AI Assistant Roblox Studio

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

Conduit (company)

Conduit Ltd. is an international software company. From its founding in 2005 to 2013, its most well-known product was the Conduit toolbar, which was widely-described as malware. In 2013, it spun off its toolbar business; today, its main product is a mobile development platform that allows users to create native and web mobile applications for smartphones. == Products == From 2005 to 2013, the company's most well-known product was the Conduit toolbar, which is flagged by most antivirus software as potentially unwanted and adware. Conduit's toolbar software is often downloaded by malware packages from other publishers. The company spun off the toolbar division that manages the Conduit toolbar in 2013. Today, the company's main product is a mobile development platform that allows users to create native and web mobile applications for smartphones. App creation for its App Gallery is free, but it charges a monthly subscription fee to place apps on the App Store or Google Play. == History == Conduit was founded in 2005 by Shilo, Dror Erez, and Gaby Bilcyzk. Between years 2005 and 2013, it ran a successful but controversial toolbar platform business. Conduit was part of the so-called Download Valley companies monetizing free software and downloads by bundling adware. The toolbars were criticized by some as being very difficult to uninstall. The toolbar software was referred to as a "potentially unwanted program" by some in the computer industry because it could be used to change browser settings. The company had more than 400 employees in 2013. In September same year, Conduit spun off its entire website toolbar business division, which combined with Perion Network. After the deal, Conduit shareholders owned 81% of Perion's existing shares and both Perion and Conduit remained independent companies. The substantial size of the Conduit user base allowed Perion to immediately surpass AOL in U.S. searches. In 2015, Conduit announced it would purchase Keeprz, a mobile customer loyalty platform, for $45 million.
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Leabra

Leabra stands for local, error-driven and associative, biologically realistic algorithm. It is a model of learning which is a balance between Hebbian and error-driven learning with other network-derived characteristics. This model is used to mathematically predict outcomes based on inputs and previous learning influences. Leabra is heavily influenced by and contributes to neural network designs and models, including emergent. == Background == It is the default algorithm in emergent (successor of PDP++) when making a new project, and is extensively used in various simulations. Hebbian learning is performed using conditional principal components analysis (CPCA) algorithm with correction factor for sparse expected activity levels. Error-driven learning is performed using GeneRec, which is a generalization of the recirculation algorithm, and approximates Almeida–Pineda recurrent backpropagation. The symmetric, midpoint version of GeneRec is used, which is equivalent to the contrastive Hebbian learning algorithm (CHL). See O'Reilly (1996; Neural Computation) for more details. The activation function is a point-neuron approximation with both discrete spiking and continuous rate-code output. Layer or unit-group level inhibition can be computed directly using a k-winners-take-all (KWTA) function, producing sparse distributed representations. A feedforward and feedback (FFFB) form of inhibition has now replaced the KWTA form of inhibition. FFFB inhibition can be efficiently implemented by using the average excitatory input and activity levels in a given layer. The net input is computed as an average, not a sum, over connections, based on normalized, sigmoidally transformed weight values, which are subject to scaling on a connection-group level to alter relative contributions. Automatic scaling is performed to compensate for differences in expected activity level in the different projections. Documentation about this algorithm can be found in the book "Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain" published by MIT press. and in the Emergent Documentation Archived 2009-04-16 at the Wayback Machine == Overview of the leabra algorithm == The pseudocode for Leabra is given here, showing exactly how the pieces of the algorithm described in more detail in the subsequent sections fit together. Iterate over minus and plus phases of settling for each event. o At start of settling, for all units: - Initialize all state variables (activation, v_m, etc.). - Apply external patterns (clamp input in minus, input & output in plus). - Compute net input scaling terms (constants, computed here so network can be dynamically altered). - Optimization: compute net input once from all static activations (e.g., hard-clamped external inputs). o During each cycle of settling, for all non-clamped units: - Compute excitatory netinput (g_e(t), aka eta_j or net) -- sender-based optimization by ignoring inactives. - Compute kWTA inhibition for each layer, based on g_i^Q: Sort units into two groups based on g_i^Q: top k and remaining k+1 -> n. If basic, find k and k+1th highest If avg-based, compute avg of 1 -> k & k+1 -> n. Set inhibitory conductance g_i from g^Q_k and g^Q_k+1 - Compute point-neuron activation combining excitatory input and inhibition o After settling, for all units, record final settling activations as either minus or plus phase (y^-_j or y^+_j). After both phases update the weights (based on linear current weight values), for all connections: o Compute error-driven weight changes with CHL with soft weight bounding o Compute Hebbian weight changes with CPCA from plus-phase activations o Compute net weight change as weighted sum of error-driven and Hebbian o Increment the weights according to net weight change. == Implementations == Emergent Archived 2015-10-03 at the Wayback Machine is the original implementation of Leabra; its most recent implementation is written in Go. It was written chiefly by Dr. O'Reilly, but professional software engineers were recently hired to improve the existing codebase. This is the fastest implementation, suitable for constructing large networks. Although emergent has a graphical user interface, it is very complex and has a steep learning curve. If you want to understand the algorithm in detail, it will be easier to read non-optimized code. For this purpose, check out the MATLAB version. There is also an R version available, that can be easily installed via install.packages("leabRa") in R and has a short introduction to how the package is used. The MATLAB and R versions are not suited for constructing very large networks, but they can be installed quickly and (with some programming background) are easy to use. Furthermore, they can also be adapted easily. == Special algorithms == Temporal differences and general dopamine modulation. Temporal differences (TD) is widely used as a model of midbrain dopaminergic firing. Primary value learned value (PVLV). PVLV simulates behavioral and neural data on Pavlovian conditioning and the midbrain dopaminergic neurons that fire in proportion to unexpected rewards (an alternative to TD). Prefrontal cortex basal ganglia working memory (PBWM). PBWM uses PVLV to train prefrontal cortex working memory updating system, based on the biology of the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia.
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Copyright and artificial intelligence in the United Kingdom

The interaction of artificial intelligence and copyright law has become one of the most contentious tech policy debates in the United Kingdom, centering on whether AI developers should be permitted to train their models on copyrighted material without explicit consent or remuneration. This debate has exposed a deep fracture between the creative industries, which seek to protect their intellectual property from unauthorised commercial exploitation, and tech companies. The academic and library sectors are also impacted, and argue that overly restrictive copyright laws hinder scientific research and the UK's sovereign AI capabilities. In 2024, the UK government proposed a broad text and data mining (TDM) exception to copyright that would have allowed AI companies to use publicly available copyrighted material for training, offering creators only an "opt-out" mechanism, similar to the exception introduced in Europe. This proposal faced intense opposition from across the creative sector. Trade unions representing writers, musicians, performers, and journalists argued that such an exception would effectively expropriate their members' work for the commercial benefit of tech giants. A report from the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, warned that generative AI posed a "clear and present danger" to the £124 billion creative economy. The government abandoned the opt-out model in March 2026, opting instead to build a stronger evidence base before pursuing any copyright reform. Conversely, the academic and library sectors have raised significant concerns that the UK's current TDM exception, which is strictly limited to non-commercial research, is too narrow. Universities and research libraries occupy a dual role as both creators of vast datasets and beneficiaries of TDM exceptions. They argue that the current legal framework restricts their ability to computationally analyse the very research they produce, thereby hobbling the UK's "AI for Science" strategy. Advocacy groups have highlighted a "triple payment" problem, wherein publicly funded research is handed over to publishers, who then charge universities substantial subscription fees and demand additional payments for specific TDM licences. This tension is further complicated by the commercial practices of major academic publishers. While publishers often restrict universities from using subscribed databases for AI training, they have simultaneously entered into lucrative, multi-million-dollar licensing agreements to sell access to this academic content to commercial AI developers. Furthermore, academics have accused publishers of actively steering authors away from permissive open-access licences towards more restrictive variants. By doing so, publishers retain the exclusive commercial rights necessary to strike these AI training deals, often without consulting the original authors or offering them any additional remuneration. This dynamic has not only reopened debates within the Open Access movement but has also created complex legal scenarios where publishers, rather than authors, control the terms of copyright litigation against major tech companies. == Training on copyrighted material == The question of whether AI developers should be permitted to train their models on copyrighted material without payment or consent has been one of the most contentious policy debates in the UK AI landscape. In 2024, the then-Conservative government proposed a broad text and data mining (TDM) exception that would have allowed AI companies to use any publicly available copyrighted material for training purposes, with creators able only to "opt out" of having their work used. This proposal provoked intense opposition from writers, musicians, visual artists, publishers, and broadcasters, who argued it would effectively expropriate their intellectual property for the commercial benefit of AI companies. The debate over text and data mining exceptions extends significantly beyond generative AI and the creative industries, implicating a wide range of scientific, industrial, and academic research applications. TDM is a foundational process for analysing large datasets to identify patterns, trends, and correlations, which is heavily utilised in fields such as medical research, climate modelling, and financial services. In the scientific and academic sectors, researchers rely on TDM to process vast amounts of published literature. For example, in biomedical research, TDM is used to accelerate drug discovery, identify new uses for existing medicines, and extract insights from clinical notes and genomic datasets. However, the application of traditional copyright frameworks to scientific literature has been criticised by academics. Researchers argue that scientific writing is intended to convey factual, verifiable information rather than creative originality, and that copyright restrictions on TDM hinder reproducibility, validation, and the advancement of science. The current UK copyright exception for TDM (Section 29A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) is limited strictly to non-commercial research, which creates barriers for public-private research partnerships and commercial scientific development. Beyond academia, non-generative AI and TDM are critical to various industrial and commercial operations. In the financial services sector, TDM is employed to monitor transactions, detect fraud, and analyse market feeds. Other non-generative applications include search engine indexing, plagiarism detection software, and media monitoring. A 2026 report by Public First estimated that 19% of UK businesses use specialised TDM tools, and that a restrictive copyright regime requiring licenses for all copyrighted content could cost the UK economy £220 billion in lost AI-driven GDP growth by 2035 compared to a broad commercial TDM exemption. Industry advocates argue that the lack of a commercial TDM exception in the UK creates legal uncertainty that stifles innovation across these broader, non-generative applications of data analysis. === Tech and AI industry positions === The technology and artificial intelligence industries lobbied for a broad text and data mining (TDM) exception to UK copyright law, arguing that such an exception is essential for the UK to remain globally competitive in AI development. Industry bodies such as techUK have argued that without a TDM exception, the UK risks becoming an "AI taker rather than an AI maker," as developers will relocate training operations to jurisdictions with more permissive copyright regimes, such as the United States, Japan, Singapore, and the European Union. During the UK government's 2024–2025 consultation on copyright and AI, major AI developers and trade associations strongly supported "Option 2" (a broad TDM exception) or "Option 3" (a TDM exception with an opt-out mechanism). OpenAI stated in its consultation response that a broad TDM exception is "necessary to drive AI innovation and investment in the UK," arguing that developers should be permitted to train models on lawfully accessed copies without further distribution. The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) similarly argued that restricting TDM to non-commercial development would undermine the government's ambitions for the UK tech sector and frustrate partnerships between commercial entities and research institutions. Tech industry advocates have also highlighted the economic implications of copyright policy. According to analysis by the think tank UK Day One, adopting an overly restrictive licensing-only approach could result in the UK economy losing up to £182 billion over 20 years, whereas a broad TDM exception could generate a positive impact of £131.61 billion over the same period. Following the government's March 2026 decision to drop plans for a TDM exception in favour of a market-led licensing approach, techUK's Deputy CEO Antony Walker criticised the move, stating that "copyright material cannot be used for AI development and training without permission" under the current framework, which he argued would push AI model training to the US. === Creative sector and political opposition to text and data mining === In March 2026, the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee published a report, AI, Copyright and the Creative Industries, which concluded that the creative industries face "a clear and present danger from generative AI" and that it would be "a very poor bet" for the government to weaken copyright protections to attract AI investment. The Committee noted that the creative industries contributed £124 billion to the UK economy in 2023 and employed 2.4 million people, compared to the AI sector's £12 billion GVA and 86,000 employees in 2024. The Committee called on the government to develop a "licensing-first" regime underpinned by mandatory transparency requirements, and to rule out any new commercial TDM exception with an opt-out model. Tra
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Semantic network

A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges, which represent semantic relations between concepts, mapping or connecting semantic fields. A semantic network may be instantiated as, for example, a graph database or a concept map. Typical standardized semantic networks are expressed as semantic triples. Semantic networks are used in natural language processing applications such as semantic parsing and word-sense disambiguation. Semantic networks can also be used as a method to analyze large texts and identify the main themes and topics (e.g., of social media posts), to reveal biases (e.g., in news coverage), or even to map an entire research field. == History == Examples of the use of semantic networks in logic, directed acyclic graphs as a mnemonic tool, dates back centuries. The earliest documented use being the Greek philosopher Porphyry's commentary on Aristotle's categories in the third century AD. In computing history, "Semantic Nets" for the propositional calculus were first implemented for computers by Richard H. Richens of the Cambridge Language Research Unit in 1956 as an "interlingua" for machine translation of natural languages. Although the importance of this work and the CLRU was only belatedly realized. Semantic networks were also independently implemented by Robert F. Simmons and Sheldon Klein, using the first order predicate calculus as a base, after being inspired by a demonstration of Victor Yngve. The "line of research was originated by the first President of the Association [Association for Computational Linguistics], Victor Yngve, who in 1960 had published descriptions of algorithms for using a phrase structure grammar to generate syntactically well-formed nonsense sentences. Sheldon Klein and I about 1962-1964 were fascinated by the technique and generalized it to a method for controlling the sense of what was generated by respecting the semantic dependencies of words as they occurred in text." Other researchers, most notably M. Ross Quillian and others at System Development Corporation helped contribute to their work in the early 1960s as part of the SYNTHEX project. It's from these publications at SDC that most modern derivatives of the term "semantic network" cite as their background. Later prominent works were done by Allan M. Collins and Quillian (e.g., Collins and Quillian; Collins and Loftus Quillian). Still later in 2006, Hermann Helbig fully described MultiNet. In the late 1980s, two Netherlands universities, Groningen and Twente, jointly began a project called Knowledge Graphs, which are semantic networks but with the added constraint that edges are restricted to be from a limited set of possible relations, to facilitate algebras on the graph. In the subsequent decades, the distinction between semantic networks and knowledge graphs was blurred. In 2012, Google gave their knowledge graph the name Knowledge Graph. The Semantic Link Network was systematically studied as a social semantics networking method. Its basic model consists of semantic nodes, semantic links between nodes, and a semantic space that defines the semantics of nodes and links and reasoning rules on semantic links. The systematic theory and model was published in 2004. This research direction can trace to the definition of inheritance rules for efficient model retrieval in 1998 and the Active Document Framework ADF. Since 2003, research has developed toward social semantic networking. This work is a systematic innovation at the age of the World Wide Web and global social networking rather than an application or simple extension of the Semantic Net (Network). Its purpose and scope are different from that of the Semantic Net (or network). The rules for reasoning and evolution and automatic discovery of implicit links play an important role in the Semantic Link Network. Recently it has been developed to support Cyber-Physical-Social Intelligence. It was used for creating a general summarization method. The self-organised Semantic Link Network was integrated with a multi-dimensional category space to form a semantic space to support advanced applications with multi-dimensional abstractions and self-organised semantic links It has been verified that Semantic Link Network play an important role in understanding and representation through text summarisation applications. Semantic Link Network has been extended from cyberspace to cyber-physical-social space. Competition relation and symbiosis relation as well as their roles in evolving society were studied in the emerging topic: Cyber-Physical-Social Intelligence More specialized forms of semantic networks has been created for specific use. For example, in 2008, Fawsy Bendeck's PhD thesis formalized the Semantic Similarity Network (SSN) that contains specialized relationships and propagation algorithms to simplify the semantic similarity representation and calculations. == Basics of semantic networks == A semantic network is used when one has knowledge that is best understood as a set of concepts that are related to one another. Most semantic networks are cognitively based. They also consist of arcs and nodes which can be organized into a taxonomic hierarchy. Semantic networks contributed ideas of spreading activation, inheritance, and nodes as proto-objects. == Examples == === In Lisp === The following code shows an example of a semantic network in the Lisp programming language using an association list. To extract all the information about the "canary" type, one would use the assoc function with a key of "canary". === WordNet === An example of a semantic network is WordNet, a lexical database of English. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. Some of the most common semantic relations defined are meronymy (A is a meronym of B if A is part of B), holonymy (B is a holonym of A if B contains A), hyponymy (or troponymy) (A is subordinate of B; A is kind of B), hypernymy (A is superordinate of B), synonymy (A denotes the same as B) and antonymy (A denotes the opposite of B). WordNet properties have been studied from a network theory perspective and compared to other semantic networks created from Roget's Thesaurus and word association tasks. From this perspective the three of them are a small world structure. === Other examples === It is also possible to represent logical descriptions using semantic networks such as the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce or the related conceptual graphs of John F. Sowa. These have expressive power equal to or exceeding standard first-order predicate logic. Unlike WordNet or other lexical or browsing networks, semantic networks using these representations can be used for reliable automated logical deduction. Some automated reasoners exploit the graph-theoretic features of the networks during processing. Other examples of semantic networks are Gellish models. Gellish English with its Gellish English dictionary, is a formal language that is defined as a network of relations between concepts and names of concepts. Gellish English is a formal subset of natural English, just as Gellish Dutch is a formal subset of Dutch, whereas multiple languages share the same concepts. Other Gellish networks consist of knowledge models and information models that are expressed in the Gellish language. A Gellish network is a network of (binary) relations between things. Each relation in the network is an expression of a fact that is classified by a relation type. Each relation type itself is a concept that is defined in the Gellish language dictionary. Each related thing is either a concept or an individual thing that is classified by a concept. The definitions of concepts are created in the form of definition models (definition networks) that together form a Gellish Dictionary. A Gellish network can be documented in a Gellish database and is computer interpretable. SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base for scientific resources. It provides unambiguous identifiers (Research Resource IDentifiers or RRIDs) for software, lab tools etc. and it also provides options to create links between RRIDs and from communities. Another example of semantic networks, based on category theory, is ologs. Here each type is an object, representing a set of things, and each arrow is a morphism, representing a function. Commutative diagrams also are prescribed to constrain the semantics. In the social sciences people sometimes use the term semantic network to refer to co-occurrence networks. == Software tools == There are also elaborate types of semantic networks connected with corresponding sets of software tools used for
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DesktopTwo

Desktoptwo was a free Webtop (whose URL was desktoptwo.com and which is now a parked domain) developed by Sapotek (whose URL was sapotek.com, which also is now a parked domain). It's also been called a WebOS although Sapotek stated on its website that the term is premature and presumptuous. It mimics the look, feel and functionality of the desktop environment of an operating system. The software only reached beta stage. It had a Spanish version called Computadora.de. Desktoptwo was web-based and required Adobe Flash Player to operate. The web applications' found on Desktoptwo were built on PHP in the back end. Features included drag-and-drop functionality. Sapotek had liberated all the web applications found on Desktoptwo through Sapodesk on an AGPL license. Desktoptwo belonged to a category of services that intended to turn the Web into a full-fledged platform by using web services as a foundation along with presentation technologies that replicated the experience of desktop applications for users. In a "Cloud OS" the functionality of a server was granularized and abstracted as Web services that Web developers used to create composite applications similar to how desktop software developers use several APIs of the OS to create their applications. Sites like Facebook attempt to create a similar effect by exposing their APIs and allowing developers to create applications upon these. Some of the features found on Desktoptwo were: File sharing, Webmail, Blog creator, Instant messenger, Address book, Calendar, RSS Reader and Office productivity applications. Desktoptwo.com and the Sapotek website no longer operate.
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Lumpers and splitters

Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any academic discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example, schools of literature, biological taxa, and so on. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways. == Origin of the terms == The earliest known use of these terms was thought to be by Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1857: "It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers". But according to research done by the deputy director at NCSE, Glenn Branch, the credit is due to naturalist Edward Newman who wrote in 1845, "The time has arrived for discarding imaginary species, and the duty of doing this is as imperative as the admission of new ones when such are really discovered. The talents described under the respective names of 'hair-splitting' and 'lumping' are unquestionably yielding their power to the mightier power of Truth." They were then introduced more widely by George G. Simpson in his 1945 work The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals. As he put it: splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera ... and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. ... Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat. A later use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper "On lumpers and splitters ..." by the medical geneticist Victor McKusick. Reference to lumpers and splitters in the humanities appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement. It followed from Hexter's detailed review of Hill's book Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, in which Hill developed Max Weber's argument that the rise of capitalism was facilitated by Calvinist Puritanism. Hexter objected to Hill's "mining" of sources to find evidence that supported his theories. Hexter argued that Hill plucked quotations from sources in a way that distorted their meaning. Hexter explained this as a mental habit that he called "lumping". According to him, "lumpers" rejected differences and chose to emphasise similarities. Any evidence that did not fit their arguments was ignored as aberrant. Splitters, by contrast, emphasised differences, and resisted simple schemes. While lumpers consistently tried to create coherent patterns, splitters preferred incoherent complexity. == Usage in various fields == === Biology === The categorisation and naming of a particular species should be regarded as a hypothesis about the evolutionary relationships and distinguishability of that group of organisms. As further information comes to hand, the hypothesis may be confirmed or refuted. Sometimes, especially in the past when communication was more difficult, taxonomists working in isolation have given two distinct names to individual organisms later identified as the same species. When two named species are agreed to be of the same species, the older species name is almost always retained dropping the newer species name honouring a convention known as "priority of nomenclature". This form of lumping is technically called synonymisation. Dividing a taxon into multiple, often new, taxa is called splitting. Taxonomists are often referred to as "lumpers" or "splitters" by their colleagues, depending on their personal approach to recognizing differences or commonalities between organisms. For example, the number of genera used in Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group I (PPG I) has proved controversial. PPG I uses 18 lycophyte and 319 fern genera. The earlier system put forward by Smith et al. (2006) had suggested a range of 274 to 312 genera for ferns alone. By contrast, the system of Christenhusz & Chase (2014) used 5 lycophyte and about 212 fern genera. The number of fern genera was further reduced to 207 in a subsequent publication. Defending PPG I, Schuettpelz et al. (2018) argue that the larger number of genera is a result of "the gradual accumulation of new collections and new data" and hence "a greater appreciation of fern diversity and ... an improved ability to distinguish taxa". They also argue that the number of species per genus in the PPG I system is already higher than in other groups of organisms (about 33 species per genus for ferns as opposed to about 22 species per genus for angiosperms) and that reducing the number of genera as Christenhusz and Chase propose yields the excessive number of about 50 species per genus for ferns. In response, Christenhusz and Chase (2018) argue that the excessive splitting of genera destabilises the usage of names and will lead to greater instability in future, and that the highly split genera have few if any characters that can be used to recognise them, making identification difficult, even to generic level. They further argue that comparing numbers of species per genus in different groups is "fundamentally meaningless". === History === In history, lumpers are those who tend to create broad definitions that cover large periods of time and many disciplines, whereas splitters want to assign names to tight groups of inter-relationships. Lumping tends to create a more and more unwieldy definition, with members having less and less mutually in common. This can lead to definitions which are little more than conventionalities, or groups which join fundamentally different examples. Splitting often leads to "distinctions without difference", ornate and fussy categories, and failure to see underlying similarities. For example, in the arts, "Romantic" can refer specifically to a period of German poetry roughly from 1780 to 1810, but would exclude the later work of Goethe, among other writers. In music it can mean every composer from Hummel through Rachmaninoff, plus many that came after. === Software modelling === Software engineering often proceeds by building models (sometimes known as model-driven architecture). A lumper is keen to generalise, and produces models with a small number of broadly defined objects. A splitter is reluctant to generalise, and produces models with a large number of narrowly defined objects. Conversion between the two styles is not necessarily symmetrical. For example, if error messages in two narrowly defined classes behave in the same way, the classes can be easily combined. But if some messages in a broad class behave differently, every object in the class must be examined before the class can be split. This illustrates the principle that "splits can be lumped more easily than lumps can be split". === Language classification === There is no agreement among historical linguists about what amount of evidence is needed for two languages to be safely classified in the same language family. For this reason, many proposed language families have had lumper–splitter controversies, including Altaic, Pama–Nyungan, Nilo-Saharan, and most of the larger families of the Americas. At a completely different level, the splitting of a mutually intelligible dialect continuum into different languages, or lumping them into one, is also an issue that continually comes up, though the consensus in contemporary linguistics is that there is no completely objective way to settle the question. Splitters regard the comparative method (meaning not comparison in general, but only reconstruction of a common ancestor or protolanguage) as the only valid proof of kinship, and consider genetic relatedness to be the question of interest. American linguists of recent decades tend to be splitters. Lumpers are more willing to admit techniques like mass lexical comparison or lexicostatistics, and mass typological comparison, and to tolerate the uncertainty of whether relationships found by these methods are the result of linguistic divergence (descent from common ancestor) or language convergence (borrowing). Much long-range comparison work has been from Russian linguists belonging to the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics, most notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Sergei Starostin. In the United States, Greenberg and Ruhlen's work has been met with little acceptance from linguists. Earlier American linguists like Morris Swadesh and Edward Sapir also pursued large-scale classifications like Sapir's 1929 scheme for the Americas, accompanied by controversy similar to that today. === Religious studies === Paul F. Bradshaw suggests that the same principles of lumping and splitting apply to the study of early Christian liturgy. Lumpers, who tend to predominate in this field, try to find a single line of successive texts from the apostolic age to the
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Yann LeCun

Yann André Le Cun ( lə-KUN; French: [ləkœ̃]; usually spelled LeCun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, robotics and image compression. He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before co-founding Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in December 2025. He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology, alongside Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner. He co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou. In 2018, LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their work on deep learning. LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton, and occasionally Jürgen Schmidhuber, are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning". == Early life and education == Yann André Le Cun was born on 8 July 1960 at Soisy-sous-Montmorency, in the suburbs of Paris. His surname, Le Cun, derives from the old Breton form Le Cunff and originates from the region of Guingamp in northern Brittany. Yann is the Breton form of Jean, the French form of John. He received a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the ESIEE Paris in 1983 and a PhD in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne University) in 1987, during which he proposed an early form of backpropagation, an algorithm crucial for enabling neural networks to learn. Before joining AT&T, LeCun was a postdoctoral researcher for a year, starting in 1987, supervised by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. LeCun has three sons, and his brother is employed by Google. He has American citizenship. == Career and research == LeCun's career has been spent primarily at Bell Labs, New York University and Meta Platforms, Inc. === Bell Labs === In 1988, LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States, headed by Lawrence D. Jackel, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as a biologically inspired model of image recognition called convolutional neural networks (LeNet), the "Optimal Brain Damage" regularization methods, and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar to conditional random field), which he applied to handwriting recognition and Optical character recognition (OCR). The bank check recognition system that he helped develop was widely deployed by NCR and other companies. In 1996, he joined AT&T Labs-Research as head of the Image Processing Research Department, which was part of Lawrence Rabiner's Speech and Image Processing Research Lab, and worked primarily on the DjVu image compression technology, a format designed for efficient distribution of scanned documents, and used by the Internet Archive to provide access to digitized texts. His collaborators at AT&T include Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik. === New York University === After a brief tenure as a fellow of NEC Research Institute, LeCun joined New York University in 2003, where he is Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Neural Science. At NYU, he has worked primarily on energy-based models for supervised and unsupervised learning, feature learning for object recognition in computer vision, and mobile robotics. In 2012, he became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. On 9 December 2013, LeCun became the first director of Meta AI Research in New York City and in early 2014 stepped down from the NYU–CDS directorship. In 2013, he and Yoshua Bengio co-founded the International Conference on Learning Representations, which adopted a post-publication open review process he previously advocated on his website. He was the chair and organiser of the "Learning Workshop" held every year between 1986 and 2012 in Snowbird, Utah. He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. He is the co-director of the Learning in Machines and Brain research program (formerly Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception) of CIFAR. In 2016, he was the visiting professor of computer science on the Chaire Annuelle Informatique et Sciences Numériques at Collège de France in Paris, where he presented the leçon inaugurale (inaugural lecture). In 2023, he was named as the inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor in Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute. LeCun is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others. === Meta Platforms === LeCun joined Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2013 as chief AI scientist and led the company's AI research laboratory, FAIR. === AMI Labs === On 19 November 2025, LeCun confirmed that he would be leaving Meta after ten years to found his own company focused on world-model architectures and human-like artificial intelligence he calls superintelligence. The company he founded, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (or AMI Labs), is run by CEO Alex LeBrun, with LeCun serving as Executive Chair. This venture is focused on building AI "world models": systems that learn to understand the physical world's structure and dynamics rather than just predict text like large language models. In March 2026, AMI announced it had raised $1.03 billion in funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. The funding round was co-led by investors including Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions. In January 2026, LeCun became founding chair of the Technical Research Board of Logical Intelligence, an AI company developing energy-based (EBM) reasoning systems. == Honours and awards == LeCun is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the French Académie des Sciences. He has received honorary doctorates from Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City in 2016, from EPFL in 2018, from Université Côte d'Azur in 2021, from Università di Siena in 2023, and from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023. In 2014, he received the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and in 2015, the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award. In 2018, LeCun was awarded the IRI Medal, established by the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), and the Harold Pender Award, given by the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In March 2019, LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award, sharing it with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research", along with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis. In 2023, the President of France made him a Chevalier (Knight) of the French Legion of Honour. During the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2024 in Davos, he received the Global Swiss AI Award 2023. The same year, he received the grand prize of the VinFuture Prize alongside Yoshua Bengio, Jensen Huang, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li for their groundbreaking contributions to neural networks and deep learning algorithms. In 2025 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering jointly with Yoshua Bengio, Bill Dally, Geoffrey E. Hinton, John Hopfield, Jensen Huang and Fei-Fei Li.
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Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence

The Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI) is a Dutch national network focused on joint technology development between academia, industry and government in the area of artificial intelligence (AI). The initiative was launched in April 2018 and is based at Amsterdam Science Park. As of 2024, the director of the ICAI is Maarten de Rijke. In November 2018, ICAI announced its contribution to AINED, the first iteration of the Dutch National AI Strategy. In January 2023, Maastricht University announced the ROBUST program, led by the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI) and supported by the University of Amsterdam and others. This initiative focuses on advancing research in trustworthy AI technology across various sectors, notably healthcare and energy, in the Netherlands. The program's plan includes the creation of 17 new labs and the appointment of PhD candidates, backed by a €25 million funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). == Labs == The ICAI network is linked to several collaborative labs: Thira Lab (Imaging): Thirona, Delft Imaging Systems and Radboud UMC, founded March 2019 AIMLab (AI for Medical Imaging): Uva and Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence from the United Arab Emirates, founded March 2019 AFL (AI for Fintech): ING and Delft University of Technology, founded March 2019 Police Lab AI: Dutch National Police, founded January 2019 Elsevier AI Lab: Uva and Elsevier, founded October 2018 AIRLab Delft (AI for Retail Robotics): TU Delft Robotics and AholdDelhaize, founded November 2018 Quva Lab (Deep Vision): Uva and Qualcomm, founded 2016 (prior to ICAI) AIRLab Amsterdam (AI for Retail): Uva and AholdDelhaize, founded April 2018 DeltaLab (Deep Learning Technologies Amsterdam): Uva and Bosch, founded April 2017 (prior to ICAI) AI4SE (AI for Software Engineering Lab) Delft University of Technology and JetBrains, founded October 2023 Atlas Lab: Uva and TomTom (TOM2)
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Artificial intelligence controversies

The controversies surrounding artificial intelligence encompass a broad range of public, academic, and political debates regarding the societal effects of artificial intelligence (AI). These debates intensified particularly in the late 2010s and 2020s, coinciding with an accelerated period of development known as the AI boom. While advocates emphasize the technology's potential to solve complex problems and enhance human quality of life, detractors highlight a wide array of dangers and challenges. These include concerns over ethics, plagiarism and theft, fraud, safety and alignment, environmental impacts, technological unemployment, and the spread of misinformation. It also covers severe future or theoretical challenges, such as the emergence of artificial superintelligence and existential risks. == 2016 == === Microsoft Tay chatbot (2016) === On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released Tay, a chatbot designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl and learn from interactions with Twitter users. Soon after its launch, Tay began posting racist, sexist, and otherwise inflammatory tweets after Twitter users deliberately taught it offensive phrases and exploited its "repeat after me" capability. Examples of controversial outputs included Holocaust denial and calls for genocide using racial slurs. Within 16 hours of its release, Microsoft suspended the Twitter account, deleted the offensive tweets, and stated that Tay had suffered from a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" that "exploited a vulnerability." Tay was briefly and accidentally re-released on March 30 during testing, after which it was permanently shut down. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later stated that Tay "has had a great influence on how Microsoft is approaching AI" and taught the company the importance of taking accountability. == 2022 == === Voiceverse NFT plagiarism scandal (2022) === On January 14, 2022, voice actor Troy Baker announced a partnership with Voiceverse, a blockchain-based company that marketed proprietary AI voice cloning technology as non-fungible tokens (NFT), triggering immediate backlash over environmental concerns, fears that AI could displace human voice actors, and concerns about fraud. Later that same day, the pseudonymous creator of 15.ai—a free, non-commercial AI voice synthesis research project—revealed through server logs that Voiceverse had used 15.ai to generate voice samples, pitch-shifted them to make them unrecognizable, and falsely marketed them as their own proprietary technology before selling them as NFTs; the developer of 15.ai had previously stated that they had no interest in incorporating NFTs into their work. Voiceverse confessed within an hour and stated that their marketing team had used 15.ai without attribution while rushing to create a demo. News publications and AI watchdog groups universally characterized the incident as theft stemming from generative artificial intelligence. === Théâtre D'opéra Spatial (2022) === On August 29, 2022, Jason Michael Allen won first place in the "emerging artist" (non-professional) division of the "Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography" category of the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition with Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, a digital artwork created using the AI image generator Midjourney, Adobe Photoshop, and AI upscaling tools, becoming one of the first images made using generative AI to win such a prize. Allen disclosed his use of Midjourney when submitting, though the judges did not know it was an AI tool but stated they would have awarded him first place regardless. While there was little contention about the image at the fair, reactions to the win on social media were negative. On September 5, 2023, the United States Copyright Office ruled that the work was not eligible for copyright protection as the human creative input was de minimis and that copyright rules "exclude works produced by non-humans." == 2023 == === Statements on AI risk (2023) === On March 22, 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling on "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", citing risks such as AI-generated propaganda, extreme automation of jobs, human obsolescence, and a society-wide loss of control. The letter, published a week after the release of OpenAI's GPT-4, asserted that current large language models were "becoming human-competitive at general tasks". It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari. The letter was criticized for diverting attention from more immediate societal risks such as algorithmic biases, with Timnit Gebru and others arguing that it amplified "some futuristic, dystopian sci-fi scenario" instead of current problems with AI. On May 30, 2023, the Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement signed by hundreds of artificial intelligence experts and other notable figures: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Signatories included Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, as well as the scientific and executive leaders of several major AI companies, including Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Bill Gates. The statement prompted responses from political leaders, including UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who retweeted it with a statement that the UK government would look carefully into it, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who commented that AI "is one of the most powerful technologies that we see currently in our time." Skeptics, including from Human Rights Watch, argued that scientists should focus on known risks of AI instead of speculative future risks. === Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI (2023) === On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board of directors ousted co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman, stating that "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." The removal was precipitated by employee concerns about his handling of artificial intelligence safety and allegations of abusive behavior. Altman was reinstated on November 22 after pressure from employees and investors, including a letter signed by 745 of OpenAI's 770 employees threatening mass resignations if the board did not resign. The removal and subsequent reinstatement caused widespread reactions, including Microsoft's stock falling nearly three percent following the initial announcement and then rising over two percent to an all-time high after Altman was hired to lead a Microsoft AI research team before his reinstatement. The incident also prompted investigations from the Competition and Markets Authority and the Federal Trade Commission into Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI. == 2024 == === Taylor Swift deepfake pornography controversy (2024) === In late January 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake images of Taylor Swift were proliferated on X, with one post reported to have been seen over 47 million times before its removal. Disinformation research firm Graphika traced the images back to 4chan, while members of a Telegram group had discussed ways to circumvent censorship safeguards of AI image generators to create pornographic images of celebrities. The images prompted responses from anti-sexual assault advocacy groups, US politicians, and Swifties. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called the incident "alarming and terrible." X briefly blocked searches of Swift's name on January 27, 2024, and Microsoft enhanced its text-to-image model safeguards to prevent future abuse. On January 30, US senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar, and Josh Hawley introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow victims to sue individuals who produced or possessed "digital forgeries" with intent to distribute, or those who received the material knowing it was made without consent. === Google Gemini image generation controversy (2024) === In February 2024, social media users reported that Google's Gemini chatbot was generating images that featured people of color and women in historically inaccurate contexts—such as Vikings, Nazi soldiers, and the Founding Fathers—and refusing prompts to generate images of white people. The images were derided on social media, including by conservatives who cited them as evidence of Google's "wokeness", and criticized by Elon Musk, who denounced Google's products as biased and racist. In response, Google paused Gemini's ability to generate images of people. Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan released a statement explaining that Gemini had "overcompensate[d]" in its efforts to strive for diversity and acknowledging that the images were "embarrassing and wrong". Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the incident offensive and unacceptable in an internal memo, promising struc
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Semantic parameterization

Semantic parameterization is a conceptual modeling process for expressing natural language descriptions of a domain in first-order predicate logic. The process yields a formalization of natural language sentences in Description Logic to answer the who, what and where questions in the Inquiry-Cycle Model (ICM) developed by Colin Potts and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The parameterization process complements the Knowledge Acquisition and autOmated Specification (KAOS) method, which formalizes answers to the when, why and how ICM questions in Temporal Logic, to complete the ICM formalization. The artifacts used in the parameterization process include a dictionary that aligns the domain lexicon with unique concepts, distinguishing between synonyms and polysemes, and several natural language patterns that aid in mapping common domain descriptions to formal specifications. == Relationship to other theories == Semantic Parameterization defines a meta-model consisting of eight roles that are domain-independent and reusable. Seven of these roles correspond to Jeffrey Gruber's thematic relations and case roles in Charles Fillmore's case grammar: The Inquiry-Cycle Model (ICM) was introduced to drive elicitation between engineers and stakeholders in requirements engineering. The ICM consists of who, what, where, why, how and when questions. All but the when questions, which require a Temporal Logic to represent such phenomena, have been aligned with the meta-model in semantic parameterization using Description Logic (DL). == Introduction with Example == The semantic parameterization process is based on Description Logic, wherein the TBox is composed of words in a dictionary, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and the ABox is partitioned into two sets of assertions: 1) those assertions that come from words in the natural language statement, called the grounding, and 2) those assertions that are inferred by the (human) modeler, called the meta-model. Consider the following unstructured natural language statement (UNLS) (see Breaux et al. for an extended discussion): UNLS1.0 The customer1,1 must not share2,2 the access-code3,3 of the customer1,1 with someone4,4 who is not the provider5,4. The modeler first identifies intensional and extensional polysemes and synonyms, denoted by the subscripts: the first subscript uniquely refers to the intensional index, i.e., the same first index in two or more words refer to the same concept in the TBox; the second subscript uniquely refers to the extensional index, i.e., two same second index in two or more words refer to the same individual in the ABox. This indexing step aligns words in the statement and concepts in the dictionary. Next, the modeler identifies concepts from the dictionary to compose the meta-model. The following table illustrates the complete DL expression that results from applying semantic parameterization.
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Mycin

MYCIN was an early backward chaining expert system that used black box to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient's body weight — the name derived from the antibiotics themselves, as many antibiotics have the suffix "-mycin". The Mycin system was also used for the diagnosis of blood clotting diseases. MYCIN was developed over five or six years in the early 1970s at Stanford University. It was written in Lisp as the doctoral dissertation of Edward Shortliffe under the direction of Bruce G. Buchanan, Stanley N. Cohen and others. MYCIN emerged from the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project. MYCIN demonstrated the potential for expert systems in building high-performance medical reasoning programs. MYCIN is often viewed as a pioneer in the field of expert systems, even being referred to as the "grandaddy of them all-the one that launched the field" by Dr. Allen Newell. MYCIN led to the EMYCIN expert system shell ("essential MYCIN") for acquiring knowledge, reasoning with it, and explaining the results, without the specific medical knowledge. It can be described as "EMYCIN = Prolog + uncertainty + caching + questions + explanations + contexts - variables". An introduction is in Chapter 16 of Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP). == Method == MYCIN operated using a fairly simple inference engine and a knowledge base of ~600 rules by obtaining individual inferential facts identified by experts and encoding such facts as individual production rules. No other AI program at the time contained as much domain-specific knowledge clearly separated from its inference procedures as MYCIN. It would query the physician running the program via a long series of simple yes/no or textual questions. At the end, it provided a list of possible culprit bacteria ranked from high to low based on the probability of each diagnosis, its confidence in each diagnosis' probability, the reasoning behind each diagnosis (that is, MYCIN would also list the questions and rules which led it to rank a diagnosis a particular way), and its recommended course of drug treatment. MYCIN could additionally respond to queries by physicians related to why it asked the user a certain question, how it arrived at a conclusion, and why it did not consider certain factors. The developers performed studies showing that MYCIN's performance was minimally affected by perturbations in the uncertainty metrics associated with individual rules, suggesting that the power in the system was related more to its knowledge representation and reasoning scheme than to the details of its numerical uncertainty model. Some observers felt that it should have been possible to use classical Bayesian statistics. MYCIN's developers argued that this would require either unrealistic assumptions of probabilistic independence, or require the experts to provide estimates for an unfeasibly large number of conditional probabilities. Subsequent studies later showed that the certainty factor model could indeed be interpreted in a probabilistic sense, and highlighted problems with the implied assumptions of such a model. However the modular structure of the system would prove very successful, leading to the development of graphical models such as Bayesian networks. === Context === A context in MYCIN determines what types of objects can be reasoned about. They are similar to variables in Prolog, or environment variables in operating systems. === Evidence combination === In MYCIN it was possible that two or more rules might draw conclusions about a parameter with different weights of evidence. For example, one rule may conclude that the organism in question is E. Coli with a certainty of 0.8 whilst another concludes that it is E. Coli with a certainty of 0.5 or even −0.8. In the event the certainty is less than zero the evidence is actually against the hypothesis. In order to calculate the certainty factor MYCIN combined these weights using the formula below to yield a single certainty factor: C F ( x , y ) = { X + Y − X Y if X , Y > 0 X + Y + X Y if X , Y < 0 X + Y 1 − min ( | X | , | Y | ) otherwise {\displaystyle CF(x,y)={\begin{cases}X+Y-XY&{\text{if }}X,Y>0\\X+Y+XY&{\text{if }}X,Y<0\\{\frac {X+Y}{1-\min(|X|,|Y|)}}&{\text{otherwise}}\end{cases}}} Where X and Y are the certainty factors. This formula can be applied more than once if more than two rules draw conclusions about the same parameter. It is commutative, so it does not matter in which order the weights were combined. The combination formula was designed to have the following desirable properties: −1 can be interpreted as "false", +1 as "true", and 0 as "uncertain". Combining unknown with anything leaves it unchanged. Combining true with anything (except false) gives true. Similarly for false. Combining true and false is a division-by-zero error. Combining +x and -x gives unknown. Combining two positives (except true) gives a larger positive. Similarly for negatives. Combining a positive and a negative gives something in between. === Examples === The following examples come from Chapter 16 of PAIP, which contains an implementation in Common Lisp of a modified and simplified version of MYCIN for pedagogical purposes. A rule, and an English paraphrase generated by the system: == Results == An evaluation of MYCIN was conducted at the Stanford Medical School. The first phase of the evaluation consisted of 10 test cases of diverse origin, chosen by a physician who was not acquainted with MYCIN's methods or knowledge base. These cases were presented to 7 physicians and 1 senior medical student. 10 prescriptions were compiled for each of the cases, 1 recommended by MYCIN, 1 prescribed by the treating physician at the county hospital, and 8 by the aforementioned individuals. The second phase of the evaluation consisted of eight infectious disease specialists being provided the clinical summary and set of 10 prescriptions for each of the 10 cases and tasked to provide their own recommendations for each case and assess the 10 prescriptions. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65%, which was comparable to the 42.5% to 62.5% rating of five faculty members. This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about therapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment. == Practical use == MYCIN was never actually used in practice. This wasn't because of any weakness in its performance. Some observers raised ethical and legal issues related to the use of computers in medicine, regarding the responsibility of the physicians in case the system gave wrong diagnosis. However, the greatest problem, and the reason that MYCIN was not used in routine practice, was the state of technologies for system integration, especially at the time it was developed. MYCIN was a stand-alone system that required a user to enter all relevant information about a patient by typing in responses to questions MYCIN posed. MYCIN ran on the DEC KI10 PDP-10, supporting a large time-shared system available over the early Internet (ARPANet), before personal computers were developed. MYCIN's greatest influence was accordingly its demonstration of the power of its representation and reasoning approach. Rule-based systems in many non-medical domains were developed in the years that followed MYCIN's introduction of the approach. In the 1980s, expert system "shells" were introduced (including one based on MYCIN, known as E-MYCIN (followed by Knowledge Engineering Environment - KEE)) and supported the development of expert systems in a wide variety of application areas. A difficulty that rose to prominence during the development of MYCIN and subsequent complex expert systems has been the extraction of the necessary knowledge for the inference engine to use from the human expert in the relevant fields into the rule base (the so-called "knowledge acquisition bottleneck").
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International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools

The International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools was founded in 1992 and is published by World Scientific. It covers research on artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including new architectures, languages and algorithms. Topics include AI in Bioinformatics, Cognitive Informatics, Knowledge-Based/Expert Systems and Object-Oriented Programming for AI. == Abstracting and indexing == The journal is abstracted and indexed in: Inspec Science Citation Index Expanded ISI Alerting Services CompuMath Citation Index Current Contents/Engineering, Computing, and Technology
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Netomi

Netomi, formerly msg.ai, is an American artificial intelligence company and developer of chatbot technologies. == History == msg.ai was founded in May 2015 by Puneet Mehta. msg.ai worked with Sony Pictures to launch a chat bot on Facebook Messenger for a $100M film, Goosebumps and subsequently joined Y Combinator as a member of the Winter 2016 class. Later that year and in 2017, msg.ai completed two rounds of seed funding, led by Y Combinator and Index Ventures. In 2018, the company changed its name to Netomi. In 2019, the company raised $14.7 million in a Series A funding round also led by Index Ventures. In 2021, the company raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by WndrCo LLC.
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Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 1986) is a computer scientist who specializes in machine learning. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning, including sequence-to-sequence learning, reasoning models, GPT models, and contributions to CLIP, DALL-E, and AlphaGo. With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. One of the most highly cited computer scientists in history, he has won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award for his lasting impact on AI research three times in a row (2022–2024) and received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science in 2026. Sutskever co-founded and was chief scientist at OpenAI, where he oversaw the research breakthroughs that led to large language models and to the launch of ChatGPT. He also led the research that led to reasoning models such as o1. In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board that ousted Sam Altman as its CEO; Altman was reinstated a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence Inc., alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. Within a year, the company was valued at more than $30 billion. == Early life and education == Sutskever was born in 1986 into a Jewish family in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union). At the age of 5, he immigrated to Israel with his family and grew up in Jerusalem. Sutskever proved to be a good student in school, and in eighth grade started taking classes at the Open University of Israel. At 16, he moved with his family to Canada, where he attended high school for a month before being admitted to the University of Toronto in Ontario as a third-year undergraduate student. At the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005, a master's degree in computer science in 2007, and a PhD in computer science in 2013. His doctoral advisor was Geoffrey Hinton. In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. == Career and research == In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to the University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain. At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm, and worked on TensorFlow. He is also one of the AlphaGo paper's many co-authors. At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI. In 2022, Sutskever tweeted, "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious", which triggered debates about AI consciousness. He is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT, and later in leading the research that led to reasoning models. He is credited with establishing OpenAI’s scaling ethos. In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which was trying to solve the alignment of superintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade. Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controlled OpenAI. In November 2023, the board fired Sam Altman, saying that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board". He authored a 52-page memo that relied heavily on information from Mira Murati, accusing Altman of lying, manipulating executives, and fostering internal division. Sutskever submitted the memo to the board after months of tension and dissatisfaction with Altman's leadership style, and ultimately joined the board in voting for Altman's termination. In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty", but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster. Altman's firing and OpenAI's co-founder Greg Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI. After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board and was absent from OpenAI's office. Some sources suggested he was leading the team remotely, while others said he no longer had access to the team's work. In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him. His decision followed a turbulent period at OpenAI marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development and alignment protocols. Jan Leike, the other leader of the superalignment project, announced his departure hours later, citing an erosion of safety and trust in OpenAI's leadership. In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. In contrast to OpenAI, which releases revenue-generating products, Sutskever said the new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then". In September 2024, the company announced that it had raised $1 billion from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. In March 2025, Safe Superintelligence Inc. raised $2 billion more and reportedly reached a $32 billion valuation, notably due to Sutskever's reputation. In June 2025, SSI rejected an offer from Meta Platforms to buy the company. Sutskever became CEO of SSI shortly thereafter, after co-founder and CEO Gross left for Meta. In an October 2024 interview after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton expressed support for Sutskever's decision to fire Altman, emphasizing concerns about AI safety. During the Musk v. Altman trial in 2026, Sutskever confirmed he had a $7 billion stake in OpenAI. === Awards and honors === In 2015, Sutskever was named in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2018, he was the keynote speaker at Nvidia Ntech 2018 and AI Frontiers Conference 2018. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In 2023 and 2024, included in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in AI In 2022, 2023, and 2024, he won Neural Information Processing Systems’ Test of Time award, which recognizes papers that significantly shaped the AI field over at least ten years. In 2025, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Toronto In 2026, he received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science, presented for the first time in artificial intelligence.
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ICAD (software)

ICAD (Corporate history: ICAD, Inc., Concentra (name change at IPO in 1995), KTI (name change in 1998), Dassault Systèmes (purchase in 2001) () is a knowledge-based engineering (KBE) system that enables users to encode design knowledge using a semantic representation that can be evaluated for Parasolid output. ICAD has an open architecture that can utilize all the power and flexibility of the underlying language. KBE, as implemented via ICAD, received a lot of attention due to the remarkable results that appeared to take little effort. ICAD allowed one example of end-user computing that in a sense is unparalleled. Most ICAD developers were degreed engineers. Systems developed by ICAD users were non-trivial and consisted of highly complicated code. In the sense of end-user computing, ICAD was the first to allow the power of a domain tool to be in the hands of the user, at the same time being open to allow extensions as identified and defined by the domain expert or subject-matter expert (SME). A COE article looked at the resulting explosion of expectations (see AI winter), which were not sustainable. However, such a bubble burst does not diminish the existence of ability that would exist were expectations and use reasonable or properly managed. == History == The original implementation of ICAD was on a Lisp machine (Symbolics). Some of the principals involved with the development were Larry Rosenfeld, Avrum Belzer, Patrick M. O'Keefe, Philip Greenspun, and David F. Place. The time frame was 1984–85. ICAD started on special-purpose Symbolics Lisp hardware and was then ported to Unix when Common Lisp became portable to general-purpose workstations. The original domain for ICAD was mechanical design with many application successes. However, ICAD has found use in other domains, such as electrical design, shape modeling, etc. An example project could be wind tunnel design or the development of a support tool for aircraft multidisciplinary design. Further examples can be found in the presentations at the annual IIUG (International ICAD Users Group) that have been published in the KTI Vault (1999 through 2002). Boeing and Airbus used ICAD extensively to develop various components in the 1990s and early 21st century. As of 2003, ICAD was featured strongly in several areas as evidenced by the Vision & Strategy Product Vision and Strategy presentation. After 2003, ICAD use diminished. At the end of 2001, the KTI Company faced financial difficulties and laid off most of its best staff. They were eventually bought out by Dassault who effectively scuppered the ICAD product. See IIUG at COE, 2003 (first meeting due to Dassault by KTI) The ICAD system was very expensive, relatively, and was in the price range of high-end systems. Market dynamics couldn't support this as there may not have been sufficient differentiating factors between ICAD and the lower-end systems (or the promises from Dassault). KTI was absorbed by Dassault Systèmes and ICAD is no longer considered the go-forward tool for knowledge-based engineering (KBE) applications by that company. Dassault Systèmes is promoting a suite of tools oriented around version 5 of their popular CATIA CAD application, with Knowledgeware the replacement for ICAD. As of 2005, things were still a bit unclear. ICAD 8.3 was delivered. The recent COE Aerospace Conference had a discussion about the futures of KBE. One issue involves the stacking of 'meta' issues within a computer model. How this is resolved, whether by more icons or the availability of an external language, remains to be seen. The Genworks GDL product (including kernel technology from the Gendl Project) is the nearest functional equivalent to ICAD currently available. == Particulars == ICAD provided a declarative language (IDL) using New Flavors (never converted to Common Lisp Object System (CLOS)) that supported a mechanism for relating parts (defpart) via a hierarchical set of relationships. Technically, the ICAD Defpart was a Lisp macro; the ICAD defpart list was a set of generic classes that can be instantiated with specific properties depending upon what was represented. This defpart list was extendible via composited parts that represented domain entities. Along with the part-subpart relations, ICAD supported generic relations via the object modeling abilities of Lisp. Example applications of ICAD range from a small collection of defparts that represents a part or component to a larger collection that represents an assembly. In terms of power, an ICAD system, when fully specified, can generate thousands of instances of parts on a major assembly design. One example of an application driving thousands of instances of parts is that of an aircraft wing – where fastener type and placement may number in the thousands, each instance requiring evaluation of several factors driving the design parameters. == Futures (KBE, etc.) == One role for ICAD may be serving as the defining prototype for KBE which would require that we know more about what occurred the past 15 years (much information is tied up behind corporate firewalls and under proprietary walls). With the rise of functional programming languages (an example is Haskell) in the markets, perhaps some of the power attributable to Lisp may be replicated.
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