AI Art Generator

AI Art Generator — hands-on reviews, top picks, pricing, pros and cons and a practical how-to guide on Aizhi.

Artifact (app)

Artifact was a personalized social news aggregator app that uses recommender systems to suggest articles. Launched in January 2023 by Nokto, Inc., a company founded by co-founders of Instagram Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the app is available for iOS and Android. The app's name is a portmanteau of the words "articles", "artificial intelligence", and "fact". The app shut down in January 2024 as a result of low interest. == History == Nokto, Inc. was established on March 3, 2022, as a foreign stock company in California, with its headquarters in San Francisco. The company's main product, Artifact, is the first new product launched by Krieger and Systrom since their 2018 resignation from Instagram after conflicts with parent company Meta, which acquired Instagram in 2012. Artifact launched on January 31, 2023, after the team had been working on it for over a year, offering the option to sign up for a waiting list for its private beta, which grew to about 160,000 people, and then launching in open beta on February 22, 2023. With a team of seven employees in San Francisco, the app was free throughout its lifetime, with the founders explaining at the time that different business models - such as advertising or subscription fees - could be explored in the future. In January 2024, cofounder Kevin Systrom announced that the app would be shutting down after concluding that "the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way." In April 2024, it was announced Artifact had been acquired by Yahoo, who intended to use the service's technology in an upgraded Yahoo! News app. == Features == Frequently described as "TikTok for text" and a competitor to Twitter, Artifact was a news aggregator that used machine learning to make personalized recommendations based on topics, news sources, and authors that the reader is interested in. In addition to reading articles, the app offered the ability to like articles, leave comments, or listen to an audio version of an article read by AI-generated voices, including a simulation of the voices of Snoop Dogg or Gwyneth Paltrow. AI also would rewrite clickbait headlines that users flagged. Artifact later expanded to a social network where users could post links, images and text to their profile, which could be liked or commented on by other users. Similar to other social news websites like Reddit, reader accounts had profiles with reputation scores.
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Umoove

Umoove is a high tech startup company that has developed and patented a software-only face and eye tracking technology. The idea was first conceived as an attempt to aid people with disabilities but has since evolved. The only compatibility qualification for tablet computers and smartphones to run Umoove software is a front-facing camera. Umoove headquarters are in Israel on Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim. Umoove has 15 employees and received two million dollars in financing in 2012. The company's original founders invested around $800,000 to start the business in 2010. In 2013 Umoove was named one of the top three most promising Israeli start ups by Newsgeeks magazine. The company also participated in the 2013 LeWeb conference in Paris, France, where innovative technology startups are showcased. == Technology == The technology uses information extracted from previous frames, such as the angle of the user's head to predict where to look for facial targets in the next frame. This anticipation minimizes the amount of computation needed to scan each image. Umoove accounts for variances in environment, lighting conditions and user hand shake/movement. The technology is designed to provide a consistent experience, whether you're in a brightly lit area or a darkened basement, and to work fluidly between them by adapting its processing when it detects color and brightness shifts. It uses an active stabilization technique to filter out natural body movements from an unstable camera in order to minimize false-positive motion detection. Running the Umoove software on a Samsung Galaxy S3 is said to take up only 2% CPU. Umoove works exclusively with software and there is no hardware add-on necessary. It can be run on any smartphone or tablet computer that has a front-facing camera. Umoove claims that even a low-quality camera on an old device will run their software flawlessly. == Umoove Experience == In January 2014 Umoove released its first game onto the app store. The Umoove Experience game lets users control where they are 'flying' in the game through simple gestures and motions with their head. The avatar will basically go toward wherever the user looks. The game was created to showcase the technology for game developers but that did not stop some from criticizing its simplicity. Umoove also announced that they raised another one million dollars and that they are opening offices in Silicon Valley, California. In February 2014, Umoove announced that their face-tracking software development kit is available for Android developers as well as iOS. == Reviews == The Umoove Experience garnered mostly positive reviews from bloggers and mainstream media with some predicting that it could be the future of mobile gaming. Mashable wrote that Umoove's technology could be the emergence of gesture recognition technology in the mobile space, similar to Kinect with console gaming and what Leap Motion has done with desktop computers. Some, however, remain skeptical. CNET, for example, did not give the game a positive review and called the eye tracking technology 'freaky but cool'. They also noted that pioneering technologies have been known to fall short of expectations, citing Apple Inc’s Siri as an example. The technology blog GigaOM said that the Umoove Experience is ’awesome’ and technology evangelist Robert Scoble has called Umoove "brilliant". == uHealth == In January 2015, Umoove released uHealth, a mobile application that uses eye tracking game-like exercise to challenge the user's ability to be attentive, continuously focus, follow commands and avoid distractions. The app is designed in the form of two games, one to improve attention and another that hones focus. uHealth is a training tool, not a diagnostic. Umoove has stated that they want to use their technology for diagnosing neurological disorders but this will depend on clinical tests and FDA approval. The company cites the direct relationship between eye movements and brain activity as well as various vision-based therapies have been backed by many scientific studies conducted over the past decades. uHealth is the first time this type of therapy is delivered right to the end user through a simple download. == Collaboration rumors == In March 2013 there were rumors on the internet that Umoove would be the functioning software embedded into the Samsung Galaxy S4, which was due to launch that month. This rumor was perpetrated by, among others, New York Times, Techcrunch and Yahoo. Once Samsung launched without the Umoove technology rumors about a potential collaboration with Apple Inc hit the web. It has been said that due to the fact that Apple Inc is losing market share and stock value to Samsung they will be more aggressive and eye tracking is a logical place to make that move.
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GeneRIF

A GeneRIF or Gene Reference Into Function is a short (255 characters or fewer) statement about the function of a gene. GeneRIFs provide a simple mechanism for allowing scientists to add to the functional annotation of genes described in the Entrez Gene database. In practice, function is constructed quite broadly. For example, there are GeneRIFs that discuss the role of a gene in a disease, GeneRIFs that point the viewer towards a review article about the gene, and GeneRIFs that discuss the structure of a gene. However, the stated intent is for GeneRIFs to be about gene function. Currently over half a million geneRIFs have been created for genes from almost 1000 different species. GeneRIFs are always associated with specific entries in the Entrez Gene database. Each GeneRIF has a pointer to the PubMed ID (a type of document identifier) of a scientific publication that provides evidence for the statement made by the GeneRIF. GeneRIFs are often extracted directly from the document that is identified by the PubMed ID, very frequently from its title or from its final sentence. GeneRIFs are usually produced by NCBI indexers, but anyone may submit a GeneRIF. To be processed, a valid Gene ID must exist for the specific gene, or the Gene staff must have assigned an overall Gene ID to the species. The latter case is implemented via records in Gene with the symbol NEWENTRY. Once the Gene ID is identified, only three types of information are required to complete a submission: a concise phrase describing a function or functions (less than 255 characters in length, preferably more than a restatement of the title of the paper); a published paper describing that function, implemented by supplying the PubMed ID of a citation in PubMed; a valid e-mail address (which will remain confidential). == Example == Here are some GeneRIFs taken from Entrez Gene for GeneID 7157, the human gene TP53. The PubMed document identifiers have been omitted from the examples. Note the wide variability with respect to the presence or absence of punctuation and of sentence-initial capital letters. p53 and c-erbB-2 may have independent role in carcinogenesis of gall bladder cancer Degradation of endogenous HIPK2 depends on the presence of a functional p53 protein. p53 codon 72 alleles influence the response to anticancer drugs in cells from aged people by regulating the cell cycle inhibitor p21WAF1 Logistic regression analysis showed p53 and COX-2 as dependent predictors in pancreatic carcinogenesis, and a reciprocal relationship to neoplastic progression between p53 and COX-2. GeneRIFs are an unusual type of textual genre, and they have recently been the subject of a number of articles from the natural language processing community.
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Point distribution model

The point distribution model is a model for representing the mean geometry of a shape and some statistical modes of geometric variation inferred from a training set of shapes. == Background == The point distribution model concept has been developed by Cootes, Taylor et al. and became a standard in computer vision for the statistical study of shape and for segmentation of medical images where shape priors really help interpretation of noisy and low-contrasted pixels/voxels. The latter point leads to active shape models (ASM) and active appearance models (AAM). Point distribution models rely on landmark points. A landmark is an annotating point posed by an anatomist onto a given locus for every shape instance across the training set population. For instance, the same landmark will designate the tip of the index finger in a training set of 2D hands outlines. Principal component analysis (PCA), for instance, is a relevant tool for studying correlations of movement between groups of landmarks among the training set population. Typically, it might detect that all the landmarks located along the same finger move exactly together across the training set examples showing different finger spacing for a flat-posed hands collection. == Details == First, a set of training images are manually landmarked with enough corresponding landmarks to sufficiently approximate the geometry of the original shapes. These landmarks are aligned using the generalized procrustes analysis, which minimizes the least squared error between the points. k {\displaystyle k} aligned landmarks in two dimensions are given as X = ( x 1 , y 1 , … , x k , y k ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} =(x_{1},y_{1},\ldots ,x_{k},y_{k})} . It's important to note that each landmark i ∈ { 1 , … k } {\displaystyle i\in \lbrace 1,\ldots k\rbrace } should represent the same anatomical location. For example, landmark #3, ( x 3 , y 3 ) {\displaystyle (x_{3},y_{3})} might represent the tip of the ring finger across all training images. Now the shape outlines are reduced to sequences of k {\displaystyle k} landmarks, so that a given training shape is defined as the vector X ∈ R 2 k {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} \in \mathbb {R} ^{2k}} . Assuming the scattering is gaussian in this space, PCA is used to compute normalized eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the covariance matrix across all training shapes. The matrix of the top d {\displaystyle d} eigenvectors is given as P ∈ R 2 k × d {\displaystyle \mathbf {P} \in \mathbb {R} ^{2k\times d}} , and each eigenvector describes a principal mode of variation along the set. Finally, a linear combination of the eigenvectors is used to define a new shape X ′ {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} '} , mathematically defined as: X ′ = X ¯ + P b {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} '={\overline {\mathbf {X} }}+\mathbf {P} \mathbf {b} } where X ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {\mathbf {X} }}} is defined as the mean shape across all training images, and b {\displaystyle \mathbf {b} } is a vector of scaling values for each principal component. Therefore, by modifying the variable b {\displaystyle \mathbf {b} } an infinite number of shapes can be defined. To ensure that the new shapes are all within the variation seen in the training set, it is common to only allow each element of b {\displaystyle \mathbf {b} } to be within ± {\displaystyle \pm } 3 standard deviations, where the standard deviation of a given principal component is defined as the square root of its corresponding eigenvalue. PDM's can be extended to any arbitrary number of dimensions, but are typically used in 2D image and 3D volume applications (where each landmark point is R 2 {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{2}} or R 3 {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3}} ). == Discussion == An eigenvector, interpreted in euclidean space, can be seen as a sequence of k {\displaystyle k} euclidean vectors associated to corresponding landmark and designating a compound move for the whole shape. Global nonlinear variation is usually well handled provided nonlinear variation is kept to a reasonable level. Typically, a twisting nematode worm is used as an example in the teaching of kernel PCA-based methods. Due to the PCA properties: eigenvectors are mutually orthogonal, form a basis of the training set cloud in the shape space, and cross at the 0 in this space, which represents the mean shape. Also, PCA is a traditional way of fitting a closed ellipsoid to a Gaussian cloud of points (whatever their dimension): this suggests the concept of bounded variation. The idea behind PDMs is that eigenvectors can be linearly combined to create an infinity of new shape instances that will 'look like' the one in the training set. The coefficients are bounded alike the values of the corresponding eigenvalues, so as to ensure the generated 2n/3n-dimensional dot will remain into the hyper-ellipsoidal allowed domain—allowable shape domain (ASD).
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Elowan

Elowan is a plant-robot cyborg. Using its own internal bioelectrical signals, The plant has a robotic extension that makes it move towards light sources. Electrodes are inserted into the leaves, stem, and ground to detect the faint bioelectrical signals the plant produces. Then they are amplified so the robot can read them. So when the plant "wants" to go to light, the cyborg automatically goes to the nearest light source. Future extensions of the robot could provide: Protection, growth frameworks, and nutrients. Other factors that could make the cyborg move are temperature, soil, and gravity conditions Elowan is one in a series of plant-electronic hybrid experiments.
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Boyfriend Maker

Boyfriend Maker was a dating sim, romance chatbot smartphone app for iOS (iPhone) and Android devices, developed by Japanese studio 36 You Games (styled as 36You) and distributed under the freemium business model. Boyfriend Maker incorporated advanced artificial intelligence chat technology a decade before products such as ChatGPT. According to the developer's website, Boyfriend Maker is an "app that lets you interact and chat with quirky virtual boyfriends". While each virtual boyfriend has certain unique characteristics, the various instances of the boyfriend are powered by a chat engine, that (at least within a language and market) can utilise vocabulary and knowledge acquired in a chat with one user in subsequent chats with other users. == Gameplay == Users gain experience points and in-game coins. Users can customize their virtual boyfriend's appearance by selecting items such as hair, clothing, face, and a necklace. == Apple delisting and reintroduction == In late November 2012, the original iOS Boyfriend Maker app was delisted from the Apple App Store due to "ribald" chat, according to the New York Times. Boyfriend Maker was removed by Apple due to "reports of references to violent sexual acts and pedophilia". Boyfriend Maker had an age rating of 4+, even though the chat bot "responds with often strange and explicit text unsuitable for young children". User-posted chat excerpts indicate that the virtual boyfriend would sometimes transition abruptly to sexual chat in response to a seemingly innocent question. In one user-posted example, in response to the question, "what kind of wedding cake will we have" the boyfriend responds, "a good sex ima be on top of u u gonna ride oon me bitin the pillow gurrl ima fuck da shit out of u". The developer's use of the SimSimi-created third-party chat engine may be responsible for the sexual text. As the virtual boyfriend converses with human users, the SimSimi chat engine acquires vocabulary from users of the game and applies this "learned" vocabulary in chats with other users. The chat engine might also employ lines harvested from human-human chat logs, song lyrics, movies or TV shows. In April 2013, a detuned and presumably tamer version of the app, titled Boyfriend Plus, was permitted on Apple's App Store.
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Image formation

The study of image formation encompasses the radiometric and geometric processes by which 2D images of 3D objects are formed. In the case of digital images, the image formation process also includes analog to digital conversion and sampling. == Imaging == The imaging process is a mapping of an object to an image plane. Each point on the image corresponds to a point on the object. An illuminated object will scatter light toward a lens and the lens will collect and focus the light to create the image. The ratio of the height of the image to the height of the object is the magnification. The spatial extent of the image surface and the focal length of the lens determines the field of view of the lens. Image formation of mirror these have a center of curvature and its focal length of the mirror is half of the center of curvature. == Illumination == An object may be illuminated by the light from an emitting source such as the sun, a light bulb or a Light Emitting Diode. The light incident on the object is reflected in a manner dependent on the surface properties of the object. For rough surfaces, the reflected light is scattered in a manner described by the Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) of the surface. The BRDF of a surface is the ratio of the exiting power per square meter per steradian (radiance) to the incident power per square meter (irradiance). The BRDF typically varies with angle and may vary with wavelength, but a specific important case is a surface that has constant BRDF. This surface type is referred to as Lambertian and the magnitude of the BRDF is R/π, where R is the reflectivity of the surface. The portion of scattered light that propagates toward the lens is collected by the entrance pupil of the imaging lens over the field of view. == Field of view and imagery == The Field of view of a lens is limited by the size of the image plane and the focal length of the lens. The relationship between a location on the image and a location on the object is y = ftan(θ), where y is the max extent of the image plane, f is the focal length of the lens and θ is the field of view. If y is the max radial size of the image then θ is the field of view of the lens. While the image created by a lens is continuous, it can be modeled as a set of discrete field points, each representing a point on the object. The quality of the image is limited by the aberrations in the lens and the diffraction created by the finite aperture stop. == Pupils and stops == The aperture stop of a lens is a mechanical aperture which limits the light collection for each field point. The entrance pupil is the image of the aperture stop created by the optical elements on the object side of the lens. The light scattered by an object is collected by the entrance pupil and focused onto the image plane via a series of refractive elements. The cone of the focused light at the image plane is set by the size of the entrance pupil and the focal length of the lens. This is often referred to as the f-stop or f-number of the lens. f/# = f/D where D is the diameter of the entrance pupil. == Pixelation and color vs. monochrome == In typical digital imaging systems, a sensor is placed at the image plane. The light is focused on to the sensor and the continuous image is pixelated. The light incident on each pixel in the sensor will be integrated within the pixel and a proportional electronic signal will be generated. The angular geometric resolution of a pixel is given by atan(p/f), where p is the pitch of the pixel. This is also called the pixel field of view. The sensor may be monochrome or color. In the case of a monochrome sensor, the light incident on each pixel is integrated and the resulting image is a grayscale like picture. For color images, a mosaic color filter is typically placed over the pixels to create a color image. An example is a Bayer filter. The signal incident on each pixel is then digitized to a bit stream. == Image quality == The quality of an image is dependent upon both geometric and physical items. Geometrically, higher density of pixels across an image will give less blocky pixelation and thus a better geometric image quality. Lens aberrations also contribute to the quality of the image. Physically, diffraction due to the aperture stop will limit the resolvable spatial frequencies as a function of f-number. In the frequency domain, Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) is a measure of the quality of the imaging system. The MTF is a measure of the visibility of a sinusoidal variation in irradiance on the image plane as a function of the frequency of the sinusoid. It includes the effects of diffraction, aberrations and pixelation. For the lens, the MTF is the autocorrelation of the pupil function, so it accounts for the finite pupil extent and the lens aberrations. The sensor MTF is the Fourier Transform of the pixel geometry. For a square pixel, MTF(ξ) = sin(πξp)/πξp where p is the pixel width and ξ is the spatial frequency. The MTF of the combination of the lens and detector is the product of the two component MTFs. == Perception == Color images can be perceived via two means. In the case of computer vision the light incident on the sensor comprises the image. In the case of visual perception, the human eye has a color dependent response to light so this must be accounted for. This is important consideration when converting to grayscale. == Image formation in eye == The principal difference between the lens of the eye and an ordinary optical lens is that the former is flexible. The radius of the curvature of the anterior surface of the lens is greater than the radius of its posterior surface. The shape of the lens is controlled by tension in the fibers of the ciliary body. To focus on distant objects, the controlling muscles cause the lens to be relatively flattened. Similarly, these muscles allow the lens to become thicker in order to focus on objects near the eye. The distance between the center of the lens and the retina (focal length) varies from approximately 17 mm to about 14 mm, as the refractive power of the lens increases from its minimum to its maximum. When the eye focuses on an object farther away than about 3 m, the lens exhibits its lowest refractive power. When the eye focuses on a close object, the lens is most strongly refractive.
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Visual descriptor

In computer vision, visual descriptors or image descriptors are descriptions of the visual features of the contents in images, videos, or algorithms or applications that produce such descriptions. They describe elementary characteristics such as the shape, the color, the texture or the motion, among others. == Introduction == As a result of the new communication technologies and the massive use of Internet in our society, the amount of audio-visual information available in digital format is increasing considerably. Therefore, it has been necessary to design some systems that allow us to describe the content of several types of multimedia information in order to search and classify them. The audio-visual descriptors are in charge of the contents description. These descriptors have a good knowledge of the objects and events found in a video, image or audio and they allow the quick and efficient searches of the audio-visual content. This system can be compared to the search engines for textual contents. Although it is relatively easy to find text with a computer, it is much more difficult to find concrete audio and video parts. For instance, imagine somebody searching a scene of a happy person. The happiness is a feeling and it is not evident its shape, color and texture description in images. The description of the audio-visual content is not a superficial task and it is essential for the effective use of this type of archives. The standardization system that deals with audio-visual descriptors is the MPEG-7 (Motion Picture Expert Group - 7). == Types == Descriptors are the first step to find out the connection between pixels contained in a digital image and what humans recall after having observed an image or a group of images after some minutes. Visual descriptors are divided in two main groups: General information descriptors: contain low level descriptors which give a description about color, shape, regions, textures and motion. Specific domain information descriptors: give information about objects and events in the scene. A concrete example would be face recognition. === General information descriptors === General information descriptors consist of a set of descriptors that covers different basic and elementary features like: color, texture, shape, motion, location and others. This description is automatically generated by means of signal processing. ==== Color ==== It's the most basic quality of visual content. Five tools are defined to describe color. The three first tools represent the color distribution and the last ones describe the color relation between sequences or group of images: Dominant color descriptor (DCD) Scalable color descriptor (SCD) Color structure descriptor (CSD) Color layout descriptor (CLD) Group of frame (GoF) or group-of-pictures (GoP) ==== Texture ==== It's an important quality in order to describe an image. The texture descriptors characterize image textures or regions. They observe the region homogeneity and the histograms of these region borders. The set of descriptors is formed by: Homogeneous texture descriptor (HTD) Texture browsing descriptor (TBD) Edge histogram descriptor (EHD) ==== Shape ==== It contains important semantic information due to human's ability to recognize objects through their shape. However, this information can only be extracted by means of a segmentation similar to the one that the human visual system implements. Nowadays, such a segmentation system is not available yet, however there exists a serial of algorithms which are considered to be a good approximation. These descriptors describe regions, contours and shapes for 2D images and for 3D volumes. The shape descriptors are the following ones: Region-based shape descriptor (RSD) Contour-based shape descriptor (CSD) 3-D shape descriptor (3-D SD) ==== Motion ==== It's defined by four different descriptors which describe motion in video sequence. Motion is related to the objects motion in the sequence and to the camera motion. This last information is provided by the capture device, whereas the rest is implemented by means of image processing. The descriptor set is the following one: Motion activity descriptor (MAD) Camera motion descriptor (CMD) Motion trajectory descriptor (MTD) Warping and parametric motion descriptor (WMD and PMD) ==== Location ==== Elements location in the image is used to describe elements in the spatial domain. In addition, elements can also be located in the temporal domain: Region locator descriptor (RLD) Spatio temporal locator descriptor (STLD) === Specific domain information descriptors === These descriptors, which give information about objects and events in the scene, are not easily extractable, even more when the extraction is to be automatically done. Nevertheless, they can be manually processed. As mentioned before, face recognition is a concrete example of an application that tries to automatically obtain this information. == Descriptors applications == Among all applications, the most important ones are: Multimedia documents search engines and classifiers. Digital library: visual descriptors allow a very detailed and concrete search of any video or image by means of different search parameters. For instance, the search of films where a known actor appears, the search of videos containing the Everest mountain, etc. Personalized electronic news service. Possibility of an automatic connection to a TV channel broadcasting a soccer match, for example, whenever a player approaches the goal area. Control and filtering of concrete audiovisual content, like violent or pornographic material. Also, authorization for some multimedia content.
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Hugging Face

Hugging Face, Inc., is an American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. Its transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform allow users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work. == History == === Founding === The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. The company was named after the U+1F917 🤗 HUGGING FACE emoji. After open sourcing the model behind the chatbot, the company pivoted to focus on being a platform for machine learning. === AI boom === On April 28, 2021, the company launched the BigScience Research Workshop in collaboration with several other research groups to release an open large language model. In 2022, the workshop concluded with the announcement of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters. In February 2023, the company announced partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would allow Hugging Face's products to be available to AWS customers to use them as the building blocks for their custom applications. The company also said the next generation of BLOOM will be run on Trainium, a proprietary machine learning chip created by AWS. In June 2024, the company announced, along with Meta and Scaleway, their launch of a new AI accelerator program for European startups. The initiative aimed to help startups integrate open foundation models into their products, accelerating the EU AI ecosystem. The program, based at STATION F in Paris, ran from September 2024 to February 2025. Selected startups received mentoring, and access to AI models and tools and Scaleway's computing power. On September 23, 2024, to further the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, Hugging Face teamed up with Meta and UNESCO to launch a new online language translator. It was built on Meta's No Language Left Behind open-source AI model, enabling free text translation across 200 languages, including many low-resource languages. In April 2025, Hugging Face announced that they acquired a humanoid robotics startup, Pollen Robotics, based in France and founded by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet in 2016. In an X tweet, Delangue shared his vision to "make Artificial Intelligence robotics Open Source". === Cyberattacks === In early 2026, hackers hijacked the Hugging Face platform to launch Android-targeted attacks involving "powerful malware" which could completely take over a compromised target.
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CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (also known as CMUdict) is an open-source pronouncing dictionary originally created by the Speech Group at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for use in speech recognition research. CMUdict provides a mapping orthographic/phonetic for English words in their North American pronunciations. It is commonly used to generate representations for speech recognition (ASR), e.g. the CMU Sphinx system, and speech synthesis (TTS), e.g. the Festival system. CMUdict can be used as a training corpus for building statistical grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models that will generate pronunciations for words not yet included in the dictionary. The most recent release is 0.7b; it contains over 134,000 entries. An interactive lookup version is available. == Database format == The database is distributed as a plain text file with one entry to a line in the format "WORD " with a two-space separator between the parts. If multiple pronunciations are available for a word, variants are identified using numbered versions (e.g. WORD(1)). The pronunciation is encoded using a modified form of the ARPABET system, with the addition of stress marks on vowels of levels 0, 1, and 2. A line-initial ;;; token indicates a comment. A derived format, directly suitable for speech recognition engines is also available as part of the distribution; this format collapses stress distinctions (typically not used in ASR). The following is a table of phonemes used by CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. == History == == Applications == The Unifon converter is based on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The Natural Language Toolkit contains an interface to the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The Carnegie Mellon Logios tool incorporates the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. PronunDict, a pronunciation dictionary of American English, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary as its data source. Pronunciation is transcribed in IPA symbols. This dictionary also supports searching by pronunciation. Some singing voice synthesizer software like CeVIO Creative Studio and Synthesizer V uses modified version of CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for synthesizing English singing voices. Transcriber, a tool for the full text phonetic transcription, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary 15.ai, a real-time text-to-speech tool using artificial intelligence, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
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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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GPTs

GPTs are custom versions of ChatGPT with added instructions and extra knowledge. GPTs can be used and created from the GPT Store. Any user can easily create them without any programming knowledge. GPTs can be tailored for specific writing styles, topics, or tasks. The ability to create GPTs was introduced in November 2023, and by January 2024, more than 3 million GPTs had been published. == Features and uses == GPTs can be configured to answer complex questions in specific fields, solve problems, provide image-based information, or create digital content. They can be programmed as educational tools, purchasing guides, or technical advisors, as well as for many others applications. GPTs are accessed from the GPT Store section of the ChatGPT web page. The “Explore GPT” link opens the store where the most popular GPTs in each section are highlighted. The GPTs are organized by categories. The store also uses a rating system based on user experiences similar to that used by other app stores such as Apple's App Store or Google Play. Those with the best ratings appear at the top of each category. According to La Vanguardia, the most popular categories are: Personal assistants Learning to program Image generation Creative writing Gaming Entertainment It is expected that in the future the creators of GPTs will be able to monetize them. Companies like Moderna are using GPTs to assist in various specific business tasks. The company has created 750 GPTs for its own internal use. == Configuration == Creating GPTs does not require prior programming knowledge. Free users can use existing GPTs but cannot create their own. Paying subscribers can use the editor on the ChatGPT site to configure the GPT's name, image and description, instructions and access to APIs, along with visibility options. == Criticism == The implementation and use of GPTs has not been without criticism. The GPT Store has been criticized for the proliferation of low-quality GPTs and spam due to a lack of effective moderation. There are also concerns about data privacy and security, as GPTs may collect and use personal information in ways that are not always transparent to users.
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Deep image prior

Deep image prior is a type of convolutional neural network used to enhance a given image with no prior training data other than the image itself. A neural network is randomly initialized and used as prior to solve inverse problems such as noise reduction, super-resolution, and inpainting. Image statistics are captured by the structure of a convolutional image generator rather than by any previously learned capabilities. == Method == === Background === Inverse problems such as noise reduction, super-resolution, and inpainting can be formulated as the optimization task x ∗ = m i n x E ( x ; x 0 ) + R ( x ) {\displaystyle x^{}=min_{x}E(x;x_{0})+R(x)} , where x {\displaystyle x} is an image, x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} a corrupted representation of that image, E ( x ; x 0 ) {\displaystyle E(x;x_{0})} is a task-dependent data term, and R(x) is the regularizer. Deep neural networks learn a generator/decoder x = f θ ( z ) {\displaystyle x=f_{\theta }(z)} which maps a random code vector z {\displaystyle z} to an image x {\displaystyle x} . The image corruption method used to generate x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} is selected for the specific application. === Specifics === In this approach, the R ( x ) {\displaystyle R(x)} prior is replaced with the implicit prior captured by the neural network (where R ( x ) = 0 {\displaystyle R(x)=0} for images that can be produced by a deep neural networks and R ( x ) = + ∞ {\displaystyle R(x)=+\infty } otherwise). This yields the equation for the minimizer θ ∗ = a r g m i n θ E ( f θ ( z ) ; x 0 ) {\displaystyle \theta ^{}=argmin_{\theta }E(f_{\theta }(z);x_{0})} and the result of the optimization process x ∗ = f θ ∗ ( z ) {\displaystyle x^{}=f_{\theta ^{}}(z)} . The minimizer θ ∗ {\displaystyle \theta ^{}} (typically a gradient descent) starts from a randomly initialized parameters and descends into a local best result to yield the x ∗ {\displaystyle x^{}} restoration function. ==== Overfitting ==== A parameter θ may be used to recover any image, including its noise. However, the network is reluctant to pick up noise because it contains high impedance while useful signal offers low impedance. This results in the θ parameter approaching a good-looking local optimum so long as the number of iterations in the optimization process remains low enough not to overfit data. === Deep Neural Network Model === Typically, the deep neural network model for deep image prior uses a U-Net like model without the skip connections that connect the encoder blocks with the decoder blocks. The authors in their paper mention that "Our findings here (and in other similar comparisons) seem to suggest that having deeper architecture is beneficial, and that having skip-connections that work so well for recognition tasks (such as semantic segmentation) is highly detrimental." == Applications == === Denoising === The principle of denoising is to recover an image x {\displaystyle x} from a noisy observation x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} , where x 0 = x + ϵ {\displaystyle x_{0}=x+\epsilon } . The distribution ϵ {\displaystyle \epsilon } is sometimes known (e.g.: profiling sensor and photon noise) and may optionally be incorporated into the model, though this process works well in blind denoising. The quadratic energy function E ( x , x 0 ) = | | x − x 0 | | 2 {\displaystyle E(x,x_{0})=||x-x_{0}||^{2}} is used as the data term, plugging it into the equation for θ ∗ {\displaystyle \theta ^{}} yields the optimization problem m i n θ | | f θ ( z ) − x 0 | | 2 {\displaystyle min_{\theta }||f_{\theta }(z)-x_{0}||^{2}} . === Super-resolution === Super-resolution is used to generate a higher resolution version of image x. The data term is set to E ( x ; x 0 ) = | | d ( x ) − x 0 | | 2 {\displaystyle E(x;x_{0})=||d(x)-x_{0}||^{2}} where d(·) is a downsampling operator such as Lanczos that decimates the image by a factor t. === Inpainting === Inpainting is used to reconstruct a missing area in an image x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} . These missing pixels are defined as the binary mask m ∈ { 0 , 1 } H × V {\displaystyle m\in \{0,1\}^{H\times V}} . The data term is defined as E ( x ; x 0 ) = | | ( x − x 0 ) ⊙ m | | 2 {\displaystyle E(x;x_{0})=||(x-x_{0})\odot m||^{2}} (where ⊙ {\displaystyle \odot } is the Hadamard product). The intuition behind this is that the loss is computed only on the known pixels in the image, and the network is going to learn enough about the image to fill in unknown parts of the image even though the computed loss doesn't include those pixels. This strategy is used to remove image watermarks by treating the watermark as missing pixels in the image. === Flash–no-flash reconstruction === This approach may be extended to multiple images. A straightforward example mentioned by the author is the reconstruction of an image to obtain natural light and clarity from a flash–no-flash pair. Video reconstruction is possible but it requires optimizations to take into account the spatial differences. == Implementations == A reference implementation rewritten in Python 3.6 with the PyTorch 0.4.0 library was released by the author under the Apache 2.0 license: deep-image-prior A TensorFlow-based implementation written in Python 2 and released under the CC-SA 3.0 license: deep-image-prior-tensorflow A Keras-based implementation written in Python 2 and released under the GPLv3: machine_learning_denoising == Example == See Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) of 2024-02-18
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AUTINDEX

AUTINDEX is a commercial text mining software package based on sophisticated linguistics. AUTINDEX, resulting from research in information extraction, is a product of the Institute of Applied Information Sciences (IAI) which is a non-profit institute that has been researching and developing language technology since its foundation in 1985. IAI is an institute affiliated to Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. AUTINDEX is the result of a number of research projects funded by the EU (Project BINDEX), by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the German Ministry for Economy. Amongst the latter there are the projects LinSearch, and WISSMER, see also the reference to IAI-Website. The basic functionality of AUTINDEX is the extraction of key words from a document to represent the semantics of the document. Ideally the system is integrated with a thesaurus that defines the standardised terms to be used for key word assignment. AUTINDEX is used in library applications (e.g. integrated in dandelon.com) as well as in high quality (expert) information systems, and in document management and content management environments. Together with AUTINDEX a number of additional software comes along such as an integration with Apache Solr / Lucene to provide a complete information retrieval environment, a classification and categorisation system on the basis of a machine learning software that assigns domains to the document, and a system for searching with semantically similar terms that are collected in so called tag clouds.
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Boyfriend Maker

Boyfriend Maker was a dating sim, romance chatbot smartphone app for iOS (iPhone) and Android devices, developed by Japanese studio 36 You Games (styled as 36You) and distributed under the freemium business model. Boyfriend Maker incorporated advanced artificial intelligence chat technology a decade before products such as ChatGPT. According to the developer's website, Boyfriend Maker is an "app that lets you interact and chat with quirky virtual boyfriends". While each virtual boyfriend has certain unique characteristics, the various instances of the boyfriend are powered by a chat engine, that (at least within a language and market) can utilise vocabulary and knowledge acquired in a chat with one user in subsequent chats with other users. == Gameplay == Users gain experience points and in-game coins. Users can customize their virtual boyfriend's appearance by selecting items such as hair, clothing, face, and a necklace. == Apple delisting and reintroduction == In late November 2012, the original iOS Boyfriend Maker app was delisted from the Apple App Store due to "ribald" chat, according to the New York Times. Boyfriend Maker was removed by Apple due to "reports of references to violent sexual acts and pedophilia". Boyfriend Maker had an age rating of 4+, even though the chat bot "responds with often strange and explicit text unsuitable for young children". User-posted chat excerpts indicate that the virtual boyfriend would sometimes transition abruptly to sexual chat in response to a seemingly innocent question. In one user-posted example, in response to the question, "what kind of wedding cake will we have" the boyfriend responds, "a good sex ima be on top of u u gonna ride oon me bitin the pillow gurrl ima fuck da shit out of u". The developer's use of the SimSimi-created third-party chat engine may be responsible for the sexual text. As the virtual boyfriend converses with human users, the SimSimi chat engine acquires vocabulary from users of the game and applies this "learned" vocabulary in chats with other users. The chat engine might also employ lines harvested from human-human chat logs, song lyrics, movies or TV shows. In April 2013, a detuned and presumably tamer version of the app, titled Boyfriend Plus, was permitted on Apple's App Store.
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