AI Art Los Angeles

AI Art Los Angeles — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

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  Avid DS

  Avid DS (which was called Avid DS Nitris until early 2008) is a high-end offline and finishing system comprising a non-linear editing system and visual effects software. It was developed by Softimage (this company was owned by Microsoft at the time of DS v1.0's launch before being acquired from Microsoft by Avid Technology, Inc. shortly thereafter) in Montreal. DS was discontinued on September 30, 2013 with support ending on the same date the following year. == Software == DS was called ‘Digital Studio’ in development. It was envisioned to be a complete platform for video/audio work. The first previews of the system were on the SGI platform, but this version was never released. The system was rewritten on Windows NT with different video hardware platforms (Matrox DigiSuite or Play Trinity running on a NetPower system) before the final system was released on Intergraph/StudioZ hardware in January 1998. After its acquisition by Avid, DS was always positioned as a high end video finishing tool. However, many users found it to be uniquely soup-to-nuts in its capabilities. From version 1.0 of the product, it competed with products like Autodesk Smoke, Quantel and Avid Symphony. The toolset in DS offered video timeline editing, an object-oriented vector-based paint tool, 2D layer compositing, sample based audio and starting with version 3.01 of the product, a 3D environment. Originally, a subset of the Softimage|XSI 3D software was planned to become part of the DS toolset, both were built on the same software foundation, but over time the code bases divided between the applications and the integration never happened. While the first version of the DS still lacked a few key features (no 3D, poor keying, no real-time effects), it had some significant features compared to the competing products at the time. It offered a large number of built in effects. Avid OMF import was available, positioning Softimage DS as a strong finishing tool for then typical off-line Avid systems. Lastly the integration of the toolset of Softimage DS was beyond what other product offered. A Softimage DS user could quickly go from editing, to paint, to compositing with a few mouse clicks all inside the same interface. Some of the lacking features were quickly resolved, within months of version 1.0 a new chroma keyer was released. Early versions of the software (up thru 4.0) added additional key features. Development continued with one of the first uncompressed HD editing systems (version 4.01) and an attempt to make the system more friendly to Media Composer editors in version 6. In later versions (v7.5 on beyond) DS was criticized for slow development of compositing tools, mainly lack of a new 3D environment and better tracking tools. Many DS users felt that Avid had not been giving DS the attention that it deserved. On July 7, 2013, Avid sent out an email marking the end of life of the DS product. "To Our Avid DS customers, We are writing to inform you that Avid will be realigning our business strategy to focus on a core suite of products to best leverage our developmental and creative resources. As part of this transition, we will be ceasing future development of Avid DS with a final sale date of September 30th, 2013" == Hardware == Up until version 10.5, DS was sold as a turn-key system; the software was not available without purchasing CPU, I/O and storage hardware from Avid. Beginning with 10.5, customers were able to configure their own systems using widely available components, based on recommended system requirements. In turn-key systems, there were many hardware refreshes over time. StudioZ single stream: Intergraph TDZ-425 with 30 minutes of uncompressed SCSI storage. CPUs at the time were Pentium II/300 MHz. StudioZ dual stream: Intergraph TDZ-2000 GT1 with one hour of fibre channel storage. CPUs on first systems were Pentium II/400 MHz, but last shipping systems had Pentium III/1 GHz. DS was one of the first applications to show that real-time effects could be processed with just the CPUs of the system, not requiring special video cards with real-time effect hardware. Equinox: Developed by Avid, it was one of the first uncompressed HD video cards available. Systems were available on CPUs from Pentium III/1 GHz to Pentium 4/2.8 GHz. Storage was typically SCSI, but fibre channel was also supported. Nitris DNA: Developed by Avid, the Nitris hardware was probably the largest hardware update to the system since it was released. 10-bit HD and SD support was standard. Real-time down and cross convert. This was the only hardware for DS that had on-board effect processing. This allowed a system at the time to play back dual-stream uncompressed HD effects in real-time at 16-bit precision. This was also the first hardware from Avid to support the DNxHD codec. Starting with Pentium 4, Intel Core Xeons were supported. SCSI storage was primarily used. AJA Video Systems: First available as a 4:4:4 option to be used in conjunction with Nitris hardware. Final-generation DS systems used the AJA Video Systems Kona 3 (Xena 2K) card as the only I/O for the system. The last systems shipped with two Intel Core Xeon 6-core processors. SAS is the recommended storage for these systems. == History ==

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  India AI Impact Summit 2026

  The India AI Impact Summit 2026 (also abbreviated as the AI Impact Summit) was an international summit on artificial intelligence held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, India, from 16 to 21 February 2026. It is the fourth in a series of global AI summits following the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in 2023, the AI Seoul Summit in 2024, and the AI Action Summit in Paris in 2025. Organised under the IndiaAI Mission by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, it is the first summit in the series to be hosted by a Global South nation. This series of AI summits will continue with the AI Summit in Geneva to be hosted by Switzerland in 2027. The summit was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 19 February 2026. The opening ceremony was also addressed by French President Emmanuel Macron and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. The summit was attended by over 20 heads of state and a delegation of global technology leaders including Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Demis Hassabis (DeepMind). The event faced criticism for organisational issues, misrepresentation of non-Indian products as Indian, and a perceived focus on trade fair activities over substantive governance. == Background == The AI Impact Summit was an international summit on artificial intelligence (AI) held in New Delhi from 16 to 20 February 2026. It followed the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, the AI Seoul Summit in 2024 and the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in 2023. According to Crowell & Moring, the changing summit titles seemed to reflect a broader shift in focus away from AI safety and governance toward practical impact, implementation, and measurable outcomes. Ahead of the summit, an international panel of experts published the second International AI Safety Report. The summit was structured around three foundational pillars, termed "Sutras": People, Planet, and Progress. Seven thematic working groups were established to deliver outcomes across these pillars, covering AI for economic growth and social good; democratising AI resources; inclusion for social empowerment; safe and trusted AI; human capital; science; and resilience, innovation, and efficiency. == Programme == The summit ran over five days, later extended to six following overwhelming public response. Originally scheduled to conclude on 20 February, the event was extended to 21 February with expanded evening hours for the exhibition. === India AI Impact Expo === The India AI Impact Expo, inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi on 16 February, featured over 300 exhibitors from 30 countries across more than 10 thematic pavilions. Pavilions were organised across thematic zones aligned with the summit's three pillars, showcasing AI applications in healthcare, agriculture, education, and sustainable industry. === Leaders' Plenary and CEO Roundtable === The Leaders' Plenary on 19 February brought together heads of state, ministers, and representatives from multilateral institutions to outline national and global priorities on AI governance, infrastructure, and international cooperation. A CEO Roundtable, held the same evening, convened senior executives from global technology and industry firms with government leaders to discuss investment, research collaboration, and deployment of AI systems. === Research Symposium === A Research Symposium on AI and its Impact was held on 18 February, with the IIIT Hyderabad as knowledge partner. Discussions covered sovereign AI infrastructure, global adoption challenges, research breakthroughs, and policy priorities. == Participants == The summit drew delegations from over 100 countries, including more than 20 heads of state and 60 ministers. Notable attendees from the technology industry included Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries). Representatives from multilateral institutions included Sangbu Kim of the World Bank. == Announcements and outcomes == === Indian AI models === Several Indian AI models and products were unveiled during the summit. Sarvam AI, an Indian AI laboratory, launched a new generation of large language models, including 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models using a mixture of experts architecture, as well as text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and vision models. Sarvam also introduced the Kaze smartglasses, described as the company's first hardware product, which Prime Minister Modi tested at the expo. The government-backed BharatGen Param2 model, a 17-billion parameter model supporting 22 Indian languages with multimodal capabilities, was also launched at the summit. === Infrastructure commitments === Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw outlined India's "whole-of-nation" AI strategy, describing plans to build a "frugal, sovereign and scalable" AI ecosystem. The government announced plans to add more than 20,000 GPUs to India's existing base of 38,000 under the IndiaAI Compute Portal. Microsoft announced at the summit that it was on track to invest US$50 billion by the end of the decade to bring AI to lower-income countries. Goa reaffirmed its commitment to artificial intelligence at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. === Guinness World Record === During the summit, India set a Guinness World Record for the most pledges received for an AI responsibility campaign in 24 hours, with 250,946 valid pledges collected between 16 and 17 February 2026. The campaign, conducted in partnership with Intel India as part of the IndiaAI Mission, exceeded its initial target of 5,000 pledges. == Controversies and criticisms == === Galgotias University incident === On 18 February, Galgotias University faced widespread criticism after a representative presented a robot dog at the university's exhibition pavilion as an indigenous development. Social media users identified the robot as the Unitree Go2, a commercially available product manufactured by Chinese company Unitree Robotics. IT Secretary S. Krishnan stated that the government did not want exhibitors to showcase items that were not their own, and the university was directed to vacate its stall. Galgotias University issued an apology, stating that the representative had been "ill-informed" and was not authorised to speak to the press. The incident drew political reactions, with the Indian National Congress using it to criticise the government. The controversy was amplified after Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had earlier shared a video clip of the robot on social media, which was subsequently deleted. === Organisational issues === On day 1 of the Summit, Dhananjay Yadav, a Bengaluru-based entrepreneur had alleged that his product was stolen in the Summit. He called it as a pain for the people in an X post. He further wrote, "Think about this: We paid for flights, accommodation, logistics and even the booth. Only to see our wearables disappear inside a high-security zone". Later, the stolen devices were recovered by The Delhi Police. Bloomberg reported that delegates were left stranded without food or water during a security lockdown ahead of the Prime Minister's visit on 19 February. The summit venue was closed to the public on 19 February for the Prime Minister's visit, leading to criticism from attendees who had registered for that day. === Protests by the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) === On 20 February, some members of the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) carried out protests inside the venue with slogans such as "PM is compromised" and the criticism of the recent trade deal between India and the US. 4 of these members were sent to police custody by the court on 22 February. While Bharatiya Janta Party condemned these protests, with its spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla saying, "From being anti-BJP, you have gone to being anti-national? If you have a problem with the BJP, then protest at the BJP office, Jantar Mantar, or outside the PM's office. But the people of the country and their alliance partners condemn them for their attempt to defame India in front of the entire world at the AI Summit." Congress leader Harish Rawat defended the protests, saying "it's also a fact that AI might become a tool in the hands of a few individuals… It's the opposition's job to warn against that… It's not the first time such international events have been opposed. I know how the BJP protested during the Commonwealth Games… To say that such opposition has happened for the first time is not correct. The BJP has been doing this while in the opposition." These protestors were granted bail by the Delhi high court on 2 March. == Reception and analysis == Bloomberg News reported that Prime Minister Modi used the summit to assert India's global AI ambitions following a challenging year in foreign policy. TechPolicy.Press published several critical analyses of the summit. One article argued that the summit's structure granted "multinational corporations parity with sovereign governments

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  Dry Drowning

  Dry Drowning is a cyberpunk mystery visual novel developed by Studio V and published by VLG Publishing and WhisperGames for Microsoft Windows on August 2, 2019. It was released on the Nintendo Switch on February 22, 2021. == Gameplay == The player takes control of Mordred Foley and has to read through the story, while making decisions at certain points. Depending on the choices, the player can influence the relationship to other characters as well as the course of the game, discovering more than 150 story branches, and eventually reach one out of three different endings with variations. The game also includes passages where the player has to find clues or items on the screen by clicking on them. These can be used in interrogation scenes with certain characters in order to unmask them and discover their lies. Throughout the game, the player has access to an in-game operating system called AquaOS. With that, they can re-read their conversations, look at their found items, and read biographies of the characters encountered. == Plot == The game is set in the fictional and totalitarian city Nova Polemos in Europa in 2066. Mordred Foley and Hera Kairis are private investigators and before the events of the game, they sent two of the most dangerous serial killers ever, Jennifer Kingston and Robert Herrington, to the electric chair. However, after their execution, their agency underwent an investigation for falsifying the evidence presented during the case, which completely destroyed its reputation. Now they want to restart their careers and lives, while dealing with their past traumas. Soon, Mordred is caught up in several cases that all led him to believe that the dreaded serial killer named Pandora has returned. In order to solve these cases, both Mordred and Hera have to face their pasts and fears, all while a racist political party is about to make the lives of refugees in Nova Polemos even worse. == Development == The game was initially conceived by Giacomo Masi and Samuele Zolfanelli, then developed by Studio V and directed and written by Giacomo Masi. It was originally written in Italian and translated into English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and German. The soundtrack was composed, written, and performed by Giorgio Maioli. The ending theme and Hera's pieces, performed on piano, were created by Alessandro Masi. The background and character artworks were made by Giulia Carli, other graphic elements such as the UI were created by Samuele Zolfanelli. The developers cited L.A. Noire, Ace Attorney, Blade Runner and Heavy Rain as some of their inspirations for the game. === Releases === Dry Drowning was originally released on Microsoft Windows through Steam, GOG, Itch.io, and Utomik in August 2019. In July 2019, Giacomo Masi announced the game would be released for Xbox One in 2020, though it was not released that year. A Nintendo Switch port was released on February 22, 2021, and a version for PlayStation 4 is set to release in 2021. == Reception == According to review aggregator platform Metacritic, Dry Drowning received "mixed or average reviews" for PC based on 11 reviews and "generally favorable reviews" for Nintendo Switch based on 6 reviews. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received fair approval, being recommended by 55% of critics. 4players.de gave a positive rating of 80% and wrote: "Stylish noir thriller with an interesting story, but mechanical limitations – despite a variety of possible interactions." Screen Rant gave a mixed rating of 3 out of 5 stars and wrote, "Dry Drowning may be a fair bit messy, but there's charm here. Players who are willing to embrace the cheesier elements will find some joy in its well-crafted setting and a decent murder mystery plot. The game is constrictive and lacks the genuine shock and engagement of top tier visual novels like Doki Doki Literature Club!, but there are some moments of clever world building and a strong enough mystery propelling it." The Italian review site SpazioGames gave a positive rating of 8.5 out of 10 points and wrote: "Dry Drowning is a very good game with great narrative experience. Every relationship between the characters is layered to increase player involvement, and each choice has different consequences. A thriller game that deserves to be played." === Awards === The game won Best of EGS 2019 and Best of JOIN 2019 awards, an honorable mention at GAMEROME and was nominated as "Best Italian Debut Game" at the Italian Video Game Awards 2020. It was also declared Best Game at Join The Indie 2019.

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  International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling

  The International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) is a leading international academic conference in automated planning and scheduling held annually for researchers and practitioners in planning and scheduling. ICAPS is supported by the National Science Foundation, the journal Artificial Intelligence, and other supporters. == The IPC and PDDL == ICAPS conducts the International Planning Competition (IPC), a competition scheduled every few years that empirically evaluates state-of-the-art planning systems on a collection of benchmark problems. The Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) was developed mainly to make the 1998/2000 International Planning Competition possible, and then evolved with each competition. PDDL is an attempt to standardize Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning languages. PDDL was first developed by Drew McDermott and his colleagues in 1998, inspired by STRIPS, ADL, and other sources. == History == The ICAPS conferences began in 2003 as a merge of two bi-annual conferences, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) and the European Conference on Planning (ECP). == List of events ==

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  User-defined function

  A user-defined function (UDF) is a function provided by the user of a program or environment, in a context where the usual assumption is that functions are built into the program or environment. UDFs are usually written for the requirement of its creator. == BASIC language == In some old implementations of the BASIC programming language, user-defined functions are defined using the "DEF FN" syntax. More modern dialects of BASIC are influenced by the structured programming paradigm, where most or all of the code is written as user-defined functions or procedures, and the concept becomes practically redundant. == COBOL language == In the COBOL programming language, a user-defined function is an entity that is defined by the user by specifying a FUNCTION-ID paragraph. A user-defined function must return a value by specifying the RETURNING phrase of the procedure division header and they are invoked using the function-identifier syntax. See the ISO/IEC 1989:2014 Programming Language COBOL standard for details. As of May 2022, the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS 6.4 (IBM COBOL) compiler contains support for user-defined functions. == Databases == In relational database management systems, a user-defined function provides a mechanism for extending the functionality of the database server by adding a function, that can be evaluated in standard query language (usually SQL) statements. The SQL standard distinguishes between scalar and table functions. A scalar function returns only a single value (or NULL), whereas a table function returns a (relational) table comprising zero or more rows, each row with one or more columns. User-defined functions in SQL are declared using the CREATE FUNCTION statement. For example, a user-defined function that converts Celsius to Fahrenheit (a temperature scale used in USA) might be declared like this: Once created, a user-defined function may be used in expressions in SQL statements. For example, it can be invoked where most other intrinsic functions are allowed. This also includes SELECT statements, where the function can be used against data stored in tables in the database. Conceptually, the function is evaluated once per row in such usage. For example, assume a table named Elements, with a row for each known chemical element. The table has a column named BoilingPoint for the boiling point of that element, in Celsius. The query would retrieve the name and the boiling point from each row. It invokes the CtoF user-defined function as declared above in order to convert the value in the column to a value in Fahrenheit. Each user-defined function carries certain properties or characteristics. The SQL standard defines the following properties: Language - defines the programming language in which the user-defined function is implemented; examples include SQL, C, C# and Java. Parameter style - defines the conventions that are used to pass the function parameters and results between the implementation of the function and the database system (only applicable if language is not SQL). Specific name - a name for the function that is unique within the database. Note that the function name does not have to be unique, considering overloaded functions. Some SQL implementations require that function names are unique within a database, and overloaded functions are not allowed. Determinism - specifies whether the function is deterministic or not. The determinism characteristic has an influence on the query optimizer when compiling a SQL statement. SQL-data access - tells the database management system whether the function contains no SQL statements (NO SQL), contains SQL statements but does not access any tables or views (CONTAINS SQL), reads data from tables or views (READS SQL DATA), or actually modifies data in the database (MODIFIES SQL DATA). User-defined functions should not be confused with stored procedures. Stored procedures allow the user to group a set of SQL commands. A procedure can accept parameters and execute its SQL statements depending on those parameters. A procedure is not an expression and, thus, cannot be used like user-defined functions. Some database management systems allow the creation of user defined functions in languages other than SQL. Microsoft SQL Server, for example, allows the user to use .NET languages including C# for this purpose. DB2 and Oracle support user-defined functions written in C or Java programming languages. === SQL Server 2000 === There are three types of UDF in Microsoft SQL Server 2000: scalar functions, inline table-valued functions, and multistatement table-valued functions. Scalar functions return a single data value (not a table) with RETURNS clause. Scalar functions can use all scalar data types, with exception of timestamp and user-defined data types. Inline table-valued functions return the result set of a single SELECT statement. Multistatement table-valued functions return a table, which was built with many TRANSACT-SQL statements. User-defined functions can be invoked from a query like built‑in functions such as OBJECT_ID, LEN, DATEDIFF, or can be executed through an EXECUTE statement like stored procedures. Performance Notes: User-defined functions are subroutines made of one or more Transact-SQL statements that can be used to encapsulate code for reuse. It takes zero or more arguments and evaluates a return value. Has both control-flow and DML statements in its body similar to stored procedures. Does not allow changes to any Global Session State, like modifications to database or external resource, such as a file or network. Does not support output parameter. DEFAULT keyword must be specified to pass the default value of parameter. Errors in UDF cause UDF to abort which, in turn, aborts the statement that invoked the UDF. === Apache Hive === Apache Hive defines, in addition to the regular user-defined functions (UDF), also user-defined aggregate functions (UDAF) and table-generating functions (UDTF). Hive enables developers to create their own custom functions with Java. === Apache Doris === Apache Doris, an open-source real-time analytical database, allows external users to contribute their own UDFs written in C++ to it.

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  YouNoodle

  YouNoodle, Inc. is a San Francisco-based company, with offices in Barcelona and Santiago, founded in 2010, building a platform for entrepreneurship competitions all over the world. YouNoodle matches entrepreneurs with competitions, accelerators, and startup programs, and provides a judging and voting SaaS platform to university, non-profit, government and enterprise clients organizing innovation challenges and competitions. Stanford's BASES, UC Berkeley LAUNCH, Start-Up Chile, Amazon Startup Challenge, and NASA are all running one or more competitions on YouNoodle's platform. == History and structure == YouNoodle was founded by Rebeca Hwang and Torsten Kolind in 2010. The company was spun off a project started by Bob Goodson (Quid) and Kirill Makharinsky (Enki) in 2007 with support from Peter Thiel (Founders Fund), Max Levchin (PayPal) and Charles Lho (Amicus Group), founding investor and Chairman of YouNoodle today. This project also spawned Quid (Goodson) and indirectly Ostrovok (Makharinsky). Although also named YouNoodle, this project/company was discontinued in 2010, when the three new entities started operations. The founders of the 2007-2010 entity were Goodson and Makharinsky, both former students of the University of Oxford. Goodson had studied medieval English literature before moving from Oxford to California when Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal, invited him to join a start-up there. Makharinsky's degree was in applied mathematics, and he was also encouraged to pursue opportunities in the United States by Levchin. Other significant employees included Hwang (co-founder of today's YouNoodle), a Stanford University doctoral student whose research is into social network theory. == Startup predictor == YouNoodle's now discontinued "Startup predictor", part of the 2007-2010 entity and developed by Makharinsky and Hwang, used mathematical models to predict the success of new businesses. The user fills in a questionnaire, which takes about half an hour to complete and concentrates on the business concept, finances, founders and advisers. Because the procedure was designed for new companies, questions on revenue and traffic are not included. The site then provided an estimate of what the company's value will be after three years and a score from 1 to 1000 representing its value as an investment. The service was free for the startups themselves, but YouNoodle intended to charge third parties for access to the results. The level of detail required by the questionnaire makes it difficult for people without inside knowledge of a company to provide the data for a prediction on their own. The company's founders have declined to explain the algorithm in detail, but state that it takes into account the entrepreneurs' experience, networks and mutual relations. Information provided by companies which use the site's networking features is used to improve the algorithm. As of August 2008, the algorithm was based on data from 3,000 startups. In the same month the company had four patents pending on the technology.

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  Speech synthesis

  Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written words on a home computer. The earliest computer operating system to have included a speech synthesizer was Unix in 1974, through the Unix speak utility. In 2000, Microsoft Sam was the default text-to-speech voice synthesizer used by the narrator accessibility feature, which shipped with all Windows 2000 operating systems, and subsequent Windows XP systems. A text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer—then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which is then imposed on the output speech. == History == Long before the invention of electronic signal processing, some people tried to build machines to emulate human speech. There were also legends of the existence of "Brazen Heads", such as those involving Pope Silvester II (d. 1003 AD), Albertus Magnus (1198–1280), and Roger Bacon (1214–1294). In 1779, the German-Danish scientist Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein won the first prize in a competition announced by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts for models he built of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds (in International Phonetic Alphabet notation: [aː], [eː], [iː], [oː] and [uː]). There followed the bellows-operated "acoustic-mechanical speech machine" of Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg, Hungary, described in a 1791 paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in 1846, Joseph Faber exhibited the "Euphonia". In 1923, Paget resurrected Wheatstone's design. In the 1930s, Bell Labs developed the vocoder, which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tones and resonances. From his work on the vocoder, Homer Dudley developed a keyboard-operated voice-synthesizer called The Voder (Voice Demonstrator), which he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories built the pattern playback in the late 1940s and completed it in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device; only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues discovered acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels). === Electronic devices === The first computer-based speech-synthesis systems originated in the late 1950s. Noriko Umeda et al. developed the first general English text-to-speech system in 1968, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and his colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer (vocoder) recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman puts it to sleep. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research into mechanical speech-synthesizers continues. Linear predictive coding (LPC), a form of speech coding, began development with the work of Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in 1966. Further developments in LPC technology were made by Bishnu S. Atal and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs during the 1970s. LPC was later the basis for early speech synthesizer chips, such as the Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips used in the Speak & Spell toys from 1978. In 1975, Fumitada Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT. From 1975 to 1981, Itakura studied problems in speech analysis and synthesis based on the LSP method. In 1980, his team developed an LSP-based speech synthesizer chip. LSP is an important technology for speech synthesis and coding, and in the 1990s was adopted by almost all international speech coding standards as an essential component, contributing to the enhancement of digital speech communication over mobile channels and the internet. In 1975, MUSA was released, and was one of the first Speech Synthesis systems. It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and a specialized software that enabled it to read Italian. A second version, released in 1978, was also able to sing Italian in an "a cappella" style. Dominant systems in the 1980s and 1990s were the DECtalk system, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, and the Bell Labs system; the latter was one of the first multilingual language-independent systems, making extensive use of natural language processing methods. Handheld electronics featuring speech synthesis began emerging in the 1970s. One of the first was the Telesensory Systems Inc. (TSI) Speech+ portable calculator for the blind in 1976. Other devices had primarily educational purposes, such as the Speak & Spell toy produced by Texas Instruments in 1978. Fidelity released a speaking version of its electronic chess computer in 1979. The first video game to feature speech synthesis was the 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game, Stratovox (known in Japan as Speak & Rescue), from Sun Electronics. The first personal computer game with speech synthesis was Manbiki Shoujo (Shoplifting Girl), released in 1980 for the PET 2001, for which the game's developer, Hiroshi Suzuki, developed a "zero cross" programming technique to produce a synthesized speech waveform. Another early example, the arcade version of Berzerk, also dates from 1980. The Milton Bradley Company produced the first multi-player electronic game using voice synthesis, Milton, in the same year. In 1976, Computalker Consultants released their CT-1 Speech Synthesizer. Designed by D. Lloyd Rice and Jim Cooper, it was an analog synthesizer built to work with microcomputers using the S-100 bus standard. Synthesized voices typically sounded male until 1990, when Ann Syrdal, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, created a female voice. Ray Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that as the cost-performance ratio caused speech synthesizers to become cheaper and more accessible, more people would benefit from the use of text-to-speech programs. === Artificial intelligence === In September 2016, DeepMind released WaveNet, which demonstrated that deep learning models are capable of modeling raw waveforms and generating speech from acoustic features like spectrograms or mel-spectrograms, starting the field of deep learning speech synthesis. Although WaveNet was initially considered to be computationally expensive and slow to be used in consumer products at the time, a year after its

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  Big Mechanism

  Big Mechanism is a $45 million DARPA research program, begun in 2014, aimed at developing software that will read cancer research papers, integrate them into a cancer model and frame new hypotheses by the end of 2017 through the automated collection of big data and integrating across various disciplines such as knowledge-based NLP, curation and ontology, systems and mathematical biology by reading research abstracts and papers to extract pieces of causal mechanisms. == Ras gene == The program focuses on mutations in the Ras gene family, which underlie some one-third of human cancers. Currently, a rough road map shows interaction sequences among proteins affecting cell replication and death. However, the causal relations are poorly understood. == Plan == The program is to occur in three stages. The first is to read literature and convert it into formal representations. Second is to integrate the knowledge into computational models. Third is to produce experimentally testable explanations and predictions. Research teams are developing four separate systems targeting all three tasks. In February 2015, an evaluation meeting reviewed progress on the first stage. Multiple tasks were considered. One was extraction of experimental procedure details and evaluating statements such as "we demonstrate" and "we suggest." Another worked to map sentence meaning and relationships. The best machine-reading system extracted 40% of relevant information from a small corpus and correctly determined how each passage related to the model. The second stage is to become active in summer 2015, when members attempt to produce a single reference model. The third stage is the most challenging, because the artificial intelligence community has had limited success at developing hypothesis generators. Molecular biology may be more amenable, because most domain knowledge is technical and available in written form.

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  DataViva

  DataViva is an information visualization engine created by the Strategic Priorities Office of the government of Minas Gerais. DataViva makes official data about exports, industries, locations and occupations available for the entirety of Brazil through eight apps and more than 100 million possible visualizations. The first set of datum – also available at ALICEWEB – is provided by MDIC (Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade) / SECEX (Secretariat of Foreign Trade), an official institution of the Government of Brazil and shows foreign trade statistics for all exporting municipalities in the country. The other database, provided by Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego (MTE – Ministry of Labor and Employment), shows information about all the industries and occupations in Brazil (RAIS – Annual Social Information Report). The platform consists of eight core applications, each of which allows different ways of visualizing the data available. Some applications are descriptive, that is, showing data aggregated at various levels in a simple and comparative way, such as Treemapping. Others are prescriptive, using calculations that allow an analytic visualization of the data, based on theories such as the Product Space. All the applications are generated using D3plus, an open source JavaScript library built on top of D3.js by Alexander Simoes and Dave Landry. Inspired by The Observatory of Economic Complexity, DataViva is an open data, open-source, and free to use tool. It was developed in a partnership with Datawheel, co-founded by MIT Media Lab Professor César Hidalgo, and is maintained by the Government of Minas Gerais.

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  Semantic Scholar

  Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval. Semantic Scholar began as a database for the topics of computer science, geoscience, and neuroscience. In 2017, the system began including biomedical literature in its corpus. As of September 2022, it includes over 200 million publications from all fields of science. == Technology == Semantic Scholar provides a one-sentence summary of scientific literature. One of its aims was to address the challenge of reading numerous titles and lengthy abstracts on mobile devices. It also seeks to ensure that the three million scientific papers published yearly reach readers, since it is estimated that only half of this literature is ever read. Artificial intelligence is used to capture the essence of a paper, generating it through an "abstractive" technique. The project uses a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and machine vision to add a layer of semantic analysis to the traditional methods of citation analysis, and to extract relevant figures, tables, entities, and venues from papers. Another key AI-powered feature is Research Feeds, an adaptive research recommender that uses AI to quickly learn what papers users care about reading and recommends the latest research to help scholars stay up to date. It uses a paper embedding model trained using contrastive learning to find papers similar to those in each Library folder. Semantic Scholar also offers Semantic Reader, an augmented reader with the potential to revolutionize scientific reading by making it more accessible and richly contextual. Semantic Reader provides in-line citation cards that allow users to see citations with TLDR (short for Too Long, Didn't Read) automatically generated short summaries as they read and skimming highlights that capture key points of a paper so users can digest faster. In contrast with Google Scholar and PubMed, Semantic Scholar is designed to highlight the most important and influential elements of a paper. The AI technology is designed to identify hidden connections and links between research topics. Like the previously cited search engines, Semantic Scholar also exploits graph structures, which include the Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph, Springer Nature's SciGraph, and the Semantic Scholar Corpus (originally a 45 million papers corpus in computer science, neuroscience and biomedicine). == Article identifier == Each paper hosted by Semantic Scholar is assigned a unique identifier called the Semantic Scholar Corpus ID (abbreviated S2CID). The following entry is an example: Liu, Ying; Gayle, Albert A; Wilder-Smith, Annelies; Rocklöv, Joacim (March 2020). "The reproductive number of COVID-19 is higher compared to SARS coronavirus". Journal of Travel Medicine. 27 (2). doi:10.1093/jtm/taaa021. PMID 32052846. S2CID 211099356. == Indexing == Semantic Scholar is free to use and unlike similar search engines (e.g., Google Scholar) does not search for material that is behind a paywall. One study compared the index scope of Semantic Scholar to Google Scholar, and found that for the papers cited by secondary studies in computer science, the two indices had comparable coverage, each only missing a handful of the papers. == Number of users and publications == As of January 2018, following a 2017 project that added biomedical papers and topic summaries, the Semantic Scholar corpus included more than 40 million papers from computer science and biomedicine. In March 2018, Doug Raymond, who developed machine learning initiatives for the Amazon Alexa platform, was hired to lead the Semantic Scholar project. As of August 2019, the number of included papers metadata (not the actual PDFs) had grown to more than 173 million after the addition of the Microsoft Academic Graph records. In 2020, a partnership between Semantic Scholar and the University of Chicago Press Journals made all articles published under the University of Chicago Press available in the Semantic Scholar corpus. At the end of 2020, Semantic Scholar had indexed 190 million papers. In 2020, Semantic Scholar reached seven million users per month.

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  Model collapse

  Model collapse, also known by other names such as "AI inbreeding", "AI cannibalism", "Habsburg AI", and "model autophagy disorder" or "MAD" is a phenomenon noted in artificial intelligence studies, where machine learning models gradually degrade due to errors coming from uncurated synthetic data, or due to training on the outputs of another model such as prior versions of itself. It is unclear to what extent the phenomenon threatens the long-term development of such models, and some techniques have been proposed to mitigate the effect. == Characteristics == Shumailov et al. coined the term to describe two specific stages to the degradation of machine learning models: early model collapse and late model collapse: In early model collapse, the model begins losing information about the tails of the distribution – mostly affecting minority data. Later work highlighted that early model collapse is hard to notice, since overall performance may appear to improve, while the model loses performance on minority data. In late model collapse, the model loses a significant proportion of its performance, confusing concepts and losing most of its variance. == Mechanism == Using synthetic data as training data can lead to issues with the quality and reliability of the trained model. Model collapse occurs for three main reasons: functional approximation errors sampling errors learning errors Importantly, it happens in even the simplest of models, where not all of the error sources are present. In more complex models the errors often compound, leading to faster collapse. == Disagreement over real-world impact == Some researchers and commentators on model collapse warn that the phenomenon could fundamentally threaten future generative AI development: As AI-generated data is shared on the Internet, it will inevitably end up in future training datasets, which are often crawled from the Internet. If training on "slop" (large quantities of unlabeled synthetic data) inevitably leads to model collapse, this could therefore pose a difficult problem. However, recently, other researchers have disagreed with this argument, showing that if synthetic data accumulates alongside human-generated data, model collapse is avoided. The researchers argue that data accumulating over time is a more realistic description of reality than deleting all existing data every year, and that the real-world impact of model collapse may not be as catastrophic as feared. An alternative branch of the literature investigates the use of machine learning detectors and watermarking to identify model generated data and filter it out. == Mathematical models of the phenomenon == === 1D Gaussian model === In 2024, a first attempt has been made at illustrating collapse for the simplest possible model — a single dimensional normal distribution fit using unbiased estimators of mean and variance, computed on samples from the previous generation. To make this more precise, we say that original data follows a normal distribution X 0 ∼ N ( μ , σ 2 ) {\displaystyle X^{0}\sim {\mathcal {N}}(\mu ,\sigma ^{2})} , and we possess M 0 {\displaystyle M_{0}} samples X j 0 {\displaystyle X_{j}^{0}} for j ∈ { 1 , … , M 0 } {\displaystyle j\in {\{\,1,\dots ,M_{0}\,{}\}}} . Denoting a general sample X j i {\displaystyle X_{j}^{i}} as sample j ∈ { 1 , … , M i } {\displaystyle j\in {\{\,1,\dots ,M_{i}\,{}\}}} at generation i {\displaystyle i} , then the next generation model is estimated using the sample mean and variance: μ i + 1 = 1 M i ∑ j X j i ; σ i + 1 2 = 1 M i − 1 ∑ j ( X j i − μ i + 1 ) 2 . {\displaystyle \mu _{i+1}={\frac {1}{M_{i}}}\sum _{j}X_{j}^{i};\quad \sigma _{i+1}^{2}={\frac {1}{M_{i}-1}}\sum _{j}(X_{j}^{i}-\mu _{i+1})^{2}.} Leading to a conditionally normal next generation model X j i + 1 | μ i + 1 , σ i + 1 ∼ N ( μ i + 1 , σ i + 1 2 ) {\displaystyle X_{j}^{i+1}|\mu _{i+1},\;\sigma _{i+1}\sim {\mathcal {N}}(\mu _{i+1},\sigma _{i+1}^{2})} . In theory, this is enough to calculate the full distribution of X j i {\displaystyle X_{j}^{i}} . However, even after the first generation, the full distribution is no longer normal: It follows a variance-gamma distribution. To continue the analysis, instead of writing the probability density function at each generation, it is possible to explicitly construct them in terms of independent random variables using Cochran's theorem. To be precise, μ 1 {\displaystyle \mu _{1}} and σ 1 {\displaystyle \sigma _{1}} are independent, with μ 1 ∼ N ( μ , σ 2 M 0 ) {\displaystyle \mu _{1}\sim {\mathcal {N}}\left(\mu ,{\frac {\sigma ^{2}}{M_{0}}}\right)} and ( M 0 − 1 ) σ 1 2 ∼ σ 2 Γ ( M 0 − 1 2 , 1 2 ) {\displaystyle (M_{0}-1)\,\sigma _{1}^{2}\sim \sigma ^{2}\,\Gamma \left({\frac {M_{0}-1}{2}},{\frac {1}{2}}\right)} , following a Gamma distribution. Denoting with Z {\displaystyle Z} Gaussian random variables distributed according to N ( 0 , 1 ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {N}}(0,1)} and with S i {\displaystyle S^{i}} random variables distributed with 1 M i − 1 − 1 Γ ( M i − 1 − 1 2 , 1 2 ) {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{M_{i-1}-1}}\Gamma \left({\frac {M_{i-1}-1}{2}},{\frac {1}{2}}\right)} , it turns out to be possible to write samples at each generation as X j 0 = μ + σ Z j 0 , {\textstyle X_{j}^{0}=\mu +\sigma Z_{j}^{0},} X j 1 = μ + σ M 0 Z 1 + σ S 1 Z j 1 , {\textstyle X_{j}^{1}=\mu +{\frac {\sigma }{\sqrt {M_{0}}}}Z^{1}+\sigma {\sqrt {S^{1}}}Z_{j}^{1},} and more generally X j n = μ + σ M 0 Z 1 + σ M 1 S 1 Z 2 + ⋯ + σ M n − 1 S 1 × ⋯ × S n − 1 Z n + σ S 1 × ⋯ × S n Z j n . {\displaystyle X_{j}^{n}=\mu +{\frac {\sigma }{\sqrt {M_{0}}}}Z^{1}+{\frac {\sigma }{\sqrt {M_{1}}}}{\sqrt {S^{1}}}Z^{2}+\dots +{\frac {\sigma }{\sqrt {M_{n-1}}}}{\sqrt {S^{1}\times \dots \times S^{n-1}}}Z^{n}+\sigma {\sqrt {S^{1}\times \dots \times S^{n}}}Z_{j}^{n}.} Note, that these are not joint distributions, as Z n {\displaystyle Z^{n}} and S n {\displaystyle S^{n}} depend directly on Z j n − 1 {\displaystyle Z_{j}^{n-1}} , but when considering X j n {\displaystyle X_{j}^{n}} on its own the formula above provides all the information about the full distribution. To analyse the model collapse, we can first calculate variance and mean of samples at generation n {\displaystyle n} . This would tell us what kind of distributions we expect to arrive at after n {\displaystyle n} generations. It is possible to find its exact value in closed form, but the mean and variance of the square root of gamma distribution are expressed in terms of gamma functions, making the result quite clunky. Following, it is possible to expand all results to second order in each of 1 / M i {\displaystyle 1/M_{i}} , assuming each sample size to be large. It is then possible to show that 1 σ 2 Var ⁡ ( X j n ) = 1 M 0 + 1 M 1 + ⋯ + 1 M n − 1 + 1 + O ( M i − 2 ) . {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{\sigma ^{2}}}\operatorname {Var} (X_{j}^{n})={\frac {1}{M_{0}}}+{\frac {1}{M_{1}}}+\dots +{\frac {1}{M_{n-1}}}+1+{\mathcal {O}}\left(M_{i}^{-2}\right).} And if all sample sizes M i = M {\displaystyle M_{i}=M} are constant, this diverges linearly as n → ∞ {\displaystyle n\to \infty } : Var ⁡ ( X j n ) = σ 2 ( 1 + n M ) ; E ( X j n ) = μ . {\displaystyle \operatorname {Var} (X_{j}^{n})=\sigma ^{2}\left(1+{\frac {n}{M}}\right);\quad \mathbb {E} (X_{j}^{n})=\mu .} This is the same scaling as for a single dimensional Gaussian random walk. However, divergence of the variance of X j n {\displaystyle X_{j}^{n}} does not directly provide any information about the corresponding estimates of μ n + 1 {\displaystyle \mu _{n+1}} and σ n + 1 {\displaystyle \sigma _{n+1}} , particularly how different they are from the original μ {\displaystyle \mu } and σ {\displaystyle \sigma } . It turns out to be possible to calculate the distance between the true distribution and the approximated distribution at step n + 1 {\displaystyle n+1} , using the Wasserstein-2 distance (which is also sometimes referred to as risk): E [ W 2 2 ( N ( μ , σ 2 ) , N ( μ n + 1 , σ n + 1 2 ) ) ] = 3 2 σ 2 ( 1 M 0 + 1 M 1 + ⋯ + 1 M n ) + O ( M i − 2 ) , {\displaystyle \mathbb {E} \left[\mathbb {W} _{2}^{2}\left({\mathcal {N}}(\mu ,\sigma ^{2}),{\mathcal {N}}(\mu _{n+1},\sigma _{n+1}^{2})\right)\right]={\frac {3}{2}}\sigma ^{2}\left({\frac {1}{M_{0}}}+{\frac {1}{M_{1}}}+\dots +{\frac {1}{M_{n}}}\right)+{\mathcal {O}}\left(M_{i}^{-2}\right),} Var ⁡ [ W 2 2 ( N ( μ , σ 2 ) , N ( μ n + 1 , σ n + 1 2 ) ) ] = 1 2 σ 4 ( 3 M 0 2 + 3 M 1 2 + ⋯ + 3 M n 2 + ∑ i ≠ j 4 M i M j ) + O ( M i − 3 ) . {\displaystyle \operatorname {Var} \left[\mathbb {W} _{2}^{2}\left({\mathcal {N}}(\mu ,\sigma ^{2}),{\mathcal {N}}(\mu _{n+1},\sigma _{n+1}^{2})\right)\right]={\frac {1}{2}}\sigma ^{4}\left({\frac {3}{M_{0}^{2}}}+{\frac {3}{M_{1}^{2}}}+\dots +{\frac {3}{M_{n}^{2}}}+\sum _{i\neq j}{\frac {4}{M_{i}M_{j}}}\right)+{\mathcal {O}}\left(M_{i}^{-3}\right).} This directly shows why model collapse occurs in this simple model. Due to errors from re-sampling the approximated distribution, each generation ends up corresponding to a

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  Artificial intelligence in pharmacy

  Artificial intelligence in pharmacy refers to the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques across pharmaceutical research and practice, including drug discovery, drug delivery, safety monitoring, clinical decision support, and pharmacy operations. Machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing have been applied to tasks ranging from molecular design to patient adherence monitoring, with the aim of reducing development costs, improving accuracy, and personalizing treatment. Adoption has been uneven. Barriers include limited AI training among pharmacists, high infrastructure costs, and the risk of harm from models trained on unrepresentative data. Regulatory frameworks for AI-based pharmaceutical tools remain in active development across most jurisdictions. == Applications == === Drug discovery and development === Drug development is resource-intensive: bringing a single drug to market typically costs around $2.6 billion and takes 12–14 years. Machine learning algorithms have been applied to analyze molecular datasets to identify potential drug candidates, predict drug–target interactions, and optimize formulations. Artificial neural networks and generative adversarial networks have been used in drug discovery tasks including virtual screening, structure-activity relationship modeling, and de novo molecule generation. Peptides designed using AI methods have shown activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria, and transcriptomic data from human cell lines has been used to train deep learning models to classify drugs by therapeutic properties. Results in drug discovery have been mixed. AI models depend on the quality and diversity of their training data; those trained on narrow chemical libraries can fail to generalize to novel molecular scaffolds. The gap between high virtual screening hit rates and success in preclinical or clinical testing remains a persistent challenge, and the translation of computationally predicted candidates into approved drugs has been slower than early projections suggested. === Drug delivery systems === AI methods including neural networks, principal component analysis, and neuro-fuzzy logic have been applied to identifying biological targets for pharmaceuticals and analyzing genetic information relevant to drug design. Computational models can predict how a formulation will behave in biological systems, helping narrow the field before laboratory synthesis begins. Systems have been proposed that monitor patient response and adjust doses in real time based on individual physiology, with potential applications in chronic disease management. Research has also explored AI applications in targeted cancer treatments and oral vaccine delivery, areas where precise control over drug release kinetics is a design priority. === Drug safety === AI has been applied to predicting and detecting adverse drug reactions using techniques including knowledge graphs, logistic regression classifiers, and neural networks. A 2023 study developed a machine learning algorithm using knowledge graph analysis to classify known causes of adverse reactions. Natural language processing and deep learning models including long short-term memory (LSTM) networks have shown better performance than conventional methods for detecting opioid misuse, drawing on both structured data from electronic health records and unstructured sources such as clinical notes. AI-based pharmacovigilance systems can scan large volumes of electronic health records and social media for drug safety signals at a scale not feasible with manual review. Limitations include difficulty distinguishing drug-related adverse events from unrelated conditions in free-text data, and the need for validated benchmarks to measure model performance against existing safety monitoring standards. === Clinical decision support and personalized medicine === Machine learning systems trained on patient datasets can predict individual risk profiles, including potential allergies and drug–drug interactions, reducing the risk of harm in complex polypharmacy cases where the number of possible interactions exceeds what a clinician can readily assess. Personalized dosing models have been developed for drugs with narrow therapeutic windows — including anticoagulants and immunosuppressants — using patient-specific variables such as weight, renal function, and relevant genetic markers. Prospective clinical validation of these systems has lagged behind their technical development. Most published evaluations report performance on retrospective datasets, and the regulatory pathway for AI-based clinical decision support tools in pharmacy varies by jurisdiction. === Pharmacy operations and automation === Robotic and AI-driven systems have been applied to dispensing accuracy and pharmacy logistics. At the UCSF Medical Center, robotic technology produced 350,000 medication doses with no dispensing errors recorded. Robots such as TUG assist with preparing and transporting medications and laboratory samples within hospital settings. AI has also been applied to inventory management, with demand-forecasting systems predicting medicine requirements to reduce shortages and minimize waste from expired stock. In community pharmacy settings, AI tools have been used to flag potential prescription errors and alert pharmacists to drug–drug interactions before dispensing. === Medication adherence === Confirming that patients take prescribed medications as directed is a persistent challenge in healthcare. AI-enabled tools including smart pillboxes, RFID tags, ingestible sensors, and video check-ins have been applied to this problem. Smart pillboxes record when they are opened, providing real-time adherence data that can be reviewed remotely by care teams. Ingestible sensors transmit a signal after dissolution, offering direct confirmation of ingestion rather than proxy measures such as pill count or self-report. == Adoption challenges == === Barriers === Several barriers limit AI adoption in pharmacy practice. Many published evaluations report model performance on retrospective datasets rather than prospective clinical outcomes, making it difficult to assess real-world benefit. Pharmacists have reported limited AI training and knowledge, and research facilities often lack the computational infrastructure required for model development and validation. Models trained on biased or unrepresentative datasets can produce misleading results with direct patient safety consequences. === Regulatory frameworks === Regulatory frameworks for AI-based pharmaceutical tools are in active development. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued guidance on AI and machine learning-based software as a medical device, addressing requirements for pre-market review and post-market performance monitoring. The European Medicines Agency has published discussion papers on the use of AI across the medicines development lifecycle, with particular attention to transparency in model training and validation. The absence of harmonized international standards creates compliance complexity for developers operating across multiple jurisdictions. === Ethical challenges === AI adoption raises data privacy and security concerns, including the risk of exposing sensitive patient information through data breaches. Algorithmic bias presents a related hazard: a model trained on an unrepresentative patient population may generate unsuitable treatment recommendations for patients not reflected in its training data, with potential for disparate outcomes across demographic groups. The opacity of some machine learning models, particularly deep neural networks, limits clinicians' ability to interpret or contest a recommendation, raising questions of accountability when a model-assisted decision results in patient harm. === Proposed solutions === Responses proposed in the literature include AI-focused education programs for pharmacists, increased public funding for healthcare AI research, encryption and governance frameworks for patient data, and regulatory requirements to prevent the use of biased training datasets. Greater transparency about training data provenance, model architecture, and validation methodology has also been recommended, including disclosure requirements in regulatory submissions. === Future directions === Research groups have called for tighter integration between AI systems and electronic health records to reduce healthcare costs and improve continuity of care across settings. International collaboration through shared AI frameworks and federated learning approaches has been proposed to address data scarcity in underrepresented patient populations and accelerate validation across institutions.

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  Dave's Redistricting

  Dave's Redistricting App (DRA) is an online web app originally created by Dave Bradlee that allows anyone to simulate redistricting a U.S. state's congressional and legislative districts. == Purpose == According to Bradlee, the software was designed to "put power in people's hands," and so that they "can see how the process works, so it's a little less mysterious than it was 10 years ago." Bradlee has noticed that many citizens are taking this process seriously and using his app to create legitimate redistricting maps that could be put in place. Some websites have called Bradlee the pioneer and cause of the rise of do-it-yourself redistricting. States such as Montana in 2021 allowed the general population to use it to submit redistricting proposals following the 2020 United States Census. Dave's Redistricting has frequently been mentioned as a resource that can be used to combat gerrymandering, given that the public has free access to it. Political science firms such as FiveThirtyEight have used the website to draw examples of gerrymandered districts, including on their famous Atlas of Redistricting. Dave Bradlee built the first generation of DRA. DRA 2020 is built by a small team of volunteers—Dave Bradlee, Terry Crowley, Alec Ramsay, and David Rinn—all with a shared passion for technology & democracy and all Microsoft veterans. Their mission is to empower civic organizations and citizen activists to advocate for fair congressional and legislative districts and increased transparency in the redistricting process. == Functions == Users can redraw the congressional and state legislative districts for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico using a variety of census and election datasets including Cook PVI. Maps can be optimized for different criteria. DRA 2020 added several major features to the first generation app: Sharing & collaborative editing of maps, like Google Docs Multiple statewide elections for all 50 states including the ability to import your own data Comprehensive analytics for evaluating and comparing maps Custom overlays, and Block-level editing DRA remains free to use. == Versions == 2.2: This uses Bing Maps, an outdated software that projects the districts of a single state onto a map of the United States. 2.5: After Bing Maps announced that it would no longer be updating for the foreseen future, the U.S. Map feature was removed. DRA 2020: At the end of 2018, a beta version of 2020 was released. This version that did not require Microsoft Silverlight and could be used in any web browser. DRA 2020 has been under continuous development since and is built using React (JavaScript library), Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, TypeScript, Node.js, Amazon Web Services, as well as many open source components, tools, and icons.

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  Iron Man 2020 (event)

  "Iron Man 2020" is a storyline published by Marvel Comics in 2020 which follows the character Arno Stark as he attempts to take over Stark Industries and the mantle of his estranged brother Tony Stark (Iron Man). The crossover characters of two different brands meeting up in one storyline received mixed reviews from critics. == Publication history == Marvel Comics released the teaser for the event at New York Comic Con in November 2019. It was also alluded to in December 2019's Incoming! In the original checklist released for the event, 2020 Force Works was originally titled Force Works 2020, while 2020 Machine Man was previously named Machine Man 2020, and so on. Additionally, 2020 Wolverine was going to be called Weapon.EXE 2020. The publication of this event was intended to span from January to June 2020, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Diamond Comic Distributors suspended the distribution of new print titles between April 1 and May 27, which also caused digital releases by Marvel Entertainment to be postponed. The rescheduling of the postponed issues to new dates pushed the event's conclusion to August, and certain issues, namely 2020 Force Works #3 and 2020 Ironheart #1–2, were released exclusively in a digital format. == Main plot == Arno Stark wakes up from a nightmare involving the Extinction Entity, a monstrous amalgamation of alien and machine. He dreams that the Extinction Entity is going to come to Earth in a matter of weeks and create an artificial intelligence (A.I.) army to consume humanity. After eating breakfast with duplicates of Howard Stark and Maria Stark, Arno suits up as Iron Man and saves a construction worker from a hostage situation involving several Nick Fury Life Model Decoys, which represent the A.I. army trying to liberate construction robots. Over different news outlets, the media wonders about the whereabouts of Tony Stark, who declared himself as nothing more than a simulation of the real, late Tony Stark. At the A.I. army's base, Machine Man is commanding the robots' moves when Arno appears, having planned for the A.I. army's leader to show himself. Machine Man activates the bomb, forcing Arno to fly it away so it explodes somewhere safe while he escapes. Machine Man reaches the Thirteenth Floor, a dimensional-shunted plane of existence made of solid light, and a haven for robotkind that humans cannot access or comprehend. Aaron meets with the leader of the A.I. army and creator of Thirteenth Floor: Tony Stark -- who is now going by the name Mark One, having embraced his nature as artificial intelligence. Also in the A.I. army are Albert, Awesome Android, H.E.R.B.I.E., Machinesmith, and Quasimodo. The A.I. army continues its efforts to liberate artificial life forms by raiding places where robots are being subjugated. Iron Man intercepts an attack on a Futura Motors testing site by Quasimodo and H.E.R.B.I.E. and manages to recover an Un-Inhibitor allowing him to take control of all A.I.s. On the Thirteenth Floor, Mark One receives a transmission from a mole inside Baintronics -- codenamed Ghost in the Machine --revealing that Arno used the submission code on Jocasta, who received a new body, making her entirely compliant. Stark plans to upload the submission code to the internet to instantly infect robots. With only three hours before the code is transmitted to Stark Unlimited's satellite network, Mark One devises a heist on Bain Tower to tamper with the code before launch. Having discovered the secret behind the Thirteenth Floor, Arno shuts out the A.I. army, uses Jocasta to lure Machine Man away from the tower, infects Machinesmith with the submission code, and confronts Mark One. H.E.R.B.I.E., Awesome Android, and Machinesmith escape from Bain Tower and call for help to every robot in New York City. Mark One is left to fight Iron Man and is defeated. Meanwhile, Sunset Bain confronts and fires Andy Bhang under the accusation of working as a mole inside Stark Unlimited and feeding Bethany Cabe information to relay to the A.I. army. Arno takes Mark One inside Bain Tower to meet Howard and Maria Stark and asks Tony to join him, but he refuses and dismisses his rationale as lunacy. The robotic mob assembled by Machine Man reaches Bain Tower, giving Mark a distraction which allows him to fly off and disable the transmission dish from which Arno intends to broadcast the obedience O.S. to subjugate every robot. Tony manages to stop the upload and make the antenna unusable. In retaliation, Arno fires all of his armor's firepower at Tony as he falls to the ground. Tony Stark's remaining allies escape with his body as Arno attacks the robot protesters. Tony wakes up inside the Thirteenth Floor and is greeted by F.R.I.D.A.Y., who had plucked Tony's consciousness from his body during his fall. In the streets, Arno Stark tracks down Howard and Maria, who die from an illness inherited from Arno. When Sunset Bain objects to Arno creating new bodies for his parents and trying to control people, he reveals she is an A.I., a duplicate of the real Bain whom Arno replaced back when she solicited him to heal a scar on her face. He makes new bodies for Howard and Maria by recreating the Arsenal and Mistress bodies from the eScape. After learning of Arno's new plan, Dr. Shapiro (who is the actual mole) sneaks into a computer and warns F.R.I.D.A.Y. about it. When F.R.I.D.A.Y. relays that only Tony Stark can stop Arno, Tony insists that he is not the real Tony Stark, but is confronted by holographic manifestations of himself in different points of his life, until they all merge into him and he acknowledges that he has always been Tony. As Arno Stark sets off to the Stark Space Station to install his mind-controlling device to enslave all of humanity, Tony Stark's allies assault the Stark Unlimited HQ, confronting Sunset Bain's duplicate and Arno's Iron Legion. Jocasta uploads a submission code to Bain and they place Tony's body inside a bio-pod that restores his body to normalcy, uploads his consciousness back into his body. Using the Thirteenth Floor's access mechanisms, Tony and his allies reach the Stark Space Station from one of the elevators within. Employing his new Virtual Armor, Tony defeats Arno in combat. When Arno prepares to activate his mind-controlling device, the Extinction Entity suddenly appears. Arno ultimately defeats the Extinction Entity by willingly assimilating with it, causing it to explode. The entity is revealed to be a delusion caused by Arno's terminal disease, of which he would die by the end of 2020. Unable to stop Arno, Tony placed him in a simulation where he successfully stopped the entity. Afterwards, Jocasta uses the submission code to force Sunset Bain's duplicate to confess all of Baintronics' crimes, also claiming responsibility for tricking Tony into thinking he was an artificial intelligence and pulling the strings of the A.I. Army, putting an end to the robot revolution. Tony gives up Stark Unlimited to Bhang Robotics and he flies off in a new armor, reasserting himself as Iron Man. == Issues involved == === Main issues === Iron Man 2020 (vol. 2) #1–6 === Tie-In issues === 2020 Force Works #1–3 2020 Iron Age #1 2020 Ironheart #1–2 2020 Machine Man #1–2 2020 Rescue #1–2 2020 iWolverine #1–2 == Critical reception == According to Comic Book Roundup, the entire crossover received an average score of 6.4 out of 10 based on 36 reviews. William Tucker from ButWhyTho Podcast stated "Iron Man 2020 #6 is an initially exciting end to a great event that eventually feels deflated. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the art, Woods has been incredible throughout, but the ending that Slott and Gage chose to round out an epic tale like this left me feeling cold. And while there were loads of enjoyable cameos, their involvement ultimately didn't seem important to the story as a whole. Which is disappointing, as the rest of the event really was a fun and exciting ride." Anthony Wendel from MonkeysFightingRobots wrote "The 2020 event seems like it is taking some big risk, and it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence from the start. Iron Man 2020 #1 has set the stakes and shown some very intense players on both sides of the board. Sadly, if it doesn't unfold just the right way, many may feel cheated about defending the path characters are taking." == Collected editions ==

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  Orange (software)

  Orange is an open-source data visualization, machine learning and data mining toolkit. It features a visual programming front-end for exploratory qualitative data analysis and interactive data visualization. == Description == Orange is a component-based visual programming software package for data visualization, machine learning, data mining, and data analysis. Orange components are called widgets. They range from simple data visualization, subset selection, and preprocessing to empirical evaluation of learning algorithms and predictive modeling. Visual programming is implemented through an interface in which workflows are created by linking predefined or user-designed widgets, while advanced users can use Orange as a Python library for data manipulation and widget alteration. == Software == Orange is an open-source software package released under GPL and hosted on GitHub. Versions up to 3.0 include core components in C++ with wrappers in Python. From version 3.0 onwards, Orange uses common Python open-source libraries for scientific computing, such as numpy, scipy and scikit-learn, while its graphical user interface operates within the cross-platform Qt framework. The default installation includes a number of machine learning, preprocessing and data visualization algorithms in 6 widget sets (data, transform, visualize, model, evaluate and unsupervised). Additional functionalities are available as add-ons (text-mining, image analytics, bioinformatics, etc.). Orange is supported on macOS, Windows and Linux and can also be installed from the Python Package Index repository (pip install Orange3). == Features == Orange consists of a canvas interface onto which the user places widgets and creates a data analysis workflow. Widgets offer basic functionalities such as reading the data, showing a data table, selecting features, training predictors, comparing learning algorithms, visualizing data elements, etc. The user can interactively explore visualizations or feed the selected subset into other widgets. Canvas: graphical front-end for data analysis Widgets: Data: widgets for data input, data filtering, sampling, imputation, feature manipulation and feature selection Visualize: widgets for common visualization (box plot, histograms, scatter plot) and multivariate visualization (mosaic display, sieve diagram). Classify: a set of supervised machine learning algorithms for classification Regression: a set of supervised machine learning algorithms for regression Evaluate: cross-validation, sampling-based procedures, reliability estimation and scoring of prediction methods Unsupervised: unsupervised learning algorithms for clustering (k-means, hierarchical clustering) and data projection techniques (multidimensional scaling, principal component analysis, correspondence analysis). == Add-ons == Orange users can extend their core set of components with components in the add-ons. Supported add-ons include: Associate: components for mining frequent itemsets and association rule learning. Bioinformatics: components for gene expression analysis, enrichment, and access to expression databases (e.g., Gene Expression Omnibus) and pathway libraries. Data fusion: components for fusing different data sets, collective matrix factorization, and exploration of latent factors. Educational: components for teaching machine learning concepts, such as k-means clustering, polynomial regression, stochastic gradient descent, ... Explain: provides an extension with components for the model explanation, including Shapley value analysis Geo: components for working with geospatial data. Image analytics: components for working with images and ImageNet embeddings Network: components for graph and network analysis. Text mining: components for natural language processing and text mining. Time series: widget components for time series analysis and modeling. Single-cell: support for single-cell gene expression analysis, including components for loading single-cell data, filtering and batch effect removal, marker genes discovery, scoring of cells and genes, and cell type prediction. Spectroscopy: components for analyzing and visualization of (hyper)spectral datasets. Survival analysis: add-on for data analysis dealing with survival data. It includes widgets for standard survival analysis techniques, such as the Kaplan-Meier plot, the Cox regression model, and several derivative widgets. World Happiness: support for downloading socioeconomic data from a database, including OECD and World Development Indicators. Provides access to thousands of country indicators from various economic databases. Fairness: add-on for evaluation and creation of fair machine learning models without discrimination. Widgets range from computing fairness metrics like statistical parity to post-, pre-, in-processing methods to build fair models. == Objectives == The program provides a platform for experiment selection, recommendation systems, and predictive modelling and is used in biomedicine, bioinformatics, genomic research, and teaching. In science, it is used as a platform for testing new machine learning algorithms and for implementing new techniques in genetics and bioinformatics. In education, it was used for teaching machine learning and data mining methods to students of biology, biomedicine, and informatics. == Extensions == Various projects build on Orange either by extending the core components with add-ons or using only the Orange Canvas to exploit the implemented visual programming features and GUI. OASYS — ORange SYnchrotron Suite scOrange — single cell biostatistics Quasar — data analysis in natural sciences == History == In 1996, the University of Ljubljana and Jožef Stefan Institute started development of ML, a machine learning framework in C++, and Python bindings were developed for this framework in 1997, which, together with emerging Python modules, formed a joint framework called Orange. Over the following years, most contemporary major algorithms for data mining and machine learning were implemented in C++ (Orange's core) or Python modules. In 2002, first prototypes to create a flexible graphical user interface were designed using Pmw Python megawidgets. In 2003, the graphical user interface was redesigned and re-developed for Qt framework using PyQt Python bindings. The visual programming framework was defined, and the development of widgets (graphical components of the data analysis pipeline) began. In 2005, extensions for data analysis in bioinformatics was created. In 2008, Mac OS X DMG and Fink-based installation packages were developed. In 2009, over 100 widgets were created and maintained. In 2009, Orange 2.0 beta was released, offering installation packages on the website based on the daily compiling cycle. In 2012, a new object hierarchy was imposed, replacing the old module-based structure. In 2013, a significant redesign of the graphical user interface included a new toolbox and depiction of workflows. In 2015, Orange 3.0 was released. Orange stores the data in NumPy arrays; machine learning algorithms mostly use scikit-learn. In 2015, a text analysis add-on for Orange3 was released. In 2016, Orange released version 3.3. Development scheduled a monthly cycle for stable releases. In 2016, Orange began development and release of an Image Analytics add-on, with server-side deep neural networks for image embedding In 2017, a Spectroscopy add-on for the analysis of spectral data was introduced. In 2017, Geo, an add-on for dealing with geo-location data and visualisation of geo maps was introduced In 2018, Orange began development and release of an add-on for single-cell data analysis. In 2019, Orange separated its graphical interface for development as a separate project, orange-canvas-core In 2020, Orange introduced the Explain add-on with widgets for explaining classification models and regression models, highlighting the strength and contributions specific features make towards predicting a specific class. In 2022, World Happiness, an add-on for the Orange3 data mining suite, was introduced, providing widgets for accessing socioeconomic data from various databases such as World Happiness Report, World Development Indicators, OECD. In 2022, Orange extended the Explain add-on with an Individual Conditional Expectation plot and the Permutation Feature Importance technique. In 2023, Orange introduced the Fairness add-on, including widgets to calculate bias metrics, as well as widgets for pre-, post-, and in-processing methods, allowing the creation of models less susceptible to systematic error due to the vagaries of the data set.

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