to the future technological development of AI. Her statistical and ranking methods shifted the direction of the development of AI towards being more expandable and led by data. Her work had a more indirect and conceptual impact on AI, compared to the current and direct impact it has had on search engines. == Gender and advocacy == Spärck Jones spent the majority of her career at Cambridge on short-term contracts without permanent employment, a situation she attributed directly to gender. In her 2001 IEEE oral history interview she stated that Cambridge was "in many ways not user-friendly, in the sense of women-friendly." She was frequently the only woman present in professional meetings throughout her career. She channelled this experience into active advocacy. She was a founding member of the women@cl network at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, worked on outreach programmes aimed at encouraging girls into computing, and became widely known for her slogan: "Computing is too important to be left to men." She was the first woman ever to receive the BCS Lovelace Medal. === Honours and awards === These include: Gerard Salton Award (1988) Elected a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1993 President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1994 Honorary degree of Doctor of Science from The City University in 1997. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), where she also served as Vice-President in 2000–2002 Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Award of Merit (2002) Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award (2006) BCS Lovelace Medal (2007) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Women's Group Athena Award (2007) == Death and legacy == Spärck Jones died on 4 April 2007, due to cancer at the age of 71. In 2008, the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the British Computer Society established an annual Karen Spärck Jones Award in her honour, to encourage and promote research that advances understanding of Natural Language Processing or Information Retrieval. The Karen Spärck Jones lecture sponsored by BCS recognises the contribution that women have made to computing. In August 2017, the University of Huddersfield renamed one of its campus buildings in her honour. Formerly known as Canalside West, the Spärck Jones building houses the University's School of Computing and Engineering. When Spärck Jones died in 2007, The Times did not publish an obituary for her, despite having published one for her husband Roger Needham in 2003. In 2019, The New York Times included her in its Overlooked series under the title "Ove
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1.58-bit large language model

A 1.58-bit large language model (also known as a ternary LLM) is a type of large language model (LLM) designed to be computationally efficient. It achieves this by using weights that are restricted to only three values: -1, 0, and +1. This restriction significantly reduces the model's memory footprint and allows for faster processing, as computationally expensive multiplication operations can be replaced with lower-cost additions. This contrasts with traditional models that use 16-bit floating-point numbers (FP16 or BF16) for their weights. Studies have shown that for models up to several billion parameters, the performance of 1.58-bit LLMs on various tasks is comparable to their full-precision counterparts. This approach could enable powerful AI to run on less specialized and lower-power hardware. The name "1.58-bit" comes from the fact that a system with three states contains log 2 ⁡ 3 ≈ 1.58 {\displaystyle \log _{2}3\approx 1.58} bits of information. These models are sometimes also referred to as 1-bit LLMs in research papers, although this term can also refer to true binary models (with weights of -1 and +1). == BitNet == In 2024, Ma et al., researchers at Microsoft, declared that their 1.58-bit model, BitNet b1.58 is comparable in performance to the 16-bit Llama 2 and opens the era of 1-bit LLM. BitNet creators did not use the post-training quantization of weights but instead relied on the new BitLinear transform that replaced the nn.Linear layer of the traditional transformer design. In 2025, Microsoft researchers had released an open-weights and open inference code model BitNet b1.58 2B4T demonstrating performance competitive with the full precision models at 2B parameters and 4T training tokens. == Post-training quantization == BitNet derives its performance from being trained natively in 1.58 bit instead of being quantized from a full-precision model after training. Still, training is an expensive process and it would be desirable to be able to somehow convert an existing model to 1.58 bits. In 2024, HuggingFace reported a way to gradually ramp up the 1.58-bit quantization in fine-tuning an existing model down to 1.58 bits. == Critique == Some researchers point out that the scaling laws of large language models favor the low-bit weights only in case of undertrained models. As the number of training tokens increases, the deficiencies of low-bit quantization surface.
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Cheng Xiang Zhai

ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. == Biography == Zhai received the BS (1984), MS (1987, under Guoliang Zheng), and PhD (1990, under Jiafu Xu) in Computer Science from Nanjing University. He spent 1990 to 1993 working at Nanjing University's State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology. In 1993, he left for America to pursue a second PhD, this time at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with David A. Evans. Evans then left to spend more time with the company ClariTech. Zhai obtained from CMU a MS (1997) in computational linguistics and then started working with John Lafferty. He finally received from CMU a PhD in Language and Information Technologies in 2002. Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor (2002–2008), Associate Professor (2008–2013), Professor (2013–2018), and Donald Biggar Willett Professor (2018–) at the UIUC Department of Computer Science. He also holds joint appointments with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Department of Statistics, and School of Information Sciences at UIUC. == Awards == ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award, 2021, "for significant and sustained contributions to information retrieval and data science. His work has defined many of the theoretical foundations of the language modeling approach, yielding major insights into areas such as smoothing methods, relevance feedback, topic diversification, and text representations that incorporate positional information. He and his collaborators have also pioneered the axiomatic approach to information retrieval, which continues to provide inspiration for retrieval model and evaluation research." ACM SIGIR Academy inductee, 2021 ACM Fellow, 2017, "for contributions to information retrieval and text data mining." ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2016, for paper A study of smoothing methods for language models applied to Ad Hoc information retrieval ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2016, for paper Document language models, query models, and risk minimization for information retrieval ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2014, for paper Beyond independent relevance: methods and evaluation metrics for subtopic retrieval ACM Distinguished Member, 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2004, "for his work on user-centered, adaptive intelligent information access. His techniques expect to improve search-engine performance, support better information organization and enable understanding of large volumes of information. Zhai's work in information retrieval is expected to enhance curricula and provide new educational tools for the growing information technology workforce." ACM SIGIR Best Paper Award, 2004, for paper A formal study of information retrieval heuristics == Personal == Zhai's son Alex has earned three medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
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Svetlana Lazebnik

Svetlana Lazebnik (born 1979) is a Ukrainian-American researcher in computer vision who works as a professor of computer science and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research involves interactions between image understanding and natural language processing, including the automated captioning of images, and the development of a benchmark database of textually grounded images. == Education and career == Lazebnik was born in Kyiv in 1979 to a family of Ukrainian Jews, and emigrated with her family to the US as a teenager. She majored in computer science at DePaul University, minoring in mathematics and graduating with the highest honors in 2000. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, with the dissertation Local, Semi-Local and Global Models for Texture, Object and Scene Recognition supervised by Jean Ponce. After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois, she became an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. She returned to the University of Illinois as a faculty member in 2012. She is a co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision. == Recognition == Lazebnik was named an IEEE Fellow in 2021, "for contributions to computer vision". With Cordelia Schmid and Jean Ponce, she won the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2016 for the best work in computer vision from ten years earlier, for their work on spatial pyramid matching.
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The Best Free AI Copywriting Tool for Beginners

Curious about the best AI copywriting tool? An AI copywriting tool is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI copywriting tool slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.
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Keyword extraction

Keyword extraction is tasked with the automatic identification of terms that best describe the subject of a document. Key phrases, key terms, key segments or just keywords are the terminology which is used for defining the terms that represent the most relevant information contained in the document. Although the terminology is different, function is the same: characterization of the topic discussed in a document. The task of keyword extraction is an important problem in text mining, information extraction, information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP). == Keyword assignment vs. extraction == Keyword assignment methods can be roughly divided into: keyword assignment (keywords are chosen from controlled vocabulary or taxonomy) and keyword extraction (keywords are chosen from words that are explicitly mentioned in original text). Methods for automatic keyword extraction can be supervised, semi-supervised, or unsupervised. Unsupervised methods can be further divided into simple statistics, linguistics or graph-based, or ensemble methods that combine some or most of these methods.
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Localization Industry Standards Association

Localization Industry Standards Association or LISA was a Swiss-based trade body concerning the translation of computer software (and associated materials) into multiple natural languages, which existed from 1990 to February 2011. It counted among its members most of the large information technology companies of the period, including Adobe, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, McAfee, Nokia, Novell and Xerox. LISA played a significant role in representing its partners at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the TermBase eXchange (TBX) standard developed by LISA was submitted to ISO in 2007 and became ISO 30042:2008. LISA also had a presence at the W3C. A number of the LISA standards are used by the OASIS Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization framework. LISA shut down on 28 February 2011, and its website went offline shortly afterwards. In the wake of the closure of LISA, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute started an Industry Specification Group (ISG) for localization. The ISG has five work items: Term-Base eXchange (TBX) / ISO 30042:2008 Translation Memory eXchange (TMX), with GALA Segmentation Rules eXchange (SRX) / ISO/CD 24621) Global information management Metrics eXchange – Volume (GMX-V); Another organization that was formed in response to the closure of LISA is Terminology for Large Organizations (TerminOrgs), a consortium of terminology professionals who promote terminology management best practices.
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AI Clip Makers: Free vs Paid (2026)

Shopping for the best AI clip maker? An AI clip maker is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI clip maker slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.
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Gary B. Fogel

Gary Bryce Fogel (born 1968) is an American biologist and computer scientist. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Natural Selection, Inc. He is most known for his applications of computational intelligence and machine learning to bioinformatics, computational biology, and industrial optimization. == Education and Research == Fogel was born and raised in La Jolla, California, graduating from La Jolla High School. He received a B.A. in biology with a minor in earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991 and a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. Fogel has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications in conferences and journals, 2 edited books, and 11 patents. As CEO of Natural Selection, Inc., his research focuses on the application of computational intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics in areas not limited to: Viral evolution, cellular differentiation, drug discovery, RNA structure, cis-regulatory elements, cancer, and evolutionary game theory as well as the development of evolutionary algorithms and other approaches. == Service == Between 2008–2018 Gary Fogel was editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal BioSystems. He has served previously as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (2005–2010), IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (2001–2013), IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (2016–2018), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2004–2008), International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications (2004–2007), International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (2005–2007), as a consulting editor for the Journal of Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics (2006–2007), and as an editorial board member of Ecological Informatics (2005–2009) and BMC Big Data Analytics (2015–2020). Within the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Fogel founded the Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee and established the IEEE Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology conference series, chairing the first two meetings in 2004 and 2005 in San Diego. He co-founded the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2023. Fogel served on the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Administrative Committee (2004–2009, 2014–2022) and served as IEEE CIS Vice President of Conferences (2010–2013, 2019). == Teaching == Gary Fogel also serves as adjunct faculty at San Diego State University in the department of aerospace engineering as well as in the Computational Science Research Center. He has authored four books and numerous articles on the history of early aviation focusing on motorless flight. He is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and serves on the AIAA History Committee. == Awards == 2023 – Outstanding Contribution to Aerospace Education Award, AIAA San Diego Section 2022 – Elected Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association 2019 – Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare by Deep Knowledge Analytics 2019 – Outstanding Contribution to Aerospace Education Award, AIAA San Diego Section 2016 – Meritorious Service Award, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society 2016 – Outstanding Contribution to the Community Award, AIAA San Diego Section 2015 – Outstanding Enhancement of the Image of the Aerospace Profession Award, AIAA San Diego Section 2012 – Medal for Significant Achievement, San Diego Chapter of Sigma Xi 2012 – Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to computational intelligence and its application to biology, chemistry, and medicine. == Aeromodeling == Gary Fogel has established national and world records for model aircraft. He helped establish the National Model Aviation Heritage program for the Academy of Model Aeronautics. He is a leader member, contest director, and fellow of the Academy of Model Aeronautics, and was inducted into the Academy of Model Aeronautics Hall of Fame in 2025.
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Spatial embedding

Spatial embedding is one of feature learning techniques used in spatial analysis where points, lines, polygons or other spatial data types. representing geographic locations are mapped to vectors of real numbers. Conceptually it involves a mathematical embedding from a space with many dimensions per geographic object to a continuous vector space with a much lower dimension. Such embedding methods allow complex spatial data to be used in neural networks and have been shown to improve performance in spatial analysis tasks == Embedded data types == Geographic data can take many forms: text, images, graphs, trajectories, polygons. Depending on the task, there may be a need to combine multimodal data from different sources. The next section describes examples of different types of data and their uses. === Text === Geolocated posts on social media can be used to acquire a library of documents bound to a given place that can be later transformed to embedded vectors using word embedding techniques. === Image === Satellites and aircraft collect digital spatial data acquired from remotely sensed images which can be used in machine learning. They are sometimes hard to analyse using basic image analysis methods and convolutional neural networks can be used to acquire an embedding of images bound to a given geographical object or a region. === Point === A single point of interest (POI) can be assigned multiple features that can be used in machine learning. These could be demographic, transportation, meteorological, or economic data, for example. When embedding single points, it is common to consider the entire set of available points as nodes in a graph. === Line / multiline === Among other things, motion trajectories are represented as lines (multilines). Individual trajectories are embedded taking into account travel time, distances and also features of points visited along the way. Embedding of trajectories allows to improve performance of such tasks as clustering and also categorization. === Polygon === The geographic areas analyzed in machine learning are defined by both administrative boundaries and top-down division into grids of regular shapes such as rectangles, for example. Both types are represented as polygons and, like points, can be assigned different demographic, transportation, or economic features. A polygon can also have features related to the size of the area or shape it represents. === Graph === An example domain where graph representation is used is the street layout in a city, where vertices can be intersections and edges can be roads. The vertices can also be destination points like public transport stops or important points in the city, and the edges represent the flow between them. Embedding graphs or single vertices allows to improve accuracy of analysis methods in which the treated geographical domain can be represented as a network. == Usage == POI recommendation - generating personalized point of interest recommendations based on user preferences. Next/future location prediction - prediction of the next location a person will go to based on their historical trajectory. Zone functions classification - based on different mobility of people or POI distribution a function of a given area in a city can be predicted. Crime prediction - estimation of crime rate in different regions of a city. Local event detection - studying spatio-temporal changes in embeddings can provide valuable information in detection of local event occurring in specific location. Regional mobility popularity prediction - analysis of mobility can show patterns in popularity of different regions in a city. Shape matching - finding a similar shape of given polygon, for example finding building with the same shape as input building. Travel time estimation - predicting estimated travel time given current traffic conditions and special occurring events. Time estimation for on-demand food delivery - estimation of delivery time when placing an order through the website. == Temporal aspect == Some of the data analyzed has a timestamp associated with it. In some cases of data analysis this information is omitted and in others it is used to divide the set into groups. The most common division is the separation of weekdays from weekends or division into hours of the day. This is particularly important in the analysis of mobility data, because the characteristics of mobility during the week and at different times of the day are very different from each other. Another area in which time division into, for example, individual months can be used is in the analysis of tourism of a given region. In order to take such a split into account, embedding methods treat the time stamp specifically or separate versions of the model are developed for different subgroups of the analyzed set.
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Best AI Writing Assistants in 2026

In search of the best AI writing assistant? An AI writing assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI writing assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.
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Lior Ron (business executive)

Lior Ron (born March 16, 1977) is an Israeli businessman. He is the founder, chairman and former CEO of logistics technology company Uber Freight, co-founder of self-driving truck company Otto, and COO of self-driving technology company Waabi. == Early life and education == Ron grew up in Israel near Haifa. He attended the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1997. He then joined Israeli Army Intelligence, where he served until 2004. After the Army, he earned a master's degree in computer science at Technion, incorporating artificial intelligence as he developed a biomedical device to assist patients suffering with Parkinson's disease. He then moved to California and earned an MBA from The Stanford Graduate School of Business. His undergraduate work and master's thesis were centered around AI when it was still in its early stages. == Career == === Google === In 2007, Ron joined Google as the Product Lead for Google Maps. He then worked at Motorola Mobility after it was acquired by Google, and in Google's robotics research effort. === Otto === In 2016, Ron left Google to found Otto, a company that makes self-driving kits to retrofit big rig trucks. Quoted in Wired, Ron said he left Google because he “felt an obligation to bring this technology to society sooner rather than later.” Otto launched in May 2016, and was acquired by Uber in late July of the same year. The Uber partnership allowed Ron and Otto the opportunity to develop a freight marketplace for truck drivers. === Uber Freight === On May 18, 2017, Ron and Uber launched Uber Freight, a unit of Uber initially designed as an app connecting long-haul truck drivers with companies in need of cargo shipping, with Ron as CEO. In August 2018, Uber Freight launched a new digital platform focused on shippers, to help them find the right driver for their needs. In 2021, Uber Freight acquired Transplace for $2.25 billion, expanding its services to include managed transportation, logistics software, and consulting. With Ron as CEO, Uber Freight has evolved into a full-scale logistics technology company for shippers and drivers, as Ron introduced more advanced generative AI capabilities to Uber Freight's software and Insights AI logistics platform. In September 2024, the company announced it manages nearly $20 billion in freight, and serves one in three Fortune 500 companies. In May 2025, the company launched the transportation industry's first large-scale AI-powered logistics network, with its large language model embedded directly into its transportation management system. === Waabi === On August 12, 2025, it was reported that Ron had been named chief operating officer of Waabi, a company developing autonomous driving technology using artificial intelligence. He remains as chairman of Uber Freight, with Rebecca Tinucci taking over as CEO. == Controversy == Ron co-founded Otto with Anthony Levandowski, who faces a lawsuit brought in 2017 from Google's parent company Alphabet that alleges Levandowski stole trade secrets while working for Alphabet's self-driving car division before he and Ron co-founded Otto.
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