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  SemEval

  SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems; it evolved from the Senseval word sense evaluation series. The evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language. While meaning is intuitive to humans, transferring those intuitions to computational analysis has proved elusive. This series of evaluations provides a mechanism to characterize in more precise terms exactly what is necessary to compute in meaning. As such, the evaluations provide an emergent mechanism to identify the problems and solutions for computations with meaning. These exercises have evolved to articulate more of the dimensions that are involved in our use of language. They began with apparently simple attempts to identify word senses computationally. They have evolved to investigate the interrelationships among the elements in a sentence (e.g., semantic role labeling), relations between sentences (e.g., coreference), and the nature of what we are saying (semantic relations and sentiment analysis). The purpose of the SemEval and Senseval exercises is to evaluate semantic analysis systems. "Semantic Analysis" refers to a formal analysis of meaning, and "computational" refer to approaches that in principle support effective implementation. The first three evaluations, Senseval-1 through Senseval-3, were focused on word sense disambiguation (WSD), each time growing in the number of languages offered in the tasks and in the number of participating teams. Beginning with the fourth workshop, SemEval-2007 (SemEval-1), the nature of the tasks evolved to include semantic analysis tasks outside of word sense disambiguation. Triggered by the conception of the SEM conference, the SemEval community had decided to hold the evaluation workshops yearly in association with the SEM conference. It was also the decision that not every evaluation task will be run every year, e.g. none of the WSD tasks were included in the SemEval-2012 workshop. == History == === Early evaluation of algorithms for word sense disambiguation === From the earliest days, assessing the quality of word sense disambiguation algorithms had been primarily a matter of intrinsic evaluation, and “almost no attempts had been made to evaluate embedded WSD components”. Only very recently (2006) had extrinsic evaluations begun to provide some evidence for the value of WSD in end-user applications. Until 1990 or so, discussions of the sense disambiguation task focused mainly on illustrative examples rather than comprehensive evaluation. The early 1990s saw the beginnings of more systematic and rigorous intrinsic evaluations, including more formal experimentation on small sets of ambiguous words. === Senseval to SemEval === In April 1997, Martha Palmer and Marc Light organized a workshop entitled Tagging with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How? in conjunction with the Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing. At the time, there was a clear recognition that manually annotated corpora had revolutionized other areas of NLP, such as part-of-speech tagging and parsing, and that corpus-driven approaches had the potential to revolutionize automatic semantic analysis as well. Kilgarriff recalled that there was "a high degree of consensus that the field needed evaluation", and several practical proposals by Resnik and Yarowsky kicked off a discussion that led to the creation of the Senseval evaluation exercises. === SemEval's 3, 2 or 1 year(s) cycle === After SemEval-2010, many participants feel that the 3-year cycle is a long wait. Many other shared tasks such as Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) and Recognizing Textual Entailments (RTE) run annually. For this reason, the SemEval coordinators gave the opportunity for task organizers to choose between a 2-year or a 3-year cycle. The SemEval community favored the 3-year cycle. Although the votes within the SemEval community favored a 3-year cycle, organizers and coordinators had settled to split the SemEval task into 2 evaluation workshops. This was triggered by the introduction of the new SEM conference. The SemEval organizers thought it would be appropriate to associate our event with the SEM conference and collocate the SemEval workshop with the SEM conference. The organizers got very positive responses (from the task coordinators/organizers and participants) about the association with the yearly SEM, and 8 tasks were willing to switch to 2012. Thus was born SemEval-2012 and SemEval-2013. The current plan is to switch to a yearly SemEval schedule to associate it with the SEM conference but not every task needs to run every year. ==== List of Senseval and SemEval Workshops ==== Senseval-1 took place in the summer of 1998 for English, French, and Italian, culminating in a workshop held at Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex, England on September 2–4. Senseval-2 took place in the summer of 2001, and was followed by a workshop held in July 2001 in Toulouse, in conjunction with ACL 2001. Senseval-2 included tasks for Basque, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Swedish. Senseval-3 took place in March–April 2004, followed by a workshop held in July 2004 in Barcelona, in conjunction with ACL 2004. Senseval-3 included 14 different tasks for core word sense disambiguation, as well as identification of semantic roles, multilingual annotations, logic forms, subcategorization acquisition. SemEval-2007 (Senseval-4) took place in 2007, followed by a workshop held in conjunction with ACL in Prague. SemEval-2007 included 18 different tasks targeting the evaluation of systems for the semantic analysis of text. A special issue of Language Resources and Evaluation is devoted to the result. SemEval-2010 took place in 2010, followed by a workshop held in conjunction with ACL in Uppsala. SemEval-2010 included 18 different tasks targeting the evaluation of semantic analysis systems. SemEval-2012 took place in 2012; it was associated with the new SEM, First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, and co-located with NAACL, Montreal, Canada. SemEval-2012 included 8 different tasks targeting at evaluating computational semantic systems. However, there was no WSD task involved in SemEval-2012, the WSD related tasks were scheduled in the upcoming SemEval-2013. SemEval-2013 was associated with NAACL 2013, North American Association of Computational Linguistics, Georgia, USA and took place in 2013. It included 13 different tasks targeting at evaluating computational semantic systems. SemEval-2014 took place in 2014. It was co-located with COLING 2014, 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and SEM 2014, Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, Dublin, Ireland. There were 10 different tasks in SemEval-2014 evaluating various computational semantic systems. SemEval-2015 took place in 2015. It was co-located with NAACL-HLT 2015, 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies and SEM 2015, Third Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, Denver, USA. There were 17 different tasks in SemEval-2015 evaluating various computational semantic systems. == SemEval Workshop framework == The framework of the SemEval/Senseval evaluation workshops emulates the Message Understanding Conferences (MUCs) and other evaluation workshops ran by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)). Stages of SemEval/Senseval evaluation workshops Firstly, all likely participants were invited to express their interest and participate in the exercise design. A timetable towards a final workshop was worked out. A plan for selecting evaluation materials was agreed. 'Gold standards' for the individual tasks were acquired, often human annotators were considered as a gold standard to measure precision and recall scores of computer systems. These 'gold standards' are what the computational systems strive towards. In WSD tasks, human annotators were set on the task of generating a set of correct WSD answers (i.e. the correct sense for a given word in a given context) The gold standard materials, without answers, were released to participants, who then had a short time to run their programs over them and return their sets of answers to the organizers. The organizers then scored the answers and the scores were announced and discussed at a workshop. == Semantic evaluation tasks == Senseval-1 & Senseval-2 focused on evaluation WSD systems on major languages that were available corpus and computerized dictionary. Senseval-3 looked beyond the lexemes and started to evaluate systems that looked into wider areas of semantics, such as Semantic Roles (technically known as Theta roles in formal semantics), Logic Form Transformation (commonly semantics of phrases, clauses or sentences were represented

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  Data lineage

  Data lineage refers to the process of tracking how data is generated, transformed, transmitted and used across systems over time. It documents data's origins, transformations and movements, providing detailed visibility into its life cycle. This process simplifies the identification of errors in data analytics workflows, by enabling users to trace issues back to their root causes. Data lineage facilitates the ability to replay specific segments or inputs of the dataflow. This can be used in debugging or regenerating lost outputs. In database systems, this concept is closely related to data provenance, which involves maintaining records of inputs, entities, systems and processes that influence data. Data provenance provides a historical record of data origins and transformations. It supports forensic activities such as data-dependency analysis, error/compromise detection, recovery, auditing and compliance analysis: "Lineage is a simple type of why provenance." Data governance plays a critical role in managing metadata by establishing guidelines, strategies and policies. Enhancing data lineage with data quality measures and master data management adds business value. Although data lineage is typically represented through a graphical user interface (GUI), the methods for gathering and exposing metadata to this interface can vary. Based on the metadata collection approach, data lineage can be categorized into three types: Those involving software packages for structured data, programming languages and Big data systems. Data lineage information includes technical metadata about data transformations. Enriched data lineage may include additional elements such as data quality test results, reference data, data models, business terminology, data stewardship information, program management details and enterprise systems associated with data points and transformations. Data lineage visualization tools often include masking features that allow users to focus on information relevant to specific use cases. To unify representations across disparate systems, metadata normalization or standardization may be required. == Representation of data lineage == Representation broadly depends on the scope of the metadata management and reference point of interest. Data lineage provides sources of the data and intermediate data flow hops from the reference point with backward data lineage, leading to the final destination's data points and its intermediate data flows with forward data lineage. These views can be combined with end-to-end lineage for a reference point that provides a complete audit trail of that data point of interest from sources to their final destinations. As the data points or hops increase, the complexity of such representation becomes incomprehensible. Thus, the best feature of the data lineage view is the ability to simplify the view by temporarily masking unwanted peripheral data points. Tools with the masking feature enable scalability of the view and enhance analysis with the best user experience for both technical and business users. Data lineage also enables companies to trace sources of specific business data to track errors, implement changes in processes and implementing system migrations to save significant amounts of time and resources. Data lineage can improve efficiency in business intelligence BI processes. Data lineage can be represented visually to discover the data flow and movement from its source to destination via various changes and hops on its way in the enterprise environment. This includes how the data is transformed along the way, how the representation and parameters change and how the data splits or converges after each hop. A simple representation of the Data Lineage can be shown with dots and lines, where dots represent data containers for data points, and lines connecting them represent transformations the data undergoes between the data containers. Data lineage can be visualized at various levels based on the granularity of the view. At a very high-level, data lineage is visualized as systems that the data interacts with before it reaches its destination. At its most granular, visualizations at the data point level can provide the details of the data point and its historical behavior, attribute properties and trends and data quality of the data passed through that specific data point in the data lineage. The scope of the data lineage determines the volume of metadata required to represent its data lineage. Usually, data governance and data management of an organization determine the scope of the data lineage based on their regulations, enterprise data management strategy, data impact, reporting attributes and critical data elements of the organization. == Rationale == Distributed systems like Google Map Reduce, Microsoft Dryad, Apache Hadoop (an open-source project) and Google Pregel provide such platforms for businesses and users. However, even with these systems, Big Data analytics can take several hours, days or weeks to run, simply due to the data volumes involved. For example, a ratings prediction algorithm for the Netflix Prize challenge took nearly 20 hours to execute on 50 cores, and a large-scale image processing task to estimate geographic information took 3 days to complete using 400 cores. "The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is expected to generate terabytes of data every night and eventually store more than 50 petabytes, while in the bioinformatics sector, the 12 largest genome sequencing houses in the world now store petabytes of data apiece. It is very difficult for a data scientist to trace an unknown or an unanticipated result. === Big data debugging === Big data analytics is the process of examining large data sets to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful business information. Machine learning, among other algorithms, is used to transform and analyze the data. Due to the large size of the data, there could be unknown features in the data. The massive scale and unstructured nature of data, the complexity of these analytics pipelines, and long runtimes pose significant manageability and debugging challenges. Even a single error in these analytics can be extremely difficult to identify and remove. While one may debug them by re-running the entire analytics through a debugger for stepwise debugging, this can be expensive due to the amount of time and resources needed. Auditing and data validation are other major problems due to the growing ease of access to relevant data sources for use in experiments, the sharing of data between scientific communities and use of third-party data in business enterprises. As such, more cost-efficient ways of analyzing data intensive scale-able computing (DISC) are crucial to their continued effective use. === Challenges in Big Data debugging === ==== Massive scale ==== According to an EMC/IDC study, 2.8 ZB of data were created and replicated in 2012. Furthermore, the same study states that the digital universe will double every two years between now and 2020, and that there will be approximately 5.2 TB of data for every person in 2020. Based on current technology, the storage of this much data will mean greater energy usage by data centers. ==== Unstructured data ==== Unstructured data usually refers to information that doesn't reside in a traditional row-column database. Unstructured data files often include text and multimedia content, such as e-mail messages, word processing documents, videos, photos, audio files, presentations, web pages and many other kinds of business documents. While these types of files may have an internal structure, they are still considered "unstructured" because the data they contain doesn't fit neatly into a database. The amount of unstructured data in enterprises is growing many times faster than structured databases are growing. Big data can include both structured and unstructured data, but IDC estimates that 90 percent of Big Data is unstructured data. The fundamental challenge of unstructured data sources is that they are difficult for non-technical business users and data analysts alike to unbox, understand and prepare for analytic use. Beyond issues of structure, the sheer volume of this type of data contributes to such difficulty. Because of this, current data mining techniques often leave out valuable information and make analyzing unstructured data laborious and expensive. In today's competitive business environment, companies have to find and analyze the relevant data they need quickly. The challenge is going through the volumes of data and accessing the level of detail needed, all at a high speed. The challenge only grows as the degree of granularity increases. One possible solution is hardware. Some vendors are using increased memory and parallel processing to crunch large volumes of data quickly. Another method is putting data in-memory but using a grid

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  Social media use in education

  Social media in education is the use of social media to enhance education. Social media are "a group of Internet-based applications...that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content". It is also known as the read/write web. As time went on and technology evolved, social media has been an integral part of people's lives, including students, scholars, and teachers. However, social media are controversial because, in addition to providing new means of connection, critics claim that they damage self-esteem, shorten attention spans, and increase mental health issues. A 2016 dissertation presented surveys that focused on the impact of social media. It reported that 54.6% of students believed that social media affected their studies positively (38% agree, 16.6% strongly agree). About 40% disagreed, and 4.7% of students strongly disagreed. 53% of female students reported that social media negatively impacted their studies. Among male students, 40% agreed that social media had a negative impact on studies, while 59% disagreed. A 2023 article dives deep into the rewards system of the brain in response to social media. This study compares the social rewards system in our brain to those from social media. From ages 10-12, most are receiving a cell phone, social rewards in the brain start to feel more satisfying. Leading to adulthood, the effects of social rewards are less likely to feel reliant on feedback from peers. Equivalent to a more mature prefrontal cortex, this enables a better management of their emotional reaction to these social rewards, meaning a more balanced and controlled reaction. == History == A survey from Cambridge International of nearly 20,000 teachers and students (ages 12–19) from 100 countries found that 48% of students use a desktop computer in class, 42% uses phones, 33% use interactive whiteboards and 20% use tablets. Desktop computers are more used than tablets. Teachers were abandoning the "no phones at school" rule. A 2024 research survey through Common Sense Education reported 54% of age 8-12 and 69% of ages 13-18 social media is an extensive distraction from homework. === United States === The long-running technology boom accelerated after the millennium. As of 2018, 95% of US teenage students had access to a smartphone and 45% said they were online almost constantly. In the early days of social media, access to technology was a significant issue as many students did not own not compatible devices and school budgets were often insufficient to purchase devices for student use. Despite backlash, Missouri passed a law that prohibited teachers from communicating privately with students over social media in 2011. Supporters were concerned that online communication between underage students and faculty could lead to inappropriate relationships. Some schools adopted a "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) policy, allowing students to bring Internet-accessing devices, such as phones or tablets to class. During the pandemic, the federal government offered funds that allowed more schools to purchase devices. Over time, more students acquired phones with social media access. Personal devices increased student satisfaction, but reduced teachers' ability to control device use in their classrooms. A 2018 Pew Research study reported that 95% of teenagers had a phone and used social media consistently. === Canada === The Peel District School Board (PDSB) in Ontario accepted the use of social media in the classroom. In 2013, the PDSB introduced BYOD and unblocked many social media sites. That was later replaced by a policy that dealt specifically with social media. == Uses == === Classroom === In the classroom, social media offers a way to systematically distribute and gather information from students. Teachers can supply documents, and audio/video media to students for immediate or later use. One study on higher education reported that devices and social media: created opportunities for interaction provided occasions for collaboration sped up information access offered more ways to learn situated learning. Frustrations included anti-technology instructors, device challenges, and devices as a distraction. Social media in classrooms can have a negative effect. A Yale University publication reported that students who used laptops in class for non-academic reasons had poorer performance. Students spent most of their time on social media, shopping, and other personal activities. Social media has helped many educators mentor their students more effectively. === Outside of class === Social media offer a venue for video calls, stories, feeds, and game playing that can enhance the learning process. Teachers can utilize social media to communicate with their students. Social media can provide students with resources that they can utilize in essays, projects, and presentations. Students can easily access comments made by teachers and peers and offer feedback to teachers. Social media can offer students the opportunity to collaborate by sharing information without requiring face to face meetings. Social media can allow students to more easily connect with experts, to go beyond course materials. Instructors in a 2010 study reported that online technologies (social media) can help students become comfortable having discussions outside the classroom better than traditional means. Teachers may face some risk when using social media outside the classroom, without appropriate work rules. Studies explores how college students' engagement with social media platforms influences their communication preferences and habits, particularly in relation to using school email for academic purposes. === Professional development === Social media can aid professional development, as teachers become students, enhancing knowledge transfer, skill master, and collaboration. === Non-academic uses === Schools can use social media to make public announcements. Teachers and administrators can communicate other important information to parents and students and to receive feedback from them. Families can keep up with school events and policies. === Ecology education === The potential of using social media in ecological, nature and forest education include: virtual nature groups can help promote good habits in forest tourism and recreation (nature ethics), by entering general rules in the regulations by administrators, e.g. "DO NOT PICK UP PLANTS UNKNOWN TO US", which is to protects rare species from pointless picking. social media activity motivates people to learn about nature in the field, allows them to gain knowledge, dispels popular myths, enables contact with scientists and practitioners, promotes valuable literature, websites, and at the same time reveals distortions and substantive errors in popular news services. contact is not only virtual. Despite financial barriers and distance, Internet users organize nature conventions. Such meetings are an opportunity not only to make friends, but also to learn about nature together and have fun. the possibility of contact between scientists and nature lovers via Facebook has become a source of cooperation in species inventory, e.g. the online campaign of the NATRIX Herpetological Society, which consists not only of collecting reports of observations of the smooth snake by Internet users, but also of drawing attention to the biology and threats to this species. Social media has become a place where ecology education quickly reaches people of different ages and social statuses. The nature groups that have been created, in which nature lovers, biologists, foresters and scientists participate, can have a real impact on the state of knowledge and data collection through citizen science. == Apps and services == Social media can allow students to participate in their field by working with organizations outside the classroom. By offering easier access to peers outside the classroom, students can broaden their perspectives and find support resources. Social media aided learning outside of the classroom through collaboration and innovation. One specific study, "Exploring education-related use of social media," called this "audience connectors". Audience connectors bring students together while studying with WhatsApp and Facebook. This study reported that "60 percent [of students in the study] agreed that technology changes education for the better." While social media can promote a beneficial education platform, downsides exist. Students may become skilled at "lifting material from the internet" rather than enhancing their personal understanding. Another downside is student attention spans decline. A concern raised by the students of this study showed how many use spell-check as a crutch and will see a trend of points taken off when spell-check is not an option. Apps like X allowed teachers to make classroom accounts where students can learn about social media in a controlled context. Teachers can post assignments on th

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  Campus network

  A campus network, campus area network, corporate area network or CAN is a computer network made up of an interconnection of local area networks (LANs) within a limited geographical area. The networking equipments (switches, routers) and transmission media (optical fiber, copper plant, Cat5 cabling etc.) are almost entirely owned by the campus tenant / owner: an enterprise, university, government etc. A campus area network is larger than a local area network but smaller than a metropolitan area network (MAN) or wide area network (WAN). == University campuses == College or university campus area networks often interconnect a variety of buildings, including administrative buildings, academic buildings, laboratories, university libraries, or student centers, residence halls, gymnasiums, and other outlying structures, like conference centers, technology centers, and training institutes. Early examples include the Stanford University Network at Stanford University, Project Athena at MIT, and the Andrew Project at Carnegie Mellon University. == Corporate campuses == Much like a university campus network, a corporate campus network serves to connect buildings. Examples of such are the networks at Googleplex and Microsoft's campus. Campus networks are normally interconnected with high speed Ethernet links operating over optical fiber such as gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. == Area range == The range of CAN is 1 to 5 km (1 to 3 mi). If two buildings have the same domain and they are connected with a network, then it will be considered as CAN only. Though the CAN is mainly used for corporate campuses so the link will be high speed.

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  Contextual image classification

  Contextual image classification, a topic of pattern recognition in computer vision, is an approach of classification based on contextual information in images. "Contextual" means this approach is focusing on the relationship of the nearby pixels, which is also called neighbourhood. The goal of this approach is to classify the images by using the contextual information. == Introduction == Similar as processing language, a single word may have multiple meanings unless the context is provided, and the patterns within the sentences are the only informative segments we care about. For images, the principle is same. Find out the patterns and associate proper meanings to them. As the image illustrated below, if only a small portion of the image is shown, it is very difficult to tell what the image is about. Even try another portion of the image, it is still difficult to classify the image. However, if we increase the contextual of the image, then it makes more sense to recognize. As the full images shows below, almost everyone can classify it easily. During the procedure of segmentation, the methods which do not use the contextual information are sensitive to noise and variations, thus the result of segmentation will contain a great deal of misclassified regions, and often these regions are small (e.g., one pixel). Compared to other techniques, this approach is robust to noise and substantial variations for it takes the continuity of the segments into account. Several methods of this approach will be described below. == Applications == === Functioning as a post-processing filter to a labelled image === This approach is very effective against small regions caused by noise. And these small regions are usually formed by few pixels or one pixel. The most probable label is assigned to these regions. However, there is a drawback of this method. The small regions also can be formed by correct regions rather than noise, and in this case the method is actually making the classification worse. This approach is widely used in remote sensing applications. === Improving the post-processing classification === This is a two-stage classification process: For each pixel, label the pixel and form a new feature vector for it. Use the new feature vector and combine the contextual information to assign the final label to the === Merging the pixels in earlier stages === Instead of using single pixels, the neighbour pixels can be merged into homogeneous regions benefiting from contextual information. And provide these regions to classifier. === Acquiring pixel feature from neighbourhood === The original spectral data can be enriched by adding the contextual information carried by the neighbour pixels, or even replaced in some occasions. This kind of pre-processing methods are widely used in textured image recognition. The typical approaches include mean values, variances, texture description, etc. === Combining spectral and spatial information === The classifier uses the grey level and pixel neighbourhood (contextual information) to assign labels to pixels. In such case the information is a combination of spectral and spatial information. === Powered by the Bayes minimum error classifier === Contextual classification of image data is based on the Bayes minimum error classifier (also known as a naive Bayes classifier). Present the pixel: A pixel is denoted as x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} . The neighbourhood of each pixel x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} is a vector and denoted as N ( x 0 ) {\displaystyle N(x_{0})} . The values in the neighbourhood vector is denoted as f ( x i ) {\displaystyle f(x_{i})} . Each pixel is presented by the vector ξ = ( f ( x 0 ) , f ( x 1 ) , … , f ( x k ) ) {\displaystyle \xi =\left(f(x_{0}),f(x_{1}),\ldots ,f(x_{k})\right)} x i ∈ N ( x 0 ) ; i = 1 , … , k {\displaystyle x_{i}\in N(x_{0});\quad i=1,\ldots ,k} The labels (classification) of pixels in the neighbourhood N ( x 0 ) {\displaystyle N(x_{0})} are presented as a vector η = ( θ 0 , θ 1 , … , θ k ) {\displaystyle \eta =\left(\theta _{0},\theta _{1},\ldots ,\theta _{k}\right)} θ i ∈ { ω 0 , ω 1 , … , ω k } {\displaystyle \theta _{i}\in \left\{\omega _{0},\omega _{1},\ldots ,\omega _{k}\right\}} ω s {\displaystyle \omega _{s}} here denotes the assigned class. A vector presents the labels in the neighbourhood N ( x 0 ) {\displaystyle N(x_{0})} without the pixel x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} η ^ = ( θ 1 , θ 2 , … , θ k ) {\displaystyle {\hat {\eta }}=\left(\theta _{1},\theta _{2},\ldots ,\theta _{k}\right)} The neighbourhood: Size of the neighbourhood. There is no limitation of the size, but it is considered to be relatively small for each pixel x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} . A reasonable size of neighbourhood would be 3 × 3 {\displaystyle 3\times 3} of 4-connectivity or 8-connectivity ( x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} is marked as red and placed in the centre). The calculation: Apply the minimum error classification on a pixel x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} , if the probability of a class ω r {\displaystyle \omega _{r}} being presenting the pixel x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} is the highest among all, then assign ω r {\displaystyle \omega _{r}} as its class. θ 0 = ω r if P ( ω r ∣ f ( x 0 ) ) = max s = 1 , 2 , … , R P ( ω s ∣ f ( x 0 ) ) {\displaystyle \theta _{0}=\omega _{r}\quad {\text{ if }}\quad P(\omega _{r}\mid f(x_{0}))=\max _{s=1,2,\ldots ,R}P(\omega _{s}\mid f(x_{0}))} The contextual classification rule is described as below, it uses the feature vector x 1 {\displaystyle x_{1}} rather than x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} . θ 0 = ω r if P ( ω r ∣ ξ ) = max s = 1 , 2 , … , R P ( ω s ∣ ξ ) {\displaystyle \theta _{0}=\omega _{r}\quad {\text{ if }}\quad P(\omega _{r}\mid \xi )=\max _{s=1,2,\ldots ,R}P(\omega _{s}\mid \xi )} Use the Bayes formula to calculate the posteriori probability P ( ω s ∣ ξ ) {\displaystyle P(\omega _{s}\mid \xi )} P ( ω s ∣ ξ ) = p ( ξ ∣ ω s ) P ( ω s ) p ( ξ ) {\displaystyle P(\omega _{s}\mid \xi )={\frac {p(\xi \mid \omega _{s})P(\omega _{s})}{p\left(\xi \right)}}} The number of vectors is the same as the number of pixels in the image. For the classifier uses a vector corresponding to each pixel x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} , and the vector is generated from the pixel's neighbourhood. The basic steps of contextual image classification: Calculate the feature vector ξ {\displaystyle \xi } for each pixel. Calculate the parameters of probability distribution p ( ξ ∣ ω s ) {\displaystyle p(\xi \mid \omega _{s})} and P ( ω s ) {\displaystyle P(\omega _{s})} Calculate the posterior probabilities P ( ω r ∣ ξ ) {\displaystyle P(\omega _{r}\mid \xi )} and all labels θ 0 {\displaystyle \theta _{0}} . Get the image classification result. == Algorithms == === Template matching === The template matching is a "brute force" implementation of this approach. The concept is first create a set of templates, and then look for small parts in the image match with a template. This method is computationally high and inefficient. It keeps an entire templates list during the whole process and the number of combinations is extremely high. For a m × n {\displaystyle m\times n} pixel image, there could be a maximum of 2 m × n {\displaystyle 2^{m\times n}} combinations, which leads to high computation. This method is a top down method and often called table look-up or dictionary look-up. === Lower-order Markov chain === The Markov chain also can be applied in pattern recognition. The pixels in an image can be recognised as a set of random variables, then use the lower order Markov chain to find the relationship among the pixels. The image is treated as a virtual line, and the method uses conditional probability. === Hilbert space-filling curves === The Hilbert curve runs in a unique pattern through the whole image, it traverses every pixel without visiting any of them twice and keeps a continuous curve. It is fast and efficient. === Markov meshes === The lower-order Markov chain and Hilbert space-filling curves mentioned above are treating the image as a line structure. The Markov meshes however will take the two dimensional information into account. === Dependency tree === The dependency tree is a method using tree dependency to approximate probability distributions.

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  Strong cryptography

  Strong cryptography or cryptographically strong are general terms used to designate the cryptographic algorithms that, when used correctly, provide a very high (usually insurmountable) level of protection against any eavesdropper, including the government agencies. There is no precise definition of the boundary line between the strong cryptography and (breakable) weak cryptography, as this border constantly shifts due to improvements in hardware and cryptanalysis techniques. These improvements eventually place the capabilities once available only to the NSA within the reach of a skilled individual, so in practice there are only two levels of cryptographic security, "cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files" (Bruce Schneier). The strong cryptography algorithms have high security strength, for practical purposes usually defined as a number of bits in the key. For example, the United States government, when dealing with export control of encryption, considered as of 1999 any implementation of the symmetric encryption algorithm with the key length above 56 bits or its public key equivalent to be strong and thus potentially a subject to the export licensing. To be strong, an algorithm needs to have a sufficiently long key and be free of known mathematical weaknesses, as exploitation of these effectively reduces the key size. At the beginning of the 21st century, the typical security strength of the strong symmetrical encryption algorithms is 128 bits (slightly lower values still can be strong, but usually there is little technical gain in using smaller key sizes). Demonstrating the resistance of any cryptographic scheme to attack is a complex matter, requiring extensive testing and reviews, preferably in a public forum. Good algorithms and protocols are required (similarly, good materials are required to construct a strong building), but good system design and implementation is needed as well: "it is possible to build a cryptographically weak system using strong algorithms and protocols" (just like the use of good materials in construction does not guarantee a solid structure). Many real-life systems turn out to be weak when the strong cryptography is not used properly, for example, random nonces are reused A successful attack might not even involve algorithm at all, for example, if the key is generated from a password, guessing a weak password is easy and does not depend on the strength of the cryptographic primitives. A user can become the weakest link in the overall picture, for example, by sharing passwords and hardware tokens with the colleagues. == Background == The level of expense required for strong cryptography originally restricted its use to the government and military agencies, until the middle of the 20th century the process of encryption required a lot of human labor and errors (preventing the decryption) were very common, so only a small share of written information could have been encrypted. US government, in particular, was able to keep a monopoly on the development and use of cryptography in the US into the 1960s. In the 1970, the increased availability of powerful computers and unclassified research breakthroughs (Data Encryption Standard, the Diffie-Hellman and RSA algorithms) made strong cryptography available for civilian use. Mid-1990s saw the worldwide proliferation of knowledge and tools for strong cryptography. By the 21st century the technical limitations were gone, although the majority of the communication were still unencrypted. At the same the cost of building and running systems with strong cryptography became roughly the same as the one for the weak cryptography. The use of computers changed the process of cryptanalysis, famously with Bletchley Park's Colossus. But just as the development of digital computers and electronics helped in cryptanalysis, it also made possible much more complex ciphers. It is typically the case that use of a quality cipher is very efficient, while breaking it requires an effort many orders of magnitude larger - making cryptanalysis so inefficient and impractical as to be effectively impossible. == Cryptographically strong algorithms == This term "cryptographically strong" is often used to describe an encryption algorithm, and implies, in comparison to some other algorithm (which is thus cryptographically weak), greater resistance to attack. But it can also be used to describe hashing and unique identifier and filename creation algorithms. See for example the description of the Microsoft .NET runtime library function Path.GetRandomFileName. In this usage, the term means "difficult to guess". An encryption algorithm is intended to be unbreakable (in which case it is as strong as it can ever be), but might be breakable (in which case it is as weak as it can ever be) so there is not, in principle, a continuum of strength as the idiom would seem to imply: Algorithm A is stronger than Algorithm B which is stronger than Algorithm C, and so on. The situation is made more complex, and less subsumable into a single strength metric, by the fact that there are many types of cryptanalytic attack and that any given algorithm is likely to force the attacker to do more work to break it when using one attack than another. There is only one known unbreakable cryptographic system, the one-time pad, which is not generally possible to use because of the difficulties involved in exchanging one-time pads without them being compromised. So any encryption algorithm can be compared to the perfect algorithm, the one-time pad. The usual sense in which this term is (loosely) used, is in reference to a particular attack, brute force key search — especially in explanations for newcomers to the field. Indeed, with this attack (always assuming keys to have been randomly chosen), there is a continuum of resistance depending on the length of the key used. But even so there are two major problems: many algorithms allow use of different length keys at different times, and any algorithm can forgo use of the full key length possible. Thus, Blowfish and RC5 are block cipher algorithms whose design specifically allowed for several key lengths, and who cannot therefore be said to have any particular strength with respect to brute force key search. Furthermore, US export regulations restrict key length for exportable cryptographic products and in several cases in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., famously in the case of Lotus Notes' export approval) only partial keys were used, decreasing 'strength' against brute force attack for those (export) versions. More or less the same thing happened outside the US as well, as for example in the case of more than one of the cryptographic algorithms in the GSM cellular telephone standard. The term is commonly used to convey that some algorithm is suitable for some task in cryptography or information security, but also resists cryptanalysis and has no, or fewer, security weaknesses. Tasks are varied, and might include: generating randomness encrypting data providing a method to ensure data integrity Cryptographically strong would seem to mean that the described method has some kind of maturity, perhaps even approved for use against different kinds of systematic attacks in theory and/or practice. Indeed, that the method may resist those attacks long enough to protect the information carried (and what stands behind the information) for a useful length of time. But due to the complexity and subtlety of the field, neither is almost ever the case. Since such assurances are not actually available in real practice, sleight of hand in language which implies that they are will generally be misleading. There will always be uncertainty as advances (e.g., in cryptanalytic theory or merely affordable computer capacity) may reduce the effort needed to successfully use some attack method against an algorithm. In addition, actual use of cryptographic algorithms requires their encapsulation in a cryptosystem, and doing so often introduces vulnerabilities which are not due to faults in an algorithm. For example, essentially all algorithms require random choice of keys, and any cryptosystem which does not provide such keys will be subject to attack regardless of any attack resistant qualities of the encryption algorithm(s) used. == Legal issues == Widespread use of encryption increases the costs of surveillance, so the government policies aim to regulate the use of the strong cryptography. In the 2000s, the effect of encryption on the surveillance capabilities was limited by the ever-increasing share of communications going through the global social media platforms, that did not use the strong encryption and provided governments with the requested data. Murphy talks about a legislative balance that needs to be struck between the power of the government that are broad enough to be able to follow the qui

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  Classora

  Classora is a knowledge base for the Internet oriented to data analysis. From a practical point of view, Classora is a digital repository that stores structured information and allows it to be displayed in multiple formats: analytically, graphically, geographically (through maps); as well as carry out OLAP analysis. The information contained in Classora comes from public sources and is uploaded into the system through bots and ETL processes. The Knowledge Base has a commercial API for semantic enhancement, and an open web through which any user can access to part of the information collected (it also allows users to complete data and share opinions). Internally, Classora is organized into Knowledge Units and Reports. A «Knowledge Unit» is any element of the World about which information may be stored and presented in the form of a data sheet (a person, a company, a country, etc.) A «Report» is a group of Knowledge Units: a ranking of companies, a sport classification table, a survey about people, etc. In fact, one of the technical capabilities of Classora is that it allows the comparison of reports and knowledge units gathered from different sources, thereby generating an added value for the media in which this information is published: digital media, interactive TV, etc. == Key definitions == === Knowledge unit === The units of knowledge (also known as entries) in Classora are data sheets that have a certain semantic equivalence with the articles on the Wikipedia: they store information about any element of the world, be it a film, a country, a company or an animal. However, they differ from Wikipedia in that Classora stores structured information, enriched with a metadata layer; and therefore it is able to automatically interpret the meaning of each unit of knowledge. === Data report === A report is a group of units of knowledge in which the repetition of elements is not allowed. This definition includes any list, poll, ranking, etc.; and, in general, any consultation that involves more than one unit of knowledge. Classora excels at the reports management due to its visualization capabilities, being able to display data in the form of tables, graphs and maps. Types of reports: Sports scores: Sports competitions results sanctioned by the competent institution. Rankings and lists: All types of interesting and curious lists, whether they have an implicit order or not. Polls: Units of knowledge that are ranked according to users’ votes. Queries to the Knowledge Base: Questions from users using CQL. Networks of connections: automatically calculated from the reports and the taxonomy of each Knowledge Unit. === Organizational taxonomy === An organizational taxonomy (also referred to as entry type) is a data sheet that brings together the common attributes of a set of units of knowledge. For instance, the organizational taxonomy F1 Driver displays attributes such as date of debut, team, etc.; and the organizational taxonomy Football Club presents attributes such as city, stadium, etc. In Classora, taxonomies are hierarchically organized, so that they inherit attributes from their parent taxonomies. For instance, F1 Driver is a subsidiary taxonomy of Sportsperson, which is a subsidiary taxonomy of Person, which in turn is a subsidiary taxonomy of Organism. The simplest type of entry in Classora is Classora Object. All the other taxonomies are its subsidiaries and inherit its attributes. In fact, the only attribute Classora Object possesses is name (all units of knowledge are required to have one name at least). == Architecture of Classora == === Data Extraction Module === The Data Extraction Module consists of a set of robots coordinated by software that also manages the potential incidents. Most of the information available in Classora is automatically uploaded through those robots, which connect to the main online public sources to gather all types of data. There are three categories of robots: Extraction robots: responsible for the massive uploading of reports from official public sources (FIFA, CIA, IMF, Eurostat...). They are used for either absolute or incremental data uploading. Data scanner robots: responsible for looking for and updating the data of a unit of knowledge. They use specific sources to perform this task: Wikipedia, IMDB, World Bank, etc. Content aggregators: they don’t connect to external sources. Instead, they generate new information using Classora’s internal database. === Participatory Module === In Classora’s Open Website, Internet users may participate providing their knowledge as they would on the Wikipedia. There are different ways to participate: adding or correcting data in the Knowledge Base, voting in surveys (participatory rankings) and creating new Knowledge Units and Data Reports. === Connectivity Module === The Knowledge Base is designed to be embedded in multi-platform, multi-channel systems, thus enabling its integration into mobile devices, tablets, interactive TV, etc. This integration may be carried out through specific plugins (for navigators or other devices) or an API REST that provides content in XML or JSON formats. The API is divided into three blocks of operations. The first one is the block of general utility tools (ranging from autosuggest components about geographical hierarchies to operations to obtain the list of today’s celebrity birthdays, using CQL). The second one is the block of operations for widget generation (graphs, maps, rankings) using information from the knowledge base. Finally, there is a block of operations designed for the publication of free-source content. == Project statistics == As of April 2012, 2,000,000 Knowledge Units, 15,000 Reports, around 10,000 Maps and several million potential Comparative Analyses had been added to Classora. According to the site of web metrics Alexa, Classora Open Website is ranked at 100,557 globally and at 2,880 in the Spanish traffic ranking. Users spend an average of 9 ½ minutes in Classora.

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  Media contacts database

  In public relations (PR) and marketing, a media contacts database is a resource which catalogs the names, contact information, and other details about people who work in various media professions. These include journalists, reporters, editors, publishers, contributors, freelance journalists, opinion writers, social media personalities/ influencers, TV show anchors, radio show hosts, DJs, and others. A media contacts database usually contains the following information: Full name of the media contact, The publication or channel they work for Designations (past and present) Topics they cover, or their beat Contact information found in public domains Online presence like blogs and other social networking sites Education Information == Overview == A media contacts database is a public relations tool that is maintained and used by PR professionals to pitch stories on a particular topic, product, or company to a specific group of journalists. These journalists would then write or speak about the particular topic in a relevant issue or episode of their shows. A media contacts database allows a PR professional to gain easy access to hundreds of journalists within a short span of time. Media contacts database are created and sold by many media research companies that offer such PR software for professionals.

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  Azure Maps

  Azure Maps is a suite of cloud-based, location-based services provided by Microsoft as part of the company's Azure platform. The platform provides geospatial and location-based services via REST APIs and software development kits (SDKs). The service is typically used to integrate maps or geospatial data into applications. Azure Maps differs from Microsoft's other enterprise mapping service, Bing Maps, in its pricing model, focus on privacy, and its level of integration into the broader Azure cloud ecosystem. == History == Azure Maps was first introduced in public preview mode under the name "Azure Location Based Services" in 2017, primarily as an enterprise solution. The services was intended to add mapping and location-based functionality onto the existing Azure cloud services suite, seen as a critical part of Microsoft's broader Internet-of-Things (IoT) strategy. The preview version included APIs which could be used to develop location aware apps for use cases such as logistics and mobility. In 2018, the software was renamed "Azure Maps," and became generally available to the public, and a number of new functions were added, including route calculation, travel time calculation, and incorporation of real-time traffic data and incident information. Azure Maps was integrated with Azure IoT Central in 2018, which added tracking, monitoring, and geofencing capabilities. A set of mobility APIs on were added in 2019, with applications such as use in public transport apps and shared bicycle fleet management. “Azure Maps Creator,” which converts private facility floor plans into indoor map data, was also introduced in 2019. Some commentators linked these services to Microsoft's broader development of augmented reality products. In 2020, Azure Maps Visual for Power BI was released, integrating location-based features and mapping capabilities into Microsoft's business intelligence software. An elevation API (which was later retired), geolocation services, and an iOS and Android software development kit were introduced in 2021. In 2022, support for historical weather, air quality, and tropical storm data was made generally available and custom styling for indoor maps was also introduced. In 2023, Azure Maps was certified as HIPAA compliant in a move to target healthcare and health insurance companies. == Functionality == === Geocoding === Geocoding is one of the core functionalities of Azure Maps, converting addresses or place names into geographic coordinates. Batch geocoding is used to process large amounts of address data, a function used for route optimization and spatial analysis. === Reverse geocoding === Reverse geocoding derives human-readable information from geographic coordinates like longitude and latitude, used in navigation and by geographic information systems. === Routing === Azure Maps uses map data and routing algorithms to calculate the shortest or fastest routes between locations based on factors like vehicle size and type, traffic conditions, and distance. Routing also supports multi-modal routing, which include multiple modes of transport in a single trip, including cycling, walking, and ferries. This functionality is used for location-based searches and route optimization in applications like fleet management, proximity marketing, and emergency services as well as logistics and delivery, urban planning, ride sharing apps, and outdoor activities. === Map visualization === The platform supports map visualizations that can be modified to reflect real-time data (including from IoT sensors) as well as historical data patterns. Visualizations include heat maps, street maps, satellite imagery and other custom data layers. Maps are rendered using raster or vector tiles which reduce the load of displaying large data sets or complex maps. This can be used in various applications in areas like transportation, smart cities, retail and marketing, public health, and environmental monitoring. For example, it can be used for tracking the spread of diseases or measuring the impact of changing climatic patterns. === Geofencing and spatial analytics === Azure Maps supports polygonal geofencing, which enables the definition of custom geographic boundaries. Geofenced areas can be monitored in real-time for events of interest. For example, an application could send an alert when equipment or persons enter or leave a defined area. Tools for analyzing historical geofencing data are also available via the APIs for optimization purposes. == Industry usage == Azure Maps' geofencing function has seen usage in the construction industry, designating hazardous areas for safety purposes and sending alerts if anyone enters the area. Private facility maps are used by construction companies for monitoring large construction sites to increase productivity and prevent accidents or damage. In emergency management, New Zealand based company Beca has used Azure Maps to provide analysis on the impact of earthquakes to users, including information on the severity and location of an earthquake and the impact on affected properties. Alaska's Department of Transportation uses Azure Maps as part of an information system providing weather-related warnings and analytics to road crews. Airmap, an airspace management platform for drones, uses Azure Maps. Azure Maps has also been used in conjunction with Azure Monitor for risk monitoring by an insurance company. Other companies that use or have used Azure Maps include BMW, Banco Santander, Jvion, MV Transportation, C.H. Robertson, Wise Skulls, Tata Consultancy Services, Providence Health and Services, Gas Brasiliano Distribuidora S.A., Shell plc, Persistent Systems, Phase 2 Dining and Entertainment, Symbio, HID, Globant, and Insight Enterprises. == Partnerships == Azure Maps and TomTom have been partners since 2016, and TomTom provides location data to Azure Maps and can process data from Azure Maps for mapping purposes. In 2021, Azure Maps partnered with AccuWeather to make climatic data available via its APIs, making weather data along all parts of calculated routes available for mobility and logistics purposes. Microsoft has partnered with Esri, the developer of ArcGIS, and there is cross-compatibility between Azure and ArcGIS so that data from Azure Maps can be integrated into ArcGIS and vice versa. Azure Maps partnered with Moovit in 2019, a startup providing software that interfaces with public transport data. Moovit's database on global public transit networks, including information on which stations and facilities are wheelchair accessible, was linked to Azure Maps. This service was noted for its use increasing accessibility to public transport for the visually impaired by means of voice activated route planning assistance. NORAD has used some Azure Maps functions for their NORAD Tracks Santa website during Christmas holidays. == Components == === REST APIs === Various APIs cover the major functionalities across Azure Maps: Data registry API Geolocation API Render API Route API Search API Spatial API Time zone API Traffic API Weather API === SDKs === Azure Maps SDKs uses MapLibre-style specifications and open source MapLibre GL-based libraries as a rendering engine. The Web SDK is used for developing web apps with maps and location-based data and functionality. It includes a map control module as well as modules with drawing tools. It also supports Azure Maps Creator and various spatial data formats. The platform also includes a set of REST SDKs for developers integrating Azure Maps REST APIs into Python, C#, Java or JavaScript applications. Azure Maps also includes Android and iOS SDKs used for developing applications for Android and Apple devices. === Azure Maps Creator === Azure Maps Creator is a tool for generating custom maps for locations like large office complexes, construction sites, or university campuses. These maps can then be integrated into applications and used with other Azure Maps functions for purposes such as wayfinding and maintenance and security in building automation contexts. === Azure Maps Visual for Power BI === Azure Maps is integrated with Microsoft Power BI, a graphical tool for producing data visualizations. Since July 2020, Power BI can be used in conjunction with Azure Maps for developing map-based data visualizations. This functionality entered general availability in May 2023.

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  Social media surgery

  A social media surgery is a gathering at which volunteer "surgeons" with expertise in using web tools, chiefly social media, offer free advice in using such tools, to representatives ("patients") of non-profit organisations, charities, community groups and activists, with "no boring speeches or jargon". The idea was conceived by Pete Ashton, with Nick Booth of Podnosh Ltd, who ran the first such surgery in Birmingham, England, on 15 October 2008. In July 2009, a spin-off surgery (dubbed the "Social media mob") started in Mosman, Australia, and in January 2010, the first spin-off surgery in Africa was held. On 16 February 2012, it was announced that the Social Media Surgery movement had won "the Prime Minister’s Big Society Award". Prime Minister David Cameron said: This is an excellent initiative - such a simple idea and yet so effective. The popularity of these surgeries and the fact that they have inspired so many others across the country to follow in their footsteps, is testament to its brilliance. Congratulations to Nick and all the volunteers who have shared their time and expertise to help so many local groups make the most of the internet to support their community. A great example of the Big Society in action. The scheme also won the 2013 Adult Learners' Week "BBC Learning Through Technology Award".

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  Social media and suicide

  Since the rise of social media, there have been numerous cases of individuals being influenced towards committing suicide or self-harm through their use of social media, and even of individuals arranging to broadcast suicide attempts, some successful, on social media. Researchers have studied social media and suicide to determine what, if any, risks social media poses in terms of suicide, and to identify methods of mitigating such risks, if they exist. The search for a correlation has not yet uncovered a clear answer. == Background == Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and as of 2020, the second leading cause of death in the United States for those aged 15–34. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the third leading cause of death among adolescents in the US, from 1999 to 2006. In 2020, people in the US had a suicide rate of 13.5 per 100,000. Suicide was a leading cause of death in the United States accounting for 48,183 deaths in 2021. Suicide rates increased by 30 per cent from 2000 to 2018 and declined in 2019 and 2020. Suicide remains a significant public health issue worldwide, despite prevention efforts and treatments. Suicide has been identified not only as an individual phenomenon but also as being influenced by social and environmental factors. There is growing evidence that online activity has influenced suicide-related behavior. The use of social media throughout the 21st century has grown exponentially. For this reason, there are a variety of sources that are accessible to the public in various forms, especially social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and many more. Although these platforms were intended to allow people to connect virtually, these platforms can lead to cyber-bullying, insecurity, and emotional distress, and sometimes may influence a person to attempt suicide. Bullying, whether on social media or elsewhere, physical or not, significantly increases victims' risk of suicidal behavior. Since social media was introduced some people have taken their lives as a result of cyberbullying. Furthermore, suicide rates among teenagers have increased from 2010 to 2022 as social media has become something that people interact with more throughout their day-to-day lives. Media algorithms tend to popularize videos and posts to inform the country of the rising trouble, which may create a popular appeal to the young and immature minds of teenagers. This is why, social media could provide higher risks with the promotion of different kinds of pro-suicidal sites, message boards, chat rooms, and forums. Moreover, the Internet not only reports suicide incidents but documents suicide methods (for example, suicide pacts, an agreement between two or more people to kill themselves at a particular time and often by the same lethal means). Therefore, the role the Internet plays, particularly social media, in suicide-related behavior is a topic of growing interest. == Cyberbullying == There is substantial evidence that the Internet and social media can influence suicide-related behavior. Such evidence includes an increase in exposure to graphic content. A research study conducted by Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin found a correlation between cyberbullying and suicide. According to their findings, cyber-bullying increases suicidal thoughts by 14.5 percent and suicide attempts by 8.7 percent. Particularly alarming is the fact that children and young people under 25 who are victims of cyberbullying are more than twice as likely to self-harm and engage in suicidal behavior. Overall, teen suicide rates have increased within the past decade.This presents a significant public health concern, with over 40,000 suicides in the United States and nearly one million worldwide annually. Adolescents involved in cyberbullying often downplay its seriousness by calling it a joke or blaming the victim. These moral disengagement strategies can normalize harmful behavior and reduce feelings of guilt. This normalization may increase emotional distress and contribute to risks like depression and suicidal thoughts. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that 14.9 per cent of teenagers have experienced online bullying, while 13.6 per cent of teenagers have seriously attempted suicide. Both of these incidents are in increasing numbers in the United States. Furthermore, in numerous recent incidents, cyber-bullying led the victim to commit suicide; this phenomenon is now known as cyberbullicide. Many parents and children are unaware of the dangers and potential legal consequences of cyberbullying. As a response, anti-bullying regulations implemented by schools aim to prevent any form of bullying, including through technology, and protect students from online harassment. While some states have enacted laws against cyberbullying, there are currently no federal regulations addressing this issue. == Social media's influence on suicide == The media may portray suicidal behavior or language which can potentially influence people to act on these suicidal ideation. This may include news reports of actual suicides that have occurred or television shows and films that reenact suicides. Some organizations have proposed guidelines about how the media should report suicide. There is evidence that compliance with the guidelines varies. Some research showed that it is unclear whether the guidelines have successfully reduced the number of suicides. On the contrary, other research studies stated that the guidelines have worked in some cases. == Impact of pro-suicidal sites, message boards, chat rooms and forums == Social media platforms have transformed traditional methods of communication by allowing instantaneous and interactive sharing of information created and controlled by individuals, groups, organizations, and governments. As of the third quarter of 2022, Facebook had 266 million monthly active users, between Canada and the US. An immense quantity of information on the topic of suicide is available on the Internet and via social media. The information available on social media on the topic of suicide can influence suicidal behavior, both negatively and positively. The social cognitive theory plays a vital role in suicide attempts influenced through social media. This theory is demonstrated when one is influenced by what they see through various processes that form into modeled behaviors. This can be shown when people post their suicide attempts online or promote suicidal behavior in general. Contributors to these social media platforms may also exert peer pressure and encourage others to take their own lives, idolize those who have killed themselves, and facilitate suicide pacts. These pro-suicidal sites reported the following. For example, on a Japanese message board in 2008, it was shared that people can kill themselves using hydrogen sulfide gas. Shortly afterwards, 220 people attempted suicide in this way, and 208 were successful. Biddle et al. conducted a systematic Web search of 12 suicide-associated terms (e.g., suicide, suicide methods, how to kill yourself, and best suicide methods) to analyze the search results, and found that pro-suicide sites and chat rooms that discussed general issues associated with suicide most often occurred within the first few hits of a search. In another study, 373 suicide-related websites were found using Internet search engines and examined. Among them, 31% were suicide-neutral, 29% were anti-suicide, and 11% were pro-suicide. Together, these studies have shown that obtaining pro-suicide information on the Internet, including detailed information on suicide methods, is very easy. While social media has been prevalent in young adult suicide, some young adults find comfort and solace through these platforms. Young adults are making connections with people in like situations that are helping them feel less lonely. Although the public opinion is that message boards are harmful, the following studies show how they point to suicide prevention and have positive influences. A study using content analysis analyzed all of the postings on the AOL Suicide Bulletin Board over 11 months and concluded that most contributions contained positive, empathetic, and supportive postings. Then, a multi-method study was able to demonstrate that the users of such forums experience a great deal of social support and only a small amount of social strain. Lastly, in the survey participants were asked to assess the extent of their suicidal thoughts on a 7-level scale (0, absolutely no suicidal thoughts, to 7, very strong suicidal thoughts) for the time directly before their first forum visit and at the time of the survey. The study found a significant reduction after using the forum. The study however cannot conclude the forum is the only reason for the decrease. Together, these studies show how forums can reduce the number of

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  Social media use in the financial services sector

  Social media in the financial services sector refers to the use of social media by the financial services sector to promote and distribute financial services. Social media is used in various aspects of the financial industry including customer service, marketing, and product development. It has enabled financial institutions to extend their reach through direct and real-time communication with customers, fostering more personal connections. It also allows individuals to talk to other individuals creating lending and trading via social groups as well as developing new financial services by fintech startup companies. In terms of marketing, social media is utilized by both traditional financial companies as well as disruptive fintech companies such as peer-to-peer lending (P2P) companies. The financial industry has used information technology since its inception in the 1960s and social media fits in with this ongoing development. Larger, traditional financial firms have integrated social media into their marketing strategies. Companies in the financial sector are subject to strict regulations that include how they use social media. In the United States, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is a key regulator that sets rules how financial firms can interact with consumers. This includes ensuring that social media posts follow financial advertising rules, such as being fair and balanced and not providing misleading information, and that financial advice is not provided by unqualified personnel, such as influencers. == History == In 2003, at the beginning of social media development, MySpace was founded as a "social networking service." It allowed people to create a profile, connect with other people, and post videos, pictures, and songs. As MySpace grew in popularity, it attracted interest from companies wishing to promote their brands on the social platform. They were joined by Facebook and in 2010 by Instagram. Financial service firms were initially slow to adapt to promotion via social media but soon joined other big firms after they saw the success other industries had in engaging with younger people. == Uses == === Branding === While companies are able to connect with more people remotely through providing online financial services, their branding strategy has shifted from customized to standardized. Prior to the outbreak of technology, most banks used customized branding where they targeted only customers in their regions. Businesses can now use technology to operate beyond their geographic location and maintain a consistent image across multiple countries with standardized branding. By being able to extend a consistent brand reputation across a wider geographic location, financial services companies can take advantage of economies of scale in advertising cost, lower administrative complexity, lower entry into new markets, and improved cross-border learning within the company. === Customer engagement === Online banking reduced face-to-face interaction between customers and their banks. Most banking transactions can now be conducted online or through mobile devices, rather than at a local branch with a teller. Social media provides a channel for firms to maintain personal contact with customers, replicating some of the interaction that was previously available at local branches. For example, a bank's Facebook page may feature an employee profile describing their job duties, which serves to present a more human face for larger institutions. === Lending === Social media is a core marketing channel for online peer-to-peer lending as well as small business lenders. Since these companies operate exclusively online, it makes sense for them to market online through social media channels. They are able to grow and find new lenders and buyers by utilizing social networks. === Trading === Social trading is an alternative way of analyzing financial data by looking at what other traders are doing and comparing, copying and discussing their techniques and strategies. Prior to the advent of social trading, investors and traders were relying on fundamental or technical analysis to form their investment decisions. Using social trading investors and traders could integrate into their investment decision-process social indicators from trading data-feeds of other traders. Investors also use platform like Reddit, Signal messaging or WeChat to create social communities to discuss investments and finance. In some cases they use this to join together using meme stocks to move financial markets, such as the 2021 GameStop short squeeze incident. They can also use social groups to launch and promote new products such as cryptocurrencies. Investing application like WeBull incorporate a forum style messaging system on each stock that is available for trading. Financial brokers such as Fidelity Investments, Interactive Brokers, and E-Trade have moved to incorporate community features in their investment apps. == Regulations == The use of social media by investors and financial services professionals for business purposes is subject to regulatory oversight, in the United States this is done primarily by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA's rules, designed to protect investors from misleading information in all communications and this also applies to social media communications. This includes ensuring that social media posts follow financial advertising rules, such as being fair and balanced and not providing misleading information, and that advice is not provided by unqualified personnel, such as influencers and bank staff acting in a personal capacity. Financial firms have to maintain books and records of all interaction with customers and this includes social media. == New products and services == Social media has created entirely new products for the financial services sector, revolutionizing products and developing new industries through the merging of social technology and financial services. Fintech startups use social media to promote products to get them established. Several developing nations have used social media to leapfrog traditional financial technology; for example, WeChat Pay, which developed from the Chinese WeChat social media platform, became a major payment system in China within a few years. In 2015, according to consulting firm Accenture, 390 million people in China had registered to use mobile banking. This figure is more than the population of the United States. In the United States, the fintech company Venmo combines technology and financial services on a social platform. Other financial technology companies that have used social media to develop or promote financial products include: Lending Club – One of the first peer-to-peer lending businesses OnDeck Capital – A US online-only lending business Funding Circle – A UK-based online lending company Wise – A global online money transfers company Kabbage – A US online unsecured loan company later acquired by American Express Avant – A US online unsecured loan company Zopa – A UK online neobank providing peer-to-peer lending == Risks == === Reputational damage === Due to the real-time nature of social media, financial services companies can be impacted by potential reputational issues. Any negative experience by customers can easily be shared online and could become a viral phenomenon, those comments could likely have a detrimental effect on the company’s stock price and reputation. On the other hand, any positive experience a customer has can also be shared online. However, positive experiences are much less likely to become viral. === Scams === The nature of social media makes it easy to target individuals without being seen by the wider community, this allows scammers to target individuals. Example include romance scams such as the pig butchering scam where an individual is tricked to transfer funds or assets to the scammer over social media making it hard for law enforcement to track them or recover funds. === Customer privacy === Customer privacy is important for the financial services industry. It is critical that customer information such as a bank account numbers and other personal information is kept private. However, this information can be leaked if for example, a customer is unhappy with a bank’s service, they may tweet at the bank expressing their frustrations and include their name and account number.

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  Artifact (app)

  Artifact was a personalized social news aggregator app that uses recommender systems to suggest articles. Launched in January 2023 by Nokto, Inc., a company founded by co-founders of Instagram Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the app is available for iOS and Android. The app's name is a portmanteau of the words "articles", "artificial intelligence", and "fact". The app shut down in January 2024 as a result of low interest. == History == Nokto, Inc. was established on March 3, 2022, as a foreign stock company in California, with its headquarters in San Francisco. The company's main product, Artifact, is the first new product launched by Krieger and Systrom since their 2018 resignation from Instagram after conflicts with parent company Meta, which acquired Instagram in 2012. Artifact launched on January 31, 2023, after the team had been working on it for over a year, offering the option to sign up for a waiting list for its private beta, which grew to about 160,000 people, and then launching in open beta on February 22, 2023. With a team of seven employees in San Francisco, the app was free throughout its lifetime, with the founders explaining at the time that different business models - such as advertising or subscription fees - could be explored in the future. In January 2024, cofounder Kevin Systrom announced that the app would be shutting down after concluding that "the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way." In April 2024, it was announced Artifact had been acquired by Yahoo, who intended to use the service's technology in an upgraded Yahoo! News app. == Features == Frequently described as "TikTok for text" and a competitor to Twitter, Artifact was a news aggregator that used machine learning to make personalized recommendations based on topics, news sources, and authors that the reader is interested in. In addition to reading articles, the app offered the ability to like articles, leave comments, or listen to an audio version of an article read by AI-generated voices, including a simulation of the voices of Snoop Dogg or Gwyneth Paltrow. AI also would rewrite clickbait headlines that users flagged. Artifact later expanded to a social network where users could post links, images and text to their profile, which could be liked or commented on by other users. Similar to other social news websites like Reddit, reader accounts had profiles with reputation scores.

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  Talim (textiles)

  Talim (Kashmiri: تعليم, Kashmiri pronunciation: [t̪əːliːm], Urdu: تَعْلِیم, Arabic: تعليم, pronounced [taʕ.liːm] ) in textiles is a symbolic code and system of notation that facilitates the creation of intricate patterns in fabrics, such as shawls and carpets, and the written coded plans that include colour schemes and weaving instructions. The term is used in traditional hand-weaving in the Indian subcontinent. Talim was initially used to create certain types of patterns in Kashmiri shawls, and later came to be applied in the production of carpets. == Etymology and origin == The term talim, which refers to a symbolic code and system of notation used by shawl and carpet artisans in their weaving processes, came to the Urdu language from the Arabic noun taʻlim (تعليم), which means "authoritative instruction", "teaching", or "edification". It means the same in Urdu and Kashmiri. The Arabic noun originated from the second form of the Arabic root verb ʻalima (علم), which means "to know". According to a local belief in Kashmir, talim was introduced to them by Persian scholar and Sufi Muslim saint Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani. The belief notwithstanding, talim might have originated from Kashmir; Amritsar was the only place outside of Srinagar where talim was used, by migrated Kashmiri artisans. == Technique == Whereas carpets are generally woven horizontally, providing weavers with a clear view of the progress they are making in creating designs, in Kashmir, carpets are woven vertically, so the weaver is reliant on the talim. The talim technique forms fabrics by passing the weft thread as per a given script that has design codes. Weavers use talim to weave the desired pattern with planned colours. Talim involves teamwork when applying the technique, as the process of creating intricate fabric designs in weaving begins with the Naqash (designer, who designs using pencils on graphs) meticulously crafting the design on a blank sheet of paper called a naska, and the master, Talim guru, making the colour codes and symbols for weft yarns that would interlace the warp to construct the desired design. He writes on a long strip of paper, in specific symbols, the colour codes, and the number of knots to be woven with each colour. Taraha guru collaborates with talim guru and is known as the artisan responsible for determining the colours. Talim uthana is a process or the act of "picking the codes" from the graph. A clerk called the Talim Navis would record the step-by-step instructions for these numbers and colours, and thousands of low-paid and interchangeable weavers would read or recite the record to carry out the design. Afterward, a talim copyist makes copies, which are needed when multiple looms weave the same product. The script, which has been encoded, is deciphered and translated according to the specific guidelines of weavers in order to incorporate the design that is included within it. Talim has been compared to "hieroglyphics" or as a "notational-cum-cryptographic system", as it is challenging to decipher and is unique to the shawls of Kashmir, which requires expertise to comprehend. According to researcher Gagan Deep Kaur, "The talim is widely held to be a trade secret of the community and has always been fiercely guarded by the owners." Those who use talim for shawl-making do not assign important tasks to women, because of the fear that the technique and knowledge may be divulged to other communities when the women are sent there to be married. The coded cards known as talim in the Kashmiri language were used for creating certain types of patterns in shawl weaving. The talim technique is employed in the creation of kani shawls, which originated from the Kanihama region of the Kashmir valley. Carpet weaving adapted the technique from shawl making. When Kashmiri artisans started to create carpets, they chose to continue using the talim rather than switching to a different method. The resurgence of the carpet industry in Amritsar during the last century resulted in the prevalent use of the talim technique among the local weavers, a majority of whom hailed from the region of Kashmir. === Recitation of codes === Talim was also communicated through recitation accompanied by a melodic chant or song. In traditional weaving practices, the use of chanting was common. The movement of the shuttles was synchronised with the song of the weaver, adding a musical rhythm to the instructions represented through hieroglyphics. The weaver's chant, "Two blue, one red, three yellow, two blue," served as a guide as they wove and replicated the designated pattern. == Usage == The first factories established in Amritsar around 1860 utilised Bokhara designs. However, Kashmiri weavers maintained their traditional techniques and employed the talim, instead of a cartoon, for tying knots. As a result, Amritsar became the second location in the Indian subcontinent to use the talim. The traditional weaving practices are still carried out in some parts of the Indian subcontinent. The exact date when talim was last used in the subcontinent varies depending on the region and the specific weaving community. Indian textile historian Jasleen Dhamija wrote in her 1989 book Handwoven Fabrics of India that there were still some weavers in the Kashmiri village of Kanihama who applied talim in weaving shawls. As of 2022, the carpet weavers in Kashmir were the only remaining users of talim in carpets, according to Zubair Ahmed, director of the Indian Institute of Carpet Technology. The institute aims to preserve traditional Kashmiri carpet designs by digitising talim and training weavers in the technique. == Gallery ==

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  Malleability (cryptography)

  Malleability is a property of some cryptographic algorithms. An encryption algorithm is said to be malleable if it is possible to transform a ciphertext into another ciphertext which decrypts to a related plaintext. That is, given an encryption of a plaintext m {\displaystyle m} , it is possible to generate another ciphertext which decrypts to f ( m ) {\displaystyle f(m)} , for a known function f {\displaystyle f} , without necessarily knowing or learning m {\displaystyle m} . Malleability is often an undesirable property in a general-purpose cryptosystem, since it allows an attacker to modify the contents of a message. For example, suppose that a bank uses a stream cipher to hide its financial information, and a user sends an encrypted message containing, say, "TRANSFER $0000100.00 TO ACCOUNT #199." If an attacker can modify the message on the wire, and can guess the format of the unencrypted message, the attacker could change the amount of the transaction, or the recipient of the funds, e.g. "TRANSFER $0100000.00 TO ACCOUNT #227". Malleability does not refer to the attacker's ability to read the encrypted message. Both before and after tampering, the attacker cannot read the encrypted message. On the other hand, some cryptosystems are malleable by design. In other words, in some circumstances it may be viewed as a feature that anyone can transform an encryption of m {\displaystyle m} into a valid encryption of f ( m ) {\displaystyle f(m)} (for some restricted class of functions f {\displaystyle f} ) without necessarily learning m {\displaystyle m} . Such schemes are known as homomorphic encryption schemes. A cryptosystem may be semantically secure against chosen-plaintext attacks or even non-adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA1) while still being malleable. However, security against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA2) is equivalent to non-malleability. == Example malleable cryptosystems == In a stream cipher, the ciphertext is produced by taking the exclusive or of the plaintext and a pseudorandom stream based on a secret key k {\displaystyle k} , as E ( m ) = m ⊕ S ( k ) {\displaystyle E(m)=m\oplus S(k)} . An adversary can construct an encryption of m ⊕ t {\displaystyle m\oplus t} for any t {\displaystyle t} , as E ( m ) ⊕ t = m ⊕ t ⊕ S ( k ) = E ( m ⊕ t ) {\displaystyle E(m)\oplus t=m\oplus t\oplus S(k)=E(m\oplus t)} . In the RSA cryptosystem, a plaintext m {\displaystyle m} is encrypted as E ( m ) = m e mod n {\displaystyle E(m)=m^{e}{\bmod {n}}} , where ( e , n ) {\displaystyle (e,n)} is the public key. Given such a ciphertext, an adversary can construct an encryption of m t {\displaystyle mt} for any t {\displaystyle t} , as E ( m ) ⋅ t e mod n = ( m t ) e mod n = E ( m t ) {\textstyle E(m)\cdot t^{e}{\bmod {n}}=(mt)^{e}{\bmod {n}}=E(mt)} . For this reason, RSA is commonly used together with padding methods such as OAEP or PKCS1. In the ElGamal cryptosystem, a plaintext m {\displaystyle m} is encrypted as E ( m ) = ( g b , m A b ) {\displaystyle E(m)=(g^{b},mA^{b})} , where ( g , A ) {\displaystyle (g,A)} is the public key. Given such a ciphertext ( c 1 , c 2 ) {\displaystyle (c_{1},c_{2})} , an adversary can compute ( c 1 , t ⋅ c 2 ) {\displaystyle (c_{1},t\cdot c_{2})} , which is a valid encryption of t m {\displaystyle tm} , for any t {\displaystyle t} . In contrast, the Cramer-Shoup system (which is based on ElGamal) is not malleable. In the Paillier, ElGamal, and RSA cryptosystems, it is also possible to combine several ciphertexts together in a useful way to produce a related ciphertext. In Paillier, given only the public key and an encryption of m 1 {\displaystyle m_{1}} and m 2 {\displaystyle m_{2}} , one can compute a valid encryption of their sum m 1 + m 2 {\displaystyle m_{1}+m_{2}} . In ElGamal and in RSA, one can combine encryptions of m 1 {\displaystyle m_{1}} and m 2 {\displaystyle m_{2}} to obtain a valid encryption of their product m 1 m 2 {\displaystyle m_{1}m_{2}} . Block ciphers in the cipher block chaining mode of operation, for example, are partly malleable: flipping a bit in a ciphertext block will completely mangle the plaintext it decrypts to, but will result in the same bit being flipped in the plaintext of the next block. This allows an attacker to 'sacrifice' one block of plaintext in order to change some data in the next one, possibly managing to maliciously alter the message. This is essentially the core idea of the padding oracle attack on CBC, which allows the attacker to decrypt almost an entire ciphertext without knowing the key. For this and many other reasons, a message authentication code is required to guard against any method of tampering. == Complete non-malleability == Fischlin, in 2005, defined the notion of complete non-malleability as the ability of the system to remain non-malleable while giving the adversary additional power to choose a new public key which could be a function of the original public key. In other words, the adversary shouldn't be able to come up with a ciphertext whose underlying plaintext is related to the original message through a relation that also takes public keys into account.

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