AI Art Quora

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

  • Dailyhunt

    Dailyhunt

    Dailyhunt (formerly Newshunt) is an Indian content and news aggregator application based in Bangalore, India that provides local language content in 14 Indian languages from multiple content providers. Viru serves as Founder of Dailyhunt with Co-founder Umang Bedi. == History == Dailyhunt, earlier called Newshunt, was created as a Symbian app in 2009 by two ex-Nokia employees Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni. Later in 2011, Newshunt became available on the Android platform. It was by that time that Virendra Gupta, founder of Verse acquired the application. Virendra Gupta, better known as Viru, had started Verse in 2007 as a value-added service (VAS) company. In 2011, he acquired Newshunt from its owners Umesh and Chandrashekhar. Umesh became the CTO and stayed on to oversee its transition towards the smartphone era. In 2015, Viru renamed Newshunt as Dailyhunt. In early 2018, Viru roped in Umang Bedi, to be the President of Dailyhunt and lead the business with him while focusing on making the benefits of the platform available to a larger audience. Umang was elevated to co-founder in 2020. == Funding == In September 2014, Dailyhunt (then known as Newshunt) closed its Series B funding of INR 1 billion ( or approx $12 million in 2014) from Sequoia Capital India. The Series C funding round was led by Falcon Capital and was closed with $40 million in February 2015. In October 2016, the company received its Series D funding of $25 million from ByteDance and a Series E funding of $6.39 million from Falcon Edge Capital in September 2018. Additionally, Dailyhunt raised $3 Mn (INR 21.75 Cr) in a Series F funding round from Stonebridge Capital in August 2019. Other investors of Dailyhunt include Matrix Partners India, Omidyar Network, Goldman Sachs and Sofina. == Tie-ups and partnerships == In January 2021, Dailyhunt partnered with Twitter to bring ‘Twitter Moments’ to the Indian social app. Dailyhunt app now has a dedicated tab called “Twitter Moments India” to showcase curated tweets pertaining to news and other events. In January 2021, Dailyhunt announced the premiere of Season 2 of the popular show QuoteUnquote with KK (Kapil Khandelwal) on the app. It was the first podcast to have been launched on the Dailyhunt app. In September 2020, Dailyhunt signed up as an Associate Sponsor with Star Sports for Dream 11 IPL 2020. In May 2020, Snapdeal partnered with Dailyhunt to add new content on marketplace. In March 2019, Discovery Communications India, the factual entertainment network, entered into a multi-year partnership with Dailyhunt to showcase short-form content.

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  • How to Choose an AI Headshot Generator

    How to Choose an AI Headshot Generator

    Comparing the best AI headshot generator? An AI headshot generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it lowers the barrier so anyone can produce professional output. Privacy matters too: check whether your data trains the model and whether a no-log or enterprise tier is available. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI headshot generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.

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  • Top 10 AI Text-to-image Tools Compared (2026)

    Top 10 AI Text-to-image Tools Compared (2026)

    Comparing the best AI text-to-image tool? An AI text-to-image tool is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it lowers the barrier so anyone can produce professional output. Privacy matters too: check whether your data trains the model and whether a no-log or enterprise tier is available. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI text-to-image tool slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.

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  • Margaret Mitchell (scientist)

    Margaret Mitchell (scientist)

    Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. She is most well known for her work on automatically removing undesired biases concerning demographic groups from machine learning models, as well as more transparent reporting of their intended use. == Education == Mitchell obtained a bachelor's degree in linguistics from Reed College, Portland, Oregon, in 2005. After having worked as a research assistant at the OGI School of Science and Engineering for two years, she subsequently obtained a Master's in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington in 2009. She enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Aberdeen, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the topic of Generating Reference to Visible Objects, graduating in 2013. == Career and research == Mitchell is best known for her work on fairness in machine learning and methods for mitigating algorithmic bias. This includes her work on introducing the concept of 'Model Cards' for more transparent model reporting, and methods for debiasing machine learning models using adversarial learning. Margaret Mitchell created the framework for recognizing and avoiding biases by testing with a variable for the group of interest, predictor and an adversary. In 2012, Mitchell joined the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral researcher, before taking up a position at Microsoft Research in 2013. At Microsoft, Mitchell was the research lead of the Seeing AI project, an app that offers support for the visually impaired by narrating texts and images. In November 2016, she became a senior research scientist at Google Research and Machine intelligence. While at Google, she founded and co-led the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team together with Timnit Gebru. In May 2018, she represented Google in the Partnership on AI. In February 2018, she gave a TED talk on "How we can build AI to help humans, not hurt us". In January 2021, after Timnit Gebru's termination from Google, Mitchell reportedly used a script to search through her corporate account and download emails that allegedly documented discriminatory incidents involving Gebru. An automated system locked Mitchell's account in response. In response to media attention Google claimed that she "exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts". After a five-week investigation, Mitchell was fired. Prior to her dismissal, Mitchell had been a vocal advocate for diversity at Google, and had voiced concerns about research censorship at the company. In late 2021, she joined AI start-up Hugging Face. Mitchell is a co-founder of Widening NLP, a special interest group within the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) seeking to increase the proportion of women and minorities working in natural language processing; and Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, an annual workshop within the ACL that brings together clinicians and computational linguists to advance the state of the art in clinical psychology.

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  • Cloud computing

    Cloud computing

    Cloud computing is defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on demand". It is commonly referred to as "the cloud". == Characteristics == In 2011, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identified five "essential characteristics" for cloud systems. Below are the exact definitions according to NIST: On-demand self-service: "A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider." Broad network access: "Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations)." Resource pooling: " The provider's computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand." Rapid elasticity: "Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time." Measured service: "Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service. By 2023, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) had expanded and refined the list. == History == The history of cloud computing extends to the 1960s, with the initial concepts of time-sharing becoming popularized via remote job entry (RJE). The "data center" model, where users submitted jobs to operators to run on mainframes, was predominantly used during this era. This period saw broad experimentation with making large-scale computing power more accessible through time-sharing, while optimizing infrastructure, platforms, and applications to improve efficiency for end users. The "cloud" metaphor for virtualized services dates to 1994, when it was used by General Magic for the universe of "places" that mobile agents in the Telescript environment could "go". The metaphor is credited to David Hoffman, a General Magic communications specialist, based on its long-standing use in networking and telecom. The expression cloud computing became more widely known in 1996 when Compaq Computer Corporation drew up a business plan for future computing and the Internet. The company's ambition was to supercharge sales with "cloud computing-enabled applications". The business plan foresaw that online consumer file storage would likely be commercially successful. As a result, Compaq decided to sell server hardware to internet service providers. In the 2000s, the application of cloud computing began to take shape with the establishment of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002, which allowed developers to build applications independently. In 2006 Amazon Simple Storage Service, known as Amazon S3, and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were released. In 2008 NASA's development of the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds. The following decade saw the launch of various cloud services. In 2010, Microsoft launched Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace Hosting and NASA initiated an open-source cloud-software project, OpenStack. IBM introduced the IBM SmartCloud framework in 2011, and Oracle announced the Oracle Cloud in 2012. In December 2019, Amazon launched AWS Outposts, a service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer data centers, co-location spaces, or on-premises facilities. == Value proposition == Cloud computing can shorten time to market by offering pre-configured tools, scalable resources, and managed services, allowing users to focus on core business value rather than maintaining infrastructure. Cloud platforms can enable organizations and individuals to reduce upfront capital expenditures on physical infrastructure by shifting to an operational expenditure model, where costs scale with usage. Cloud platforms also offer managed services and tools, such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning, which might otherwise require significant in-house expertise and infrastructure investment. While cloud computing can offer cost advantages through effective resource optimization, organizations often face challenges such as unused resources, inefficient configurations, and hidden costs without proper oversight and governance. Many cloud platforms provide cost management tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer and Azure Cost Management, and frameworks like FinOps have emerged to standardize financial operations in the cloud. Cloud computing also facilitates collaboration, remote work, and global service delivery by enabling secure access to data and applications from any location with an internet connection. Cloud providers offer various redundancy options for core services, such as managed storage and managed databases, though redundancy configurations often vary by service tier. Advanced redundancy strategies, such as cross-region replication or failover systems, typically require explicit configuration and may incur additional costs or licensing fees. Cloud environments operate under a shared responsibility model, where providers are typically responsible for infrastructure security, physical hardware, and software updates, while customers are accountable for data encryption, identity and access management (IAM), and application-level security. These responsibilities vary depending on the cloud service model—Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS)—with customers typically having more control and responsibility in IaaS environments and progressively less in PaaS and SaaS models, often trading control for convenience and managed services. == Adoption and suitability == The decision to adopt cloud computing or maintain on-premises infrastructure depends on factors such as scalability, cost structure, latency requirements, regulatory constraints, and infrastructure customization. Organizations with variable or unpredictable workloads, limited capital for upfront investments, or a focus on rapid scalability benefit from cloud adoption. Startups, SaaS companies, and e-commerce platforms often prefer the pay-as-you-go operational expenditure (OpEx) model of cloud infrastructure. Additionally, companies prioritizing global accessibility, remote workforce enablement, disaster recovery, and leveraging advanced services such as AI/ML and analytics are well-suited for the cloud. In recent years, some cloud providers have started offering specialized services for high-performance computing and low-latency applications, addressing some use cases previously exclusive to on-premises setups. On the other hand, organizations with strict regulatory requirements, highly predictable workloads, or reliance on deeply integrated legacy systems may find cloud infrastructure less suitable. Businesses in industries like defense, government, or those handling highly sensitive data often favor on-premises setups for greater control and data sovereignty. Additionally, companies with ultra-low latency requirements, such as high-frequency trading (HFT) firms, rely on custom hardware (e.g., FPGAs) and physical proximity to exchanges, which most cloud providers cannot fully replicate despite recent advancements. Similarly, tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon build their own data centers due to economies of scale, predictable workloads, and the ability to customize hardware and network infrastructure for optimal efficiency. However, these companies also use cloud services selectively for certain workloads and applications where it aligns with their operational needs. In practice, many organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud architectures, combining on-premises infrastructure with cloud services. This approach allows businesses to balance scalability, cost-effectiveness, and control, offering the benefits of both deployment models while mitigating their respective limitations. == Challenges and limitations == One of the primary challenges of cloud computing, compared with traditional on-premises systems, is maintaining data security and privacy. Cloud users entrust their sensitive data to third-party providers, who may not have adequate measures to protect it from unau

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  • Linguistic Data Consortium

    Linguistic Data Consortium

    The Linguistic Data Consortium is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for linguistics research and development purposes. The University of Pennsylvania is the LDC's host institution. The LDC was founded in 1992 with a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is partly supported by grant IRI-9528587 from the Information and Intelligent Systems division of the National Science Foundation. The director of LDC is Mark Liberman. It subsumed the previous ACL Data Collection Initiative. Part of the motivation was to support the benchmark-oriented methodology of DARPA's Human Language Technology program. Previously, John R. Pierce directed the committee that produced the ALPAC report (1966), which caused a severe decrease in funding for linguistic AI for about 10 years. Later, Charles Wayne restarted funding in speech and language in the mid-1980s. In order to avoid the criticisms from the ALPAC report, they needed a way to demonstrate objective progress, which led to the benchmark-oriented methodology. DARPA would propose specific quantifiable and testable score targets on benchmarks, and teams being funded would attempt to reach the score targets. It was noted that by 1993, the data needed for training and benchmarking the models was big enough that "Not even the largest companies can easily afford enough of [the needed] data... Researchers at smaller companies and in universities risk being frozen out of the process almost entirely." The LDC provided a central location for creating and dispensing such data. There is a membership fee that has been increased once since its founding.

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  • Jian Ma (computational biologist)

    Jian Ma (computational biologist)

    Jian Ma (Chinese: 马坚) is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a faculty member in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department. His lab develops AI/ML methods to study the structure and function of the human genome and cellular organization and their implications for health and disease. During his Ph.D. and postdoc training, he developed algorithms to reconstruct the ancestral mammalian genome and evolutionary history. His research group has recently pioneered a series of new machine learning solutions for 3D genome organization, single-cell epigenomics, spatial omics, and complex molecular interactions. His lab also explores large language models to uncover gene regulatory mechanisms and the intricate connections among cellular components, with the aim of driving discovery and guiding experimentation. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2011. In 2020, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Computer Science. He received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence (2025). He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the International Society for Computational Biology, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He leads an NIH 4D Nucleome Center to develop machine learning algorithms to better understand the cell nucleus. He served as the Program Chair for RECOMB 2024. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago (CZ Biohub Chicago) and the RECOMB Steering Committee. In 2024, he launched the Center for AI-Driven Biomedical Research (AI4BIO) at CMU, which will be a catalyst for innovations at the intersection of AI and biomedicine across the School of Computer Science and campus. == Selected Recent Publications == Chen V#, Yang M#, Cui W, Kim JS, Talwalkar A, and Ma J. Applying interpretable machine learning in computational biology - pitfalls, recommendations and opportunities for new developments. Nature Methods, 21(8):1454-1461, 2024. Xiong K#, Zhang R#, and Ma J. scGHOST: Identifying single-cell 3D genome subcompartments. Nature Methods, 21(5):814-822, 2024. Zhou T, Zhang R, Jia D, Doty RT, Munday AD, Gao D, Xin L, Abkowitz JL, Duan Z, and Ma J. GAGE-seq concurrently profiles multiscale 3D genome organization and gene expression in single cells. Nature Genetics, 56(8):1701-1711, 2024. Zhang Y, Boninsegna L, Yang M, Misteli T, Alber F, and Ma J. Computational methods for analysing multiscale 3D genome organization. Nature Reviews Genetics, 5(2):123-141, 2024. Chidester B#, Zhou T#, Alam S, and Ma J. SPICEMIX enables integrative single-cell spatial modeling of cell identity. Nature Genetics, 55(1):78-88, 2023. [Cover Article] Zhang R#, Zhou T#, and Ma J. Ultrafast and interpretable single-cell 3D genome analysis with Fast-Higashi. Cell Systems, 13(10):P798-807.E6, 2022. [Cover Article] Zhu X#, Zhang Y#, Wang Y, Tian D, Belmont AS, Swedlow JR, and Ma J. Nucleome Browser: An integrative and multimodal data navigation platform for 4D Nucleome. Nature Methods, 19(8):911-913, 2022. Zhang R, Zhou T, and Ma J. Multiscale and integrative single-cell Hi-C analysis with Higashi. Nature Biotechnology, 40:254–261, 2022.

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  • Paul Christiano

    Paul Christiano

    Paul Christiano is an American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on AI alignment, which is the subfield of AI safety research that aims to steer AI systems toward human interests. He serves as the Head of Safety for the Center for AI Standards and Innovation inside NIST. He formerly led the language model alignment team at OpenAI and became founder and head of the non-profit Alignment Research Center (ARC), which works on theoretical AI alignment and evaluations of machine learning models. In 2023, Christiano was named as one of the TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI (TIME100 AI). In September 2023, Christiano was appointed to the UK government's Frontier AI Taskforce advisory board. Before working at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, he was an initial trustee on Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust. == Education == Christiano attended the Harker School in San Jose, California. He competed on the U.S. team and won a silver medal at the 49th International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in 2008. In 2012, Christiano graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in mathematics. At MIT, he researched data structures, quantum cryptography, and combinatorial optimization. He then went on to complete a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Christiano collaborated with researcher Katja Grace on AI Impacts, co-developing a preliminary methodology for comparing supercomputers to brains, using traversed edges per second (TEPS). He also experimented with putting Carl Shulman's donor lottery theory into practice, raising nearly $50,000 in a pool to be donated to a single charity. == Career == At OpenAI, Christiano co-authored the paper "Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences" (2017) and other works developing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). He is considered one of the principal architects of RLHF, which in 2017 was "considered a notable step forward in AI safety research", according to The New York Times. Other works such as "AI safety via debate" (2018) focus on the problem of scalable oversight – supervising AIs in domains where humans would have difficulty judging output quality. Christiano left OpenAI in 2021 to work on more conceptual and theoretical issues in AI alignment and subsequently founded the Alignment Research Center to focus on this area. One subject of study is the problem of eliciting latent knowledge from advanced machine learning models. ARC also develops techniques to identify and test whether an AI model is potentially dangerous. In April 2023, Christiano told The Economist that ARC was considering developing an industry standard for AI safety. As of April 2024, Christiano was listed as the head of AI safety for the US AI Safety Institute at NIST. One month earlier in March 2024, staff members and scientists at the institute threatened to resign upon being informed of Christiano's pending appointment to the role, stating that his ties to the effective altruism movement may jeopardize the AI Safety Institute's objectivity and integrity. === Views on AI risks === He is known for his views on the potential risks of advanced AI. In 2017, Wired magazine stated that Christiano and his colleagues at OpenAI weren't worried about the destruction of the human race by "evil robots", explaining that "[t]hey’re more concerned that, as AI progresses beyond human comprehension, the technology’s behavior may diverge from our intended goals." However, in a widely quoted interview with Business Insider in 2023, Christiano said that there is a “10–20% chance of AI takeover, [with] many [or] most humans dead.” He also conjectured a “50/50 chance of doom shortly after you have AI systems that are human level.” == Personal life == Christiano is married to Ajeya Cotra, a member of METR's technical staff.

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  • Auralization

    Auralization

    Auralization is a procedure designed to model and simulate the experience of acoustic phenomena rendered as a soundfield in a virtualized space. This is useful in configuring the soundscape of architectural structures, concert venues, and public spaces, as well as in making coherent sound environments within virtual immersion systems. == History == The English term auralization was used for the first time by Kleiner et al. in an article in the journal of the AES en 1991. The increase of computational power allowed the development of the first acoustic simulation software towards the end of the 1960s. == Principles == Auralizations are experienced through systems rendering virtual acoustic models made by convolving or mixing acoustic events recorded 'dry' (or in an anechoic chamber) projected within a virtual model of an acoustic space, the characteristics of which are determined by means of sampling its impulse response (IR). Once this h ( t ) {\displaystyle h(t)} has been determined, the simulation of the resulting soundfield s ( t ) {\displaystyle s(t)} in the target environment is obtained by convolution: r ( t ) = h ( t ) ∗ s ( t ) {\displaystyle r(t)=h(t)s(t)} The resulting sound r ( t ) {\displaystyle r(t)} is heard as it would if emitted in that acoustic space. == Binaurality == For auralizations to be perceived as realistic, it is critical to emulate the human hearing in terms of position and orientation of the listener's head with respect to the sources of sound. For IR data to be convolved convincingly, the acoustic events are captured using a dummy head where two microphones are positioned on each side of the head to record an emulation of sound arriving at the locations of human ears, or using an ambisonics microphone array and mixed down for binaurality. Head-related transfer functions (HRTF) datasets can be used to simplify the process insofar as a monaural IR can be measured or simulated, then audio content is convolved with its target acoustic space. In rendering the experience, the transfer function corresponding to the orientation of the head is applied to simulate the corresponding spatial emanation of sound.

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  • AI Voice Assistants: Free vs Paid (2026)

    AI Voice Assistants: Free vs Paid (2026)

    Shopping for the best AI voice assistant? An AI voice assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI voice assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.

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  • Yaron Singer

    Yaron Singer

    Yaron Singer is a computer scientist and entrepreneur whose work has focused on algorithms, machine learning, optimization, and artificial intelligence security. He was the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University and co-founded Robust Intelligence, an artificial intelligence security company acquired by Cisco Systems in 2024. == Education == Singer received a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Christos Papadimitriou. == Academic career == Singer was a postdoctoral research scientist at Google Research. Singer joined the computer science faculty at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2013 and became a full professor in 2019. == Research == Singer's research has focused on algorithms and machine learning, including optimization, algorithmic mechanism design, and adversarial machine learning. His doctoral work studied computational limits in algorithmic mechanism design, including truthful mechanisms and budget-feasible mechanisms. In optimization, Singer co-authored work on submodular optimization and parallel algorithms for large-scale data processing. Singer has also worked on adversarial machine learning, including attacks that use small perturbations or noise to affect the behavior of machine learning systems. == Entrepreneurship == In 2020, Singer co-founded Robust Intelligence Kojin Oshiba. Harvard SEAS reported that the company raised $14 million that year, and TechCrunch reported in 2021 that the company raised a $30 million Series B round led by Tiger Global. The company developed tools for testing AI models and detecting failures before or during deployment. TechCrunch described its RIME product as using an "AI firewall" to stress-test models. In 2024, Cisco Systems acquired Robust Intelligence. CTech reported that Cisco had not disclosed the purchase amount when the acquisition was announced, and later reported the deal value as $400 million. In 2025, Cisco launched Foundation AI, a Cisco team focused on AI for cybersecurity. Techzine reported that Singer led the team and was Cisco's VP of AI and Security. == Recognition == Singer has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and a Facebook Faculty Award. As a graduate student, he received Microsoft Research and Facebook fellowships. In 2012, he received the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining for "How to Win Friends and Influence People, Truthfully: Influence Maximization Mechanisms for Social Networks."

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  • Is an AI Sales Assistant Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Sales Assistant Worth It in 2026?

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

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  • Digital on-screen graphics by country

    Digital on-screen graphics by country

    Digital on-screen graphics by country are the varying logos and differences of digital on-screen graphics in different countries and regions. == Overview == Digital on-screen graphics (DOGs; also called a digitally originated graphic, bug, network bug, on-screen bug, or screenbug) are almost always placed in one of four corners: the top left, the top right, the bottom left, or the bottom right. There are few exceptions to this rule: most notably, Saturday! in Russia, which places their DOG in the top center. Many news broadcasters, as well as a few television networks, also place a clock alongside their bug. In the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, DOGs may also include the show's parental guideline rating. In Australia, this is known as a Program Return Graphic (PRG). It has become common to place text above the station's logo advertising other programs on the network. In many countries, some TV networks insert the word "live" near the DOG to advise viewers that the program is live, rather than pre-recorded. During televised sports events, a DOG may also display game-related statistics such as the current score. This has led people in Canada and the United States to refer to such a DOG as a score bug. In many countries, DOGs are removed in non-program sections such as commercials and program trailers, but TV channels in some other countries have retained in full color or instead replaced them in either of these sections or in both sections (like Turkey, Indonesia, Italy, the entirety of South Asia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Russia). == MENA == === Arab world === Arabic TV logos are placed in the top-right and top-left except for Al-Jazeera, whose logo appears on the bottom-right of the screen. Some Arabian TV stations hide their logos during commercial breaks and promos/trailers, such as Dubai TV, Dubai One, Funoon, the Egyptian CBC and Nile TV networks, ART Hekayat, ART Hekayat 2, Iqraa, and Al-Jazeera. Abu Dhabi TV and MBC1 initially had their logos at the bottom-right corner from their launch until the mid-2000s, when they were moved to the top-right corner. === Iran === Iranian broadcaster IRIB introduced DOGs in early 2000s. Unlike other Middle Eastern nations that introduced DOGs on their TV networks in 1990s, Iran was very late in this practice. Almost all Iranian TV channels display DOGs at top-left corner of the screen. The few exception is IRIB-owned channels remove DOGs during news broadcasts. === Israel === In Israel, Television DOGs were first introduced in 1991. Israeli channel watermarks most often appear on the top left or the top right corner since Israeli cable and satellite-based services often have the channel description and programming (OSD) on the bottom of the screen. Most channels have an opaque, full-color watermark, though exceptions exist, for example Channel 9, which displays a blue-tinted semi-transparent logo. In ad breaks, it is required to replace the channel watermark with another symbol – sometimes on the other edge of the screen – indicating there are ads at the moment. The Israel Broadcasting Authority, whose channels placed their logos in the top left corner, ceased broadcasting in May 2017. The new public broadcaster, the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, displays its logos at the top right instead. The erstwhile Channel 2 as well as its successors, Keshet 12 and Reshet 13, also use the top right corner. However, Channel 10 used the top left corner before rebranding to Eser (Literally "Ten") in 2017 and simultaneously moving its logo to the top right (Not long after, in January 2019, it ceased broadcasting as it merged with Reshet 13). Channel 14 as well as its predecessor Channel 20 use the top right corner as well. The Knesset Channel, however, uses the top left corner. === Morocco === The SNRT and 2M And Al-Aoula Uses permanent on-screen DOGs for their TV channels. In contrast, other channels such as Medi 1 TV hide their DOGs during commercial breaks. == Asia == === Brunei === Radio Television Brunei introduced DOGs in 1994. Like TV channels from neighbouring Malaysia, all DOGs are removed during advertisement breaks. === Cambodia === Cambodian TV channels introduced DOGs in 1995. Like Thailand, all logos are full-color and displayed on the top-right corner of the screen. Some channels such as TV5 hide their logos during commercial breaks. Hang Meas HDTV Logo on the top-left corner of the screen, CTN (Cambodian Television Network), MyTV, Bayon TV, PNN, Logo on the top-right corner of the screen. === China === TV stations in mainland China always place their logo (usually semi-transparent and sometimes animated) in the top-left corner of the screen in full-color or grey-scale. Regardless of the content being broadcast (program or advertisements), some channels like Phoenix Television hide their logos during commercial breaks; although in some rare cases, the DOG may be placed elsewhere to avoid covering the score bug during the broadcast of a sporting event. China introduced logos in 1983 on the bottom-left corner of the screen, but they were used only during commercial breaks and clock idents. Later China Central Television (CCTV) introduced permanent DOGs for all programs in 1992, on the top-left corner of the screen. China also displays a clock on top-right corner of the screen for 1 minute between 59:30–00:30 & 29:30–30:30 time in transition between programs. === Hong Kong === Hong Kong TV introduced DOGs in 1994. Hong Kong DOGs can be either of full color or semi-transparent and (except for RTHK 31) always be hidden during commercial breaks. Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) placed their logos at the top-right corner of the screen while now-defunct Asia Television and other channels placed their logos at the top-left corner of the screen. Sometimes, weather information, date, and time clocks had been used alongside DOGs in news programs, continuity & live broadcasts. === India === The first on-screen logo in India was introduced in 1984 by DD2 Metro (now DD News). It was white and slightly transparent. All Indian TV channels have on-screen logos. They are always full-colors, never transparent, and they are almost never removed during commercial breaks (though the channels of the South Indian Sun TV Network did so until 2015). The great majority of Indian TV channels place their logos in the top right corner of the screen, though there are exceptions. The corner used may be broadcaster-dependent. Among the big national broadcasters: Channels from the Sony network always use the top right corner, without exception. Star channels also use the top right, with the exception of National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild, which use the top left corner in line with their international counterparts. Past exceptions include The History Channel, whose logo was placed in the top left until it rebranded to Fox History & Entertainment in 2008; the now-defunct Channel V, which used the top left between 2013 and 2016; and Nat Geo People, Nat Geo Music and BabyTV, were withdrawn from India in June 2019. TV18 and Viacom18 channels use the top right corner as well, with the exceptions of regional-language movie channels (e.g., Colors Kannada Cinema and Colors Gujarati Cinema) as well as Colors Super, which have shown their logos at the top left corner since 2018; and VH1, which has always used the bottom right corner. Also, CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz and CNBC Bajar use the bottom right. Moreover, MTV showed its logo in the top left corner until 23 April 2018, when it was moved to the top right (its HD version, launched in 2017, has always used the top right). Unlike most other major networks, the Zee Network's non-news channels containing 'Zee' in their name display their logos at the top left corner and not the top right. This has been the case since 15 October 2017, when almost all the Zee-branded TV channels of the Zee network rebranded with a new logo and, in many cases, a new graphics package and look. Before then, the logos were shown at the top right, as with other broadcasters. (News channels' logos—i.e., logos of channels owned by Zee Media Corporation—stayed put at the top right corner, with the exception of WION, which uses the bottom left.) All the major Zee-branded channels—such as Zee TV, Zee Cinema, Zee Café and the regional-language channels like Zee Tamil, Zee Telugu, Zee Marathi and Zee Bangla—show their logos at the top left; moreover, the Odia-language channel Sarthak TV rebranded to Zee Sarthak and moved its logo to the top left. Among the Zee channels not containing the word 'Zee' that moved their logos to the top left during the big rebrand in 2017 was English movie channel Zee Studio; when it was renamed to &flix on 3 June 2018, the logo remained at the top left. Moreover, Hindi movie channel &pictures has always shown its logo at the top left since its launch in 2013. However, &privé HD, Zee's other English movie channel, and Hindi entertainment channel &TV place the

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  • Evaluation of machine translation

    Evaluation of machine translation

    Various methods for the evaluation for machine translation have been employed. This article focuses on the evaluation of the output of machine translation, rather than on performance or usability evaluation. == Round-trip translation == A typical way for lay people to assess machine translation quality is to translate from a source language to a target language and back to the source language with the same engine. Though intuitively this may seem like a good method of evaluation, it has been shown that round-trip translation is a "poor predictor of quality". The reason why it is such a poor predictor of quality is reasonably intuitive. A round-trip translation is not testing one system, but two systems: the language pair of the engine for translating into the target language, and the language pair translating back from the target language. Consider the following examples of round-trip translation performed from English to Italian and Portuguese from Somers (2005): In the first example, where the text is translated into Italian then back into English—the English text is significantly garbled, but the Italian is a serviceable translation. In the second example, the text translated back into English is perfect, but the Portuguese translation is meaningless; the program thought "tit" was a reference to a tit (bird), which was intended for a "tat", a word it did not understand. While round-trip translation may be useful to generate a "surplus of fun," the methodology is deficient for serious study of machine translation quality. == Human evaluation == This section covers two of the large scale evaluation studies that have had significant impact on the field—the ALPAC 1966 study and the ARPA study. === Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) === One of the constituent parts of the ALPAC report was a study comparing different levels of human translation with machine translation output, using human subjects as judges. The human judges were specially trained for the purpose. The evaluation study compared an MT system translating from Russian into English with human translators, on two variables. The variables studied were "intelligibility" and "fidelity". Intelligibility was a measure of how "understandable" the sentence was, and was measured on a scale of 1–9. Fidelity was a measure of how much information the translated sentence retained compared to the original, and was measured on a scale of 0–9. Each point on the scale was associated with a textual description. For example, 3 on the intelligibility scale was described as "Generally unintelligible; it tends to read like nonsense but, with a considerable amount of reflection and study, one can at least hypothesize the idea intended by the sentence". Intelligibility was measured without reference to the original, while fidelity was measured indirectly. The translated sentence was presented, and after reading it and absorbing the content, the original sentence was presented. The judges were asked to rate the original sentence on informativeness. So, the more informative the original sentence, the lower the quality of the translation. The study showed that the variables were highly correlated when the human judgment was averaged per sentence. The variation among raters was small, but the researchers recommended that at the very least, three or four raters should be used. The evaluation methodology managed to separate translations by humans from translations by machines with ease. The study concluded that, "highly reliable assessments can be made of the quality of human and machine translations". === Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) === As part of the Human Language Technologies Program, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) created a methodology to evaluate machine translation systems, and continues to perform evaluations based on this methodology. The evaluation programme was instigated in 1991, and continues to this day. Details of the programme can be found in White et al. (1994) and White (1995). The evaluation programme involved testing several systems based on different theoretical approaches; statistical, rule-based and human-assisted. A number of methods for the evaluation of the output from these systems were tested in 1992 and the most recent suitable methods were selected for inclusion in the programmes for subsequent years. The methods were; comprehension evaluation, quality panel evaluation, and evaluation based on adequacy and fluency. Comprehension evaluation aimed to directly compare systems based on the results from multiple choice comprehension tests, as in Church et al. (1993). The texts chosen were a set of articles in English on the subject of financial news. These articles were translated by professional translators into a series of language pairs, and then translated back into English using the machine translation systems. It was decided that this was not adequate for a standalone method of comparing systems and as such abandoned due to issues with the modification of meaning in the process of translating from English. The idea of quality panel evaluation was to submit translations to a panel of expert native English speakers who were professional translators and get them to evaluate them. The evaluations were done on the basis of a metric, modelled on a standard US government metric used to rate human translations. This was good from the point of view that the metric was "externally motivated", since it was not specifically developed for machine translation. However, the quality panel evaluation was very difficult to set up logistically, as it necessitated having a number of experts together in one place for a week or more, and furthermore for them to reach consensus. This method was also abandoned. Along with a modified form of the comprehension evaluation (re-styled as informativeness evaluation), the most popular method was to obtain ratings from monolingual judges for segments of a document. The judges were presented with a segment, and asked to rate it for two variables, adequacy and fluency. Adequacy is a rating of how much information is transferred between the original and the translation, and fluency is a rating of how good the English is. This technique was found to cover the relevant parts of the quality panel evaluation, while at the same time being easier to deploy, as it didn't require expert judgment. Measuring systems based on adequacy and fluency, along with informativeness is now the standard methodology for the ARPA evaluation program. == Automatic evaluation == In the context of this article, a metric is a measurement. A metric that evaluates machine translation output represents the quality of the output. The quality of a translation is inherently subjective, there is no objective or quantifiable "good." Therefore, any metric must assign quality scores so they correlate with the human judgment of quality. That is, a metric should score highly translations that humans score highly, and give low scores to those humans give low scores. Human judgment is the benchmark for assessing automatic metrics, as humans are the end-users of any translation output. The measure of evaluation for metrics is correlation with human judgment. This is generally done at two levels, at the sentence level, where scores are calculated by the metric for a set of translated sentences, and then correlated against human judgment for the same sentences. And at the corpus level, where scores over the sentences are aggregated for both human judgments and metric judgments, and these aggregate scores are then correlated. Figures for correlation at the sentence level are rarely reported, although Banerjee et al. (2005) do give correlation figures that show that, at least for their metric, sentence-level correlation is substantially worse than corpus level correlation. While not widely reported, it has been noted that the genre, or domain, of a text has an effect on the correlation obtained when using metrics. Coughlin (2003) reports that comparing the candidate text against a single reference translation does not adversely affect the correlation of metrics when working in a restricted domain text. Even if a metric correlates well with human judgment in one study on one corpus, this successful correlation may not carry over to another corpus. Good metric performance, across text types or domains, is important for the reusability of the metric. A metric that only works for text in a specific domain is useful, but less useful than one that works across many domains—because creating a new metric for every new evaluation or domain is undesirable. Another important factor in the usefulness of an evaluation metric is to have a good correlation, even when working with small amounts of data, that is candidate sentences and reference translations. Turian et al. (2003) point out that, "Any MT evaluation measure is less reliable on shorter translations", and

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  • ISO 2033

    ISO 2033

    The ISO 2033:1983 standard ("Coding of machine readable characters (MICR and OCR)") defines character sets for use with Optical Character Recognition or Magnetic Ink Character Recognition systems. The Japanese standard JIS X 9010:1984 ("Coding of machine readable characters (OCR and MICR)", originally designated JIS C 6229-1984) is closely related. == Character set for OCR-A == The version of the encoding for the OCR-A font registered with the ISO-IR registry as ISO-IR-91 is the Japanese (JIS X 9010 / JIS C 6229) version, which differs from the encoding defined by ISO 2033 only in the addition of a Yen sign at 5C. == Character set for OCR-B == The version of the G0 set for the OCR-B font registered with the ISO-IR registry as ISO-IR-92 is the Japanese (JIS X 9010 / JIS C 6229) version, which differs from the encoding defined by ISO 2033 only in being based on JIS-Roman (with a dollar sign at 0x24 and a Yen sign at 0x5C) rather than on the ISO 646 IRV (with a backslash at 0x5C and, at the time, a universal currency sign (¤) at 0x24). Besides those code points, it differs from ASCII only in omitting the backtick (`) and tilde (~). An additional supplementary set registered as ISO-IR-93 assigns the pound sign (£), universal currency sign (¤) and section sign (§) to their ISO-8859-1 codepoints, and the backslash to the ISO-8859-1 codepoint for the Yen sign. == Character set for JIS X 9008 (JIS C 6257) == JIS X 9010 (JIS C 6229) also defines character sets for the JIS X 9008:1981 (formerly JIS C 6257-1981) "hand-printed" OCR font. These include subsets of the JIS X 0201 Roman set (registered as ISO-IR-94 and omitting the backtick (`), lowercase letters, curly braces ({, }) and overline (‾)), and kana set (registered as ISO-IR-96 and omitting the East Asian style comma (、) and full stop (。), the interpunct (・) and the small kana), in addition to a set (registered as ISO-IR-95) containing only the backslash, which is assigned to the same code point as in ISO-IR-93. The JIS C 6527 font stylises the slash and backslash characters with a doubled appearance. The character names given are "Solidus" and "Reverse Solidus", matching the Unicode character names for the ASCII slash and backslash. However, the Unicode Optical Character Recognition block includes an additional code point for an "OCR Double Backslash" (⑊), although not for a double (forward) slash, although a double slash is available elsewhere, as U+2AFD ⫽ DOUBLE SOLIDUS OPERATOR. == Character set for E-13B == The ISO-IR-98 encoding defined by ISO 2033 encodes the character repertoire of the E13B font, as used with magnetic ink character recognition. Although ISO 2033 also specifies other encodings, the encoding for E-13B is the encoding referred to as ISO_2033_1983 by Perl libintl, and as ISO_2033-1983 or csISO2033 by the IANA. Other registered labels include iso-ir-98, its ISO-IR registration number, and simply e13b. The digits are preserved in their ASCII locations. Letters and symbols unavailable in the E13B font are omitted, while specialised punctuation for bank cheques included in the E13B font is added. The same symbols are available in Unicode in the Optical Character Recognition block.

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