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Object Data Management Group

The Object Data Management Group (ODMG) was conceived in the summer of 1991 at a breakfast with object database vendors that was organized by Rick Cattell of Sun Microsystems. In 1998, the ODMG changed its name from the Object Database Management Group to reflect the expansion of its efforts to include specifications for both object database and object–relational mapping products. The primary goal of the ODMG was to put forward a set of specifications that allowed a developer to write portable applications for object database and object–relational mapping products. In order to do that, the data schema, programming language bindings, and data manipulation and query languages needed to be portable. Between 1993 and 2001, the ODMG published five revisions to its specification. The last revision was ODMG version 3.0, after which the group disbanded. == Major components of the ODMG 3.0 specification == Object Model. This was based on the Object Management Group's Object Model. The OMG core model was designed to be a common denominator for object request brokers, object database systems, object programming languages, etc. The ODMG designed a profile by adding components to the OMG core object model. Object Specification Languages. The ODMG Object Definition Language (ODL) was used to define the object types that conform to the ODMG Object Model. The ODMG Object Interchange Format (OIF) was used to dump and load the current state to or from a file or set of files. Object Query Language (OQL). The ODMG OQL was a declarative (nonprocedural) language for query and updating. It used SQL as a basis, where possible, though OQL supports more powerful object-oriented capabilities. C++ Language Binding. This defined a C++ binding of the ODMG ODL and a C++ Object Manipulation Language (OML). The C++ ODL was expressed as a library that provides classes and functions to implement the concepts defined in the ODMG Object Model. The C++ OML syntax and semantics are those of standard C++ in the context of the standard class library. The C++ binding also provided a mechanism to invoke OQL. Smalltalk Language Binding. This defined the mapping between the ODMG ODL and Smalltalk, which was based on the OMG Smalltalk binding for the OMG Interface Definition Language (IDL). The Smalltalk binding also provided a mechanism to invoke OQL. Java Language Binding. This defined the binding between the ODMG ODL and the Java programming language as defined by the Java 2 Platform. The Java binding also provided a mechanism to invoke OQL. == Status == ODMG 3.0 was published in book form in 2000.[1] By 2001, most of the major object database and object-relational mapping vendors claimed conformance to the ODMG Java Language Binding. Compliance to the other components of the specification was mixed.[2] In 2001, the ODMG Java Language Binding was submitted to the Java Community Process as a basis for the Java Data Objects specification. The ODMG member companies then decided to concentrate their efforts on the Java Data Objects specification. As a result, the ODMG disbanded in 2001. In 2004, the Object Management Group (OMG) was granted the right to revise the ODMG 3.0 specification as an OMG specification by the copyright holder, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. In February 2006, the OMG announced the formation of the Object Database Technology Working Group (ODBT WG) and plans to work on the 4th generation of an object database standard. == ODMG Compliant DBMS == Orient ODBMS: http://www.OrienTechnologies.com Objectivity/DB C++, Java and Smalltalk interfaces.
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General Data Protection Regulation

The General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), abbreviated GDPR, is a European Union regulation on information privacy in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and human rights law, in particular Article 8(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. It also governs the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA. The GDPR's goals are to enhance individuals' control and rights over their personal information and to simplify the regulations for international business. It supersedes the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and, among other things, simplifies the terminology. The European Parliament and Council of the European Union adopted the GDPR on 14 April 2016, to become effective on 25 May 2018. As an EU regulation (instead of a directive), the GDPR has direct legal effect and does not require transposition into national law. However, it also provides flexibility for individual member states to modify (derogate from) some of its provisions. As an example of the Brussels effect, the regulation became a model for many other laws around the world, including in Brazil, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. After leaving the European Union, the United Kingdom enacted its "UK GDPR", identical to the GDPR. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), adopted on 28 June 2018, has many similarities with the GDPR. == Contents == The GDPR 2016 has eleven chapters, concerning general provisions, principles, rights of the data subject, duties of data controllers or processors, transfers of personal data to third-party countries, supervisory authorities, cooperation among member states, remedies, liability or penalties for breach of rights, provisions related to specific processing situations, and miscellaneous final provisions. The GDPR also contains 173 recitals purposed to clarify scope and rationale for the regulatory provisions, as well as its legislative intents – Recital 4, for instance, begins by saying that the processing of personal data should be "designed to serve mankind". === General provisions === The regulation applies if the data controller, or processor, or the data subject (person) is based in the EU. The regulation also applies to organisations based outside the EU if they collect or process personal data of individuals located inside the EU. The regulation does not apply to the processing of data by private persons provided that the purpose has no connection to a professional or commercial activity." (Recital 18). According to the European Commission, "Personal data is information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual. If you cannot directly identify an individual from that information, then you need to consider whether the individual is still identifiable. You should take into account the information you are processing together with all the means reasonably likely to be used by either you or any other person to identify that individual." The precise definitions of terms such as "personal data", "processing", "data subject", "controller", and "processor" are stated in Article 4. The regulation does not purport to apply to the processing of personal data for national security activities or law enforcement of the EU; however, industry groups concerned about facing a potential conflict of laws have questioned whether Article 48 could be invoked to seek to prevent a data controller subject to a third country's laws from complying with a legal order from that country's law enforcement, judicial, or national security authorities to disclose to such authorities the personal data of an EU person, regardless of whether the data resides in or out of the EU. Article 48 states that any judgement of a court or tribunal and any decision of an administrative authority of a third country requiring a controller or processor to transfer or disclose personal data may not be recognised or enforceable in any manner unless based on an international agreement, like a mutual legal assistance treaty in force between the requesting third (non-EU) country and the EU or a member state. The data protection reform package also includes a separate Data Protection Directive for the police and criminal justice sector that provides rules on personal data exchanges at State level, Union level, and international levels. A single set of rules applies to all EU member states. Each member state establishes an independent supervisory authority (SA) to hear and investigate complaints, sanction administrative offences, etc. SAs in each member state co-operate with other SAs, providing mutual assistance and organising joint operations. If a business has multiple establishments in the EU, it must have a single SA as its "lead authority", based on the location of its "main establishment" where the main processing activities take place. The lead authority thus acts as a "one-stop shop" to supervise all the processing activities of that business throughout the EU. A European Data Protection Board (EDPB) co-ordinates the SAs. EDPB thus replaces the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. There are exceptions for data processed in an employment context or in national security that still might be subject to individual country regulations. === Principles and lawful purposes === Article 5 sets out six principles relating to the lawfulness of processing personal data. The first of these specifies that data must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner. Article 6 develops this principle by specifying that personal data may not be processed unless there is at least one legal basis for doing so. The other principles refer to "purpose limitation", "data minimisation", "accuracy", "storage limitation", and "integrity and confidentiality". Article 6 states that the lawful purposes are: (a) If the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data; (b) To fulfill contractual obligations with a data subject, or for tasks at the request of a data subject who is in the process of entering into a contract; (c) To comply with a data controller's legal obligations; (d) To protect the vital interests of a data subject or another individual; (e) To perform a task in the public interest or in official authority; (f) For the legitimate interests of a data controller or a third party, unless these interests are overridden by interests of the data subject or her or his rights according to the Charter of Fundamental Rights (especially in the case of children). If informed consent is used as the lawful basis for processing, consent must have been explicit for data collected and each purpose data is used for. Consent must be a specific, freely given, plainly worded, and unambiguous affirmation given by the data subject; an online form which has consent options structured as an opt-out selected by default is a violation of the GDPR, as the consent is not unambiguously affirmed by the user. In addition, multiple types of processing may not be "bundled" together into a single affirmation prompt, as this is not specific to each use of data, and the individual permissions are not freely given. (Recital 32). Data subjects must be allowed to withdraw this consent at any time, and the process of doing so must not be harder than it was to opt in. A data controller may not refuse service to users who decline consent to processing that is not strictly necessary in order to use the service. Consent for children, defined in the regulation as being less than 16 years old (although with the option for member states to individually make it as low as 13 years old), must be given by the child's parent or custodian, and verifiable. If consent to processing was already provided under the Data Protection Directive, a data controller does not have to re-obtain consent if the processing is documented and obtained in compliance with the GDPR's requirements (Recital 171). === Rights of the data subject === ==== Transparency and modalities ==== Article 12 requires the data controller to provide information to the "data subject in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language, in particular for any information addressed specifically to a child." ==== Information and access ==== The right of access (Article 15) is a data subject right. It gives people the right to access their personal data and information about how this personal data is being processed. A data controller must provide, upon request, an overview of the categories of data that are being processed as well as a copy of the actual data; furthermore, the data controller has to inform the data subject on details about the processing, such as the purposes of the processing, with whom the data is shared, and how it acquired the data. A data subject must be able to transfer personal data from one electro
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Knowledge processing for robots

KnowRob (Knowledge processing for robots) is a system which combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods to acquire and ground knowledge. This system is the backbone of openEASE. both under developing at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen, Germany. == The framework == KnowRob can serve as a common sense framework for the integration of knowledge. This knowledge can be static encyclopedic knowledge, common sense knowledge, task descriptions, environment models, object information, observed actions, etc., which can come from different sources, like manually axiomatized, derived from observations, or imported from the web. KnowRob has been used by different research groups, as the Rice University using the ontological knowledge base in a robotic platform. As well by the Eindhoven University of Technology research group competing in the RoboCup league, in the "at Home" category, with the RoboEarth project. As well, KnowRob is mentioned in the work of some research groups from the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Middle East Technical University in their combination of different knowledge bases, Keio University as related work because of the ontology service, University of Texas at Austin as related work as well because of the relation with the work presented, Hanyang University as related work as an OWL based knowledge processing framework. == Representations == To represent the knowledge, KnowRob uses the OWL ontology language and an extended first-order logic knowledge representation with computable predicates. To give the order of subactions, KnowRob includes a pair-wise ordering constrain, which gives a partial ordering. KnowRob adopts the closed-world assumption Prolog, and an open-world assumption by the use of computables. To include reasoning rules into Prolog, KnowRob uses an inference procedure beyond the capabilities of OWL to extract information about tasks executions. In its second version, KnowRob provides a logic interface to the hybrid reasoning kernel as a logic based language. This language presents the hybrid reasoning kernel as if everything were entities retrievable by providing partial descriptions for them. This entities descriptions include objects, their parts, and articulation models, environments composed of objects, software components, actions, and events. === Episodic memories === Episodic memory is related to the experience information, which is organized temporally and spatially, alongside combined with context information. In KnowRob, an episodic memory is understood as a recording that the agent makes of the ongoing activity, which includes very detailed information about the actions, motions, their purposes, effects and the behavior they generate, it also includes the images captured during execution, etc. == Usage == The knowledge is computed by external methods using Prolog queries. In the second version of the KnowRob system, is included a better structure of the packages and documentations. Which includes some extensions from the previous version, as well as a logic based language. For example, a cup description from perception can be represented in this language as: entity(Cup,[an, object, [type, cup], [shape, cylinder], [color, orange]]) As well, a controller could represent the same object as: entity(Cup, [an, object, [type, cup], [proper_physical_parts, [an, object, [type, handle], [grasp−pose, G−pose]]]]) The interface language is comparable to other query languages for symbolic knowledge bases. KnowRob's query language integrates reasoning methods, such as the simulation-based reasoning. == Goals == The goal of the KnowRob framework is to make semantic knowledge available for service robots. It is able to answer queries about missing information in vague instructions for tasks. This is possible with the actions hierarchical representation and information about objects which can be included in certain action.
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Botler AI

Botler AI is a Montreal-based Canadian Artificial Intelligence company that helps users navigate the legal system. Launched in 2017 by Amir Morv and Ritika Dutt, Botler offers a free online tool which provides users who are unaware of their legal rights with information and guidance. Botler is known for its role in unveiling misconduct in the Government of Canada's procurement practices. Botler's findings have prompted numerous investigations, including by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. == History == Botler's first AI was trained on over 300,000 U.S. and Canadian legal documents to help individuals identify and enforce their legal rights, without fear of judgment. Launched during the height of the #MeToo movement, the tool initially focused on sexual harassment with a goal of creating "a general artificial intelligence that would help the average person with any legal issue." === Department of Justice Canada === In 2020, Botler launched an expanded misconduct detection system in the form of an anonymous chatbot which provided users with an explanation of the law and relevant resources. In March 2021, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada announced the Government of Canada's support for Botler AI to assist complainants of sexual harassment in the workplace. The initiative, entitled Botler for Citizens and implemented with the support of the Department of Justice Canada, established an Artificial Intelligence-powered hybrid legal service delivery model. == Notable cases == On October 4, 2023, the RCMP confirmed to The Globe and Mail that they "are investigating a file referred from the CBSA (Canada Border Services Agency) that is based on allegations brought to their attention by Botler". In 2019, GCStrategies's managing partner, Kristian Firth, reached out to Botler on behalf of his client, the CBSA, to solicit their misconduct detection chatbot. After interactions with GCStrategies, Dalian Enterprises and Coradix Technology Consulting, the three main contractors involved in developing the controversial ArriveCAN app, Dutt and Morv alerted the CBSA to questionable contracting practices in federal government procurement in September, 2021, and again in November, 2022. In response to Botler's November 2022 report, the CBSA launched an internal review and referred the matter to the RCMP. During testimony before a parliamentary committee, the CBSA's President stated that the CBSA investigation to date has raised some concerns and shows "that there was a pattern of persistent collaboration between certain officials and GCStrategies... to circumvent or ignore certain established processes and roles and responsibilities". The Auditor General of Canada, which extended its study into ArriveCAN following the Botler revelations, found that GCStrategies was directly involved in setting narrow terms for a request for proposal for a $25-million government contract it ultimately won. The firm, which has just two employees, charges the government a commission of between 15 per cent and 30 per cent of each contract's value. The Office of the Procurement Ombudsman of Canada found "numerous examples" where GCStrategies "had simply copied and pasted" the required work experience to meet contracting requirements. To date, more than a dozen probes have been launched into the matter, including by the government, parliamentary committees, independent watchdogs and law-enforcement agencies. On April 17, 2024, GCStrategies' Firth was the first person summoned in over a century to answer questions before Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. During his appearance, Firth testified that the RCMP had raided "my property to obtain electronic goods surrounding the Botler allegations". === Government of Canada Reforms === One day after The Globe reported that the RCMP is investigating allegations of misconduct, the federal government responded by announcing new guidelines from the Treasury Board of Canada aimed at cutting back on the use of private consultants and that outsourcing contracts were under examination. Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) invalidated and replaced all master level user agreements with government client departments in November 2023. The agreements set out the conditions for access to select Professional Services methods of supply which are used for outsourcing. In March 2024, PSPC announced its suspension of the respective security statuses of GCStrategies, Dalian and Coradix, barring them from participating in all federal procurements. Records show that the total value of contracts awarded to the three companies amounts to more than $1 Billion.
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Cognitive computing

Cognitive computing refers to technology platforms that, broadly speaking, are based on the scientific disciplines of artificial intelligence and signal processing. These platforms encompass machine learning, reasoning, natural language processing, speech recognition and vision (object recognition), human–computer interaction, dialog and narrative generation, among other technologies. == Definition == At present, there is no widely agreed upon definition for cognitive computing in either academia or industry. In general, the term cognitive computing has been used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain (2004). In this sense, cognitive computing is a new type of computing with the goal of more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses, reasons, and responds to stimulus. Cognitive computing applications link data analysis and adaptive page displays (AUI) to adjust content for a particular type of audience. As such, cognitive computing hardware and applications strive to be more affective and more influential by design. The term "cognitive system" also applies to any artificial construct able to perform a cognitive process where a cognitive process is the transformation of data, information, knowledge, or wisdom to a new level in the DIKW Pyramid. While many cognitive systems employ techniques having their origination in artificial intelligence research, cognitive systems, themselves, may not be artificially intelligent. For example, a neural network trained to recognize cancer on an MRI scan may achieve a higher success rate than a human doctor. This system is certainly a cognitive system but is not artificially intelligent. Cognitive systems may be engineered to feed on dynamic data in real-time, or near real-time, and may draw on multiple sources of information, including both structured and unstructured digital information, as well as sensory inputs (visual, gestural, auditory, or sensor-provided). == Cognitive analytics == Cognitive computing-branded technology platforms typically specialize in the processing and analysis of large, unstructured datasets. == Applications == Education Even if cognitive computing can not take the place of teachers, it can still be a heavy driving force in the education of students. Cognitive computing being used in the classroom is applied by essentially having an assistant that is personalized for each individual student. This cognitive assistant can relieve the stress that teachers face while teaching students, while also enhancing the student's learning experience over all. Teachers may not be able to pay each and every student individual attention, this being the place that cognitive computers fill the gap. Some students may need a little more help with a particular subject. For many students, Human interaction between student and teacher can cause anxiety and can be uncomfortable. With the help of Cognitive Computer tutors, students will not have to face their uneasiness and can gain the confidence to learn and do well in the classroom. While a student is in class with their personalized assistant, this assistant can develop various techniques, like creating lesson plans, to tailor and aid the student and their needs. Healthcare Numerous tech companies are in the process of developing technology that involves cognitive computing that can be used in the medical field. The ability to classify and identify is one of the main goals of these cognitive devices. This trait can be very helpful in the study of identifying carcinogens. This cognitive system that can detect would be able to assist the examiner in interpreting countless numbers of documents in a lesser amount of time than if they did not use Cognitive Computer technology. This technology can also evaluate information about the patient, looking through every medical record in depth, searching for indications that can be the source of their problems. Commerce Together with Artificial Intelligence, it has been used in warehouse management systems to collect, store, organize and analyze all related supplier data. All these aims at improving efficiency, enabling faster decision-making, monitoring inventory and fraud detection Human Cognitive Augmentation In situations where humans are using or working collaboratively with cognitive systems, called a human/cog ensemble, results achieved by the ensemble are superior to results obtainable by the human working alone. Therefore, the human is cognitively augmented. In cases where the human/cog ensemble achieves results at, or superior to, the level of a human expert then the ensemble has achieved synthetic expertise. In a human/cog ensemble, the "cog" is a cognitive system employing virtually any kind of cognitive computing technology. Other use cases Speech recognition Sentiment analysis Face detection Risk assessment Fraud detection Behavioral recommendations == Industry work == Cognitive computing in conjunction with big data and algorithms that comprehend customer needs, can be a major advantage in economic decision making. The powers of cognitive computing and artificial intelligence hold the potential to affect almost every task that humans are capable of performing. This can negatively affect employment for humans, as there would be no such need for human labor anymore. It would also increase the inequality of wealth; the people at the head of the cognitive computing industry would grow significantly richer, while workers without ongoing, reliable employment would become less well off. The more industries start to use cognitive computing, the more difficult it will be for humans to compete. Increased use of the technology will also increase the amount of work that AI-driven robots and machines can perform. The influence of competitive individuals in conjunction with artificial intelligence/cognitive computing has the potential to change the course of humankind.
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Tree (abstract data type)

In computer science, a tree is a widely used abstract data type that represents a hierarchical tree structure with a set of connected nodes. Each node in the tree can be connected to many children (depending on the type of tree), but must be connected to exactly one parent, except for the root node, which has no parent (i.e., the root node as the top-most node in the tree hierarchy). These constraints mean there are no cycles or "loops" (no node can be its own ancestor), and also that each child can be treated like the root node of its own subtree, making recursion a useful technique for tree traversal. In contrast to linear data structures, many trees cannot be represented by relationships between neighboring nodes (parent and children nodes of a node under consideration, if they exist) in a single straight line (called edge or link between two adjacent nodes). Binary trees are a commonly used type, which constrain the number of children for each parent to at most two. When the order of the children is specified, this data structure corresponds to an ordered tree in graph theory. A value or pointer to other data may be associated with every node in the tree, or sometimes only with the leaf nodes, which have no children nodes. The abstract data type (ADT) can be represented in a number of ways, including a list of parents with pointers to children, a list of children with pointers to parents, or a list of nodes and a separate list of parent-child relations (a specific type of adjacency list). Representations might also be more complicated, for example using indexes or ancestor lists for performance. Trees as used in computing are similar to but can be different from mathematical constructs of trees in graph theory, trees in set theory, and trees in descriptive set theory. == Terminology == A node is a structure which may contain data and connections to other nodes, sometimes called edges or links. Each node in a tree has zero or more child nodes, which are below it in the tree (by convention, trees are drawn with descendants going downwards). A node that has a child is called the child's parent node (or superior). All nodes have exactly one parent, except the topmost root node, which has none. A node might have many ancestor nodes, such as the parent's parent. Child nodes with the same parent are sibling nodes. Typically siblings have an order, with the first one conventionally drawn on the left. Some definitions allow a tree to have no nodes at all, in which case it is called empty. An internal node (also known as an inner node, inode for short, or branch node) is any node of a tree that has child nodes. Similarly, an external node (also known as an outer node, leaf node, or terminal node) is any node that does not have child nodes. The height of a node is the length of the longest downward path to a leaf from that node. The height of the root is the height of the tree. The depth of a node is the length of the path to its root (i.e., its root path). Thus the root node has depth zero, leaf nodes have height zero, and a tree with only a single node (hence both a root and leaf) has depth and height zero. Conventionally, an empty tree (tree with no nodes, if such are allowed) has height −1. Each non-root node can be treated as the root node of its own subtree, which includes that node and all its descendants. Other terms used with trees: Neighbor Parent or child. Ancestor A node reachable by repeated proceeding from child to parent. Descendant A node reachable by repeated proceeding from parent to child. Also known as subchild. Degree For a given node, its number of children. A leaf, by definition, has degree zero. Degree of tree The degree of a tree is the maximum degree of a node in the tree. Distance The number of edges along the shortest path between two nodes. Level The level of a node is the number of edges along the unique path between it and the root node. This is the same as depth. Width The number of nodes in a level. Breadth The number of leaves. Complete tree A tree with every level filled, except the last. Forest A set of one or more disjoint trees. Ordered tree A rooted tree in which an ordering is specified for the children of each vertex. Size of a tree Number of nodes in the tree. == Common operations == Enumerating all the items Enumerating a section of a tree Searching for an item Adding a new item at a certain position on the tree Deleting an item Pruning: Removing a whole section of a tree Grafting: Adding a whole section to a tree Finding the root for any node Finding the lowest common ancestor of two nodes === Traversal and search methods === Stepping through the items of a tree, by means of the connections between parents and children, is called walking the tree, and the action is a walk of the tree. Often, an operation might be performed when a pointer arrives at a particular node. A walk in which each parent node is traversed before its children is called a pre-order walk; a walk in which the children are traversed before their respective parents are traversed is called a post-order walk; a walk in which a node's left subtree, then the node itself, and finally its right subtree are traversed is called an in-order traversal. (This last scenario, referring to exactly two subtrees, a left subtree and a right subtree, assumes specifically a binary tree.) A level-order walk effectively performs a breadth-first search over the entirety of a tree; nodes are traversed level by level, where the root node is visited first, followed by its direct child nodes and their siblings, followed by its grandchild nodes and their siblings, etc., until all nodes in the tree have been traversed. == Representations == There are many different ways to represent trees. In working memory, nodes are typically dynamically allocated records with pointers to their children, their parents, or both, as well as any associated data. If of a fixed size, the nodes might be stored in a list. Nodes and relationships between nodes might be stored in a separate special type of adjacency list. In relational databases, nodes are typically represented as table rows, with indexed row IDs facilitating pointers between parents and children. Nodes can also be stored as items in an array, with relationships between them determined by their positions in the array (as in a binary heap). A binary tree can be implemented as a list of lists: the head of a list (the value of the first term) is the left child (subtree), while the tail (the list of second and subsequent terms) is the right child (subtree). This can be modified to allow values as well, as in Lisp S-expressions, where the head (value of first term) is the value of the node, the head of the tail (value of second term) is the left child, and the tail of the tail (list of third and subsequent terms) is the right child. Ordered trees can be naturally encoded by finite sequences, for example with natural numbers. == Examples of trees and non-trees == == Type theory == As an abstract data type, the abstract tree type T with values of some type E is defined, using the abstract forest type F (list of trees), by the functions: value: T → E children: T → F nil: () → F node: E × F → T with the axioms: value(node(e, f)) = e children(node(e, f)) = f In terms of type theory, a tree is an inductive type defined by the constructors nil (empty forest) and node (tree with root node with given value and children). == Mathematical terminology == Viewed as a whole, a tree data structure is an ordered tree, generally with values attached to each node. Concretely, it is (if required to be non-empty): A rooted tree with the "away from root" direction (a more narrow term is an "arborescence"), meaning: A directed graph, whose underlying undirected graph is a tree (any two vertices are connected by exactly one simple path), with a distinguished root (one vertex is designated as the root), which determines the direction on the edges (arrows point away from the root; given an edge, the node that the edge points from is called the parent and the node that the edge points to is called the child), together with: an ordering on the child nodes of a given node, and a value (of some data type) at each node. Often trees have a fixed (more properly, bounded) branching factor (outdegree), particularly always having two child nodes (possibly empty, hence at most two non-empty child nodes), hence a "binary tree". Allowing empty trees makes some definitions simpler, some more complicated: a rooted tree must be non-empty, hence if empty trees are allowed the above definition instead becomes "an empty tree or a rooted tree such that ...". On the other hand, empty trees simplify defining fixed branching factor: with empty trees allowed, a binary tree is a tree such that every node has exactly two children, each of which is a tree (possibly empty). == Applications == Trees are commonly used to represent or manipulate hierarchical data in ap
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Nortel Speech Server

The Nortel Speech Server (formerly known as Periphonics Speech Processing Platform) in telecommunications is a speech processing system that was originally developed by Nortel. Following the bankruptcy of Nortel, it is now sold by Avaya. The system is primarily used for large vocabulary speech recognition, natural language understanding, text-to-speech, and speaker verification. The Nortel Speech Server was based on the Periphonics OSCAR platform. The original OSCAR Platform was based upon Solaris servers. The current range of Speech Servers is Windows based. Nortel Speech Server is a component of the MPS 500, MPS 1000, and ICP platforms. On MPS systems, it may be used to stream prerecorded audio.
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Oracle Database

Oracle AI Database (commonly referred to as Oracle Database, Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and mixed (OLTP & DW) database workloads. Oracle AI Database uses SQL for database updating and retrieval. Oracle Database runs on-premises, on Oracle engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata, on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and as a managed Autonomous Database service. It is also offered inside Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services data centers through Oracle's multicloud offerings. The current long-term support release, Oracle AI Database 26ai, became available in the cloud and on Oracle engineered systems in October 2025 and on-premises for Linux x86-64 in January 2026. == History == Larry Ellison and his two friends and former co-workers, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977, later Oracle Corporation. SDL developed the original version of the Oracle software. The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a Central Intelligence Agency-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by Ampex; the CIA was Oracle's first customer, and allowed the company to use the code name for the new product. Ellison wanted his database to be compatible with IBM System R, but that company's Don Chamberlin declined to release its error codes. By 1985 Oracle advertised, however, that "Programs written for SQL/DS or DB2 will run unmodified" on the many non-IBM mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers its database supported "Because all versions of ORACLE are identical". Later releases introduced capabilities associated with successive eras of the product, including PL/SQL stored procedures and triggers in Oracle7 (1992), Real Application Clusters in Oracle9i (2001), grid infrastructure and automatic management in Oracle 10g (2003), the multitenant architecture and In-Memory Column Store in Oracle Database 12c (2013), and AI Vector Search and JSON Relational Duality in Oracle Database 23ai (2024). In October 2025 Oracle rebranded the 23ai line as Oracle AI Database 26ai. (see Release History) == Architecture == An Oracle Database system consists of an instance and a database. The instance is a set of memory structures and background processes; the database is the set of files that store data. The instance exists only in memory, and a single instance is associated with one multitenant container database. The principal memory structures are the System Global Area, which is shared, and the Program Global Areas, which are private to individual processes. The shared pool, database buffer cache, and redo log buffer are components of the System Global Area, and the optional In-Memory Column Store also resides there. Background processes operate on the database files and use these memory structures; they include the database writer, the log writer, the checkpoint process, and the system and process monitor processes. Server processes handle connections from client programs and run their SQL statements. Storage is organized logically and physically. Logically, data is held in tablespaces composed of segments, extents, and data blocks. Physically, the database comprises datafiles, control files, and online redo log files, with archived redo logs supporting media recovery. == High Availability and Scalability == Oracle Database includes several technologies for high availability, disaster recovery, and scale. Oracle Real Application Clusters allows multiple instances on separate servers to access one shared database concurrently; it was introduced with Oracle9i in 2001. Oracle Data Guard maintains standby databases synchronized with a primary database, and Active Data Guard additionally allows read-only workloads on a standby while it applies changes. Oracle GoldenGate performs logical replication and data integration across heterogeneous systems. Native sharding, introduced in Oracle Database 12c Release 2, distributes one logical database across independent shards. Oracle Exadata is an engineered system that pairs database servers with storage servers and offloads operations such as filtering to the storage tier; it is available on-premises, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and through Cloud@Customer. == Notable Features == AI Vector Search adds a vector data type, vector indexes, and vector distance operators to the database. These allow similarity search over machine-learning embeddings to be expressed in SQL and combined with queries over relational, JSON, spatial, and graph data. It became generally available in Oracle Database 23ai. JSON Relational Duality exposes the same data both as relational tables and as JSON documents through duality views, so that an application can read and write either representation of the data. It became generally available in Oracle Database 23ai. In-Memory Column Store maintains a column-oriented copy of selected tables in memory in addition to the row-oriented format, and the optimizer can use the columnar copy for analytic queries. It was introduced in Oracle Database 12c Release 1.Partitioning divides large tables and indexes into independently managed pieces. Advanced Compression and Hybrid Columnar Compression are compression features for transactional and warehouse data respectively. == Data Types == Oracle AI Database supports a variety of data types and data models within a single system. These include traditional relational data types as well as semi-structured, unstructured, and specialized data formats, enabling different types of data to be stored and queried together. == Releases and versions == Oracle products follow a custom release-numbering and -naming convention. The "ai" in the current release, Oracle AI Database 26ai, stands for "Artificial Intelligence". Previous releases (e.g. Oracle Database 19c, 10g, and Oracle9i Database) have used suffixes of "c", "g", and "i" which stand for "Cloud", "Grid", and "Internet" respectively. Prior to the release of Oracle8i Database, no suffixes featured in Oracle AI Database naming conventions. There was no v1 of Oracle AI Database, as Ellison "knew no one would want to buy version 1". For some database releases, Oracle also provides an Express Edition (XE) that is free to use. Oracle AI Database release numbering has used the following codes: The Introduction to Oracle AI Database includes a brief history on some of the key innovations introduced with each major release of Oracle AI Database. See My Oracle Support (MOS) note Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1) for the current Oracle AI Database releases and their patching end dates. == Patch updates and security alerts == Prior to Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation released Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) and Security Patch Updates (SPUs) and Security Alerts to close security vulnerabilities. These releases are issued quarterly; some of these releases have updates issued prior to the next quarterly release. Starting with Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Corporation releases Release Updates (RUs) and Release Update Revisions (RURs). RUs usually contain security, regression (bug), optimizer, and functional fixes which may include feature extensions as well. RURs include all fixes from their corresponding RU but only add new security and regression fixes. However, no new optimizer or functional fixes are included. == Competition == In the market for relational databases, Oracle AI Database competes against commercial products such as IBM Db2 and Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle and IBM tend to battle for the mid-range database market on Unix and Linux platforms, while Microsoft dominates the mid-range database market on Microsoft Windows platforms. However, since they share many of the same customers, Oracle and IBM tend to support each other's products in many middleware and application categories (for example: WebSphere, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems CRM), and IBM's hardware divisions work closely with Oracle on performance-optimizing server-technologies (for example, Linux on IBM Z). Niche commercial competitors include Teradata (in data warehousing and business intelligence), Software AG's ADABAS, Sybase, and IBM's Informix, among many others. In the cloud, Oracle AI Database competes against the database services of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Increasingly, the Oracle AI Database products compete against open-source software relational and non-relational database systems such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Couchbase, Neo4j, ArangoDB and others. Oracle acquired Innobase, supplier of the InnoDB codebase to MySQL, in part to compete better against open source alternatives, and acquired Sun Microsystems, owner of MySQL, in 2010. Database products licensed as open
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Robot learning

Robot learning is a research field at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. It studies techniques allowing a robot to acquire novel skills or adapt to its environment through learning algorithms. The embodiment of the robot, situated in a physical embedding, provides at the same time specific difficulties (e.g. high-dimensionality, real time constraints for collecting data and learning) and opportunities for guiding the learning process (e.g. sensorimotor synergies, motor primitives). Example of skills that are targeted by learning algorithms include sensorimotor skills such as locomotion, grasping, active object categorization, as well as interactive skills such as joint manipulation of an object with a human peer, and linguistic skills such as the grounded and situated meaning of human language. Learning can happen either through autonomous self-exploration or through guidance from a human teacher, like for example in robot learning by imitation. Robot learning can be closely related to adaptive control, reinforcement learning as well as developmental robotics which considers the problem of autonomous lifelong acquisition of repertoires of skills. While machine learning is frequently used by computer vision algorithms employed in the context of robotics, these applications are usually not referred to as "robot learning". == Imitation learning == Many research groups are developing techniques where robots learn by imitating. This includes various techniques for learning from demonstration (sometimes also referred to as "programming by demonstration") and observational learning. == Sharing learned skills and knowledge == In Tellex's "Million Object Challenge", the goal is robots that learn how to spot and handle simple items and upload their data to the cloud to allow other robots to analyze and use the information. RoboBrain is a knowledge engine for robots which can be freely accessed by any device wishing to carry out a task. The database gathers new information about tasks as robots perform them, by searching the Internet, interpreting natural language text, images, and videos, object recognition as well as interaction. The project is led by Ashutosh Saxena at Stanford University. RoboEarth is a project that has been described as a "World Wide Web for robots" − it is a network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other and a cloud for outsourcing heavy computation tasks. The project brings together researchers from five major universities in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain and is backed by the European Union. Google Research, DeepMind, and Google X have decided to allow their robots share their experiences. == Vision-language-action model == Research groups and companies are developing vision-language-action models, foundation models that allow robotic control through the combination of vision and language. Google DeepMind, Figure AI and Hugging Face are actively working on that.
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GOFAI

In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, GOFAI (good old-fashioned artificial intelligence) is classical symbolic AI, as opposed to other approaches, such as neural networks, situated robotics, narrow symbolic AI or neuro-symbolic AI. The term was coined by philosopher John Haugeland in his 1985 book Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Haugeland coined the term to address two questions: Can GOFAI produce human-level artificial intelligence in a machine? Is GOFAI the primary method that brains use to display intelligence? AI founder Herbert A. Simon speculated in 1963 that the answers to both these questions was "yes". His evidence was the performance of programs he had co-written, such as Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver, and his psychological research on human problem solving. AI research in the 1950s and 60s had an enormous influence on intellectual history: it inspired the cognitive revolution, led to the founding of the academic field of cognitive science, and was the essential example in the philosophical theories of computationalism, functionalism and cognitivism in ethics and the psychological theories of cognitivism and cognitive psychology. The specific aspect of AI research that led to this revolution was what Haugeland called "GOFAI". In AI development and technology, GOFAI is used to refer to programs that are built with deliberate, explicit instructions for a single task. This is in contrast to approaches that use machine learning. Examples of GOFAI applications include AlphaGo and Apple's initial Siri design. == Western rationalism == Haugeland places GOFAI within the rationalist tradition in western philosophy, which holds that abstract reason is the "highest" faculty, that it is what separates man from the animals, and that it is the most essential part of our intelligence. This assumption is present in Plato and Aristotle, in Shakespeare, Hobbes, Hume and Locke, it was central to the Enlightenment, to the logical positivists of the 1930s, and to the computationalists and cognitivists of the 1960s. As Shakespeare wrote: What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty ... In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. Symbolic AI in the 1960s was able to successfully simulate the process of high-level reasoning, including logical deduction, algebra, geometry, spatial reasoning and means-ends analysis, all of them in precise English sentences, just like the ones humans used when they reasoned. Many observers, including philosophers, psychologists and the AI researchers themselves became convinced that they had captured the essential features of intelligence. This was not just hubris or speculation -- this was entailed by rationalism. If it was not true, then it brings into question a large part of the entire Western philosophical tradition. Continental philosophy, which included Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and others, rejected rationalism and argued that our high-level reasoning was limited and prone to error, and that most of our abilities come from our intuitions, culture, and instinctive feel for the situation. Philosophers who were familiar with this tradition were the first to criticize GOFAI and the assertion that it was sufficient for intelligence, such as Hubert Dreyfus and Haugeland. == Haugeland's GOFAI == Critics and supporters of Haugeland's position, from philosophy, psychology, or AI research have found it difficult to define "GOFAI" precisely, and thus the literature contains a variety of interpretations. Drew McDermott, for example, finds Haugeland's description of GOFAI "incoherent" and argues that GOFAI is a "myth". Haugeland coined the term GOFAI in order to examine the philosophical implications of “the claims essential to all GOFAI theories”, which he listed as: 1. our ability to deal with things intelligently is due to our capacity to think about them reasonably (including sub-conscious thinking); and 2. our capacity to think about things reasonably amounts to a faculty for internal “automatic” symbol manipulation This is very similar to the sufficient side of the physical symbol systems hypothesis proposed by Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell in 1963: "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action." It is also similar to Hubert Dreyfus' "psychological assumption": "The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits of information according to formal rules. " Haugeland's description of GOFAI refers to symbol manipulation governed by a set of instructions for manipulating the symbols. The "symbols" he refers to are discrete physical things that are assigned a definite semantics -- like and . They do not refer to signals, or unidentified numbers, or matrixes of unidentified numbers, or the zeros and ones of digital machinery. Thus, Haugeland's GOFAI does not include "good old fashioned" techniques such as cybernetics, perceptrons, dynamic programming or control theory or modern techniques such as neural networks or support vector machines. These questions ask if GOFAI is sufficient for general intelligence -- they ask if there is nothing else required to create fully intelligent machines. Thus GOFAI, for Haugeland, does not include systems that combine symbolic AI with other techniques, such as neuro-symbolic AI, and also does not include narrow symbolic AI systems that are designed only to solve a specific problem and are not expected to exhibit general intelligence. == Replies == === Replies from AI scientists === Russell and Norvig wrote, in reference to Dreyfus and Haugeland:The technology they criticized came to be called Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI). GOFAI corresponds to the simplest logical agent design ... and we saw ... that it is indeed difficult to capture every contingency of appropriate behavior in a set of necessary and sufficient logical rules; we called that the qualification problem. Later symbolic AI work after the 1980's incorporated more robust approaches to open-ended domains such as probabilistic reasoning, non-monotonic reasoning, and machine learning. Currently, most AI researchers believe deep learning, and more likely, a synthesis of neural and symbolic approaches (neuro-symbolic AI), will be required for general intelligence.
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Social History and Industrial Classification

Social History and Industrial Classification (SHIC) is a classification system used by many British museums for social history and industrial collections. It was first published in 1983. == Purpose == SHIC classifies materials (books, objects, recordings etc.) by their interaction with the people who used them. For example, a carpenter's hammer is classified with other tools of the carpenter, and not with a blacksmith's hammer. In contrast other classification systems, for example the Dewey Decimal Classification, might class all hammers together and close to the classification for other percussive tools. The specialist subject network, Social History Curator's Group (SHCG), obtained funding in 2012 to develop an on-line version, now on their website http://www.shcg.org.uk/ == Scheme == Materials are classified under four major category numbers: Community life Domestic and family life Personal life Working life Further classification within a category is by the use of further numbers after the decimal point. It is permissible to assign more than one classification in cases where the object had more than one use.
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RevoScaleR

RevoScaleR is a machine learning package in R created by Microsoft. It is available as part of Machine Learning Server, Microsoft R Client, and Machine Learning Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2016. The package contains functions for creating linear model, logistic regression, random forest, decision tree and boosted decision tree, and K-means, in addition to some summary functions for inspecting and visualizing data. It has a Python package counterpart called revoscalepy. Another closely related package is MicrosoftML, which contains machine learning algorithms that RevoScaleR does not have, such as neural network and SVM. In June 2021, Microsoft announced to open source the RevoScaleR and revoscalepy packages, making them freely available under the MIT License. == Concepts == Many R packages are designed to analyze data that can fit in the memory of the machine and usually do not make use of parallel processing. RevoScaleR was designed to address these limitations. The functions in RevoScaleR orientate around three main abstraction concepts that users can specify to process large amount of data that might not fit in memory and exploit parallel resources to speed up the analysis. === Compute Contexts === A compute context refers to the location where the computation on the data happens. It could be "local" (on the client machine) or "remote" (on a data platform such as a SQL server, or Spark). Pushing the computation to a remote server allows people to take advantage of the greater compute resources that a remote machine may have. If the data being analyzed reside on the same machine, using a remote compute context also removes the need to pull data across the network onto the client machine. === Data source === Data source defines where the data comes from. There are various data sources available in RevoScaleR, such as text data, Xdf data, in-SQL data, and a spark dataframe. People can wrap their data in a data source object and use that as run analytics in different compute context. Different data sources are available in different compute context. For example, if the compute context is set to SQL server, then the only data source one can use would be an in-SQL data source. === Analytics === Analytic functions in RevoScaleR takes in data source object, a compute context, and the other parameters needed to build the specific model, such as formula for the logistic regression or the number of trees in a decision tree. In addition to those parameters, one can also specify the level of parallelism, such as the size of the data chunk for each process or number of processes to build the model. However, parallelism is only available in non-express edition. == Limitations == The package is mostly meant to be used with a SQL server or other remote machines. To fully leverage the abstractions it uses to process a large dataset, one needs a remote server and non-Express free edition of the package. It cannot be easily installed such as by running "install.packages("RevoScaleR")" like most open source R packages. It's available only through Microsoft R Client, a distribution of R for data science, or Microsoft Machine Learning Server (stand-alone with no SQL server attached), or Microsoft Machine Learning Services (a SQL server services). However, one can still use the analytics functions in an Express, free version of the package.
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Neurocomputing (journal)

Neurocomputing is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural computation. It was established in 1989 and is published by Elsevier. The editor-in-chief is Zidong Wang (Brunel University London). Independent scientometric studies noted that despite being one of the most productive journals in the field, it has kept its reputation across the years intact and plays an important role in leading the research in the area. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and Science Citation Index Expanded. According to the Journal Citation Reports, its 2023 impact factor is 5.5.
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AlphaFold

AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which performs predictions of protein structure. It is designed using deep learning techniques. AlphaFold 1 (2018) placed first in the overall rankings of the 13th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) in December 2018. It was particularly successful at predicting the most accurate structures for targets rated as most difficult by the competition organizers, where no existing template structures were available from proteins with partially similar sequences. AlphaFold 2 (2020) repeated this placement in the CASP14 competition in November 2020. It achieved a level of accuracy much higher than any other entry. It scored above 90 on CASP's global distance test (GDT) for approximately two-thirds of the proteins, a test measuring the similarity between a computationally predicted structure and the experimentally determined structure, where 100 represents a complete match. The inclusion of metagenomic data has improved the quality of the prediction of multiple sequence alignments. One of the biggest sources of the training data was the custom-built Big Fantastic Database of 65,983,866 protein families, represented as multiple sequence alignments and Hidden Markov models, covering 2,204,359,010 protein sequences from reference databases, metagenomes, and metatranscriptomes. AlphaFold 2's results at CASP14 were described as "astounding" and "transformational". However, some researchers noted that the accuracy was insufficient for a third of its predictions, and that it did not reveal the underlying mechanism or rules of protein folding for the protein folding problem, which remains unsolved. Despite this, the technical achievement was widely recognized. On 15 July 2021, the AlphaFold 2 paper was published in Nature as an advance access publication alongside open source software and a searchable database of species proteomes. As of November 2025, the paper had been cited nearly 43,000 times. AlphaFold 3 was announced on 8 May 2024. It can predict the structure of complexes created by proteins with DNA, RNA, various ligands, and ions. The new prediction method shows a minimum 50% improvement in accuracy for protein interactions with other molecules compared to existing methods. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared one half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded "for protein structure prediction," while the other half went to David Baker "for computational protein design." Hassabis and Jumper had previously won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2023 for their leadership of the AlphaFold project. == Background == Proteins consist of chains of amino acids which spontaneously fold to form the three dimensional (3-D) structures of the proteins. The 3-D structure is crucial to understanding the biological function of the protein. Protein structures can be determined experimentally through techniques such as X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which are all expensive and time-consuming. Such efforts, using the experimental methods, have identified the structures of about 170,000 proteins over the last 60 years, while there are over 200 million known proteins across all life forms. Over the years, researchers have applied numerous computational methods to predict the 3D structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences, accuracy of such methods in best possible scenario is close to experimental techniques (NMR) by the use of homology modeling based on molecular evolution. CASP, which was launched in 1994 to challenge the scientific community to produce their best protein structure predictions, found that GDT scores of only about 40 out of 100 can be achieved for the most difficult proteins by 2016. AlphaFold started competing in the 2018 CASP using an artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning technique. == Algorithm == DeepMind is known to have trained the program on over 170,000 protein structures from the Protein Data Bank, a public repository of protein sequences and structures. The program uses a form of attention network, a deep learning technique that focuses on having the AI identify parts of a larger problem, then piece it together to obtain the overall solution. The overall training was conducted on processing power between 100 and 200 GPUs. === AlphaFold 1 (2018) === AlphaFold 1 (2018) was built on work developed by various teams in the 2010s, work that looked at the large databases of related protein sequences now available from many different organisms (most without known 3D structures), to try to find changes at different residues (peptides) that appeared to be correlated, even though the residues were not consecutive in the main chain. Such correlations suggest that the residues may be close to each other physically, even though not close in the sequence, allowing a contact map to be estimated. Building on recent work prior to 2018, AlphaFold 1 extended this by estimating a probability distribution for the distances between residues, effectively transforming the contact map into a distance map. It also used more advanced learning methods than previously to develop the inference. The code was not made publicly available, except to run on sequences of proteins in the 2018 CASP competition. === AlphaFold 2 (2020) === The 2020 version of the program (AlphaFold 2, 2020) is significantly different from the original version that won CASP 13 in 2018, according to the team at DeepMind. AlphaFold 1 used a number of separately trained modules to produce a guide potential, which was then combined with a physics-based energy potential. AlphaFold 2 replaced this with a system of interconnected sub-networks, forming a single, differentiable, end-to-end model based on pattern recognition. This model was trained in an integrated manner. After the neural network's prediction converges, a final refinement step applies local physical constraints using energy minimization based on the AMBER force field. This step only slightly adjusts the predicted structure. A key part of the 2020 system are two modules, believed to be based on a transformer design, which are used to progressively refine a vector of information for each relationship (or "edge" in graph-theory terminology) between an amino acid residue of the protein and another amino acid residue (these relationships are represented by the array shown in green); and between each amino acid position and each different sequences in the input sequence alignment (these relationships are represented by the array shown in red). Internally these refinement transformations contain layers that have the effect of bringing relevant data together and filtering out irrelevant data (the "attention mechanism") for these relationships, in a context-dependent way, learned from training data. These transformations are iterated, the updated information output by one step becoming the input of the next, with the sharpened residue/residue information feeding into the update of the residue/sequence information, and then the improved residue/sequence information feeding into the update of the residue/residue information. As the iteration progresses, according to one report, the "attention algorithm ... mimics the way a person might assemble a jigsaw puzzle: first connecting pieces in small clumps—in this case clusters of amino acids—and then searching for ways to join the clumps in a larger whole." The output of these iterations then informs the final structure prediction module, which also uses transformers, and is itself then iterated. In an example presented by DeepMind, the structure prediction module achieved a correct topology for the target protein on its first iteration, scored as having a GDT_TS of 78, but with a large number (90%) of stereochemical violations – i.e. unphysical bond angles or lengths. With subsequent iterations the number of stereochemical violations fell. By the third iteration the GDT_TS of the prediction was approaching 90, and by the eighth iteration the number of stereochemical violations was approaching zero. The training data was originally restricted to single peptide chains. However, the October 2021 update, named AlphaFold-Multimer, included protein complexes in its training data. DeepMind stated this update succeeded about 70% of the time at accurately predicting protein-protein interactions. === AlphaFold 3 (2024) === Announced on 8 May 2024, AlphaFold 3 was co-developed by Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, both subsidiaries of Alphabet. AlphaFold 3 is not limited to proteins, as it can also predict the structures of protein complexes with DNA, RNA, post-translational modifications and selected ligands and ions. AlphaFold 3 introduces the "Pairformer," a deep learning architecture inspired by the transformer, which is considered similar to, but si
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Resilience (mathematics)

In mathematical modeling, resilience refers to the ability of a dynamical system to recover from perturbations and return to its original stable steady state. It is a measure of the stability and robustness of a system in the face of changes or disturbances. If a system is not resilient enough, it is more susceptible to perturbations and can more easily undergo a critical transition. A common analogy used to explain the concept of resilience of an equilibrium is one of a ball in a valley. A resilient steady state corresponds to a ball in a deep valley, so any push or perturbation will very quickly lead the ball to return to the resting point where it started. On the other hand, a less resilient steady state corresponds to a ball in a shallow valley, so the ball will take a much longer time to return to the equilibrium after a perturbation. The concept of resilience is particularly useful in systems that exhibit tipping points, whose study has a long history that can be traced back to catastrophe theory. While this theory was initially overhyped and fell out of favor, its mathematical foundation remains strong and is now recognized as relevant to many different systems. == History == In 1973, Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling proposed a definition of resilience in the context of ecological systems. According to Holling, resilience is "a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables". Holling distinguished two types of resilience: engineering resilience and ecological resilience. Engineering resilience refers to the ability of a system to return to its original state after a disturbance, such as a bridge that can be repaired after an earthquake. Ecological resilience, on the other hand, refers to the ability of a system to maintain its identity and function despite a disturbance, such as a forest that can regenerate after a wildfire while maintaining its biodiversity and ecosystem services. With time, the once well-defined and unambiguous concept of resilience has experienced a gradual erosion of its clarity, becoming more vague and closer to an umbrella term than a specific concrete measure. == Definition == Mathematically, resilience can be approximated by the inverse of the return time to an equilibrium given by resilience ≡ − Re ( λ 1 ( A ) ) {\displaystyle {\text{resilience}}\equiv -{\text{Re}}(\lambda _{1}({\textbf {A}}))} where λ 1 {\textstyle \lambda _{1}} is the maximum eigenvalue of matrix A {\textstyle {\textbf {A}}} . The largest this value is, the faster a system returns to the original stable steady state, or in other words, the faster the perturbations decay. == Applications and examples == In ecology, resilience might refer to the ability of the ecosystem to recover from disturbances such as fires, droughts, or the introduction of invasive species. A resilient ecosystem would be one that is able to adapt to these changes and continue functioning, while a less resilient ecosystem might experience irreversible damage or collapse. The exact definition of resilience has remained vague for practical matters, which has led to a slow and proper application of its insights for management of ecosystems. In epidemiology, resilience may refer to the ability of a healthy community to recover from the introduction of infected individuals. That is, a resilient system is more likely to remain at the disease-free equilibrium after the invasion of a new infection. Some stable systems exhibit critical slowing down where, as they approach a basic reproduction number of 1, their resilience decreases, hence taking a longer time to return to the disease-free steady state. Resilience is an important concept in the study of complex systems, where there are many interacting components that can affect each other in unpredictable ways. Mathematical models can be used to explore the resilience of such systems and to identify strategies for improving their resilience in the face of environmental or other changes. For example, when modelling networks it is often important to be able to quantify network resilience, or network robustness, to the loss of nodes. Scale-free networks are particularly resilient since most of their nodes have few links. This means that if some nodes are randomly removed, it is more likely that the nodes with fewer connections are taken out, thus preserving the key properties of the network.
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