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  Predictive text

  Predictive text is an input technology used where one key or button represents many letters, such as on the physical numeric keypads of mobile phones and in accessibility technologies. Each key press results in a prediction rather than repeatedly sequencing through the same group of "letters" it represents, in the same, invariable order. Predictive text could allow for an entire word to be input by a single keypress. Predictive text makes efficient use of fewer device keys to input writing into a text message, an e-mail, an address book, a calendar, and the like. The most widely used, general, predictive text systems are T9, iTap, eZiText, and LetterWise/WordWise. There are many ways to build a device that predicts text, but all predictive text systems have initial linguistic settings that offer predictions that are re-prioritized to adapt to each user. This learning adapts, by way of the device memory, to a user's disambiguating feedback that results in corrective key presses, such as pressing a "next" key to get to the intention. Most predictive text systems have a user database to facilitate this process. Theoretically the number of keystrokes required per desired character in the finished writing is, on average, comparable to using a keyboard. This is approximately true provided that all words used are in its database, punctuation is ignored, and no input mistakes are made when typing or spelling. The theoretical keystrokes per character, KSPC, of a keyboard is KSPC=1.00, and of multi-tap is KSPC=2.03. Eatoni's LetterWise is a predictive multi-tap hybrid, which when operating on a standard telephone keypad achieves KSPC=1.15 for English. The choice of which predictive text system is the best to use involves matching the user's preferred interface style, the user's level of learned ability to operate predictive text software, and the user's efficiency goal. There are various levels of risk in predictive text systems, versus multi-tap systems, because the predicted text that is automatically written provides the speed and mechanical efficiency benefit, which, if the user is not careful to review, results in transmitting misinformation. Predictive text systems take time to learn to use well, and so generally, a device's system has user options to set up the choice of multi-tap or any one of several schools of predictive text methods. == Background == Short message service (SMS) permits a mobile phone user to send text messages (also called messages, SMSes, texts, and txts) as a short message. The most common system of SMS text input is referred to as "multi-tap". Using multi-tap, a key is pressed multiple times to access the list of letters on that key. For instance, pressing the "2" key once displays an "a", twice displays a "b" and three times displays a "c". To enter two successive letters that are on the same key, the user must either pause or hit a "next" button. A user can type by pressing an alphanumeric keypad without looking at the electronic equipment display. Thus, multi-tap is easy to understand and can be used without any visual feedback. However, multi-tap is not very efficient, requiring potentially many keystrokes to enter a single letter. In ideal predictive text entry, all words used are in the dictionary, punctuation is ignored, no spelling mistakes are made, and no typing mistakes are made. The ideal dictionary would include all slang, proper nouns, abbreviations, URLs, foreign-language words and other user-unique words. This ideal circumstance gives predictive text software a reduction in the number of key strokes a user is required to enter a word. The user presses the number corresponding to each letter. As long as the word exists in the predictive text dictionary or is correctly disambiguated by non-dictionary systems, it will appear. For instance, pressing "4663" will typically be interpreted as the word good, provided that a linguistic database in English is currently in use, though alternatives such as home, hood and hoof are also valid interpretations of the sequence of key strokes. The most widely used systems of predictive text are Tegic's T9, Motorola's iTap, and the Eatoni Ergonomics' LetterWise and WordWise. T9 and iTap use dictionaries, but Eatoni Ergonomics' products use a disambiguation process, a set of statistical rules to recreate words from keystroke sequences. All predictive text systems require a linguistic database for every supported input language. == Dictionary vs. non-dictionary systems == Traditional disambiguation works by referencing a dictionary of commonly used words, though Eatoni offers a dictionaryless disambiguation system. In dictionary-based systems, as the user presses the number buttons, an algorithm searches the dictionary for a list of possible words that match the keypress combination and offers up the most probable choice. The user can then confirm the selection and move on, or use a key to cycle through the possible combinations. A non-dictionary system constructs words and other sequences of letters from the statistics of word parts. To attempt predictions of the intended result of keystrokes not yet entered, disambiguation may be combined with a word completion facility. Either system (disambiguation or predictive) may include a user database, which can be further classified as a "learning" system when words or phrases are entered into the user database without direct user intervention. The user database is for storing words or phrases that are not well disambiguated by the pre-supplied database. Some disambiguation systems further attempt to correct spelling, format text or perform other automatic rewrites, with the risky effect of either enhancing or frustrating user efforts to enter text. == History == The predictive text and autocomplete technology was invented out of necessities by Chinese scientists and linguists in the 1950s to solve the input inefficiency of the Chinese typewriter, as the typing process involved finding and selecting thousands of logographic characters on a tray, drastically slowing down the word processing speed. The actuating keys of the Chinese typewriter created by Lin Yutang in the 1940s included suggestions for the characters following the one selected. In 1951, the Chinese typesetter Zhang Jiying arranged Chinese characters in associative clusters, a precursor of modern predictive text entry, and broke speed records by doing so. Predictive entry of text from a telephone keypad has been known at least since the 1970s (Smith and Goodwin, 1971). Predictive text was mainly used to look up names in directories over the phone until mobile phone text messaging came into widespread use. == Example == On a typical phone keypad, if users wished to type the in a "multi-tap" keypad entry system, they would need to: Press 8 (tuv) once to select t. Press 4 (ghi) twice to select h. Press 3 (def) twice to select e. Meanwhile, in a phone with predictive text, they need only: Press 8 once to select the (tuv) group for the first character. Press 4 once to select the (ghi) group for the second character. Press 3 once to select the (def) group for the third character. The system updates the display as each keypress is entered, to show the most probable entry. In this example, prediction reduced the number of button presses from five to three. The effect is even greater with longer words and those composed of letters later in each key's sequence. A dictionary-based predictive system is based on the hope that the desired word is in the dictionary. That hope may be misplaced if the word differs in any way from common usage—in particular, if the word is not spelled or typed correctly, is slang, or is a proper noun. In these cases, some other mechanism must be used to enter the word. Furthermore, the simple dictionary approach fails with agglutinative languages, where a single word does not necessarily represent a single semantic entity. == Companies and products == Predictive text is developed and marketed in a variety of competing products, such as Nuance Communications's T9. Other products include Motorola's iTap; Eatoni Ergonomic's LetterWise (character, rather than word-based prediction); WordWise (word-based prediction without a dictionary); EQ3 (a QWERTY-like layout compatible with regular telephone keypads); Prevalent Devices's Phraze-It; Xrgomics' TenGO (a six-key reduced QWERTY keyboard system); Adaptxt (considers language, context, grammar and semantics); Lightkey (a predictive typing software for Windows); Clevertexting (statistical nature of the language, dictionaryless, dynamic key allocation); and Oizea Type (temporal ambiguity); Intelab's Tauto; WordLogic's Intelligent Input Platform™ (patented, layer-based advanced text prediction, includes multi-language dictionary, spell-check, built-in Web search); Google's Gboard. == Textonyms == Words produced by the same combination of keypresses have been called "textonyms"; also "txtonyms"; or "T9o

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  Machine learning in video games

  Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are used in video games for a wide variety of applications such as non-player character (NPC) control, procedural content generation (PCG) and deep learning-based content generation. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses historical data to build predictive and analytical models. This is in sharp contrast to traditional methods of artificial intelligence such as search trees and expert systems. Information on machine learning techniques in the field of games is mostly known to public through research projects as most gaming companies choose not to publish specific information about their intellectual property. The most publicly known application of machine learning in games is likely the use of deep learning agents that compete with professional human players in complex strategy games. There has been a significant application of machine learning on games such as Atari/ALE, Doom, Minecraft, StarCraft, and car racing. Other games that did not originally exists as video games, such as chess and Go have also been affected by the machine learning. == Overview of relevant machine learning techniques == === Deep learning === Deep learning is a subset of machine learning which focuses heavily on the use of artificial neural networks (ANN) that learn to solve complex tasks. Deep learning uses multiple layers of ANN and other techniques to progressively extract information from an input. Due to this complex layered approach, deep learning models often require powerful machines to train and run on. ==== Convolutional neural networks ==== Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are specialized ANNs that are often used to analyze image data. These types of networks are able to learn translation invariant patterns, which are patterns that are not dependent on location. CNNs are able to learn these patterns in a hierarchy, meaning that earlier convolutional layers will learn smaller local patterns while later layers will learn larger patterns based on the previous patterns. A CNN's ability to learn visual data has made it a commonly used tool for deep learning in games. === Recurrent neural network === Recurrent neural networks are a type of ANN that are designed to process sequences of data in order, one part at a time rather than all at once. An RNN runs over each part of a sequence, using the current part of the sequence along with memory of previous parts of the current sequence to produce an output. These types of ANN are highly effective at tasks such as speech recognition and other problems that depend heavily on temporal order. There are several types of RNNs with different internal configurations; the basic implementation suffers from a lack of long term memory due to the vanishing gradient problem, thus it is rarely used over newer implementations. ==== Long short-term memory ==== A long short-term memory (LSTM) network is a specific implementation of a RNN that is designed to deal with the vanishing gradient problem seen in simple RNNs, which would lead to them gradually "forgetting" about previous parts of an inputted sequence when calculating the output of a current part. LSTMs solve this problem with the addition of an elaborate system that uses an additional input/output to keep track of long term data. LSTMs have achieved very strong results across various fields, and were used by several monumental deep learning agents in games. === Reinforcement learning === Reinforcement learning is the process of training an agent using rewards and/or punishments. The way an agent is rewarded or punished depends heavily on the problem; such as giving an agent a positive reward for winning a game or a negative one for losing. Reinforcement learning is used heavily in the field of machine learning and can be seen in methods such as Q-learning, policy search, Deep Q-networks and others. It has seen strong performance in both the field of games and robotics. === Neuroevolution === Neuroevolution involves the use of both neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. Instead of using gradient descent like most neural networks, neuroevolution models make use of evolutionary algorithms to update neurons in the network. Researchers claim that this process is less likely to get stuck in a local minimum and is potentially faster than state of the art deep learning techniques. == Deep learning agents == Machine learning agents have been used to take the place of a human player rather than function as NPCs, which are deliberately added into video games as part of designed gameplay. Deep learning agents have achieved impressive results when used in competition with both humans and other artificial intelligence agents. === Chess === Chess is a turn-based strategy game that is considered a difficult AI problem due to the computational complexity of its board space. Similar strategy games are often solved with some form of a Minimax Tree Search. These types of AI agents have been known to beat professional human players, such as the historic 1997 Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov match. Since then, machine learning agents have shown ever greater success than previous AI agents. === Go === Go is another turn-based strategy game which is considered an even more difficult AI problem than chess. The state space of is Go is around 10^170 possible board states compared to the 10^120 board states for Chess. Prior to recent deep learning models, AI Go agents were only able to play at the level of a human amateur. ==== AlphaGo ==== Google's 2015 AlphaGo was the first AI agent to beat a professional Go player. AlphaGo used a deep learning model to train the weights of a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). The deep learning model consisted of 2 ANN, a policy network to predict the probabilities of potential moves by opponents, and a value network to predict the win chance of a given state. The deep learning model allows the agent to explore potential game states more efficiently than a vanilla MCTS. The network were initially trained on games of humans players and then were further trained by games against itself. ==== AlphaGo Zero ==== AlphaGo Zero, another implementation of AlphaGo, was able to train entirely by playing against itself. It was able to quickly train up to the capabilities of the previous agent. === StarCraft series === StarCraft and its sequel StarCraft II are real-time strategy (RTS) video games that have become popular environments for AI research. Blizzard and DeepMind have worked together to release a public StarCraft 2 environment for AI research to be done on. Various deep learning methods have been tested on both games, though most agents usually have trouble outperforming the default AI with cheats enabled or skilled players of the game. ==== Alphastar ==== Alphastar was the first AI agent to beat professional StarCraft 2 players without any in-game advantages. The deep learning network of the agent initially received input from a simplified zoomed out version of the gamestate, but was later updated to play using a camera like other human players. The developers have not publicly released the code or architecture of their model, but have listed several state of the art machine learning techniques such as relational deep reinforcement learning, long short-term memory, auto-regressive policy heads, pointer networks, and centralized value baseline. Alphastar was initially trained with supervised learning, it watched replays of many human games in order to learn basic strategies. It then trained against different versions of itself and was improved through reinforcement learning. The final version was hugely successful, but only trained to play on a specific map in a protoss mirror matchup. === Dota 2 === Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game. Like other complex games, traditional AI agents have not been able to compete on the same level as professional human player. The only widely published information on AI agents attempted on Dota 2 is OpenAI's deep learning Five agent. ==== OpenAI Five ==== OpenAI Five utilized separate long short-term memory networks to learn each hero. It trained using a reinforcement learning technique known as Proximal Policy Learning running on a system containing 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores. Five trained for months, accumulating 180 years of game experience each day, before facing off with professional players. It was eventually able to beat the 2018 Dota 2 esports champion team in a 2019 series of games. === Planetary Annihilation === Planetary Annihilation is a real-time strategy game which focuses on massive scale war. The developers use ANNs in their default AI agent. === Supreme Commander 2 === Supreme Commander 2 is a real-time strategy (RTS) video game. The game uses Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) to control a platoon’s reaction to encountered enemy units. Total of four MLPs are used, one for each platoon type: land, naval

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  Structural risk minimization

  Structural risk minimization (SRM) is an inductive principle of use in machine learning. Commonly in machine learning, a generalized model must be selected from a finite data set, with the consequent problem of overfitting – the model becoming too strongly tailored to the particularities of the training set and generalizing poorly to new data. The SRM principle addresses this problem by balancing the model's complexity against its success at fitting the training data. This principle was first set out in a 1974 book by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis and uses the VC dimension. In practical terms, Structural Risk Minimization is implemented by minimizing E t r a i n + β H ( W ) {\displaystyle E_{train}+\beta H(W)} , where E t r a i n {\displaystyle E_{train}} is the train error, the function H ( W ) {\displaystyle H(W)} is called a regularization function, and β {\displaystyle \beta } is a constant. H ( W ) {\displaystyle H(W)} is chosen such that it takes large values on parameters W {\displaystyle W} that belong to high-capacity subsets of the parameter space. Minimizing H ( W ) {\displaystyle H(W)} in effect limits the capacity of the accessible subsets of the parameter space, thereby controlling the trade-off between minimizing the training error and minimizing the expected gap between the training error and test error. The SRM problem can be formulated in terms of data. Given n data points consisting of data x and labels y, the objective J ( θ ) {\displaystyle J(\theta )} is often expressed in the following manner: J ( θ ) = 1 2 n ∑ i = 1 n ( h θ ( x i ) − y i ) 2 + λ 2 ∑ j = 1 d θ j 2 {\displaystyle J(\theta )={\frac {1}{2n}}\sum _{i=1}^{n}(h_{\theta }(x^{i})-y^{i})^{2}+{\frac {\lambda }{2}}\sum _{j=1}^{d}\theta _{j}^{2}} The first term is the mean squared error (MSE) term between the value of the learned model, h θ {\displaystyle h_{\theta }} , and the given labels y {\displaystyle y} . This term is the training error, E t r a i n {\displaystyle E_{train}} , that was discussed earlier. The second term, places a prior over the weights, to favor sparsity and penalize larger weights. The trade-off coefficient, λ {\displaystyle \lambda } , is a hyperparameter that places more or less importance on the regularization term. Larger λ {\displaystyle \lambda } encourages sparser weights at the expense of a more optimal MSE, and smaller λ {\displaystyle \lambda } relaxes regularization allowing the model to fit to data. Note that as λ → ∞ {\displaystyle \lambda \to \infty } the weights become zero, and as λ → 0 {\displaystyle \lambda \to 0} , the model typically suffers from overfitting.

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  Isotropic position

  In the fields of machine learning, the theory of computation, and random matrix theory, a probability distribution over vectors is said to be in isotropic position if its covariance matrix is proportional to the identity matrix. == Formal definitions == Let D {\textstyle D} be a distribution over vectors in the vector space R n {\textstyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} . Then D {\textstyle D} is in isotropic position if, for vector v {\textstyle v} sampled from the distribution, E v v T = I d . {\displaystyle \mathbb {E} \,vv^{\mathsf {T}}=\mathrm {Id} .} A set of vectors is said to be in isotropic position if the uniform distribution over that set is in isotropic position. In particular, every orthonormal set of vectors is isotropic. As a related definition, a convex body K {\textstyle K} in R n {\textstyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} is called isotropic if it has volume | K | = 1 {\textstyle |K|=1} , center of mass at the origin, and there is a constant α > 0 {\textstyle \alpha >0} such that ∫ K ⟨ x , y ⟩ 2 d x = α 2 | y | 2 , {\displaystyle \int _{K}\langle x,y\rangle ^{2}dx=\alpha ^{2}|y|^{2},} for all vectors y {\textstyle y} in R n {\textstyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} ; here | ⋅ | {\textstyle |\cdot |} stands for the standard Euclidean norm.

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  Slopaganda

  Slopaganda is a portmanteau of "AI slop" and "propaganda", referring to AI-generated content designed to manipulate beliefs, emotions, and political decision-making at scale. The term is credited to Michał Klincewicz, an assistant professor in the Department of Computational Cognitive Science at Tilburg University, in 2025. == Definition == Slopaganda is distinguished from traditional propaganda by three features: scale, scope, and speed. Generative AI makes it possible to produce large volumes of content quickly and at low cost, allows for highly personalised and targeted messaging to specific sub-audiences, and leverages the hyper-connectivity of social networks to accelerate dissemination beyond what conventional media could achieve. Unlike traditional propaganda, which delivers a uniform message to all recipients, slopaganda can be micro-targeted — tailored to individuals based on estimated prior beliefs to reinforce political biases or emotional associations. The authors note that it need not aim at literal deception: much slopaganda is expressive rather than truth-apt, designed to create emotional associations rather than false factual beliefs. == Relation to AI slop == Slopaganda is a subset of AI slop — low-quality, mass-produced AI-generated content — distinguished by intent. Where AI slop may be produced indifferently for commercial or engagement-farming purposes, slopaganda is deployed with a deliberate political or ideological goal. == Notable examples == Examples discussed by the term's originators include Donald Trump's prolific use of AI in Truth Social posts and Iranian Lego-themed music videos. AI-generated videos posted by the White House mixing real military footage with clips from films and video games; and deepfake audio imitating political candidates during the 2024 US presidential campaign have also been given the label slopaganda.

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  Lazy learning

  (Not to be confused with the lazy learning regime, see Neural tangent kernel). In machine learning, lazy learning is a learning method in which generalization of the training data is, in theory, delayed until a query is made to the system, as opposed to eager learning, where the system tries to generalize the training data before receiving queries. The primary motivation for employing lazy learning, as in the K-nearest neighbors algorithm, used by online recommendation systems ("people who viewed/purchased/listened to this movie/item/tune also ...") is that the data set is continuously updated with new entries (e.g., new items for sale at Amazon, new movies to view at Netflix, new clips at YouTube, new music at Spotify or Pandora). Because of the continuous update, the "training data" would be rendered obsolete in a relatively short time especially in areas like books and movies, where new best-sellers or hit movies/music are published/released continuously. Therefore, one cannot really talk of a "training phase". Lazy classifiers are most useful for large, continuously changing datasets with few attributes that are commonly queried. Specifically, even if a large set of attributes exist - for example, books have a year of publication, author/s, publisher, title, edition, ISBN, selling price, etc. - recommendation queries rely on far fewer attributes - e.g., purchase or viewing co-occurrence data, and user ratings of items purchased/viewed. == Advantages == The main advantage gained in employing a lazy learning method is that the target function will be approximated locally, such as in the k-nearest neighbor algorithm. Because the target function is approximated locally for each query to the system, lazy learning systems can simultaneously solve multiple problems and deal successfully with changes in the problem domain. At the same time they can reuse a lot of theoretical and applied results from linear regression modelling (notably PRESS statistic) and control. It is said that the advantage of this system is achieved if the predictions using a single training set are only developed for few objects. This can be demonstrated in the case of the k-NN technique, which is instance-based and function is only estimated locally. == Disadvantages == Theoretical disadvantages with lazy learning include: The large space requirement to store the entire training dataset. In practice, this is not an issue because of advances in hardware and the relatively small number of attributes (e.g., as co-occurrence frequency) that need to be stored. Particularly noisy training data increases the case base unnecessarily, because no abstraction is made during the training phase. In practice, as stated earlier, lazy learning is applied to situations where any learning performed in advance soon becomes obsolete because of changes in the data. Also, for the problems for which lazy learning is optimal, "noisy" data does not really occur - the purchaser of a book has either bought another book or hasn't. Lazy learning methods are usually slower to evaluate. In practice, for very large databases with high concurrency loads, the queries are not postponed until actual query time, but recomputed in advance on a periodic basis - e.g., nightly, in anticipation of future queries, and the answers stored. This way, the next time new queries are asked about existing entries in the database, the answers are merely looked up rapidly instead of having to be computed on the fly, which would almost certainly bring a high-concurrency multi-user system to its knees. Larger training data also entail increased cost. Particularly, there is the fixed amount of computational cost, where a processor can only process a limited amount of training data points. There are standard techniques to improve re-computation efficiency so that a particular answer is not recomputed unless the data that impact this answer has changed (e.g., new items, new purchases, new views). In other words, the stored answers are updated incrementally. This approach, used by large e-commerce or media sites, has long been used in the Entrez portal of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to precompute similarities between the different items in its large datasets: biological sequences, 3-D protein structures, published-article abstracts, etc. Because "find similar" queries are asked so frequently, the NCBI uses highly parallel hardware to perform nightly recomputation. The recomputation is performed only for new entries in the datasets against each other and against existing entries: the similarity between two existing entries need not be recomputed. == Examples of Lazy Learning Methods == K-nearest neighbors, which is a special case of instance-based learning. Local regression. Lazy naive Bayes rules, which are extensively used in commercial spam detection software. Here, the spammers keep getting smarter and revising their spamming strategies, and therefore the learning rules must also be continually updated.

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  Qloo

  Qloo (pronounced "clue") is a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to understand taste and cultural correlations. It provides companies with an application programming interface (API). It received funding from Leonardo DiCaprio, Elton John, Barry Sternlicht, Pierre Lagrange and others. Qloo establishes consumer preference correlations via machine learning across data spanning cultural domains including music, film, television, dining, nightlife, fashion, books, and travel. The recommender system uses AI to predict correlations for further applications. == History == Qloo was founded in 2012 by chief executive officer Alex Elias and chief operating officer Jay Alger. Qloo initially launched an app designed for consumers, allowing them to understand their own tastes and receive personalized recommendations. The company amassed several million users and built a large catalog of cultural entities and corresponding user sentiment. In 2012, Qloo raised $1.4 million in seed funding from investors including Cedric the Entertainer, and venture capital firm Kindler Capital. Qloo had a public beta release in November 2012 after its initial funding. In 2013, the company raised an additional $1.6 million from Cross Creek Pictures founding partner Tommy Thompson, and Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury, founders of Maktoob, an Internet services company purchased by Yahoo! for $164 million in 2009. On November 14, 2013, a website and an iPhone app were announced. The company later released an Android app, and tablet versions, in mid-2014. In 2015, Twitter approached Qloo about powering personalized social feeds and targeted eCommerce ads on the platform based on what users were posting. Qloo developed an enterprise-grade API to support Twitter’s needs. Twitter ended up pivoting to enable brands to use the social platform for customer service and support, but Qloo was able to sell access to its cultural intelligence via API to many other enterprise clients, marking the official transition from a B2C company to a B2B company. In 2016, Qloo secured $4.5 million in venture capital investment. The $4.5 million was split between a number of investors, including Barry Sternlicht, Pierre Lagrange, and Leonardo DiCaprio. In July 2017, Qloo raised $6.5 million in funding rounds from AXA Strategic Ventures, and Elton John. Following the investment, the founders stated in an interview with Tech Crunch that they would use the investment to expand Qloo's database. They hoped the move would secure larger contracts with corporate clients. At the time, clients already included Fortune 500 companies such as Twitter, PepsiCo, and BMW. In 2019, the company announced that it had acquired cultural recommendation service TasteDive, with Alex Elias becoming chairman of TasteDive. In September 2019, Qloo was named among the Top 14 Artificial Intelligence APIs by ProgrammableWeb. In 2022, Qloo raised $15M in Series B funding from Eldridge and AXA Venture Partners, enabling the privacy-centric AI leader to expand its team of world-class data scientists, enrich its technology, and build on its sales channels in order to continue to offer premier insights into global consumer taste for Fortune 500 companies across the globe. Qloo was recognized as the "Best Decision Intelligence Company" at the 2023 AI Breakthrough Awards. Also in 2023, the company was awarded a Top Performer Award by SourceForge. As of 2024, Qloo is a three-time Inc. 5000 honoree: No. 360 (2022), No. 344 (2021), No. 187 (2020). Qloo raised $25 million Series C round on February 21, 2024. The round was led by AI Ventures with participation from AXA Venture Partners, Eldridge, and Moderne Ventures, allowing Qloo to address new commercial surface areas for Taste AI, including on-device learning and foundational models leveraging Qloo, as well as introduce self-service platform to make consumer and taste analytics available to small and mid-sized enterprises and individuals. Qloo also announced pursuing opportunistic M&A using its balance sheet along the lines of the TasteDive acquisition completed, which expanded Qloo's first-party data moat and corpus of cultural learning. This latest financing brought the total amount raised since the company's founding in 2012 to over $56 million. == Services and features == Qloo calls itself a cultural AI platform to provide real-time correlation data across domains of culture and entertainment including: film, music, television, dining, nightlife, fashion, books, and travel. Each category contains subcategories. Qloo’s knowledge of a user's taste in one category can be utilized to offer suggestions in other categories. Users then rate the suggestions, providing it with feedback for future suggestions. Qloo has partnerships with companies such as Expedia and iTunes. == Technology == Qloo’s Taste AI technology uses machine learning to decode and predict consumers’ interests, maintaining user anonymity. It is powered by 3.7 billion lifestyle entities (brands, music, film, TV, dining, nightlife, fashion, books, travel, and more) and trillions of anonymized consumer behavioral signals. Through AI, Qloo identifies patterns in these data signals, making predictions about how much interest a person or group has in a concept or thing. Central to Qloo’s technology are algorithms designed to detect and mitigate biases within datasets and models, allowing Qloo to assess the fairness of its AI systems with a focus on attributes such as age, gender, and race, enabling the company to fine-tune its AI models to align with their ethical standards. They also use visualization tools to probe the behavior of their AI models for conducting counterfactual analyses and for comparing the performances of the AI models across diverse demographic segments. Qloo’s Taste AI doesn’t collect or use any Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Instead, it derives recommendations for audience segments based on co-occurrences between lifestyle entities and anonymized behavioral signals. == Applications == Starbucks uses Qloo to create in-store music playlists tailored to specific neighborhoods. Hershey’s uses Qloo to customize the content of assorted candy bags. Michelin uses Qloo to serve recommendations in its Michelin Guide app. Netflix leverages Qloo’s technology to enhance merchandising by identifying actors who resonate with certain demographics. Qloo also works with PepsiCo, Samsung, The New York Mets, BuzzFeed, and Ticketmaster, Universal Music Group, and OOH advertising company JCDecaux.

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  Resisting AI

  Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence is a book on artificial intelligence (AI) by Dan McQuillan, published in 2022 by Bristol University Press. == Content == Resisting AI takes the form of an extended essay, which contrasts optimistic visions about AI's potential by arguing that AI may best be seen as a continuation and reinforcement of bureaucratic forms of discrimination and violence, ultimately fostering authoritarian outcomes. For McQuillan, AI's promise of objective calculability is antithetical to an egalitarian and just society. McQuillan uses the expression "AI violence" to describe how – based on opaque algorithms – various actors can discriminate against categories of people in accessing jobs, loans, medical care, and other benefits. The book suggests that AI has a political resonance with soft eugenic approaches to the valuation of life by modern welfare states, and that AI exhibits eugenic features in its underlying logic, as well as in its technical operations. The parallel is with historical eugenicists achieving saving to the state by sterilizing defectives so the state would not have to care for their offspring. The analysis of McQuillan goes beyond the known critique of AI systems fostering precarious labour markets, addressing "necropolitics", the politics of who is entitled to live, and who to die. Although McQuillan offers a brief history of machine learning at the beginning of the book – with its need for "hidden and undercompensated labour", he is concerned more with the social impacts of AI rather than with its technical aspects. McQuillan sees AI as the continuation of existing bureaucratic systems that already marginalize vulnerable groups – aggravated by the fact that AI systems trained on existing data are likely to reinforce existing discriminations, e.g. in attempting to optimize welfare distribution based on existing data patterns, ultimately creating a system of "self-reinforcing social profiling". In elaborating on the continuation between existing bureaucratic violence and AI, McQuillan connects to Hannah Arendt's concept of the thoughtless bureaucrat in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which now becomes the algorithm that, lacking intent, cannot be accountable, and is thus endowed with an "algorithmic thoughtlessness". McQuillan defends the "fascist" in the title of the work by arguing that while not all AI is fascist, this emerging technology of control may end up being deployed by fascist or authoritarian regimes. For McQuillan, AI can support the diffusion of states of exception, as a technology impossible to properly regulate and a mechanism for multiplying exceptions more widely. An example of a scenario where AI systems of surveillance could bring discrimination to a new high is the initiative to create LGBT-free zones in Poland. Skeptical of ethical regulations to control the technology, McQuillan suggests people's councils and workers' councils, and other forms of citizens' agency to resist AI. A chapter titled "Post-Machine Learning" makes an appeal for resistance via currents of thought from feminist science (standpoint theory), post-normal science (extended peer communities), and new materialism; McQuillan encourages the reader to question the meaning of "objectivity" and calls for the necessity of alternative ways of knowing. Among the virtuous examples of resistance – possibly to be adopted by the AI workers themselves – McQuillan notes the Lucas Plan of the workers of Lucas Aerospace Corporation, in which a workforce declared redundant took control, reorienting the enterprise toward useful products. McQuillan advocates for what he calls decomputing, an opposition to the sweeping application and expansion of artificial intelligence. Similar to degrowth, the approach criticizes AI as an outgrowth of the systemic issues within capitalist systems. McQuillan argues that a different future is possible, in which distance between people is reduced rather than increased through AI intermediaries. The work of McQuillan warns against "watered-down forms of engagement" with AI, such as citizen juries, which superficially look like democratic deliberation but may actually obscure important decisions about AI that are outside the purview of the engagement situation (McQuillan 2022, 128). In an interview about the book, McQuillan describes himself as an "AI abolitionist". == Reception == The book has been praised for how it "masterfully disassembles AI as an epistemological, social, and political paradigm". On the critical side, a review in the academic journal Justice, Power and Resistance took exception to the "nightmarish visions of Big Brother" offered by McQuillan, and argued that while many elements of AI may pose concern, a critique should not be based on a caricature of what AI is, concluding that McQuillan's work is "less of a theory and more of a Manifesto". Another review notes "a disconnect between the technical aspects of AI and the socio-political analysis McQuillan provides." Although the book was published before the ChatGPT and large language model debate heated up, the book has not lost relevance to the AI discussion. It is noted for suggesting a link between beliefs in artificial intelligence and beliefs in a racialised and gendered visions of intelligence overall, whereby a certain type of rational, measurable intelligence is privileged, leading to "historical notions of hierarchies of being". The blog Reboot praised McQuillan for offering a theory of harm of AI (why AI could end up hurting people and society) that does not just encourage tackling in isolation specific predicted problems with AI-centric systems: bias, non-inclusiveness, exploitativeness, environmental destructiveness, opacity, and non-contestability. For educational policies could also look at AI following the reading of McQuillan: In his book Resisting AI, Dan McQuillan argues that "When we're thinking about the actuality of AI, we can't separate the calculations in the code from the social context of its application" .... McQuillan's particular concern is how many contemporary applications of AI are amplifying existing inequalities and injustices as well as deepening social divisions and instabilities. His book makes a powerful case for anticipating these effects and actively resisting them for the good of societies. Videos and podcasts with an interest in AI and emerging technology have discussed the book.

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  AZFinText

  Arizona Financial Text System (AZFinText) is a textual-based quantitative financial prediction system written by Robert P. Schumaker of University of Texas at Tyler and Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona. == System == This system differs from other systems in that it uses financial text as one of its key means of predicting stock price movement. This reduces the information lag-time problem evident in many similar systems where new information must be transcribed (e.g., such as losing a costly court battle or having a product recall), before the quant can react appropriately. AZFinText overcomes these limitations by utilizing the terms used in financial news articles to predict future stock prices twenty minutes after the news article has been released. It is believed that certain article terms can move stocks more than others. Terms such as factory exploded or workers strike will have a depressing effect on stock prices whereas terms such as earnings rose will tend to increase stock prices. The AZFinText system analyzes financial news to identify the patterns in how investors react to such specific information. It uses methods like sentiment analysis and term weighting to examine the text of news articles. This system is designed to find price differences that occur when the market responds to news stories. This approach provides an alternative and easier method for predicting stock market movements. == Overview of research == The foundation of AZFinText can be found in the ACM TOIS article. Within this paper, the authors tested several different prediction models and linguistic textual representations. From this work, it was found that using the article terms and the price of the stock at the time the article was released was the most effective model and using proper nouns was the most effective textual representation technique. Combining the two, AZFinText netted a 2.84% trading return over the five-week study period. AZFinText was then extended to study what combination of peer organizations help to best train the system. Using the premise that IBM has more in common with Microsoft than GM, AZFinText studied the effect of varying peer-based training sets. To do this, AZFinText trained on the various levels of GICS and evaluated the results. It was found that sector-based training was most effective, netting an 8.50% trading return, outperforming Jim Cramer, Jim Jubak and DayTraders.com during the study period. AZFinText was also compared against the top 10 quantitative systems and outperformed 6 of them. A third study investigated the role of portfolio building in a textual financial prediction system. From this study, Momentum and Contrarian stock portfolios were created and tested. Using the premise that past winning stocks will continue to win and past losing stocks will continue to lose, AZFinText netted a 20.79% return during the study period. It was also noted that traders were generally overreacting to news events, creating the opportunity of abnormal returns. A fourth study looked into using author sentiment as an added predictive variable. Using the premise that an author can unwittingly influence market trades simply by the terms they use, AZFinText was tested using tone and polarity features. It was found that Contrarian activity was occurring within the market, where articles of a positive tone would decrease in price and articles of a negative tone would increase in price. A further study investigated what article verbs have the most influence on stock price movement. From this work, it was found that planted, announcing, front, smaller and crude had the highest positive impact on stock price. == Notable publicity == AZFinText has been the topic of discussion by numerous media outlets. Some of the more notable ones include The Wall Street Journal, MIT's Technology Review, Dow Jones Newswire, WBIR in Knoxville, TN, Slashdot and other media outlets.

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  Socially assistive robot

  A socially assistive robot (SAR) aids users through social engagement and support rather than through physical tasks and interactions. == Background == The field of socially assistive robotics emerged in the early 2000s, following the emergence of the field of social robots. In contrast to social robots, SARs aid users with specific goals related to behavior change rather than serving as purely social entities. The term "Socially assistive robot" was initially defined by Maja Matarić and David Feil-Seifer in 2005. Since its inception, the field has gained substantial recognition, featuring numerous research projects, a wealth of global research publications, startup companies, and a growing array of products on the consumer market. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the immense potential of socially assistive robots, particularly in addressing the needs of large user populations, including children engaged in remote learning, elderly individuals grappling with loneliness, and those affected by social isolation and its associated negative consequences. == Characteristics of interaction == SARs rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to generate real-time, responsive, natural, and meaningful robot behaviors during interactions with humans. The robots employ various forms of communication, such as facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and speech. In contrast to robots intended for physical tasks, SARs are designed to support and motivate users to perform their own tasks. The tasks a user engages in can be physical (e.g., rehabilitation exercises for post-stroke users), cognitive (e.g., dementia screening for elderly users), or social (e.g., turn-taking for users with autism spectrum disorders). This complex interaction involves detecting and interpreting the user's movement, behavior, intent, goals, speech, and preferences. Machine learning and robot learning techniques are frequently employed to enhance the robot's understanding of the user, predict user preferences, and provide effective assistance. The effectiveness of socially assistive robots is assessed based on objective measurements of user performance and improvement resulting from the robot’s assistance and support. Unlike other branches of robotics, where effectiveness depends on the robot's physical task completion, SAR measures the success of the robot based on the user's progress and achievements. This evaluation is carried out using quantitative objective metrics, such as time spent on tasks, accuracy, retention, and verbalization, as well as quantitative subjective metrics, such as user survey tools. SAR is based on the large body of evidence showing that users tend to respond more positively to interactions with physical robots compared to interactions with screens. Interaction with physical robots also encourages users to learn and retain more information than screen-based interactions. This fundamental insight underlines why physical robots in SAR applications are more effective, as opposed to interactions solely involving screens, tablets, or computers. == Uses and applications == SARs have been developed and validated in a wide array of applications, including healthcare, elder care, education, and training. For example, SARs have been developed to support children on the autism spectrum in acquiring and practicing social and cognitive skills, to motivate and coach stroke patients throughout their rehabilitation exercises, monitoring individuals health (ex. fall detection), and to encourage elderly users to be more physically and socially active. There is a concern that technophobia and lack of trust in robots will pose a barrier to the effectiveness of SARs in older adults.

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  H (company)

  H Company, also known simply as H, is a French artificial intelligence startup which develops "action-oriented" artificial intelligence agents for enterprise automation and productivity. In May 2024, H Company closed a record-setting $220 million seed round, at the time the largest AI raise in Europe. In 2026, H Company released Holo 3, the latest generation of its computer-use AI models. The update marked a major advance in agentic AI, enabling agents to navigate any user interface, interpret screens, and complete complex, multi-step tasks across enterprise systems—much like a human user. This breakthrough positioned H Company at the frontier of computer-use autonomy, accelerating the integration of AI in enterprise workflows. == History == H Company was founded in 2023 in Paris by Laurent Sifre, Charles Kantor, and three DeepMind veterans: Daan Wiestra, Karl Tuyls, Julien Perollat. In May 2024, the firm secured what was then the largest European AI seed round, totaling $220 million led by US investors including Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO), Amazon, and backed by Accel, Bpifrance, UiPath, Eurazeo, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault, Samsung and others. In August 2024, three cofounders (Wiestra, Tuyls, Perollat) left the company over operational disagreements. In November 2024, H launched Runner H, its first agentic-API platform, which combined a large language model (LLM) and a reduced, 2-billion parameter vision-language model (VLM). In May 2025, H Company acquired Mithril Security, and in June 2025 the company widened its offering for agentic models. In June 2025, Gautier Cloix (formerly CEO Palantir France) replaced Charles Kantor as CEO of H Company, aiming to pivot the company towards a "forward deployed engineers" model. In July 2025, H Company introduced Surfer-H-CLI, an open-source, web-native Chrome agent designed for browser-based automation—able to search, scroll, click, and type on behalf of users and controllable via any visual language model (VLM). When paired with its June 2025 open-sourced 3B-parameter Holo-1 model, Surfer-H-CLI achieved 92.2% WebVoyager benchmark accuracy. == Activity == H Company creates enterprise AI models and agents (agentic AI) to automate and optimize complex workflows. H Company specifically designs AI agents called computer use capable of autonomously interfacing with any software (local or cloud-based) to detect and automate repetitive operations. H Company is based in Paris, France, with international offices in London and New York. H Company raised $220 million since its inception. Gautier Cloix is president and CEO of the company. H Company client include the French national lottery FDJ United. In March 2026, H Company released Holo3, a family of artificial intelligence models designed to operate digital systems by interacting directly with user interfaces. Holo3 enables agents ("virtual humanoids") to understand what is displayed in front-end environments—such as web pages, desktop applications, and other graphical user interfaces—and perform actions such as clicking, typing, and navigating across them to complete multi-step tasks. On the OSWorld-Verified benchmark, Holo3 reportedly achieved about 78.9%, surpassing the scores of OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on this specific test, at roughly one-tenth of the inference cost of these proprietary systems. The release has been presented as a significant step toward automating routine digital workflows, allowing organizations to offload repetitive on-screen work, such as data entry and reconciliation across multiple tools, to AI-based agents.

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  Instance-based learning

  In machine learning, instance-based learning (sometimes called memory-based learning) is a family of learning algorithms that, instead of performing explicit generalization, compare new problem instances with instances seen in training, which have been stored in memory. Because computation is postponed until a new instance is observed, these algorithms are sometimes referred to as "lazy." It is called instance-based because it constructs hypotheses directly from the training instances themselves. This means that the hypothesis complexity can grow with the data: in the worst case, a hypothesis is a list of n training items and the computational complexity of classifying a single new instance is O(n). One advantage that instance-based learning has over other methods of machine learning is its ability to adapt its model to previously unseen data. Instance-based learners may simply store a new instance or throw an old instance away. Examples of instance-based learning algorithms are the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, kernel machines and RBF networks. These store (a subset of) their training set; when predicting a value/class for a new instance, they compute distances or similarities between this instance and the training instances to make a decision. To battle the memory complexity of storing all training instances, as well as the risk of overfitting to noise in the training set, instance reduction algorithms have been proposed.

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  Egocentric vision

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

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  Pedagogical agent

  A pedagogical agent is a concept borrowed from computer science and artificial intelligence and applied to education, usually as part of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). It is a simulated human-like interface between the learner and the content, in an educational environment. A pedagogical agent is designed to model the type of interactions between a student and another person. Mabanza and de Wet define it as "a character enacted by a computer that interacts with the user in a socially engaging manner". A pedagogical agent can be assigned different roles in the learning environment, such as tutor or co-learner, depending on the desired purpose of the agent. "A tutor agent plays the role of a teacher, while a co-learner agent plays the role of a learning companion". == History == The history of Pedagogical Agents is closely aligned with the history of computer animation. As computer animation progressed, it was adopted by educators to enhance computerized learning by including a lifelike interface between the program and the learner. The first versions of a pedagogical agent were more cartoon than person, like Microsoft's Clippy which helped users of Microsoft Office load and use the program's features in 1997. However, with developments in computer animation, pedagogical agents can now look lifelike. By 2006 there was a call to develop modular, reusable agents to decrease the time and expertise required to create a pedagogical agent. There was also a call in 2009 to enact agent standards. The standardization and re-usability of pedagogical agents is less of an issue since the decrease in cost and widespread availability of animation tools. Individualized pedagogical agents can be found across disciplines including medicine, math, law, language learning, automotive, and armed forces. They are used in applications directed to every age, from preschool to adult. == Learning theories related to pedagogical agent design == === Distributed cognition theory === Distributed cognition theory is the method in which cognition progresses in the context of collaboration with others. Pedagogical agents can be designed to assist the cognitive transfer to the learner, operating as artifacts or partners with collaborative role in learning. To support the performance of an action by the user, the pedagogical agent can act as a cognitive tool as long as the agent is equipped with the knowledge that the user lacks. The interactions between the user and the pedagogical agent can facilitate a social relationship. The pedagogical agent may fulfill the role of a working partner. === Socio-cultural learning theory === Socio-cultural learning theory is how the user develops when they are involved in learning activities in which there is interaction with other agents. A pedagogical agent can: intervene when the user requests, provide support for tasks that the user cannot address, and potentially extend the learners cognitive reach. Interaction with the pedagogical agent may elicit a variety of emotions from the learner. The learner may become excited, confused, frustrated, and/or discouraged. These emotions affect the learners' motivation. === Extraneous Cognitive Load === Extraneous cognitive load is the extra effort being exerted by an individual's working memory due to the way information is being presented. A pedagogical agent can increase the user's cognitive load by distracting them and becoming the focus of their attention, causing split attention between the instructional material and the agent. Agents can reduce the perceived cognitive load by providing narration and personalization that can also promote a user's interest and motivation. While research on the reduction of cognitive load from pedagogical agents is minimal, more studies have shown that agents do not increase it. == Effectiveness == It has been suggested by researchers that pedagogical agents may take on different roles in the learning environment. Examples of these roles are: supplanting, scaffolding, coaching, testing, or demonstrating or modelling a procedure. A pedagogical agent as a tutor has not been demonstrated to add any benefit to an educational strategy in equivalent lessons with and without a pedagogical agent. According to Richard Mayer, there is some support in research for pedagogical agent increasing learning, but only as a presenter of social cues. A co-learner pedagogical agent is believed to increase the student's self-efficacy. By pointing out important features of instructional content, a pedagogical agent can fulfill the signaling function, which research on multimedia learning has shown to enhance learning. Research has demonstrated that human-human interaction may not be completely replaced by pedagogical agents, but learners may prefer the agents to non-agent multimedia systems. This finding is supported by social agency theory. Much like the varying effectiveness of the pedagogical agent roles in the learning environment, agents that take into account the user's affect have had mixed results. Research has shown pedagogical agents that make use of the users’ affect have been found to increase user knowledge retention, motivation, and perceived self-efficacy. However, with such a broad range of modalities in affective expressions, it is often difficult to utilize them. Additionally, having agents detect a user's affective state with precision remains challenging, as displays of affect are different across individuals. == Design == === Attractiveness === The appearance of a pedagogical agent can be manipulated to meet the learning requirements. The attractiveness of a pedagogical agent can enhance student's learning when the users were the opposite gender of the pedagogical agent. Male students prefer a sexy appearance of a female pedagogical agents and dislike the sexy appearance of male agents. Female students were not attracted by the sexy appearance of either male or female pedagogical agents. === Affective Response === Pedagogical agents have reached a point where they can convey and elicit emotion, but also reason about and respond to it. These agents are often designed to elicit and respond to affective actions from users through various modalities such as speech, facial expressions, and body gestures. They respond to the affective state of the given user, and make use of these modalities using a wide array of sensors incorporated into the design of the agent. Specifically in education and training applications, pedagogical agents are often designed to increasingly recognize when users or learners exhibit frustration, boredom, confusion, and states of flow. The added recognition in these agents is a step toward making them more emotionally intelligent, comforting and motivating the users as they interact. === Digital Representation === The design of a pedagogical agent often begins with its digital representation, whether it will be 2D or 3D and static or animated. Several studies have developed pedagogical agents that were both static and animated, then evaluated the relative benefits. Similar to other design considerations, the improved learning from static or animated agents remains questionable. One study showed that the appearance of an agent portrayed using a static image can impact a user's recall, based on the visual appearance. Other research found results that suggest static agent images improve learning outcomes. However, several other studies found user's learned more when the pedagogical agent was animated rather than static. Recently a meta-analysis of such research found a negligible improvement in learning via pedagogical agents, suggesting more work needs to be done in the area to support any claims.

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  Statistical relational learning

  Statistical relational learning (SRL) is a subdiscipline of artificial intelligence and machine learning that is concerned with domain models that exhibit both uncertainty (which can be dealt with using statistical methods) and complex, relational structure. Typically, the knowledge representation formalisms developed in SRL use (a subset of) first-order logic to describe relational properties of a domain in a general manner (universal quantification) and draw upon probabilistic graphical models (such as Bayesian networks or Markov networks) to model the uncertainty; some also build upon the methods of inductive logic programming. Significant contributions to the field have been made since the late 1990s. As is evident from the characterization above, the field is not strictly limited to learning aspects; it is equally concerned with reasoning (specifically probabilistic inference) and knowledge representation. Therefore, alternative terms that reflect the main foci of the field include statistical relational learning and reasoning (emphasizing the importance of reasoning) and first-order probabilistic languages (emphasizing the key properties of the languages with which models are represented). Another term that is sometimes used in the literature is relational machine learning (RML). == Canonical tasks == A number of canonical tasks are associated with statistical relational learning, the most common ones being. collective classification, i.e. the (simultaneous) prediction of the class of several objects given objects' attributes and their relations link prediction, i.e. predicting whether or not two or more objects are related link-based clustering, i.e. the grouping of similar objects, where similarity is determined according to the links of an object, and the related task of collaborative filtering, i.e. the filtering for information that is relevant to an entity (where a piece of information is considered relevant to an entity if it is known to be relevant to a similar entity) social network modelling object identification/entity resolution/record linkage, i.e. the identification of equivalent entries in two or more separate databases/datasets == Representation formalisms == One of the fundamental design goals of the representation formalisms developed in SRL is to abstract away from concrete entities and to represent instead general principles that are intended to be universally applicable. Since there are countless ways in which such principles can be represented, many representation formalisms have been proposed in recent years. In the following, some of the more common ones are listed in alphabetical order: Bayesian logic program BLOG model Markov logic networks Multi-entity Bayesian network Probabilistic logic programs Probabilistic relational model – a Probabilistic Relational Model (PRM) is the counterpart of a Bayesian network in statistical relational learning. Probabilistic soft logic Recursive random field Relational Bayesian network Relational dependency network Relational Markov network Relational Kalman filtering

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