AI Avatar Arbitrage

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  Artificial brain

  An artificial brain (or artificial mind) is software and hardware with cognitive abilities similar to those of the animal or human brain. Research investigating "artificial brains" and brain emulation plays three important roles in science: An ongoing attempt by neuroscientists to understand how the human brain works, known as cognitive neuroscience. A thought experiment in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, demonstrating that it is possible, at least in theory, to create a machine that has all the capabilities of a human being. A long-term project to create machines exhibiting behavior comparable to those of animals with complex central nervous system such as mammals and most particularly humans. The ultimate goal of creating a machine exhibiting human-like behavior or intelligence is sometimes called strong AI. An example of the first objective is the project reported by Aston University in Birmingham, England where researchers are using biological cells to create "neurospheres" (small clusters of neurons) in order to develop new treatments for diseases including Alzheimer's, motor neurone and Parkinson's disease. The second objective is a reply to arguments such as John Searle's Chinese room argument, Hubert Dreyfus's critique of AI or Roger Penrose's argument in The Emperor's New Mind. These critics argued that there are aspects of human consciousness or expertise that can not be simulated by machines. One reply to their arguments is that the biological processes inside the brain can be simulated to any degree of accuracy. This reply was made as early as 1950, by Alan Turing in his classic paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". The third objective is generally called artificial general intelligence by researchers. However, Ray Kurzweil prefers the term "strong AI". In his book The Singularity is Near, he focuses on whole brain emulation using conventional computing machines as an approach to implementing artificial brains, and claims (on grounds of computer power continuing an exponential growth trend) that this could be done by 2025. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project (which is attempting brain emulation), made a similar claim (2020) at the Oxford TED conference in 2009. == Approaches to brain simulation == W. Ross Ashby's pioneering work in cybernetics provided an early mathematical framework for understanding adaptive brain-like systems. In his 1952 book Design for a Brain, Ashby proposed that the brain could be modeled as an ultrastable system that maintains equilibrium through continuous adaptation to environmental perturbations. His approach used differential equations and state-space models to describe how neural systems could exhibit purposeful behavior through feedback mechanisms. Ashby's homeostat, a physical machine built in 1948, demonstrated these principles through an electromechanical device with four interconnected units that automatically adjusted their parameters to maintain stability when disturbed. The homeostat represented one of the first attempts to build an artificial system exhibiting brain-like adaptive behavior, influencing subsequent work in adaptive systems, neural networks, and artificial intelligence. Although direct human brain emulation using artificial neural networks on a high-performance computing engine is a commonly discussed approach, there are other approaches. An alternative artificial brain implementation could be based on Holographic Neural Technology (HNeT) non linear phase coherence/decoherence principles. The analogy has been made to quantum processes through the core synaptic algorithm which has strong similarities to the quantum mechanical wave equation. EvBrain is a form of evolutionary software that can evolve "brainlike" neural networks, such as the network immediately behind the retina. In November 2008, IBM received a US$4.9 million grant from the Pentagon for research into creating intelligent computers. The Blue Brain project is being conducted with the assistance of IBM in Lausanne. The project is based on the premise that it is possible to artificially link the neurons "in the computer" by placing thirty million synapses in their proper three-dimensional position. Some proponents of strong AI speculated in 2009 that computers in connection with Blue Brain and Soul Catcher may exceed human intellectual capacity by around 2015, and that it is likely that we will be able to download the human brain at some time around 2050. While Blue Brain is able to represent complex neural connections on the large scale, the project does not achieve the link between brain activity and behaviors executed by the brain. In 2012, project Spaun (Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network) attempted to model multiple parts of the human brain through large-scale representations of neural connections that generate complex behaviors in addition to mapping. Spaun's design recreates elements of human brain anatomy. The model, consisting of approximately 2.5 million neurons, includes features of the visual and motor cortices, GABAergic and dopaminergic connections, the ventral tegmental area (VTA), substantia nigra, and others. The design allows for several functions in response to eight tasks, using visual inputs of typed or handwritten characters and outputs carried out by a mechanical arm. Spaun's functions include copying a drawing, recognizing images, and counting. There are good reasons to believe that, regardless of implementation strategy, the predictions of realising artificial brains in the near future are optimistic. In particular brains (including the human brain) and cognition are not currently well understood, and the scale of computation required is unknown. Another near term limitation is that all current approaches for brain simulation require orders of magnitude larger power consumption compared with a human brain. The human brain consumes about 20 W of power, whereas current supercomputers may use as much as 1 MW—i.e., an order of 100,000 more. == Artificial brain thought experiment == Some critics of brain simulation believe that it is simpler to create general intelligent action directly without imitating nature. Some commentators have used the analogy that early attempts to construct flying machines modeled them after birds, but that modern aircraft do not look like birds.

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  TuVox

  TuVox is a company that produces VXML-based telephone speech-recognition applications to replace DTMF touch-tone systems for their clients. == History == TuVox was founded in 2001 by Steven S. Pollock and Ashok Khosla, formerly of Apple Computer Corporation and Claris Corporation. Since then, TuVox has grown to over 150 employees and has US offices in Cupertino, California and Boca Raton, Florida as well as international offices in London, Vancouver and Sydney. In 2005, TuVox acquired the customers and hosting facilities of Net-By-Tel. In 2007, the company raised $20m for its speech recognition, and phone menu software. On July 22, 2010, West Interactive — a subsidiary of West Corporation — announced its acquisition of TuVox. == Customers == TuVox clients include: 1-800-Flowers.com, AMC Entertainment, American Airlines, British Airways, M&T Bank, Canon Inc., Gateway, Inc., Motorola, Progress Energy Inc., Telecom New Zealand, Time, Inc., BECU, Virgin America and USAA.

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  Pulsar (social listening platform)

  Pulsar is a software platform for social media monitoring, audience intelligence and social listening that allows organizations to monitor and analyze online conversations across social media, news, and other digital sources. The platform combines social media listening, media monitoring, trend analysis, and audience segmentation to help users understand public discussions and audience behavior in real time. The platform is a social listening platform, which aggregates data from networks such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and forums) and applies artificial intelligence for text and sentiment analysis. Pulsar is offered as a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) tool and insights consultancy. It has been part of Pulsar Group (formerly Access Intelligence), a publicly listed group of communications software products, since 2019. As well as commercial uses, the platform has been used in peer-reviewed academic research analysing online discourse. The platform is listed on the UK government's G-Cloud 14 Digital Marketplace for the provision of social listening and audience intelligence services. == History == Pulsar originated in the early 2010s as a project within Face, a London-based innovation and market research consultancy. The platform's first product, Pulsar TRAC, launched in 2013 as a social media analytics tool. Pulsar TRAC was designed to measure the reach of conversations, mapping brand audiences, and tracking how content spreads through networks. The development was led by Dr Francesco D'Orazio, who created the Pulsar brand and led the development of the platform while serving as VP of Product and Innovation at Face. Face itself had been acquired by the Cello Group Plc (a UK-based advisory firm) in 2012, and Pulsar became part of Cello's portfolio of research and data tools. In January 2017, Cello Group made a significant investment to scale Pulsar and announced the merger of Face's qualitative research business into Pulsar, unifying both under the Pulsar brand for global expansion. In 2018, Pulsar opened an office in Los Angeles to better serve its growing U.S. client base in media, healthcare, and entertainment sectors and Francesco D'Orazio was appointed CEO. The company focused on developing new products amid a wave of consolidation in the social listening industry. In October 2019, Pulsar was acquired by Access Intelligence Plc (now Pulsar Group), an AIM-listed communications software company. The group, which also owns PR and media tools Isentia, Vuelio and ResponseSource, integrated Pulsar to their end-to-end marketing and communications insights offering. Pulsar established a new office in Sydney, Australia in 2022 as part of this global expansion, adding to its existing offices in London and Los Angeles. In 2023, Pulsar Group (then Access Intelligence) was recognised as one of Europe's fastest growing companies by the Financial Times. In May 2024, Access Intelligence PLC changed its name to Pulsar Group PLC. The company has since continued to develop its platform. In March 2025 it introduced new tool Narratives AI, described as a "search engine for public opinion" and the first of its kind for analyzing public narratives and their evolutions in both social media and the news. In October 2025, Pulsar launched Insight Agents, a set of AI agents embedded into the platform advertised to "proactively anticipate user needs or issues, carry out routine tasks, uncover anomalies in your datasets, and prompt responses at scale, 24/7." == Products == Pulsar's architecture integrates four main products into a single interface. The core product suite is often broken into three main components: Pulsar TRAC (for social listening and audience analysis), Pulsar TRENDS (for trend discovery and analysis), and Pulsar CORE (for owned-channel and web analytics). Pulsar's fourth product is Narratives AI. === Pulsar TRAC === Pulsar TRAC is a social listening and audience intelligence platform that allows users to configure searches that track public conversations and measure audience behaviour. Pulsar TRAC is focused on conversation insights and audience segmentations - the platform is reported to collect and analyse data from a wide range of sources, including major social networks, forums, news and review sites, and ecommerce platforms, with real-time visualisations and AI-supported analytics used to find patterns and communities of interest. Pulsar TRAC can be incorporated into workflows with other audience tools, such as an integration with Audiense that connects TRAC's conversation insights to external audience-segmentation datasets. === Pulsar CORE === Pulsar CORE centres on the analysis of owned-channel data, such as brand social media profiles, website interaction and other in-house digital assets, to generate audience and content insights. CORE can monitor published content, evaluate competitors, and extract demographic and behavioural segmentation from owned channels. === Narratives AI === Narratives AI is a tool within the Pulsar audience intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to detect, cluster and analyse narratives forming across social and news media. It was launched in March 2025 as a standalone search interface that processes real-time and historical data to find cultural trends, behaviours and beliefs. It uses clustering algorithms and visualisation to show how conversations form and spread online, and their relative importance within wider discourse. == Notable features == === Insight Agents === Pulsar's Insight Agents are AI-powered agents within the Pulsar platform designed to automate and augment common tasks in media, social, audience and narrative intelligence. Branded as TeamMates, these agents are grouped into four functional types: Sentinels for real-time monitoring, anomaly detection and alerting Oracles for forecasting and scenario planning Custodians for governance, compliance and policy enforcement Analysts for research, reporting and recommendations Each agent is trained on Pulsar's multi-source data and domain-specific workflows. In February 2026, Pulsar introduced 'Crisis Oracle,' an AI-driven system designed to quantify narrative momentum and predict reputational risk. == Academic research == Pulsar has been used as a data collection and analysis tool in peer-reviewed academic research across public health, infodemiology, veterinary science, and policy research. Published uses include a World Health Organization report on infodemic management, a Journal of Medical Internet Research study on headache and migraine discourse across Japan, Germany, and France, a Frontiers in Big Data study of Long COVID narratives, and Frontiers in Veterinary Science studies on canine chronic kidney disease and oral medication administration in dogs.

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  Speech synthesis

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

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  Actionstep

  Actionstep is a cloud-based legal practice management software for law firms and compliance-focused businesses. Actionstep is built to be a comprehensive practice management software with features for workflow automation as well as automatic document generation == History == Actionstep was created by Ted Jordan, CEO of Actionstep, in 2004. It was first used commercially in 2005 by a New Zealand construction franchise as well as a law firm. Actionstep soon expanded into central government and a wider range of small business users (mainly in New Zealand and Australia). After a few years the expanse of their legal client base prompted the company to add key legal specific features to the product with the aim of further expanding their legal market. Through Actionstep's tenure as a practice management software they have gradually expanded from their headquarters in New Zealand and offices located in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. In October 2020, private equity firm Serent Capital Partners purchased 84.25% stake in Actionstep. In April 2022, the company announced unlimited annual leave to its staff == Product == The premise of Actionstep is that it saves companies from having to purchase software tailored to their work flow and instead allows companies to modify the program without additional coding.{{Citation needed}} The founder and CEO Ted Jordan used cloud technology to allow the software to be continuously updated without the need to purchase or redesign new software. This theoretically allows businesses to remain current all the time and cut external I.T. costs.{{Citation needed}} Actionstep also integrates with software from other companies, such as Xero accounting, Microsoft Office & Office 365, Gmail, Google Drive, Dropbox, NetDocuments, QuickBooks, LawPay, BundleDocs, Box, HotDocs, Infotrack, GlobalX, PEXA, JOSEF and Zapier. Actionstep contains workflow automation features aimed at increasing office efficiency. These automated processes include automatic task assignment, information collection, document generation & automation, cataloguing, and matter generation. == Awards == Actionstep was named First International Best of SaaS Showplace Award Winner in 2009. Actionstep has also been a finalist in the ComputerWorld Excellence Awards (2007), and the Vero Excellence in Business Support (2010).

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  Terminator (franchise)

  Terminator is an American media franchise created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. It is considered to be of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. The franchise primarily focuses on the events leading to a future post-apocalyptic war between a synthetic intelligence known as Skynet, and a surviving resistance of humans led by John Connor. In this future, Skynet uses an arsenal of cyborgs known as Terminators, designed to mimic humans and infiltrate the resistance. Much of the franchise takes place in time periods prior to the Skynet takeover, with both humans and Terminators using time travel to attempt to alter the past and change the outcome of the future. A prominent Terminator model throughout the films is the T-800, commonly known as "the Terminator", with instances of this model portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The franchise began with the 1984 film The Terminator, written and directed by Cameron, with Hurd as producer. They would return for the 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (or T2). Both films were critical and commercial successes. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (or T3) was released in 2003 to positive reviews, followed by Terminator Salvation in 2009 to more negative reviews. Salvation was intended as the first in a new trilogy, which was later scrapped after the film rights were sold. Cameron was consulted for the 2015 film Terminator Genisys, a reboot branching off from the timeline of the original film. It was negatively received and performed poorly at the box-office. Cameron had a larger role as a producer of the 2019 film Terminator: Dark Fate, a direct sequel to T2 that ignores the three preceding films. As with Salvation, both Genisys and Dark Fate were planned as first installments of new trilogies, with the plans scrapped each time due to the films' poor box-office performances. Outside of the theatrical films, Cameron co-directed T2-3D: Battle Across Time, a 1996 theme park film-based attraction. It was produced as the original sequel to T2 and reunited its main cast. A television series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, was developed without Cameron's involvement and aired for two seasons in 2008 and 2009. It was also produced as a T2 sequel, taking place in an alternate timeline that ignores the third film and subsequent events. Terminator Zero, an anime series, premiered in August 2024. The franchise has also inspired several lines of comic books since 1988, and numerous video games since 1991. By 2010, the franchise had generated $3 billion in revenue. == Themes and setting == The central theme of the franchise is the battle for survival between the nearly-extinct human race and the world-spanning, synthetic intelligence that is Skynet. Skynet is positioned in the first film, The Terminator (1984), as a U.S. strategic "Global Digital Defense Network" computer system by Cyberdyne Systems which becomes self-aware. Shortly after activation, Skynet seemingly perceives all humans as a threat to its existence and formulates a plan to systematically wipe out humanity itself. The system initiates a nuclear first strike against Russia, thereby ensuring a devastating second strike and a nuclear holocaust which wipes out much of humanity in the resulting nuclear war. In the post-apocalyptic aftermath, Skynet later builds up its own autonomous machine-based military capability which includes the Terminators used against individual human targets and thereafter proceeds to wage a persistent total war against the surviving elements of humanity, some of whom have militarily organized themselves into a Resistance. At some point in this future, Skynet develops the capability of time travel and both it and the Resistance seek to use this technology in order to win the war; either by altering or accelerating past events or by preventing the apocalyptic timeline. === Judgment Day === In the franchise, Judgment Day (a reference to the biblical Day of Judgment) is the date on which Skynet becomes self-aware, in which case its creators panic and attempt to deactivate the network. As a result, Skynet perceives humanity as a threat and attempts to exterminate them. Skynet launches an all-out nuclear attack on Russia in order to provoke a nuclear counter-strike against the United States, knowing this will eliminate its human enemies. Due to time travel and the consequent ability to change the future, several differing dates are given for Judgment Day. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Sarah Connor states that Judgment Day will occur on August 29, 1997. However, this date is delayed following the attack on Cyberdyne Systems in the same film. Judgment Day has various different dates in different timelines of the subsequent films, as well as the television series, creating a multiverse of temporal phenomena. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Terminator Salvation (2009), Judgment Day was postponed to July 2003. In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–2009), the attack on Cyberdyne Systems in the second film delayed Judgment Day to April 21, 2011. In Terminator Genisys (2015), the fifth film in the franchise, Judgment Day was postponed to an unspecified day in October 2017, attributed to altered events in both the future and the past. Sarah and Kyle Reese travel through time to the year 2017 and seemingly defeat Skynet, but the system core, contained inside a subterranean blast shelter, survives unknown to them, thus further delaying, rather than preventing, Judgment Day. In Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), the direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a date is not given for the new Judgment Day though it is named as such by Grace. Since Grace is a ten-year-old in 2020 and shown as a teenager in the post-Judgment Day world in flash-forwards throughout the film, Judgment Day occurs sometime in the early 2020s in this timeline. == Franchise rights == Before the first film was created, director James Cameron sold the rights for $1 to Gale Anne Hurd, his future wife, who produced the film, under the strict provision that he be allowed to direct it. Hemdale Film Corporation also became a 50-percent owner of the franchise rights, until its share was sold in 1990 to Carolco Pictures, a company founded by Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar. Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released a year later. Carolco filed for bankruptcy in 1995 and its library was subsequently acquired by StudioCanal, which continues to own the franchise today. However, the rights to future Terminator films were ultimately put up for auction. By that time, Cameron had become interested in making a Terminator 3 film. The rights were ultimately auctioned to Vajna in 1997, for $8 million. Vajna and Kassar spent another $8 million to purchase Hurd's half of the rights in 1998, becoming the full owners of the franchise. Hurd was initially opposed to the sale of the rights, while Cameron had lost interest in the franchise and a third film. After the 2003 release of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the franchise rights were sold in 2007 for about $25 million to The Halcyon Company, which produced Terminator Salvation in 2009. Later that year, the company faced legal issues and filed for bankruptcy, putting the franchise rights up for sale. The rights were valued at about $70 million. In 2010, the rights were sold for $29.5 million to Pacificor, a hedge fund that was Halcyon's largest creditor. In 2012, the rights were sold to Megan Ellison and her production company Annapurna Pictures for less than $20 million, a lower price than what was previously offered. The low price was because of the possibility of Cameron regaining the rights in 2019, as a result of new North American copyright laws. Megan's brother David Ellison and Skydance Productions produced Terminator Genisys in 2015. Cameron worked together with David Ellison to produce the 2019 film Terminator: Dark Fate. As the film neared its release, Hurd filed to terminate a copyright grant made 35 years earlier. Under this move, Hurd would again become a 50-percent owner of the rights with Cameron and Skydance could lose the rights to make any additional Terminator films beginning in November 2020, unless a new deal is worked out. Skydance responded that it had a deal in place with Cameron and that it "controls the rights to the Terminator franchise for the foreseeable future". == Films == === The Terminator (1984) === The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film released by Orion Pictures, co-written and directed by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. It is the first work in the Terminator franchise. In the film, robots take over the world in the near future, directed by the artificial intelligence Skynet. With its sole mission to completely annihilate humanity, it develops android assassins called Terminators that outwardly appear human. A man named John Connor starts the Tech-Com resistance to fight the machi

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  Fuzzy differential inclusion

  Fuzzy differential inclusion is the extension of differential inclusion to fuzzy sets introduced by Lotfi A. Zadeh. x ′ ( t ) ∈ [ f ( t , x ( t ) ) ] α {\displaystyle x'(t)\in [f(t,x(t))]^{\alpha }} with x ( 0 ) ∈ [ x 0 ] α {\displaystyle x(0)\in [x_{0}]^{\alpha }} Suppose f ( t , x ( t ) ) {\displaystyle f(t,x(t))} is a fuzzy valued continuous function on Euclidean space. Then it is the collection of all normal, upper semi-continuous, convex, compactly supported fuzzy subsets of R n {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} . == Second order differential == The second order differential is x ″ ( t ) ∈ [ k x ] α {\displaystyle x''(t)\in [kx]^{\alpha }} where k ∈ [ K ] α {\displaystyle k\in [K]^{\alpha }} , K {\displaystyle K} is trapezoidal fuzzy number ( − 1 , − 1 / 2 , 0 , 1 / 2 ) {\displaystyle (-1,-1/2,0,1/2)} , and x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} is a trianglular fuzzy number (-1,0,1). == Applications == Fuzzy differential inclusion (FDI) has applications in Cybernetics Artificial intelligence, Neural network, Medical imaging Robotics Atmospheric dispersion modeling Weather forecasting Cyclone Pattern recognition Population biology

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  DEAP (software)

  Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Python (DEAP) is an evolutionary computation framework for rapid prototyping and testing of ideas. It incorporates the data structures and tools required to implement most common evolutionary computation techniques such as genetic algorithm, genetic programming, evolution strategies, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, traffic flow and estimation of distribution algorithm. It is developed at Université Laval since 2009. == Example == The following code gives a quick overview how the Onemax problem optimization with genetic algorithm can be implemented with DEAP.

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  Actifsource

  Actifsource is a domain-specific modeling workbench. It is realized as plug-in for the software development environment Eclipse. Actifsource supports the creation of multiple domain models which can be linked together. It comes with a UML-like graphical editor to create domain-specific languages and a general graphical editor to edit structures in the created languages. It supports code generation using user-defined generic code templates which are directly linked to the domain models. Code generation is integrated into Eclipse's incremental build process. == Interoperability == Actifsource can use models from other modelling tools by importing and exporting the ecore format which is defined by the Eclipse Modeling Framework. == Licensing policy == There are two versions of actifsource available: The free community edition which can be used freely for non-commercial projects and the enterprise edition which contains additional features. The enterprise edition comes with customer support and maintenance for a limited period of time. This package allows the customers to upgrade to new versions and maintenance releases during their support period.

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  Autonomic computing

  Autonomic computing (AC) is distributed computing resources with self-managing characteristics, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. Initiated by IBM in 2001, this initiative ultimately aimed to develop computer systems capable of self-management, to overcome the rapidly growing complexity of computing systems management, and to reduce the barrier that complexity poses to further growth. == Description == The AC system concept is designed to make adaptive decisions, using high-level policies. It will constantly check and optimize its status and automatically adapt itself to changing conditions. An autonomic computing framework is composed of autonomic components (AC) interacting with each other. An AC can be modeled in terms of two main control schemes (local and global) with sensors (for self-monitoring), effectors (for self-adjustment), knowledge and planner/adapter for exploiting policies based on self- and environment awareness. This architecture is sometimes referred to as Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute (MAPE). Driven by such vision, a variety of architectural frameworks based on "self-regulating" autonomic components has been recently proposed. A similar trend has recently characterized significant research in the area of multi-agent systems. However, most of these approaches are typically conceived with centralized or cluster-based server architectures in mind and mostly address the need of reducing management costs rather than the need of enabling complex software systems or providing innovative services. Some autonomic systems involve mobile agents interacting via loosely coupled communication mechanisms. Autonomy-oriented computation is a paradigm proposed by Jiming Liu in 2001 that uses artificial systems imitating social animals' collective behaviours to solve difficult computational problems. For example, ant colony optimization could be studied in this paradigm. == Problem of growing complexity == Forecasts suggested that the computing devices in use would grow at 38% per year and the average complexity of each device was increasing. This volume and complexity was managed by highly skilled humans; but the demand for skilled IT personnel was already outstripping supply, with labour costs exceeding equipment costs by a ratio of up to 18:1. Computing systems have brought great benefits of speed and automation but there is now an overwhelming economic need to automate their maintenance. In a 2003 IEEE Computer article, Kephart and Chess warn that the dream of interconnectivity of computing systems and devices could become the "nightmare of pervasive computing" in which architects are unable to anticipate, design and maintain the complexity of interactions. They state the essence of autonomic computing is system self-management, freeing administrators from low-level task management while delivering better system behavior. A general problem of modern distributed computing systems is that their complexity, and in particular the complexity of their management, is becoming a significant limiting factor in their further development. Large companies and institutions are employing large-scale computer networks for communication and computation. The distributed applications running on these computer networks are diverse and deal with multiple tasks, ranging from internal control processes to presenting web content to customer support. Additionally, mobile computing is pervading these networks at an increasing speed: employees need to communicate with their companies while they are not in their office. They do so by using laptops, personal digital assistants, or mobile phones with diverse forms of wireless technologies to access their companies' data. This creates an enormous complexity in the overall computer network which is hard to control manually by human operators. Manual control is time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. The manual effort needed to control a growing networked computer-system tends to increase quickly. 80% of such problems in infrastructure happen at the client specific application and database layer. Most 'autonomic' service providers guarantee only up to the basic plumbing layer (power, hardware, operating system, network and basic database parameters). == Characteristics of autonomic systems == A possible solution could be to enable modern, networked computing systems to manage themselves without direct human intervention. The Autonomic Computing Initiative (ACI) aims at providing the foundation for autonomic systems. It is inspired by the autonomic nervous system of the human body. This nervous system controls important bodily functions (e.g. respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure) without any conscious intervention. In a self-managing autonomic system, the human operator takes on a new role: instead of controlling the system directly, he/she defines general policies and rules that guide the self-management process. For this process, IBM defined the following four types of property referred to as self-star (also called self-, self-x, or auto-) properties. Self-configuration: Automatic configuration of components; Self-healing: Automatic discovery, and correction of faults; Self-optimization: Automatic monitoring and control of resources to ensure the optimal functioning with respect to the defined requirements; Self-protection: Proactive identification and protection from arbitrary attacks. Others such as Poslad and Nami and Sharifi have expanded on the set of self-star as follows: Self-regulation: A system that operates to maintain some parameter, e.g., Quality of service, within a reset range without external control; Self-learning: Systems use machine learning techniques such as unsupervised learning which does not require external control; Self-awareness (also called Self-inspection and Self-decision): System must know itself. It must know the extent of its own resources and the resources it links to. A system must be aware of its internal components and external links in order to control and manage them; Self-organization: System structure driven by physics-type models without explicit pressure or involvement from outside the system; Self-creation (also called Self-assembly, Self-replication): System driven by ecological and social type models without explicit pressure or involvement from outside the system. A system's members are self-motivated and self-driven, generating complexity and order in a creative response to a continuously changing strategic demand; Self-management (also called self-governance): A system that manages itself without external intervention. What is being managed can vary dependent on the system and application. Self -management also refers to a set of self-star processes such as autonomic computing rather than a single self-star process; Self-description (also called self-explanation or Self-representation): A system explains itself. It is capable of being understood (by humans) without further explanation. IBM has set forth eight conditions that define an autonomic system: The system must know itself in terms of what resources it has access to, what its capabilities and limitations are and how and why it is connected to other systems; be able to automatically configure and reconfigure itself depending on the changing computing environment; be able to optimize its performance to ensure the most efficient computing process; be able to work around encountered problems by either repairing itself or routing functions away from the trouble; detect, identify and protect itself against various types of attacks to maintain overall system security and integrity; adapt to its environment as it changes, interacting with neighboring systems and establishing communication protocols; rely on open standards and cannot exist in a proprietary environment; anticipate the demand on its resources while staying transparent to users. Even though the purpose and thus the behaviour of autonomic systems vary from system to system, every autonomic system should be able to exhibit a minimum set of properties to achieve its purpose: Automatic: This essentially means being able to self-control its internal functions and operations. As such, an autonomic system must be self-contained and able to start-up and operate without any manual intervention or external help. Again, the knowledge required to bootstrap the system (Know-how) must be inherent to the system. Adaptive: An autonomic system must be able to change its operation (i.e., its configuration, state and functions). This will allow the system to cope with temporal and spatial changes in its operational context either long term (environment customisation/optimisation) or short term (exceptional conditions such as malicious attacks, faults, etc.). Aware: An autonomic system must be able to monitor (sense) its operational context as well as its internal state in order to be able to asses

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  Oblivion (2013 film)

  Oblivion is a 2013 American epic post-apocalyptic science fiction action film produced and directed by Joseph Kosinski from a screenplay by Karl Gajdusek and Michael deBruyn, starring Tom Cruise in the main role alongside Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Melissa Leo in supporting roles. Based on Kosinski's unpublished Radical Comics graphic novel of the same name, the film pays homage to 1970s sci-fi, and is a "love story" set in 2077 on an Earth desolated by an alien war; a maintenance technician on the verge of completing his mission finds a woman who survived from a space ship crash, leading him to question his purpose and discover the truth about the war. Oblivion premiered in Buenos Aires on March 26, 2013, and was released in theaters by Universal Pictures on April 19. The film grossed $286 million worldwide on a production budget of $120 million and received mixed reviews from critics. == Plot == In 2017, aliens known as Scavengers attack Earth and destroy the Moon, triggering global natural disasters. Although humanity wins the war using nuclear weapons, Earth is left uninhabitable. Sixty years later, the remnants of humanity have relocated to a colony on Saturn's moon Titan, except for Unit 49—technician Jack and his communications officer Victoria—who are scheduled to join them in two weeks. The pair oversee hydro rigs that convert seawater into fusion energy for the Tet, the last remaining human colony ship in orbit. Though Jack and Victoria are romantically involved and have had their memories erased for security reasons, Jack experiences recurring dreams of an unknown woman. He also secretly visits a hidden, verdant valley where he has built a lakeside cabin and collects relics of Earth's past. While investigating a missing drone—autonomous, highly advanced, and heavily armed machines—Jack is nearly captured by Scavengers. Later, he discovers the Scavengers are transmitting a signal into space. A NASA pod crash-lands at the signal's coordinates, carrying five humans in suspended animation, including the woman from Jack's dreams. A drone arrives and destroys four of the pods, but Jack rescues the remaining one and brings the unconscious woman to Unit 49's base. After reviving her, Jack and Victoria learn that the woman, Julia, has been in stasis aboard the Odyssey spaceship since 2017. Julia insists on recovering the ship's flight recorder. However, she and Jack are captured by Scavengers and brought to the Raven Rock Mountain Complex. Their leader, Malcolm, reveals that the Scavengers are actually surviving humans. Malcolm needs Jack to reprogram a captured drone to deliver a nuclear bomb, built from Odyssey's reactor, to the Tet. Jack refuses, so Malcolm releases him and Julia, urging him to seek the truth in the radiation zone, which is supposedly deadly and off-limits. Julia helps Jack recall that she is his wife, and fragments of his memories begin to return. When they arrive back at Unit 49, a devastated Victoria informs Sally, the Tet's mission controller, that she and Jack are no longer an "effective team." A drone activates and kills Victoria. Jack and Julia destroy the drone, but crash their aircraft inside the radiation zone. There, they encounter another version of Jack—"Jack-52"—who arrives to repair the drone. Jack subdues him, but Julia is seriously injured in the fight. Jack impersonates his clone to infiltrate Unit 52, meets Victoria-52, and steals medical supplies for Julia. They rest at his cabin. At Raven Rock, Malcolm reveals the truth: humanity lost the war, and the Tet is an alien machine intelligence harvesting Earth's resources. After the Moon's destruction, the Tet deployed thousands of clones of astronaut Jack Harper—brainwashed into obedience—to exterminate the remaining humans. Malcolm had assumed these clones were inhuman until witnessing Jack show interest in a discarded book, hinting at lingering humanity. Jack reprograms the captured drone, but it is destroyed in a surprise attack by other drones, leaving Malcolm badly wounded. Jack and Julia resolve to deliver the bomb themselves; Julia enters a stasis pod. En route, Jack listens to the Odyssey's flight recorder, which reveals the original Jack Harper and Victoria were astronauts sent to explore Titan before being confronted by the Tet. The pair were captured, but not before Jack ejected the remaining crew—including Julia—in stasis pods to protect them. Jack gains access to the Tet by claiming he is delivering Julia, as previously instructed. However, the stasis pod contains a dying Malcolm. Jack and Malcolm detonate the bomb, destroying the Tet and themselves. Julia later awakens at the cabin. Three years later, Julia lives there and it is revealed she had a daughter with Jack. A group of Raven Rock survivors arrives, alongside Jack-52, who has begun regaining fragments of his own lost identity. == Cast == Tom Cruise as Jack Harper—Tech 49, a technician who works to repair drones on Earth and questions his mission. Originally, he was the American commander of a mission en route to Titan who was captured by the Tet and cloned to fight humanity. Cruise also plays Jack Harper—Tech 52, a clone who seeks out Julia after the destruction of the Tet. Morgan Freeman as Malcolm Beech, an American veteran soldier and leader of a large community of scavengers, the human survivors of the alien Tet's attacks. Olga Kurylenko as Julia Rusakova Harper, Jack's wife and a Russian crew member on the Odyssey, who was sent back towards Earth by her husband to protect her from the initial contact with the Tet. Andrea Riseborough as Victoria "Vika" Olsen, Jack's communications partner and housemate. Originally, she was the British co-pilot of Jack's mission to Titan who was captured and cloned to assist in the Tet's war on humanity. Riseborough also plays a clone of Vika who Jack misleads to obtain medical supplies. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Sergeant Sykes, the main military commander of Beech's community of scavengers who is skeptical of Jack at first. Melissa Leo as the Tet, an alien artificial intelligence seeking to acquire Earth's natural resources and wipe out humanity. Leo also plays Sally, the mission director of Jack and Julia's mission to Titan; her likeness was copied by the Tet to serve as its visual and auditory representation. Zoë Bell as Kara, a soldier and member of the scavengers. == Production == === Development === Joseph Kosinski started the movie process by beginning work on a graphic novel called Oblivion featuring his story. While the completion of this would be teased to the public and the concept was used to pitch the movie, it was never finished and Kosinski claims he never intended to, stating it was "just a stage in the project [of film development]". Arvid Nelson was billed as co-writer and Radical Comics was attached as publisher. The novel was never finished; Kosinski explaining: "the partnership with Radical Comics allowed me to continue working on the story by developing a series of images and continuing to refine the story more over a period of years. Then I basically used all that development as a pitch kit to the studio. So even though we really never released it as an illustrated novel the story is being told as a film, which was always the intention." Walt Disney Pictures, which produced Kosinski's previous film Tron: Legacy (2010), acquired the Oblivion film adaptation rights from Radical Comics and Kosinski after a heated auction in August 2010. The film was a directing vehicle for Kosinski, with Barry Levine producing, and Jesse Berger executive producing. Other studios that made bids on the film were Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Universal Pictures. Disney subsequently released the rights after realizing the PG-rated film they envisioned, in line with their family-oriented reputation, would require too many story changes. Universal, which had also bid for the original rights, then bought them from Kosinski and Radical and authorized a PG-13 film version. The film's script was originally written by Kosinski and William Monahan and underwent a first rewrite by Karl Gajdusek. When the film passed into Universal's hands, a final rewrite was done by Michael Arndt, under the pen name "Michael deBruyn". Universal was particularly appreciative of the script, saying, "It's one of the most beautiful scripts we've ever come across." The Bubble Ship operated by Cruise's main character, Jack 49, was inspired by the Bell 47 helicopter (often colloquially referred to as a "bubble cockpit" helicopter), a utilitarian 1947 vehicle with a transparent round canopy that Kosinski saw in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, and which he likened to a dragonfly. Daniel Simon, who previously worked with Kosinski as the lead vehicle designer on Tron: Legacy, was tasked with creating the Bubble Ship from this basis, incorporating elements evocative of an advanced fighter

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  Opposition to AI data centers

  Since 2024, dozens of local community-led protest campaigns have emerged in opposition to AI data centers. == Motivations == Organized opposition to AI data centers has been driven by concerns about energy use, energy costs, noise pollution, air pollution, and water waste. Opposition sentiment is widespread with a Gallup poll conducted in March 2026 showing that 70% of respondents oppose the construction of new AI data centers in their neighborhood. == Impact == In 2025, local opposition to AI data centers led to the delay or cancellation of projects totalling US$156 billion. == Specific protests and outcomes in the United States == According to Data Center Watch, there are has been a wave of dozens of protests against AI data centers since 2022. Below is a non-exhaustive list of some notable examples. === Goodyear and Buckeye, Arizona: Tract AI Data Center Proposal === In Goodyear and Buckeye, Arizona, a $14 billion project by developer Tract was withdrawn after local authorities blocked necessary rezoning in response to pressure from resident organizers. Opponest stiff resistance due to concerns over building heights, noise pollution, and the potential strain on local utilities. However, the company announced a revised project near the Buckeye airport in August 2024, with the backing of local officials and the mayor. === Peculiar, Missouri: Diode Ventures Harper Road Technology Park Proposal === In Peculiar, Missouri, residents from the group "Peaceful Peculiar" organized to stop a data center proposal from Diode Ventures called Harper Road Technology Park. Citing concerns around noise and light pollution, health, environmental impacts, jobs, property values, and energy use, organizers attended local planning and zoning meetings in large numbers and lobbied councilors to reject the proposal. Ultimately, the city council unanimously rejected the proposal in September 2024. === Chesterton, Indiana: Provident Realty Advisors Proposal === In Chesterton, Indiana, the Texas-based company Provident Reality Advisors applied for a $1.3 billion construction of a data center complex on the Brassie Golf Club property. Provident Realty Advisors wanted to purchase the 200 acres owned by PPM Chesterton LLC in 2024 order to build a data center complex, with eight buildings and an end user of a hyperscaler. The Town Council of Chesterton released a statement saying that they would never support this project, at least not at the scale and location it was planned for. They cited fears of added noise for locals, electrical or water management concerns, the intrusiveness of a data center built next to houses, and more. Provident released a statement shortly after rescinding their plan, because it was clear than the town of Chesterton would not support them. === Cascade Locks, Oregon: Roundhouse Digital Infrastructure Proposal === Startup data center developer Roundhouse Digital Infrastructure had planned to build out a 10-megawatt data center using a vacant industrial building and nearby 10-acre site in the Port of Cascade Locks, Oregon. After significant organized community opposition, the project was abandoned. === Forth Worth, Texas: WUSF 5 Rock Creek East Proposal === In September 2024, the City Council of Fort Worth, Texas approved a zoning change that would allow construction of a data center. In responses, neighbors mounted opposition citing concerns about traffic, light pollution, energy consumption, water use, and noise issues if the data center were to be built. In response to extensive public comments opposing a tax break for the data center, a city councilor withdrew his motion to approve the tax break. As of April, 2026, the future of the project is still uncertain. === Santa Clara, California: GI Partners Proposal === GI partners sought to build a new AI data center in Santa Clara, California, which is already home to many data centers, by acquiring a conditional permit use that would have allowed the developer to knock down a property and replace it with a data center. To obtain this permit they were required to go before members of the Planning Commission. Ultimately, the project was delayed with the Planning Commission requiring GI partners to do more public outreach. === Virginia === ==== Richmond: DC Blox Proposal ==== After residents organized to lobby the municipal government to block the proposal to avoid noise pollution and higher energy use, commissioners denied the company's permit. ==== Catlett Station: Headwaters Site Proposal ==== In Catlett, Virginia, developer Headwaters proposed construction of a data center complex just north of the town in 2020. In response, a residents' organization called "Protect Catlett" was formed to oppose the project. Arguments against the data center involved its impacts on water and power availability, its noise as a residential disturbance, and its destruction of historic and community heritage buildings. Arguments in favor cited job creation and $20 million in local tax revenue if the project were to go through. Protect Catlett utilized town halls and public comments to mobilize opposition to the project. They also dedicated time to educating other residents about the project's negative impacts and canvassing door-to-door in order to garner even more opposition to the project. Ultimately, after fervent opposition from most town residents, the project was canceled by the town and the developer. ==== Culpeper County: Culpeper Acquisitions Proposal ==== Culpeper Acquisitions, LLC, proposed a massive $12 billion data center project in Culpeper County, Virginia, designed to feature 4.6 million square feet of space across nine multi-story buildings. Coalition to Save Culpeper (C2SC) is an activist organization formed to resist the development of the project. C2SC has been active on many fronts including, messaging on social media, reaching out to local officials, and organizing meetings to bring community members with aligned interests together. Ultimately, the project was delayed due to unanimous denial by the Culpeper County Planning Commission on June 12, 2024, which was driven by intense opposition from C2SC. C2SC was successful in their mission largely because they were able to get so many people from the community behind it, and put enough pressure on local officials to take action. ==== Midlothian: Province Group Proposal ==== In late October 2025, the Powhatan County Board of Supervisors in Virginia voted unanimously to approve the $3 billion data center, despite the county's Planning Commission having unanimously recommended denial several days earlier. The reasoning behind their support for the center is that it will generate substantial tax revenue, reducing the county's reliance on residential property taxes. This appeal of lowering residential property taxes is the major selling point for the center's development. The developer, California-based Province Group, incentivized the Board by being agreeable to its conditions for building the center. The center is still on track for development, but faces local resistance, though little information is available on specific groups opposing it. ==== Warrenton: Amazon Proposal ==== Citizens for Farquier County (CFFC) advocates to "preserve the natural, historic and agricultural resources" of their county. Historically, this has meant opposing the building of a dam or lights in front of fast food stores. This group has recently mobilized in opposition of a plan to build data centers for Amazon. They first filed a suit to stop the construction in 2023 and it has been in litigation ever since. The case hinges on opposition to a 2021 zoning amendment which allowed data centers to be built in town. CFFC's lawyer, Dale Mullen, argues that this amendment violates state law, which requires such amendments to state their "public purpose". They argue that the permit for the Amazon data center was "void from the beginning". The CFFC also organized to vote out town council members who approved the first data center and were up for reelection, replacing them with candidates who opposed the data center. In May 2025, after attending town council meetings to speak out against the data center, the planning commission voted 4–1 to remove the zoning amendment allowing data center construction in town, citing public opposition. Currently, CFFC is advocating along with Piedmont Environmental Group, for phasing out data center tax breaks at the state level. ==== France: Marseille opposition ==== In France, local opposition materialised in response to proposed data centre developments, especially in and around the city of Marseille. Opposition came from activists, such as "Clouds Were Under Our Feet" group, residents ,and local politicians. Issues raised related to energy use, environmental impact, and limited local benefits (such as the creation of a few jobs only). == Legislation in the United States == Legal limits and moratoriums on the construction of new d

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  Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner

  Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner (formerly Windows Live Safety Center and codenamed Vegas) was an online scanning, PC cleanup, and diagnosis service to help remove of viruses, spyware/adware, and other malware. It was a free web service that was part of Windows Live. On November 18, 2008, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Windows Live OneCare, offering users a new free anti-malware suite Microsoft Security Essentials, which had been available since the second half of 2009. However, Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner, under the same branding as Windows Live OneCare, was not discontinued during that time. The service was officially discontinued on April 15, 2011 and replaced with Microsoft Safety Scanner. == Overview == Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner offered a free online scanning and protection from threats. The Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner must be downloaded and installed to your computer to scan your computer. The "Full Service Scan" looks for common PC health issues such as viruses, temporary files, and open network ports. It searches and removes viruses, improves a computer's performance, and removes unnecessary clutter on the PC's hard disk. The user can choose between a "Full Scan" (which can be customized) or a "Quick Scan". The "Full Scan" scans for viruses (comprehensive scan or quick scan), hard disk performance (Disk fragmentation scan and/or Desk cleanup scan) and network safety (open port scan). The "Quick Scan" only scans for viruses, only on specific areas on the computer. The quick scan is faster than the full scan, hence that appellation. The service also provides a virus database, information about online threats, and general computer security documentation and tools. == Limits == The virus scanner on the Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner site runs a scan of the user's computer only when the site is visited. It does not run periodic scans of the system, and does not provide features to prevent viruses from infecting the computer at the time, or thereafter. It simply resolves detected infections. Many users who have posted on the Product Feedback forum report script errors relating to Internet Explorer 7 (besides IE being the only browser supported by this service). The OneCare safety scanner team have been actively solving these problems, many of them registry-related.

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  Stable Diffusion

  Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on diffusion techniques. The generative artificial intelligence technology is the premier product of Stability AI and is considered to be a part of the ongoing AI boom. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt. Its development involved researchers from the CompVis Group at LMU Munich and Runway with a computational donation from Stability and training data from non-profit organizations. Stable Diffusion is a latent diffusion model, a kind of deep generative artificial neural network. Its code and model weights have been released publicly, and an optimized version can run on most consumer hardware equipped with a modest GPU with as little as 2.4 GB VRAM. This marked a departure from previous proprietary text-to-image models such as DALL-E and Midjourney which were accessible only via cloud services. == Development == Stable Diffusion originated from a project called Latent Diffusion, developed in Germany by researchers at LMU Munich in Munich and Heidelberg University. Four of the original 5 authors (Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz) later joined Stability AI and released subsequent versions of Stable Diffusion. The technical license for the model was released by the CompVis group at LMU Munich. Development was led by Patrick Esser of Runway and Robin Rombach of CompVis, who were among the researchers who had earlier invented the latent diffusion model architecture used by Stable Diffusion. Stability AI also credited EleutherAI and LAION (a German nonprofit which assembled the dataset on which Stable Diffusion was trained) as supporters of the project. == Technology == === Architecture === Diffusion models, introduced in 2015, are trained with the objective of removing successive applications of Gaussian noise on training images, which can be thought of as a sequence of denoising autoencoders. The name diffusion is from the thermodynamic diffusion, since they were first developed with inspiration from thermodynamics. Models in Stable Diffusion series before SD 3 all used a variant of diffusion models, called latent diffusion model (LDM), developed in 2021 by the CompVis (Computer Vision & Learning) group at LMU Munich. Stable Diffusion consists of 3 parts: the variational autoencoder (VAE), U-Net, and an optional text encoder. The VAE encoder compresses the image from pixel space to a smaller dimensional latent space, capturing a more fundamental semantic meaning of the image. Gaussian noise is iteratively applied to the compressed latent representation during forward diffusion. The U-Net block, composed of a ResNet backbone, denoises the output from forward diffusion backwards to obtain a latent representation. Finally, the VAE decoder generates the final image by converting the representation back into pixel space. The denoising step can be flexibly conditioned on a string of text, an image, or another modality. The encoded conditioning data is exposed to denoising U-Nets via a cross-attention mechanism. For conditioning on text, the fixed, pretrained CLIP ViT-L/14 text encoder is used to transform text prompts to an embedding space. Researchers point to increased computational efficiency for training and generation as an advantage of LDMs. With 860 million parameters in the U-Net and 123 million in the text encoder, Stable Diffusion is considered relatively lightweight by 2022 standards, and unlike other diffusion models, it can run on consumer GPUs, and even CPU-only if using the OpenVINO version of Stable Diffusion. ==== SD XL ==== The XL version uses the same LDM architecture as previous versions, except larger: larger UNet backbone, larger cross-attention context, two text encoders instead of one, and trained on multiple aspect ratios (not just the square aspect ratio like previous versions). The SD XL Refiner, released at the same time, has the same architecture as SD XL, but it was trained for adding fine details to preexisting images via text-conditional img2img. ==== SD 3.0 ==== The 3.0 version completely changes the backbone. Not a UNet, but a Rectified Flow Transformer, which implements the rectified flow method with a Transformer. The Transformer architecture used for SD 3.0 has three "tracks", for original text encoding, transformed text encoding, and image encoding (in latent space). The transformed text encoding and image encoding are mixed during each transformer block. The architecture is named "multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT), where the "multimodal" means that it mixes text and image encodings inside its operations. This differs from previous versions of DiT, where the text encoding affects the image encoding, but not vice versa. === Training data === Stable Diffusion was trained on pairs of images and captions taken from LAION-5B, a publicly available dataset derived from Common Crawl data scraped from the web, where 5 billion image-text pairs were classified based on language and filtered into separate datasets by resolution, a predicted likelihood of containing a watermark, and predicted "aesthetic" score (e.g. subjective visual quality). The dataset was created by LAION, a German non-profit which receives funding from Stability AI. The Stable Diffusion model was trained on three subsets of LAION-5B: laion2B-en, laion-high-resolution, and laion-aesthetics v2 5+. A third-party analysis of the model's training data identified that out of a smaller subset of 12 million images taken from the original wider dataset used, approximately 47% of the sample size of images came from 100 different domains, with Pinterest taking up 8.5% of the subset, followed by websites such as WordPress, Blogspot, Flickr, DeviantArt and Wikimedia Commons. An investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk showed that LAION's datasets, hosted on Hugging Face, contain large amounts of private and sensitive data. === Training procedures === The model was initially trained on the laion2B-en and laion-high-resolution subsets, with the last few rounds of training done on LAION-Aesthetics v2 5+, a subset of 600 million captioned images which the LAION-Aesthetics Predictor V2 predicted that humans would, on average, give a score of at least 5 out of 10 when asked to rate how much they liked them. The LAION-Aesthetics v2 5+ subset also excluded low-resolution images and images which LAION-5B-WatermarkDetection identified as carrying a watermark with greater than 80% probability. Final rounds of training additionally dropped 10% of text conditioning to improve Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance. The model was trained using 256 Nvidia A100 GPUs on Amazon Web Services for a total of 150,000 GPU-hours, at a cost of $600,000. === Limitations === Stable Diffusion has issues with degradation and inaccuracies in certain scenarios. Initial releases of the model were trained on a dataset that consists of 512×512 resolution images, meaning that the quality of generated images noticeably degrades when user specifications deviate from its "expected" 512×512 resolution; the version 2.0 update of the Stable Diffusion model later introduced the ability to natively generate images at 768×768 resolution. Another challenge is in generating human limbs due to poor data quality of limbs in the LAION database. The model is insufficiently trained to replicate human limbs and faces due to the lack of representative features in the database, and prompting the model to generate images of such type can confound the model. In addition to human limbs, Stable Diffusion is unable to generate legible ambigrams and some other forms of text and typography. Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) version 1.0, released in July 2023, introduced native 1024x1024 resolution and improved generation for limbs and text. Accessibility for individual developers can also be a problem. In order to customize the model for new use cases that are not included in the dataset, such as generating anime characters ("waifu diffusion"), new data and further training are required. Fine-tuned adaptations of Stable Diffusion created through additional retraining have been used for a variety of different use-cases, from medical imaging to algorithmically generated music. However, this fine-tuning process is sensitive to the quality of new data; low resolution images or different resolutions from the original data can not only fail to learn the new task but degrade the overall performance of the model. Even when the model is additionally trained on high quality images, it is difficult for individuals to run models in consumer electronics. For example, the training process for waifu-diffusion requires a minimum 30 GB of VRAM, which exceeds the usual resource provided in such consumer GPUs as Nvidia's GeForce 30 series, w

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  Digital fashion

  Digital fashion is a field of fashion design that relies on 3D software or artificial intelligence to produce hyper-realistic, data-intensive digital 3D garment simulations that are digital-only products or digital models for physical products. Digital garments can be worn and presented in virtual environments, social media, online gaming, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) platforms. The field aims to contribute to the development of a more sustainable future for the fashion industry. It has been praised as a possible answer to ethical and creative concerns of traditional fashion by promoting innovation, reducing waste, and encouraging conscious consumption. However, empirical research has questioned whether digital fashion communities embody the radical and anti-consumerist values they claim. A 2025 study presented by YeSeung Lee at the FACTUM international conference on fashion communication analysed 88,141 posts across nine platforms over eight months using Pulsar. It found that only 4.8% of author biographies indicated any sociopolitical focus, and that discourse predominantly relied on generic slogans and trending buzzwords, primarily reinforcing existing fashion hierarchies and consumerist frameworks rather than challenging them. Digital fashion is also the interplay between digital technology and couture. Human AI is an intersection of technology and human representation, in which human value is emphasized and enhanced by technology and the possibilities of discovering design. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been deeply integrated both into the fashion industry, as well as within the experience of clients and prospects. Such interplay has happened at three main levels. ICTs are used to design and produce fashion products, while the industry organization also leverages digital technologies. ICTs impact marketing, distribution and sales. ICTs are extensively used in communication activities with all relevant stakeholders and contribute to co-create the fashion world. The fashion industry in general has paved the way for digital fashion to be introduced with more technology being in the industry, like virtual dressing rooms and the gamification of the fashion industry. Digital fashion is also seen on many different online fashion retail websites. This evolution in the fashion industry has called for more education and research of digital fashion. == Design, production, and organization == Among the many applications available to fashion designers to model the fusion of creativity with digital avenues, the Digital Textile Printing can be mentioned here. === Digital textile printing === Digital textile printing has brought together the worlds of fashion, technology, art, chemistry, and printing to produce a new process for printing textiles on clothing. Digital printing is a process in which prints are directly applied to fabrics with a printer, reducing 95% of the use of water, 75% of the use of energy and minimizing textile waste. The main advantage of digital printing is the ability to do very small runs of each design (even less than 1 yard). Digital Textile printing also offers other benefits, such as fast printing speeds that help the time and space needed to print different patterns on garments of choice. == Marketing, distribution, and sales == While all digital channels can be used in order to market and sell fashion completely online (eCommerce), they usually are implemented in connection with offline channels (so-called "omni-channel"). Here, virtual and augmented reality play a crucial role. The fashion industry has faced its own problems including pollution and fabric waste, which has resulted in a shift to more sustainable methods like digital fashion. The industry is also constantly being intertwined with digital media and has allowed for the use of digital tools within the business itself and with consumers. Two of the ways digital fashion is utilized with consumers is through virtual dressing rooms and virtual cosmetic counters. Prospects and clients can use ICTs - own computers, tablets and smartphones - to virtually simulate fitting rooms and cosmetics counters and see how they look in specific outfits and makeup. Customers can give any look and decide on what suits them and buy products. Oftentimes, beauty retailers will feature virtual fitting rooms to allow users to experience the look of their product before committing to a purchase. Some examples are color contact retailers Freshlook, which allows users to simulate contact lens wear in their color contacts studio before purchase. Colorful Eyes also offers a virtual color contact lens try-on room. === Virtual dressing room === A virtual dressing room (also often referred to as virtual fitting room and virtual changing room although they do perform different functions) is the online equivalent of the near-ubiquitous in-store changing room – that is, it enables shoppers to try on clothes to check one or more of size, fit or style, but virtually rather than physically. Fashion retailer Topshop installed a Kinect-powered virtual fitting room at its Moscow store. Created by AR Door, the Augmented Fitting Room system overlays 3D augmented reality clothes on the customer. Simple gestures and on-screen buttons let users "try on" different outfits. However, the high variability of virtual fit platforms to predict consumer clothes sizes called into question the accuracy of these systems in their current form. AI-powered Wardrobe and Outfit Planning Beyond virtual fitting rooms, the integration of artificial intelligence has enabled the rise of digital wardrobe management. These platforms use computer vision and machine learning to catalog a user’s physical or digital garments, providing automated outfit recommendations based on weather, occasion, and personal style trends. Fashion-tech startups utilize AI-driven garment simulation to help users plan outfits virtually, bridging the gap between digital-only fashion and physical wardrobe utility. This "smart closet" approach aims to reduce "wardrobe fatigue" and decrease unnecessary consumption by maximizing the use of existing items through digital visualization. === Communication and experience co-creation === Fashion is also a matter of socially negotiating what is "in" or "out", fashionable or not. In other words, fashion items do not only play on the economic market of physical goods but also - and sometimes even more importantly - on the semiotic market of the production of social tastes and customs. Thanks to social media, and to all services offered by the so-called web2.0, laypeople can contribute to co-create the fashion world, shaping tastes, customs, and fashion-related values. Social media, in general, has catapulted the impact fashion has on our everyday lives and values. Fashion has taken a central role in mass production and is constantly evolving due to the ever-lasting digital transformation. Social media has also helped evolve to a point where not only can brands reach consumers, but consumers can reach brands as well. TikTok for example started a trend in 2020 with #GucciModelChallenge. This creates a space where the brand is gaining awareness from their consumers in the ever-changing digital age. === Gamification === Gaming has played an important role in fostering digital aspects of the fashion world, first beginning with dress-up games that used avatars and allowed players to select garments. Nevertheless, it seems it will now move on to the real world and start using avatars of real people. Garments from luxurious brands have been copied and adapted into the aesthetics of games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Sims. As to the former, during COVID-19 lock-downs players recreated outfits from a variety of fashion brands, including Chanel, Gucci and Versace. It became a platform for users to showcase their costume designs. In April 2019, Moschino collaborated with simulation game The Sims in a capsule collection that featured signature Jeremy Scott garments. The collection was made available to shop and the campaign was set against the backdrop of a Sims-like atmosphere. Furthermore, in May 2019, Nike partnered up with Fortnite to include their iconic Jordan sneakers. In similar fashion, in May 2020, Marc Jacobs designed 6 of the brand's favorite looks for Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons in a partnership with Instagram user @AnimalCrossingFashionArchive. They were made available to download. Similarly, the other luxury brands mentioned, Louis Vuitton partnered with game League of Legends to create skins for characters within the game. Digital fashion in different video games allows users to express themselves beyond their avatars and combine the self-expression of fashion into the digital gaming realm. == Digital fashion education and research == Nowadays, the fashion industry needs experts in digital fashion, equipped with the above-ske

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