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  • Glossary of machine vision

    Glossary of machine vision

    The following are common definitions related to the machine vision field. General related fields Machine vision Computer vision Image processing Signal processing == 0-9 == 1394. FireWire is Apple Inc.'s brand name for the IEEE 1394 interface. It is also known as i.Link (Sony's name) or IEEE 1394 (although the 1394 standard also defines a backplane interface). It is a personal computer (and digital audio/digital video) serial bus interface standard, offering high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data services. 1D. One-dimensional. 2D computer graphics. The computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models (such as 2D geometric models, text, and digital images) and by techniques specific to them. 3D computer graphics. 3D computer graphics are different from 2D computer graphics in that a three-dimensional representation of geometric data is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images. Such images may be for later display or for real-time viewing. Despite these differences, 3D computer graphics rely on many of the same algorithms as 2D computer vector graphics in the wire frame model and 2D computer raster graphics in the final rendered display. In computer graphics software, the distinction between 2D and 3D is occasionally blurred; 2D applications may use 3D techniques to achieve effects such as lighting, and primarily 3D may use 2D rendering techniques. 3D scanner. This is a device that analyzes a real-world object or environment to collect data on its shape and possibly color. The collected data can then be used to construct digital, three dimensional models useful for a wide variety of applications. == A == Aberration. Optically, defocus refers to a translation along the optical axis away from the plane or surface of best focus. In general, defocus reduces the sharpness and contrast of the image. What should be sharp, high-contrast edges in a scene become gradual transitions. Algebraic distance or algebraic error. The algebraic distance from a point xi to a curve or surface defined by f ( x , β ) = 0 {\displaystyle f(x,\beta )=0} is the value of f ( x i , β ) {\displaystyle f(x_{i},\beta )} , i.e. the residual in the least squares problem with data point (xi, 0) and model function f. This term is mainly used in computer vision.[1][2] Aperture. In context of photography or machine vision, aperture refers to the diameter of the aperture stop of a photographic lens. The aperture stop can be adjusted to control the amount of light reaching the film or image sensor. aspect ratio (image). The aspect ratio of an image is its displayed width divided by its height (usually expressed as "x:y"). Angular resolution. Describes the resolving power of any image forming device such as an optical or radio telescope, a microscope, a camera, or an eye. Automated optical inspection. == B == Barcode. A barcode (also bar code) is a machine-readable representation of information in a visual format on a surface. Blob discovery. Inspecting an image for discrete blobs of connected pixels (e.g. a black hole in a grey object) as image landmarks. These blobs frequently represent optical targets for machining, robotic capture, or manufacturing failure. Bitmap. A raster graphics image, digital image, or bitmap, is a data file or structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, on a computer monitor, paper, or other display device. == C == Camera. A camera is a device used to take pictures, either singly or in sequence. A camera that takes pictures singly is sometimes called a photo camera to distinguish it from a video camera. Camera Link. Camera Link is a serial communication protocol designed for computer vision applications based on the National Semiconductor interface Channel-link. It was designed for the purpose of standardizing scientific and industrial video products including cameras, cables and frame grabbers. The standard is maintained and administered by the Automated Imaging Association, or AIA, the global machine vision industry's trade group. Charge-coupled device. A charge-coupled device (CCD) is a sensor for recording images, consisting of an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. CCD sensors and cameras tend to be more sensitive, less noisy, and more expensive than CMOS sensors and cameras. CIE 1931 Color Space. In the study of the perception of color, one of the first mathematically defined color spaces was the CIE XYZ color space (also known as CIE 1931 color space), created by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in 1931. CMOS. CMOS ("see-moss")stands for complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, is a major class of integrated circuits. CMOS imaging sensors for machine vision are cheaper than CCD sensors but more noisy. CoaXPress. CoaXPress (CXP) is an asymmetric high speed serial communication standard over coaxial cable. CoaXPress combines high speed image data, low speed camera control and power over a single coaxial cable. The standard is maintained by JIIA, the Japan Industrial Imaging Association. Color. The perception of the frequency (or wavelength) of light, and can be compared to how pitch (or a musical note) is the perception of the frequency or wavelength of sound. Color blindness. Also known as color vision deficiency, in humans is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish Color temperature. "White light" is commonly described by its color temperature. A traditional incandescent light source's color temperature is determined by comparing its hue with a theoretical, heated black-body radiator. The lamp's color temperature is the temperature in kelvins at which the heated black-body radiator matches the hue of the lamp. Color vision. CV is the capacity of an organism or machine to distinguish objects based on the wavelengths (or frequencies) of the light they reflect or emit. computer vision. The study and application of methods which allow computers to "understand" image content. Contrast. In visual perception, contrast is the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background. C-Mount. Standardized adapter for optical lenses on CCD - cameras. C-Mount lenses have a back focal distance 17.5 mm vs. 12.5 mm for "CS-mount" lenses. A C-Mount lens can be used on a CS-Mount camera through the use of a 5 mm extension adapter. C-mount is a 1" diameter, 32 threads per inch mounting thread (1"-32UN-2A.) CS-Mount. Same as C-Mount but the focal point is 5 mm shorter. A CS-Mount lens will not work on a C-Mount camera. CS-mount is a 1" diameter, 32 threads per inch mounting thread. == D == Data matrix. A two dimensional Barcode. Depth of field. In optics, particularly photography and machine vision, the depth of field (DOF) is the distance in front of and behind the subject which appears to be in focus. Depth perception. DP is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions. It is a trait common to many higher animals. Depth perception allows the beholder to accurately gauge the distance to an object. Diaphragm. In optics, a diaphragm is a thin opaque structure with an opening (aperture) at its centre. The role of the diaphragm is to stop the passage of light, except for the light passing through the aperture. == E == Edge detection. ED marks the points in a digital image at which the luminous intensity changes sharply. It also marks the points of luminous intensity changes of an object or spatial-taxon silhouette. Electromagnetic interference. Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is electromagnetic radiation which is emitted by electrical circuits carrying rapidly changing signals, as a by-product of their normal operation, and which causes unwanted signals (interference or noise) to be induced in other circuits. == F == FireWire. FireWire (also known as i. Link or IEEE 1394) is a personal computer (and digital audio/video) serial bus interface standard, offering high-speed communications. It is often used as an interface for industrial cameras. Fixed-pattern noise. Flat-field correction. Frame grabber. An electronic device that captures individual, digital still frames from an analog video signal or a digital video stream. Fringe Projection Technique. 3D data acquisition technique employing projector displaying fringe pattern on a surface of measured piece, and one or more cameras recording image(s). Field of view. The field of view (FOV) is the part which can be seen by the machine vision system at one moment. The field of view depends from the lens of the system and from the working distance between object and camera. Focus. An image, or image point or region, is said to be in focus if light from object points is converged about as well as possible in the image; conversely, it is out of focus if light is not w

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  • Is an AI Pair Programmer Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Pair Programmer Worth It in 2026?

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

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  • AI Text-to-video Tools: Free vs Paid (2026)

    AI Text-to-video Tools: Free vs Paid (2026)

    Curious about the best AI text-to-video tool? An AI text-to-video tool is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI text-to-video tool slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  • Best Conversational AI Platforms in 2026

    Best Conversational AI Platforms in 2026

    Looking for the best conversational AI platform? An conversational AI platform is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it can save you hours every week by automating repetitive work. Most options offer a generous free tier, with paid plans unlocking higher limits, faster processing, and team features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right conversational AI platform slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  • NCover

    NCover

    NCover is a .NET code coverage tool. There are two non-related NCover products that do .NET code coverage. There is an open source NCover that can be found on SourceForge and there is a company called NCover, LLC. There has been additional development on both products since this 2004 reference. The company NCover, LLC began when the founder, Peter Waldschmidt, decided to commercialize the open source tool he created. The commercial versions were launched in 2007, but the last supported free version 1.5.8 is still available on the company site.

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  • How to Choose an AI Subtitle Generator

    How to Choose an AI Subtitle Generator

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

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  • Is an AI Chatbot Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Chatbot Worth It in 2026?

    Curious about the best AI chatbot? An AI chatbot is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI chatbot slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  • Synchronous context-free grammar

    Synchronous context-free grammar

    Synchronous context-free grammars (SynCFG or SCFG; not to be confused with stochastic CFGs) are a type of formal grammar designed for use in transfer-based machine translation. Rules in these grammars apply to two languages at the same time, capturing grammatical structures that are each other's translations. The theory of SynCFGs borrows from syntax-directed transduction and syntax-based machine translation, modeling the reordering of clauses that occurs when translating a sentence by correspondences between phrase-structure rules in the source and target languages. Performance of SCFG-based MT systems has been found comparable with, or even better than, state-of-the-art phrase-based machine translation systems. Several algorithms exist to perform translation using SynCFGs. == Formalism == Rules in a SynCFG are superficially similar to CFG rules, except that they specify the structure of two phrases at the same time; one in the source language (the language being translated) and one in the target language. Numeric indices indicate correspondences between non-terminals in both constituent trees. Chiang gives the Chinese/English example: X → (yu X1 you X2, have X2 with X1) This rule indicates that an X phrase can be formed in Chinese with the structure "yu X1 you X2", where X1 and X2 are variables standing in for subphrases; and that the corresponding structure in English is "have X2 with X1" where X1 and X2 are independently translated to English. == Software == cdec, MT decoding package that supports SynCFGs Joshua, a machine translation decoding system written in Java

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  • Microscope image processing

    Microscope image processing

    Microscope image processing is a broad term that covers the use of digital image processing techniques to process, analyze and present images obtained from a microscope. Such processing is now commonplace in a number of diverse fields such as medicine, biological research, cancer research, drug testing, metallurgy, etc. A number of manufacturers of microscopes now specifically design in features that allow the microscopes to interface to an image processing system. == Image acquisition == Until the early 1990s, most image acquisition in video microscopy applications was typically done with an analog video camera, often simply closed circuit TV cameras. While this required the use of a frame grabber to digitize the images, video cameras provided images at full video frame rate (25-30 frames per second) allowing live video recording and processing. While the advent of solid state detectors yielded several advantages, the real-time video camera was actually superior in many respects. Today, acquisition is usually done using a CCD camera mounted in the optical path of the microscope. The camera may be full colour or monochrome. Very often, very high resolution cameras are employed to gain as much direct information as possible. Cryogenic cooling is also common, to minimise noise. Often digital cameras used for this application provide pixel intensity data to a resolution of 12-16 bits, much higher than is used in consumer imaging products. Ironically, in recent years, much effort has been put into acquiring data at video rates, or higher (25-30 frames per second or higher). What was once easy with off-the-shelf video cameras now requires special, high speed electronics to handle the vast digital data bandwidth. Higher speed acquisition allows dynamic processes to be observed in real time, or stored for later playback and analysis. Combined with the high image resolution, this approach can generate vast quantities of raw data, which can be a challenge to deal with, even with a modern computer system. While current CCD detectors allow very high image resolution, often this involves a trade-off because, for a given chip size, as the pixel count increases, the pixel size decreases. As the pixels get smaller, their well depth decreases, reducing the number of electrons that can be stored. In turn, this results in a poorer signal-to-noise ratio. For best results, one must select an appropriate sensor for a given application. Because microscope images have an intrinsic limiting resolution, it often makes little sense to use a noisy, high resolution detector for image acquisition. A more modest detector, with larger pixels, can often produce much higher quality images because of reduced noise. This is especially important in low-light applications such as fluorescence microscopy. Moreover, one must also consider the temporal resolution requirements of the application. A lower resolution detector will often have a significantly higher acquisition rate, permitting the observation of faster events. Conversely, if the observed object is motionless, one may wish to acquire images at the highest possible spatial resolution without regard to the time required to acquire a single image. == 2D image techniques == Image processing for microscopy application begins with fundamental techniques intended to most accurately reproduce the information contained in the microscopic sample. This might include adjusting the brightness and contrast of the image, averaging images to reduce image noise and correcting for illumination non-uniformities. Such processing involves only basic arithmetic operations between images (i.e. addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). The vast majority of processing done on microscope image is of this nature. Another class of common 2D operations called image convolution are often used to reduce or enhance image details. Such "blurring" and "sharpening" algorithms in most programs work by altering a pixel's value based on a weighted sum of that and the surrounding pixels (a more detailed description of kernel based convolution deserves an entry for itself) or by altering the frequency domain function of the image using Fourier Transform. Most image processing techniques are performed in the Frequency domain. Other basic two dimensional techniques include operations such as image rotation, warping, color balancing etc. At times, advanced techniques are employed with the goal of "undoing" the distortion of the optical path of the microscope, thus eliminating distortions and blurring caused by the instrumentation. This process is called deconvolution, and a variety of algorithms have been developed, some of great mathematical complexity. The end result is an image far sharper and clearer than could be obtained in the optical domain alone. This is typically a 3-dimensional operation, that analyzes a volumetric image (i.e. images taken at a variety of focal planes through the sample) and uses this data to reconstruct a more accurate 3-dimensional image. == 3D image techniques == Another common requirement is to take a series of images at a fixed position, but at different focal depths. Since most microscopic samples are essentially transparent, and the depth of field of the focused sample is exceptionally narrow, it is possible to capture images "through" a three-dimensional object using 2D equipment like confocal microscopes. Software is then able to reconstruct a 3D model of the original sample which may be manipulated appropriately. The processing turns a 2D instrument into a 3D instrument, which would not otherwise exist. In recent times this technique has led to a number of scientific discoveries in cell biology. == Analysis == Analysis of images will vary considerably according to application. Typical analysis includes determining where the edges of an object are, counting similar objects, calculating the area, perimeter length and other useful measurements of each object. A common approach is to create an image mask which only includes pixels that match certain criteria, then perform simpler scanning operations on the resulting mask. It is also possible to label objects and track their motion over a series of frames in a video sequence.

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  • Law and Corpus Linguistics

    Law and Corpus Linguistics

    Law and corpus linguistics (LCL) is an academic sub-discipline that uses large databases of examples of language usage equipped with tools designed by linguists called corpora to better get at the meaning of words and phrases in legal texts (statutes, constitutions, contracts, etc.). Thus, LCL is the application of corpus linguistic tools, theories, and methodologies to issues of legal interpretation in much the same way law and economics is the application of economic tools, theories, and methodologies to various legal issues. == History == A 2005 law review article by Lawrence Solan noted in passing that corpus linguistics had potential for its application to interpreting legal texts. But the first systematic exploration and advocacy of applying the tools and methodologies of corpus linguistics to legal interpretive questions of law and corpus linguistics came in the fall of 2010, when the BYU Law Review published a note by Stephen Mouritsen, entitled The Dictionary is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning. The note argued that dictionaries are the primary linguistic tool used by judges to determine the plain or ordinary meaning of words and phrases, and highlighted the deficiencies of such an approach. In its stead, the note proposed using corpus linguistics. And the note would be later cited by Adam Liptak in a New York Times article on statutory construction. Law and corpus linguistics (LCL) gained greater legitimacy in July 2011 with the first judicial opinion in American history utilizing corpus linguistics to determine the meaning of a legal text: In re the Adoption of Baby E.Z. In a concurrence in part and in the judgment, Justice Thomas Lee wrote to put forth an alternative ground for the majority's holding—interpreting the phrase "custody determination" by using corpus linguistics. Justice Lee looked at 500 randomized sample sentences from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and found that the most common sense of "custody" was in the context of divorce rather than adoption. Further, he found that "custody" is ten times more likely to co-occur (or collocate) with "divorce" than with "adoption". From that evidence Justice Lee concluded that he "would find that the custody proceedings covered by the Act are limited to proceedings resulting in the modifiable custody orders of a divorce", rather than the broader range of custody proceedings. Other jurisprudence and scholarship would follow. In a 2015 concurrence in State v. Rasabout, Justice Lee used a COCA search to determine that "discharge" when used with a firearm (or one of its synonyms) overwhelmingly referred to a single shot rather than emptying the entire magazine of the weapon. And in 2016, four of the five justices joined a footnote in a majority opinion by Justice Lee commending a party for using corpus linguistics in its briefing even though the Court found it unnecessary to resolve the related question. Finally, in 2016 the Michigan Supreme Court became the first court to use a linguist-designed corpus in a majority opinion (COCA), with both the majority and the dissent turning to COCA to determine the meaning of the word "information". In 2020, courts desiring to bolster the legal theory of original intent have sought the opportunity to undertake analyses of statutes utilizing corpus linguistics. In a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case, Jones v. Becerra (No. 20-56174), a case involving the Second Amendment and the constitutionality of a California statute which bans the sale of firearms to individuals under the age of 21, a Ninth Circuit panel requested that the parties address three questions: 1) “What is the original public meaning of the Second Amendment phrases: ‘A well regulated Militia’; ‘the right of the people’; and ‘shall not be infringed’? 2) How does the tool of corpus linguistics help inform the determination of the original public meaning of those Second Amendment phrases?” 3) How do the data yielded from corpus linguistics assist in the interpretation of the constitutionality of age-based restrictions under the Second Amendment? As to scholarship, in 2012, Mouritsen followed up his original work with an article in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, where he further refined and promoted the use of corpus-based methods for determining questions of legal ambiguity. Additionally, in 2016 two essays and an article on law and corpus linguistics were published. The Yale Law Journal Forum published Corpus Linguistics & Original Public Meaning: A New Tool to Make Originalism More Empirical. Written by Justice Lee and two co-authors, the essay urged originalists to turn to corpus linguistics to improve the rigor and accuracy of originalist scholarship. And in response, the Forum published an essay by Lawrence Solan (a Brooklyn Law professor with a PhD in linguistics), Can Corpus Linguistics Help Make Originalism Scientific? The Boston University Public Interest Law Journal published The Merciful Corpus: The Rule of Lenity, Ambiguity and Corpus Linguistics by Daniel Ortner. In the article Ortner applied corpus linguistics to determining whether sufficient ambiguity exists to trigger the rule of lenity in five Supreme Court cases. Looking forward, in 2017 two more articles are slated for publication. Lee Strang focuses on corpus linguistics and originalism in the U.C. Davis Law Review, and Lawrence Solan and Tammy Gales explore corpus linguistics in the context of finding ordinary meaning in statutory interpretation in the International Journal of Legal Discourse. Lawyers and journalists have also taken notice of corpus linguistics at it relates to the law. In 2010, Neal Goldfarb filed the first known brief in the Supreme Court using corpus linguistics (COCA) to determine whether the ordinary meaning of "personal" referred to corporations in the case FCC v. AT&T. The amicus brief looked at the top collocates (words that co-occur) of "personal" in COHA as well as BYU's Time Magazine Corpus. And writing for The Atlantic, Ben Zimmer took note of this new trend, referring to corpus linguistics in the courts as "Like Lexis on Steroids". On the academic front, in 2013 BYU Law School started the first class on law and corpus linguistics, co-taught by Mouritsen, Lee, and (now Dean) Gordon Smith. The class is currently in its fourth year. And in February 2016, BYU Law School hosted the inaugural conference on LCL, with over two dozen legal and linguistic scholars from around the country discussing and debating the next steps forward for the growing academic movement. The conference has been held regularly in subsequent years. At the 2016 conference BYU Law School announced its plans and progress on the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA), a corpus that covers 1760–1799 and contains more than 120 million words have been collected from founding era letters, diaries, newspapers, non-fiction books, fiction, sermons, speeches, debates, legal cases, and other legal materials.

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  • Bob Coecke

    Bob Coecke

    Bob Coecke (born 23 July 1968) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and logician. He was Professor of Quantum foundations, Logics, and Structures at Oxford University until 2020. He was Chief Scientist at quantum computing company Quantinuum, until 2025 and founded a startup called Relational Intelligence in 2026. He is also Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He pioneered categorical quantum mechanics (entry 18M40 in Mathematics Subject Classification 2020), Quantum Picturalism, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat model for natural language,, quantum natural language processing (QNLP) and quantum education through the book Quantum in Pictures. He is a founder of the Quantum Physics and Logic community and the Applied Category Theory communities and conference series, and of the journal Compositionality. Coecke is also a composer and musician, who has been called a pioneer of industrial music, and is also one of the pioneers of employing quantum computers in music. == Education and career == Coecke obtained his doctorate in sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1996, and performed postdoctoral work in the Theoretical Physics Group of Imperial College, London in the Category Theory Group of the Mathematics and Statistics Department at McGill University in Montreal, in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics of Cambridge University, and in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, where he became Lecturer in Quantum Computer Science in 2007, and jointly with Samson Abramsky built and headed the Quantum Group. In July 2011, he was nominated professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University, with retroactive effect as of October 2010. He was a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford since 2007, where he now is an Emeritus Fellow. In January 2019, Coecke became Senior Scientific Advisor of Cambridge Quantum Computing, and in January 2021 he resigned from his Professorship at Oxford, to become Chief Scientist of Cambridge Quantum Computing. After the merger of Cambridge Quantum Computing with Honeywell Quantum Systems, he stayed on as Chief Scientist of the joint entity Quantinuum until 2025. In January 2023 he also became Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. == Work == Coecke's research focuses on the foundations of physics, more particularly category theory, logic, and diagrammatic reasoning, with application to quantum informatics, quantum gravity, and NLP. He has pioneered categorical quantum mechanics together with Samson Abramsky, and spearheaded the development of a diagrammatic quantum formalism based on Penrose graphical notation, on which he wrote a textbook entitled Picturing Quantum Processes with Aleks Kissinger. With Ross Duncan he pioneered ZX-calculus. He pioneered the DisCoCat model for natural language, with Stephen Clark and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh. He also pioneered quantum natural language processing (QNLP), with Will Zeng, and colleagues at Cambridge Quantum Computing. == Music == Coecke is also a musician, performing and recording since the eighties. He retrospectively has been named a pioneer of industrial music. His band, Black Tish, "used cutting edge sampling techniques for the time, a host of synth and sound loops and metal-style guitars to create a heavy rock/electronica fusion unlike anything heard before", and "bridge the gap between the pure experimental nature of bands like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten and the (comparatively) more radio accessible Ministry or Nine Inch Nails". Coecke is also one of the pioneers of employing quantum computers in music. == Selected publications == Textbooks Bob Coecke, Aleks Kissinger:Picturing Quantum Processes. A First Course in Quantum Theory and Diagrammatic Reasoning, Cambridge University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1316219317 Bob Coecke, Stefano Gogioso:Quantum in Pictures, Quantinuum, 2022, ISBN 978-1-7392147-1-5 Books (as editor) Bob Coecke, David Moore, Alexander Wilce (eds.): Current Research in Operational Quantum Logic: Algebras, Categories, Languages, Fundamental Theories of Physics, Kluwer Academic, 2010, ISBN 978-9048154371 Bob Coecke (ed.): New Structures for Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 813, Springer, 2011, ISBN 978-3642128202 Articles Bob Coecke: Kindergarten quantum mechanics, arXiv:quant-ph/0510032 Samson Abramsky, Bob Coecke: A categorical semantics of quantum protocols, Proceedings of the 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 2004, pp. 415–425 Bob Coecke, Ross Duncan: Interacting quantum observables, Automata, Languages and Programming, pp. 298–310, 2008 Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Alexis Toumi, Giovanni de Felice, Bob Coecke: Grammar-Aware Question-Answering on Quantum Computers, arXiv:2012.03756 Bob Coecke: The Mathematics of Text Structure, arXiv:1904.03478 Will Zeng, Bob Coecke: Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Natural Language Processing, arXiv:1608.01406 Bob Coecke, Tobias Fritz, Robert Spekkens: A mathematical theory of resources, arXiv:1409.5531 Bob Coecke: An Alternative Gospel of structure: order, composition, processes, arxiv:1307.4038 Bob Coecke, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Steven Clark: Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning, arXiv:1003.4394 Bob Coecke: Quantum Picturalism, arXiv:0908.1787 Software articles Eduardo Reck Miranda, Richie Yeung, Anna Pearson, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Bob Coecke: A quantum natural language processing approach to musical intelligence, arXiv:2111.06741 Dimitri Kartsaklis, Ian Fan, Richie Yeung, Anna Pearson, Robin Lorenz, Alexis Toumi, Giovanni de Felice, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Stephen Clark, Bob Coecke: lambeq: An efficient high-level python library for quantum NLP, arXiv:2110.04236 Giovanni de Felice, Alexis Toumi, Bob Coecke: Discopy: monoidal categories in Python, arXiv:2111.06741

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  • Tamara Broderick

    Tamara Broderick

    Tamara Ann Broderick is an American computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She works on machine learning and Bayesian inference. == Education and early career == Broderick is from Parma Heights, Ohio. She attended Laurel School and graduated in 2003. Whilst at high school she took part in the inaugural Massachusetts Institute of Technology Women's Technology Program. She studied mathematics at Princeton University, earning a bachelor's degree in 2007. She was a Marshall scholar, allowing her to pursue graduate research at the University of Cambridge. She was a runner-up in the Association for Women in Mathematics Alice T. Shafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics. She was co-president of the Princeton Math Club and organised a competition for high school maths teams. She won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for the highest academic average at Princeton University. During her undergraduate degree, Broderick worked on dark matter haloes with Rachel Mandelbaum. Broderick moved to the United Kingdom for her graduate studies, earning a Master of Advanced Studies for completing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge in 2009. Her Master's thesis looked at the Nomon selection method, improving the efficiency of communications. She returned to America in 2009, joining University of California, Berkeley for her Master's and PhD. Her graduate research was supported by the Berkeley Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Fellowship. Her PhD thesis Clusters and features from combinatorial stochastic processes looked at clustering and speeding up the analysis of large, streaming data sets. In 2013 she was selected for the Berkeley EECS Rising Stars conference. == Research and career == Broderick joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in 2015. She is interested in Bayesian statistics and graphical models. She was the recipient of a Google Faculty Research Grant and International Society for Bayesian Analysis Lifetime Members Junior Researcher Award. She was awarded an Army Research Office young investigator program award to investigate machine-learning to quantify uncertainty in data analysis. Broderick is also Alfred P. Sloan Foundation scholar. === Academic service === In 2018, Broderick spoke at the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science Women in Data Science conference. She spoke about Bayesian inference at the 2018 International Conference on Machine Learning. She led a three-day Masterclass on machine learning at University College London in June 2018. Broderick is a scientific advisor for AI.Reverie and WiML (Women in Machine Learning). She has developed a high-school level introduction to machine learning with the Women's Technology Program (WTP). Software she has developed is available on her website. === Awards and honors === Broderick was awarded the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and Citation and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis Savage Award for her doctoral thesis. She was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to scale her machine learning techniques. She was a 2021 Leadership Academy winner of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.

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  • Instance-based learning

    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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  • Katz's back-off model

    Katz's back-off model

    Katz back-off is a generative n-gram language model that estimates the conditional probability of a word given its history in the n-gram. It accomplishes this estimation by backing off through progressively shorter history models under certain conditions. By doing so, the model with the most reliable information about a given history is used to provide the better results. The model was introduced in 1987 by Slava M. Katz. Prior to that, n-gram language models were constructed by training individual models for different n-gram orders using maximum likelihood estimation and then interpolating them together. == Method == The equation for Katz's back-off model is: P b o ( w i ∣ w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 ) = { d w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i C ( w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 w i ) C ( w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 ) if C ( w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i ) > k α w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 P b o ( w i ∣ w i − n + 2 ⋯ w i − 1 ) otherwise {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&P_{bo}(w_{i}\mid w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1})\\[4pt]={}&{\begin{cases}d_{w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i}}{\dfrac {C(w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1}w_{i})}{C(w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1})}}&{\text{if }}C(w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i})>k\\[10pt]\alpha _{w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1}}P_{bo}(w_{i}\mid w_{i-n+2}\cdots w_{i-1})&{\text{otherwise}}\end{cases}}\end{aligned}}} where C(x) = number of times x appears in training wi = ith word in the given context Essentially, this means that if the n-gram has been seen more than k times in training, the conditional probability of a word given its history is proportional to the maximum likelihood estimate of that n-gram. Otherwise, the conditional probability is equal to the back-off conditional probability of the (n − 1)-gram. The more difficult part is determining the values for k, d and α. k {\displaystyle k} is the least important of the parameters. It is usually chosen to be 0. However, empirical testing may find better values for k. d {\displaystyle d} is typically the amount of discounting found by Good–Turing estimation. In other words, if Good–Turing estimates C {\displaystyle C} as C ∗ {\displaystyle C^{}} , then d = C ∗ C {\displaystyle d={\frac {C^{}}{C}}} To compute α {\displaystyle \alpha } , it is useful to first define a quantity β, which is the left-over probability mass for the (n − 1)-gram: β w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 = 1 − ∑ { w i : C ( w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i ) > k } d w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i C ( w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 w i ) C ( w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 ) {\displaystyle \beta _{w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1}}=1-\sum _{\{w_{i}:C(w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i})>k\}}d_{w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i}}{\frac {C(w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1}w_{i})}{C(w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1})}}} Then the back-off weight, α, is computed as follows: α w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 = β w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i − 1 ∑ { w i : C ( w i − n + 1 ⋯ w i ) ≤ k } P b o ( w i ∣ w i − n + 2 ⋯ w i − 1 ) {\displaystyle \alpha _{w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1}}={\frac {\beta _{w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i-1}}}{\sum _{\{w_{i}:C(w_{i-n+1}\cdots w_{i})\leq k\}}P_{bo}(w_{i}\mid w_{i-n+2}\cdots w_{i-1})}}} The above formula only applies if there is data for the "(n − 1)-gram". If not, the algorithm skips n-1 entirely and uses the Katz estimate for n-2. (and so on until an n-gram with data is found) == Discussion == This model generally works well in practice, but fails in some circumstances. For example, suppose that the bigram "a b" and the unigram "c" are very common, but the trigram "a b c" is never seen. Since "a b" and "c" are very common, it may be significant (that is, not due to chance) that "a b c" is never seen. Perhaps it's not allowed by the rules of the grammar. Instead of assigning a more appropriate value of 0, the method will back off to the bigram and estimate P(c | b), which may be too high.

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  • Is an AI Customer-support Bot Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Customer-support Bot Worth It in 2026?

    In search of the best AI customer-support bot? An AI customer-support bot is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI customer-support bot slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.

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