AI Assistant For Writing

AI Assistant For Writing — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

Egocentric vision

Egocentric vision or first-person vision is a sub-field of computer vision that entails analyzing images and videos captured by a wearable camera, which is typically worn on the head or on the chest and naturally approximates the visual field of the camera wearer. Consequently, visual data capture the part of the scene on which the user focuses to carry out the task at hand and offer a valuable perspective to understand the user's activities and their context in a naturalistic setting. The wearable camera looking forwards is often supplemented with a camera looking inward at the user's eye and able to measure a user's eye gaze, which is useful to reveal attention and to better understand the user's activity and intentions. == History == The idea of using a wearable camera to gather visual data from a first-person perspective dates back to the 70s, when Steve Mann invented "Digital Eye Glass", a device that, when worn, causes the human eye itself to effectively become both an electronic camera and a television display. Subsequently, wearable cameras were used for health-related applications in the context of Humanistic Intelligence and Wearable AI. Egocentric vision is best done from the point-of-eye, but may also be done by way of a neck-worn camera when eyeglasses would be in-the-way. This neck-worn variant was popularized by way of the Microsoft SenseCam in 2006 for experimental health research works. The interest of the computer vision community into the egocentric paradigm has been arising slowly entering the 2010s and it is rapidly growing in recent years, boosted by both the impressive advances in the field of wearable technology and by the increasing number of potential applications. The prototypical first-person vision system described by Kanade and Hebert, in 2012 is composed by three basic components: a localization component able to estimate the surrounding, a recognition component able to identify object and people, and an activity recognition component, able to provide information about the current activity of the user. Together, these three components provide a complete situational awareness of the user, which in turn can be used to provide assistance to the user or to the caregiver. Following this idea, the first computational techniques for egocentric analysis focused on hand-related activity recognition and social interaction analysis. Also, given the unconstrained nature of the video and the huge amount of data generated, temporal segmentation and summarization were among the first problems addressed. After almost ten years of egocentric vision (2007–2017), the field is still undergoing diversification. Emerging research topics include: Social saliency estimation Multi-agent egocentric vision systems Privacy preserving techniques and applications Attention-based activity analysis Social interaction analysis Hand pose analysis Ego graphical User Interfaces (EUI) Understanding social dynamics and attention Revisiting robotic vision and machine vision as egocentric sensing Activity forecasting Gaze prediction == Technical challenges == Today's wearable cameras are small and lightweight digital recording devices that can acquire images and videos automatically, without the user intervention, with different resolutions and frame rates, and from a first-person point of view. Therefore, wearable cameras are naturally primed to gather visual information from our everyday interactions since they offer an intimate perspective of the visual field of the camera wearer. Depending on the frame rate, it is common to distinguish between photo-cameras (also called lifelogging cameras) and video-cameras. The former (e.g., Narrative Clip and Microsoft SenseCam), are commonly worn on the chest, and are characterized by a very low frame rate (up to 2fpm) that allows to capture images over a long period of time without the need of recharging the battery. Consequently, they offer considerable potential for inferring knowledge about e.g. behaviour patterns, habits or lifestyle of the user. However, due to the low frame-rate and the free motion of the camera, temporally adjacent images typically present abrupt appearance changes so that motion features cannot be reliably estimated. The latter (e.g., Google Glass, GoPro), are commonly mounted on the head, and capture conventional video (around 35fps) that allows to capture fine temporal details of interactions. Consequently, they offer potential for in-depth analysis of daily or special activities. However, since the camera is moving with the wearer head, it becomes more difficult to estimate the global motion of the wearer and in the case of abrupt movements, the images can result blurred. In both cases, since the camera is worn in a naturalistic setting, visual data present a huge variability in terms of illumination conditions and object appearance. Moreover, the camera wearer is not visible in the image and what he/she is doing has to be inferred from the information in the visual field of the camera, implying that important information about the wearer, such for instance as pose or facial expression estimation, is not available. == Applications == A collection of studies published in a special theme issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has demonstrated the potential of lifelogs captured through wearable cameras from a number of viewpoints. In particular, it has been shown that used as a tool for understanding and tracking lifestyle behaviour, lifelogs would enable the prevention of noncommunicable diseases associated to unhealthy trends and risky profiles (such as obesity and depression). In addition, used as a tool of re-memory cognitive training, lifelogs would enable the prevention of cognitive and functional decline in elderly people. More recently, egocentric cameras have been used to study human and animal cognition, human-human social interaction, human-robot interaction, human expertise in complex tasks. Other applications include navigation/assistive technologies for the blind, monitoring and assistance of industrial workflows, and augmented reality interfaces.
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RightsCon

RightsCon is an annual conference on digital rights hosted by Access Now. It convenes international leaders and organizations to discuss global problems including internet censorship, the regulation of algorithms, electronic surveillance, the ethics of technology, online hate speech, content moderation, cyberwarfare, and more. == History == The conference was first convened by Access (today, Access Now) in Silicon Valley in 2011, with the intention of gathering civil society to discuss impacts of the growing tech industry on digital rights and human rights. It sought the participation of leaders from both industry (including companies such as Twitter, Google, Mozilla, and Comcast) and civil society organizations (such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and New America). Keynote speakers included the then-Assistant Secretary of State, Michael Posner; Egyptian blogger and political prisoner, Alaa Abd El-Fattah; and then-director of public policy at Google, Bob Boorstin. RightsCon organizers have sought to ensure the event is accessible to attendees from across the globe, particularly global majority countries, informing the decision to hold the conference in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. === Online convenings === In 2020, RightsCon was to be held in San José, Costa Rica, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting took place in an online format. In 2021, the 10th edition of RightsCon was again held online from Monday, June 7 to Friday, June 11, 2021, due to the continued global COVID-19 pandemic which altered several digital rights physical meetings. The topics for RightsCon2021 included: Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, data protection and user control, digital futures, democracy, elections, new business models, content control, peacebuilding, censorship, internet shutdowns, freedom of the media and many others were discussed by several digital rights organizations and individuals. === 2026 cancellation === The 14th RightsCon was scheduled to be held in Zambia from May 5 to 8, 2026. On April 29, 2026, the Zambian government abruptly postponed the conference, writing in a statement that the postponement was "necessitated by the need for comprehensive disclosure […] relating to key thematic issues proposed for discussion during the Summit." In May 2026, the conference was cancelled due to pressure from the Chinese government. In a statement the same day, Access Now wrote that it was "told that diplomats from the People's Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person." == List of conferences == Past RightsCon conferences include:
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Global call for AI red lines

The global call for AI red lines is a declaration made on 22 September 2025 calling on governments to define and internationally prohibit unacceptable AI uses and behaviors. The online declaration was announced by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa at the 80th United Nations General Assembly high-level week. The declaration was initially signed by 200 prominent politicians and scientists, including 10 Nobel Prize winners. The call does not specify which red lines to set, but suggests several, such as banning bioweapon design, mass surveillance or AI impersonation. == The declaration == The declaration was published online as an open letter on 22 September 2025. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa announced it in her opening speech at the 80th United Nations General Assembly high-level week in New York, urging governments to "define what AI should never be allowed to do" and "establish clear international boundaries to prevent universally unacceptable risks for A.I." The initiative was organized by three nonprofit organisations: the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA), The Future Society, and the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI). The letter argues that humanity faces risks such as engineered pandemics, widespread disinformation, large-scale manipulation, unemployment and loss of control. Proponents argue that national laws are insufficient to address these risks and that "an international agreement on clear and verifiable red lines is necessary". They urge governments to reach an agreement by the end of 2026, and called for robust enforcement mechanisms and the creation of an independent organisation to implement it. The letter does not call for specific red lines, but suggests the possibility of banning lethal autonomous weapons, autonomous replication of AI systems and the use of AI in nuclear warfare. Other examples of possible red lines include social scoring, mass surveillance, bioweapon design, AI-generated child sexual abuse material and AI impersonation. A red line could prohibit either AI behaviors (what AI systems should be guaranteed to never do even if asked to) or AI uses. == Signatories == When published, the online declaration was signed by more than 200 prominent politicians and scientists, including 10 Nobel Prize winners. Signers include former president of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos and researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. It also includes popular authors like Stephen Fry and Yuval Noah Harari. The letter received support from European lawmakers, including former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta, and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson. == Development of red lines == As of 2025, there is no global red line on AI. Some regional red lines exist, such as with the uses deemed "unacceptable" by the AI Act in Europe, and with the US-China agreement not to leave to AI the decision of whether to launch nuclear weapons. At the United Nations Security Council, days after the declaration, Michael Kratsios, Donald Trump's director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said "We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralized control and global governance of AI." The topic of AI red lines gained prominence in 2026 with the dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense (DoD), which resulted from the DoD requesting Anthropic to remove contractual red lines on fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. The event led employees from Google and OpenAI as well as Senate Democrats to further call for red lines on military use of AI. Senator Adam Schiff proposed a bill to "codify" Anthropic's red lines.
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Cleverpath AION Business Rules Expert

Cleverpath AION Business Rules Expert (formerly Platinum AIONDS, and before that Trinzic AIONDS, and originally Aion) is an expert system and Business rules engine owned by Computer Associates by 2000. == History == The product was created around 1986 as "Aion" by the Aion company. In its initial release Aion was multi-platform and continues to be deliverable to the PC, Unixs, and Mainframe computer's. In addition it ties in seamlessly with a variety of databases including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and ODBC. Aion was founded by Harry Reinstein, Larry Cohn, Garry Hallee, Scott Grinis, and others. From Scott Grinis's bio: Scott founded Aion, a company that developed expert systems and whose advanced inference engine and object technology were used by financial services and insurance firms to develop risk-scoring and underwriting applications. Harry Reinstein was quoted as saying: “Our biggest competitor was not AICorp, it was COBOL” Trinzic owned AION by 1993. A reference in a 1993 announcement indicates that Trinzic's formation was the result of a merger (paraphased): Trinzic set three development initiatives shortly after its formation from the merger of Aion Corp. and AICorp. The other initiatives -- adding SQL extensions to Aion/DS and evaluating the unbundling of some of that product's object-oriented programming capabilities -- are still active. Writing in 1993 Judith Hodges and Deborah Melewski give the date for the merger: Two rival artificial intelligence software vendors -- AICorp, Inc. and Aion Corp. -- merged in September 1992 to form Trinzic Corp. As part of the merger, redundant jobs were eliminated (20% of the combined work force), leaving a total work force of 245 employees worldwide. The new firm also boasted a combined installed base of more than 1,200 sites representing more than 10,000 software licenses. Although in the merger, technically AICorp bought Aion, as AICorp was a public company and Aion was still private, the reality was that Aion's leadership and technology subsumed AICorp's. Jim Gagnard, the CEO of Aion, became CEO of Trinzic and AICorp's flagship product, KBMS, was discontinued, while the Aion Development System continued to be enhanced and KBMS customers were assisted in converting to AIONDS, under the continued technical leadership of Garry Hallee and Scott Grinis. On August 1, 1994 Trinzic released version 6.4 of AIONDS saying, in part: Trinzic Corp., Palo Alto, Calif., has unveiled The Aion Development System (AionDS) Version 6.4, an upgrade to the company's development environment for building business process automation applications. Version 6.4 provides a visual development environment for Microsoft Windows or OS/2 PM applications using business rules. Trinzic was acquired by PLATINUM Technologies in 1995 which retained at least some of Trinzic's acquisitions Platinum Technologies was acquired by Computer Associates in 1999. CA changed the system's name to CA Aion Business Rules Expert" on or before 2009. It is currently (June 2011) at Release 11 on a wide range of supported platforms. == Applications using Aion == Aion has been used in a variety of industries including Energy, Insurance, Military, Aviation, and Banking. At one point an Aion expert system application written by Covia, LLC existed to do airport gate assignment. Colossus, a computer program, developed by Computer Sciences Corporation is the insurance industry’s leading expert system for assisting adjusters in the evaluation of bodily injury claims (aka "pain and suffering"). Colossus helps adjusters reduce variance in payouts on similar bodily injury claims through objective use of industry standard rules.
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ElabFTW

eLabFTW is a web application written by Nicolas Carpi in PHP which can be used to create personal and common logbooks. It has been developed at the Curie Institute originally. Besides there, it is used on universities around the world eLabFTW is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License as free software. It is translated into seven languages. == Description == eLabFTW is a free and open-source lab book. It is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. Docker containers are also available. Among the various features are Secure. Entries and transmission are encrypted Timestamps. RFC 3161 compliant timestamping of experiments. Inventory management. Apart from experience logs, it also can manage the inventory Import and export. Entries can be imported and exported == Platforms == eLabFTW is a PHP package with Mysql database. Therefore, it can be executed on most servers. Furthermore, the docker containers allow to run it almost everywhere. == Usage == eLabFTW is used by various universities, like University of Alberta, Berkeley University, Hanover Medical School, Cardiff University and UMC Utrecht
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IPO underpricing algorithm

IPO underpricing is the increase in stock value from the initial offering price to the first-day closing price. Many believe that underpriced IPOs leave money on the table for corporations, but some believe that underpricing is inevitable. Investors state that underpricing signals high interest to the market which increases the demand. On the other hand, overpriced stocks will drop long-term as the price stabilizes so underpricing may keep the issuers safe from investor litigation. == IPO underpricing algorithms == Underwriters and investors and corporations going for an initial public offering (IPO), issuers, are interested in their market value. There is always tension that results since the underwriters want to keep the price low while the companies want a high IPO price. Underpricing may also be caused by investor over-reaction causing spikes on the initial days of trading. The IPO pricing process is similar to pricing new and unique products where there is sparse data on market demand, product acceptance, or competitive response. Thus it is difficult to determine a clear price which is compounded by the different goals issuers and investors have. The problem with developing algorithms to determine underpricing is dealing with noisy, complex, and unordered data sets. Additionally, people, environment, and various environmental conditions introduce irregularities in the data. To resolve these issues, researchers have found various techniques from artificial intelligence that normalizes the data. == Evolutionary models == Evolutionary programming is often paired with other algorithms e.g. artificial neural networks to improve the robustness, reliability, and adaptability. Evolutionary models reduce error rates by allowing the numerical values to change within the fixed structure of the program. Designers provide their algorithms the variables, they then provide training data to help the program generate rules defined in the input space that make a prediction in the output variable space. In this approach, the solution is made an individual and the population is made of alternatives. However, the outliers cause the individuals to act unexpectedly as they try to create rules to explain the whole set. === Rule-based system === For example, Quintana first abstracts a model with 7 major variables. The rules evolved from the Evolutionary Computation system developed at Michigan and Pittsburgh: Underwriter prestige – Is the underwriter prestigious in role of lead manager? 1 for true, 0 otherwise. Price range width – The width of the non-binding reference price range offered to potential customers during the roadshow. This width can be interpreted as a sign of uncertainty regarding the real value of the company and a therefore, as a factor that could influence the initial return. Price adjustment – The difference between the final offer price and the price range width. It can be viewed as uncertainty if the adjustment is outside the previous price range. Offering price – The final offer price of the IPO Retained stock – Ratio of number of shares sold at the IPO divided by post-offering number of shares minus the number of shares sold at the IPO. Offering size – Logarithm of the offering size in millions of dollars excluding the over-allotment option Technology – Is this a technology company? 1 for true, 0 otherwise. Quintana uses these factors as signals that investors focus on. The algorithm his team explains shows how a prediction with a high-degree of confidence is possible with just a subset of the data. === Two-layered evolutionary forecasting === Luque approaches the problem with outliers by performing linear regressions over the set of data points (input, output). The algorithm deals with the data by allocating regions for noisy data. The scheme has the advantage of isolating noisy patterns which reduces the effect outliers have on the rule-generation system. The algorithm can come back later to understand if the isolated data sets influence the general data. Finally, the worst results from the algorithm outperformed all other algorithms' predictive abilities. == Agent-based modelling == Currently, many of the algorithms assume homogeneous and rational behavior among investors. However, there's an approach alternative to financial modeling, and it's called agent-based modelling (ABM). ABM uses different autonomous agents whose behavior evolves endogenously which lead to complicated system dynamics that are sometimes impossible to predict from the properties of individual agents. ABM is starting to be applied to computational finance. Though, for ABM to be more accurate, better models for rule-generation need to be developed.
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Kinect

Kinect is a discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB cameras, and infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light or time of flight calculations, which can in turn be used to perform real-time gesture recognition and body skeletal detection, among other capabilities. They also contain microphones that can be used for speech recognition and voice control. Kinect was originally developed as a motion controller peripheral for Xbox video game consoles, distinguished from competitors (such as Nintendo's Wii Remote and Sony's PlayStation Move) by not requiring physical controllers. The first-generation Kinect was based on technology from Israeli company PrimeSense, and unveiled at E3 2009 as a peripheral for Xbox 360 codenamed "Project Natal". It was first released on November 4, 2010, and would go on to sell eight million units in its first 60 days of availability. The majority of the games developed for Kinect were casual, family-oriented titles, which helped to attract new audiences to Xbox 360, but did not result in wide adoption by the console's existing, overall userbase. As part of the 2013 unveiling of Xbox 360's successor, Xbox One, Microsoft unveiled a second-generation version of Kinect with improved tracking capabilities. Microsoft also announced that Kinect would be a required component of the console, and that it would not function unless the peripheral is connected. The requirement proved controversial among users and critics due to privacy concerns, prompting Microsoft to backtrack on the decision. However, Microsoft still bundled the new Kinect with Xbox One consoles upon their launch in November 2013. A market for Kinect-based games still did not emerge after the Xbox One's launch; Microsoft would later offer Xbox One hardware bundles without Kinect included, and later revisions of the console removed the dedicated ports used to connect it (requiring a powered USB adapter instead). Microsoft ended production of Kinect for Xbox One in October 2017. Kinect has also been used as part of non-game applications in academic and commercial environments, as it was cheaper and more robust than other depth-sensing technologies at the time. While Microsoft initially objected to such applications, it later released software development kits (SDKs) for the development of Microsoft Windows applications that use Kinect. In 2020, Microsoft released Azure Kinect as a continuation of the technology integrated with the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Part of the Kinect technology was also used within Microsoft's HoloLens project. Microsoft discontinued the Azure Kinect developer kits in October 2023. == History == === Development === The origins of the Kinect started around 2005, at a point where technology vendors were starting to develop depth-sensing cameras. Microsoft had been interested in a 3D camera for the Xbox line earlier but because the technology had not been refined, had placed it in the "Boneyard", a collection of possible technology they could not immediately work on. In 2005, Israeli company PrimeSense was founded by mathematicians and engineers to develop the "next big thing" for video games, incorporating cameras that were capable of mapping a human body in front of them and sensing hand motions. They showed off their system at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, where Microsoft's Alex Kipman, the general manager of hardware incubation, saw the potential in PrimeSense's technology for the Xbox system. Microsoft began discussions with PrimeSense about what would need to be done to make their product more consumer-friendly: not only improvements in the capabilities of depth-sensing cameras, but a reduction in size and cost, and a means to manufacture the units at scale was required. PrimeSense spent the next few years working at these improvements. Nintendo released the Wii in November 2006. The Wii's central feature was the Wii Remote, a handheld device that was detected by the Wii through a motion sensor bar mounted onto a television screen to enable motion controlled games. Microsoft felt pressure from the Wii, and began looking into depth-sensing in more detail with PrimeSense's hardware, but could not get to the level of motion tracking they desired. While they could determine hand gestures, and sense the general shape of a body, they could not do skeletal tracking. A separate path within Microsoft looked to create an equivalent of the Wii Remote, considering that this type of unit may become standardized similar to how two-thumbstick controllers became a standard feature. However, it was still ultimately Microsoft's goal to remove any device between the player and the Xbox. Kudo Tsunoda and Darren Bennett joined Microsoft in 2008, and began working with Kipman on a new approach to depth-sensing aided by machine learning to improve skeletal tracking. They internally demonstrated this and established where they believed the technology could be in a few years, which led to the strong interest to fund further development of the technology; this has also occurred at a time that Microsoft executives wanted to abandon the Wii-like motion tracking approach, and favored the depth-sensing solution to present a product that went beyond the Wii's capabilities. The project was greenlit by late 2008 with work started in 2009. The project was codenamed "Project Natal" after the Brazilian city Natal, Kipman's birthplace. Additionally, Kipman recognized the Latin origins of the word "natal" to mean "to be born", reflecting the new types of audiences they hoped to draw with the technology. Much of the initial work was related to ethnographic research to see how video game players' home environments were laid out, lit, and how those with Wiis used the system to plan how Kinect units would be used. The Microsoft team discovered from this research that the up-and-down angle of the depth-sensing camera would either need to be adjusted manually, or would require an expensive motor to move automatically. Upper management at Microsoft opted to include the motor despite the increased cost to avoid breaking game immersion. Kinect project work also involved packaging the system for mass production and optimizing its performance. Hardware development took around 22 months. During hardware development, Microsoft engaged with software developers to use Kinect. Microsoft wanted to make games that would be playable by families since Kinect could sense multiple bodies in front of it. One of the first internal titles developed for the device was the pack-in game Kinect Adventures developed by Good Science Studio that was part of Microsoft Studios. One of the game modes of Kinect Adventures was "Reflex Ridge", based on the Japanese Brain Wall game where players attempt to contort their bodies in a short time to match cutouts of a wall moving at them. This type of game was a key example of the type of interactivity they wanted with Kinect, and its development helped feed into the hardware improvements. Another development was Project Milo, a prototype game developed by Lionhead Studios led by Peter Molyneux where the player could interact with a virtual avatar through motion controls and voice recognition. Lionhead had developed the project based on original capabilities of the Kinect, but according to Molyneux, Microsoft had found that a consumer-grade version of the Kinect would cost thousands of dollars, so they scaled back the device and refocused the role of games for the Kinect to be more casual games as seen on the Wii. As a result, Project Milo no longer fit Microsoft's portfolio and was cancelled. Nearing the planned release, there was a problem of widespread testing of Kinect in various room types and different bodies accounting for age, gender, and race among other factors, while keeping the details of the unit confidential. Microsoft engaged in a company-wide program offering employees to take home Kinect units to test them. Microsoft also brought other non-gaming divisions, including its Microsoft Research, Microsoft Windows, and Bing teams to help complete the system. Microsoft established its own large-scale manufacturing facility to bulk product Kinect units and test them. === Introduction === Kinect was first announced to the public as "Project Natal" on June 1, 2009, during Microsoft's press conference at E3 2009; film director Steven Spielberg joined Microsoft's Don Mattrick to introduce the technology and its potential. Three demos were presented during the conference—Microsoft's Ricochet and Paint Party, and Lionhead Studios' Milo & Kate created by Peter Molyneux—while a Project Natal-enabled version of Criterion Games' Burnout Paradise was shown during the E3 exhibition. By E3 2009, the skeletal mapping technology was capable of simultaneously tracking four people, with a feature extraction of 4
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Daniel Wolfe

Daniel Wolfe (born 1960) is an American activist, advocate, and writer whose work advances health programs and policy that balance scientific research and community expertise. His career has focused on support for community health movements, particularly among groups often regarded as criminal or socially suspect, including gay men and people who use illicit drugs. == Early life == Wolfe was raised between Arizona—including time on Rancho Linda Vista, a commune outside of Tucson—and East Hampton, NY. He received his undergraduate degree in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, and following time studying Arabic in Egypt, worked as the junior ghostwriter on the autobiographies of First Lady of Egypt Jehan Sadat and Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Upon return to New York, he was an assistant at the Council on Foreign Relations to Richard W. Murphy, former US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Disagreement with US killing of Iraqi civilians during the 1990 Gulf War—and the rising toll of HIV in NY—moved Wolfe to leave Middle East studies and work full-time on AIDS in 1990. == Education == Wolfe was Community Scholar at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Healthwhere he received his Masters in Public Health in 2004. He holds a Masters of Philosophy (in history) from Columbia University, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He was the recipient of a Charles H. Revson Foundation fellowship for urban leaders who have made a substantial contribution to New York City, and a fellow at the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad in Cairo, Egypt. == AIDS and gay activism == Wolfe was part of the media committee for ACT UP’s 1998 action to seize control of the FDA, and helped organize ACT UP NY’s challenge to Governor Cuomo to do better on the AIDS response and other actions.Wolfe also joined ACT UP colleagues Gregg Bordowitz, David Barr, Richard Elovich, Jean Carlomusto and others to work at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the nation’s first AIDS organization, where he served as director of communications and spokesperson on issues including opposition to NY State cuts to the AIDS budget, the disclosure that Olympic Champion Greg Louganis had HIV, reports of the FBI spying on AIDS activists, and GMHC’s move to offer HIV testing and targeted support to those who were HIV-negative. Wolfe also continued cultural work, making art, performance and video as a member of the gay and lesbian collective GANG with artists and ACT UP members including Zoe Leonard, Suzanne Wright, Loring McAlpin, Wellington Love, Adam Rolston and others, and writing a biography of Lawrence of Arabia for a series for young adults on famous gay men and lesbians in history edited by Martin Duberman. Controversy followed, with North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms waving a GANG piece in an issue of the Movement Research Performance Journal on the floor of Congress to show the "rottenness" of publicly funded art, and a number of schools banning the biography series for young adults from their libraries. Wolfe and others challenged the move as continuing the longstanding and homophobic demand that notable gay men and lesbians stay silent about essential details of their private lives even while being celebrated for their professional achievements. == Gay health == The approval of antiretroviral therapy for HIV in 1996 opened up new space for discussions of gay health beyond HIV, and new directions for Wolfe. Working from hundreds of interviews, surveys, workshops, and with a team of writers, Wolfe was the author of Men Like Us, the Our Bodies, Ourselves-inspired GMHC Complete Guide to Gay Men’s Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Well-being, covering issues from spirituality to sexual health to aging. The move to frame gay health beyond condoms and pills—and to offer a guide to health that “did not need to be translated from the original heterosexual”—was part of a larger gay health movement encompassing wellness and pleasure, and focused less on health disparity than on individual and community resilience. Wolfe was a keynote speaker and workshop leader, along with Eric Rofes, Chris Bartlett, and other organizers, at the first National Gay Men’s Health Summit held in Boulder, Colorado in 2002. Awarded a Charles H. Revson Fellowship for urban leaders in the City of New York, Wolfe became a community scholar at Columbia University’s Center of History and Ethics of Public Health, where he received his MPH in 2003, and was a contributor to Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America. == International harm reduction == Wolfe was Director of International Harm Reduction Development at the Open Society Foundations (2005-2021) where he led grantmaking and advocacy to protect the health and rights of people who use drugs in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Wolfe challenged approaches that conditioned support on abstinence or that sought to treat people who use illegal drugs like drugs themselves, as something to be controlled or contained. As with the gay health movement, he advocated a focus on community resilience and strengths, and on supporting individuals and communities to negotiate the balance between risk and pleasure of activities integral to life. Noting what he called the “antisocial behavior of health systems,” Wolfe’s analysis elevated issues such as forced labor and harsh punishment delivered in the name of addiction treatment and rehabilitation, the role of criminalization, imprisonment and stigma in interrupting or impeding HIV treatment, and the bias toward coercive approaches in studying and delivering addiction treatments. He also pointed to defects in national and international drug control policies and human rights violations as a root cause of HIV, hepatitis, and other health challenges faced by people who used drugs. Concrete advocacy supported by Open Society’s International Harm Reduction Development program under his direction included rebuffing US government efforts to force the UN to remove all references to harm reduction in its materials, addition of the addiction treatment medicines methadone and buprenorphine to the World Health Organization’s essential medicines list, and WHO endorsement of lay distribution of the opioid overdose antidote naloxone. Wolfe and OSF colleagues also advocated for new approaches to intellectual property and data sharing in research and development of medicines and vaccines to lower price and improve access to medicines globally to those in need. == AI and patient rights == Reports of patients denied opioid prescriptions based on an algorithm purporting to calculate their risk of overdose led Wolfe to work on AI, first as a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and then as Executive Director of a new UCSF UC Berkeley program pioneering efforts to join AI, clinical and public health practice, and equity. In keeping with his earlier (analog) work on HIV, Wolfe has highlighted concerns about health systems using algorithms to gauge the merit of treatments for those regarded as socially suspect, the importance of moving beyond proprietary, black box algorithms toward an architecture of health data as a public good, and the need to maximize benefit for patients and communities, as well health systems, in the use of large language models.
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Hamilton C shell

Hamilton C shell is a clone of the Unix C shell and utilities for Microsoft Windows created by Nicole Hamilton at Hamilton Laboratories as a completely original work, not based on any prior code. It was first released on OS/2 on December 12, 1988 and on Windows NT in July 1992. The OS/2 version was discontinued in 2003 but the Windows version continues to be actively supported. == Design == Hamilton C shell differs from the Unix C shell in several respects. These include its compiler architecture, its use of threads, and the decision to follow Windows rather than Unix conventions. === Parser === The original C shell uses an ad hoc parser. This has led to complaints about its limitations. It works well enough for the kinds of things users type interactively but not very well for the more complex commands a user might take time to write in a script. It is not possible, for example, to pipe the output of a foreach statement into grep. There was a limit to how complex a command it could handle. By contrast, Hamilton uses a top-down recursive descent parser that allows it to compile statements to an internal form before running them. As a result, statements can be nested or piped arbitrarily. The language has also been extended with built-in and user-defined procedures, local variables, floating point and additional expression, editing and wildcarding operators, including an "indefinite directory" wildcard construct written as "..." that matches zero or more directory levels as required to make the rest of the pattern match. === Threads === Lacking fork or a high performance way to recreate that functionality, Hamilton uses the Windows threads facilities instead. When a new thread is created, it runs within the same process space and it shares all of the process state. If one thread changes the current directory or the contents of memory, it's changed for all the threads. It's much cheaper to create a thread than a process but there's no isolation between them. To recreate the missing isolation of separate processes, the threads cooperate to share resources using locks. === Windows conventions === Hamilton differs from other Unix shells in that it also directly supports Windows conventions for drive letters, filename slashes, escape characters, etc.
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Brain.js

Brain.js is a JavaScript library used for neural networking, which is released as free and open-source software under the MIT License. It can be used in both the browser and Node.js backends. Brain.js is most commonly used as a simple introduction to neural networking, as it hides complex mathematics and has a familiar modern JavaScript syntax. It is maintained by members of the Brain.js organization and open-source contributors. == Examples == Creating a feedforward neural network with backpropagation: Creating a recurrent neural network: Train the neural network on RGB color contrast:
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Project Joshua Blue

Joshua Blue is a project under development by IBM that focuses on advancing the artificial intelligence field by designing and programming computers to emulate human mental functions. == Goals == According to researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the main goal of Joshua Blue is "to achieve cognitive flexibility that approaches human functioning". In short, IBM is aiming to design Joshua Blue to 'think like a human', mainly in terms of emotional thought. == How it will work == A model of Joshua Blue's learning pattern has been created. Similar to how young children learn human traits through interacting with their surroundings, Joshua Blue will acquire knowledge through external stimuli present in its environment. IBM believes that if computers evolve to learn in this way and then comprehend and analyze the knowledge gained using reason, computers could begin to possess a "mind", of sorts, capable of demonstrating complex social behaviors similar to those of humans. Thus far, IBM has revealed that Joshua Blue will be a computer with a network of wires and input nodes that function as a computer nervous system. This nervous system will be used by Joshua Blue to perceive affect or personal emotional feelings. Not only will this network of input nodes help Joshua Blue discover things physically, but it will also allow Joshua Blue to interpret the significance of events. The input nodes, or proprioceptors, will enable Joshua Blue to be aware of things that happen around itself, as well as recognize and attach meaning to the emotional effect produced by interacting with an object in a certain way. In addition, Joshua Blue's proprioceptors will function as pain and pleasure sensors, allowing Joshua Blue to employ a similar "reward and punishment" system that humans use to form behaviors.
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Feigenbaum test

A Feigenbaum test is a variation of the Turing test where a computer system attempts to replicate an expert in a given field such as chemistry or marketing. It is also known, as a subject matter expert Turing test and was proposed by Edward Feigenbaum in a 2003 paper. The concept is also described by Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil argues that machines who pass this test are an inevitable consequence of Moore's Law.
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AFNLP

AFNLP (Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing Associations) is the organization for coordinating the natural language processing related activities and events in the Asia-Pacific region. == Foundation == AFNLP was founded on 4 October 2000. == Member Associations == ALTA – Australasian Language Technology Association ANLP Japan Association of Natural Language Processing ROCLING Taiwan ROC Computational Linguistics Society SIG-KLC Korea SIG-Korean Language Computing of Korea Information Science Society == Existing Asian Initiatives == NLPRS: Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium IRAL: International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages PACLING: Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics PACLIC: Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation PRICAI: Pacific Rim International Conference on AI ICCPOL: International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages ROCLING: Research on Computational Linguistics Conference == Conferences == IJCNLP-04: The 1st International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Hainan Island, China IJCNLP-05: The 2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Jeju Island, Korea IJCNLP-08: The 3rd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Hyderabad, India ACL-IJCNLP-2009: Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) in Singapore IJNCLP-11: The 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Chiang Mai, Thailand
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John M. Jumper

John Michael Jumper (born 1 January 1985) is an American chemist and computer scientist. Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction. As of 2025 Jumper serves as director at Google DeepMind. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021. == Education == Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007, a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship, a Master of Science in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2017. His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed. == Career and research == Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction. === AlphaFold === AlphaFold is a deep learning algorithm developed by Jumper and his team at DeepMind, a research lab acquired by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. It is an artificial intelligence program which performs predictions of protein structure. === Awards and honors === In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. This international competition benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold won the competition, outperforming other algorithms scoring above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match, within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT. In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine". In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein. In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 2024, Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions, the other half went to David Baker for computational protein design. In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Marshall Medal of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator

The Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator (SNARC) is a neural network machine designed by Marvin Minsky. Prompted by a letter from Minsky, George Armitage Miller gathered the funding (a few thousand dollars) for the project from the Office of Naval Research of the U.S. Department of Defense in the summer of 1951 with the work to be carried out by Minsky, who was then a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton University. At the time, a physics graduate student at Princeton, Dean S. Edmonds, volunteered that he was good with electronics and therefore Minsky brought him onto the project. During undergraduate years, Minsky was inspired by the 1943 Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts paper on artificial neurons, and decided to build such a machine. The learning was Skinnerian reinforcement learning, and Minsky talked with Skinner extensively during the development of the machine. They tested the machine on a copy of Shannon's maze, and found that it could learn to solve the maze. Unlike Shannon's maze, this machine did not control a physical robot, but simulated rats running in a maze. The simulation is displayed as an "arrangement of lights", and the circuit was reinforced each time the simulated rat reached the goal. The machine surprised its creators. "The rats actually interacted with one another. If one of them found a good path, the others would tend to follow it." The machine itself is a randomly connected network of approximately 40 Hebb synapses. These synapses each have a memory that holds the probability that signal comes in one input and another signal will come out of the output. There is a probability knob that goes from 0 to 1 that shows this probability of the signals propagating. If the probability signal gets through, a capacitor remembers this function and engages an electromagnetic clutch. At this point, the operator will press a button to give a reward to the machine. This activates a motor on a surplus Minneapolis-Honeywell C-1 gyroscopic autopilot from a B-24 bomber. The motor turns a chain that goes to all 40 synapse machines, checking if the clutch is engaged or not. As the capacitor can only "remember" for a certain amount of time, the chain only catches the most recent updates of the probabilities. Each neuron contained 6 vacuum tubes and a motor. The entire machine is "the size of a grand piano" and contained 300 vacuum tubes. The tubes failed regularly, but the machine would still work despite failures. This machine is considered one of the first pioneering attempts at the field of artificial intelligence. Minsky went on to be a founding member of MIT's Project MAC, which split to become the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and is now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1985 Minsky became a founding member of the MIT Media Laboratory. According to Minsky, he loaned the machine to students in Dartmouth, and subsequently lost, except for a single neuron. A photo of Minsky's last neuron can be seen here. The photo shows 6 vacuum tubes, one of which is a Sylvania JAN-CHS-6H6GT/G/VT-90A.
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