AI Code Zz

AI Code Zz — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Vote Compass

    Vote Compass

    Vote Compass is an interactive, online voting advice application developed by political scientists and run during election campaigns. It surveys users about their political views and, based on their responses, calculates the individual alignment of each user with the parties or candidates running in a given election contest. It is operated by a social enterprise called Vox Pop Labs in partnership with locale-specific news organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, the Canadian and Australian Broadcasting Corporations, Television New Zealand, France24, RTL Group, and Grupo Globo. Vote Compass also operates under the trademarks Boussole électorale and Wahl-Navi for French- and German-language iterations, respectively. == Background == Vote Compass was developed by Clifton van der Linden, a professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. It is run by van der Linden along with a team of social and statistical scientists from Vox Pop Labs. Although inspired by European Voting Advice Applications, van der Linden explicitly rejects this terminology, arguing that Vote Compass was "never intended to account for every variable that influences voter choice and its results should not be interpreted as voting advice." == Methodology == Using a Likert scale, users indicate their responses to a series of policy propositions designed to discriminate between candidates' policies on prominent issues relevant to the election. Propositions are crafted in collaboration with political scientists local to each jurisdiction in which Vote Compass is run. Based on a candidate or political party's public disclosures (i.e. party manifestos, policy proposals, official websites, speeches, media releases, statements made in the legislature, etc.) they are calibrated on the same propositions and scales as are users. A series of aggregation algorithms calculate the overall distance between the user and the candidates or parties. There have been claims that Vote Compass surveys have the potential to become push polling, if the survey questions posed are poorly designed.

    Read more →
  • Storage area network

    Storage area network

    A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage. A SAN typically is a dedicated network of storage devices not accessible through the local area network (LAN). Although a SAN provides only block-level access, file systems built on top of SANs do provide file-level access and are known as shared-disk file systems. Newer SAN configurations enable hybrid SAN and allow traditional block storage that appears as local storage but also object storage for web services through APIs. == Storage architectures == Storage area networks (SANs) are sometimes referred to as network behind the servers and historically developed out of a centralized data storage model, but with its own data network. A SAN is, at its simplest, a dedicated network for data storage. In addition to storing data, SANs allow for the automatic backup of data, and the monitoring of the storage as well as the backup process. A SAN is a combination of hardware and software. It grew out of data-centric mainframe architectures, where clients in a network can connect to several servers that store different types of data. To scale storage capacities as the volumes of data grew, direct-attached storage (DAS) was developed, where disk arrays or just a bunch of disks (JBODs) were attached to servers. In this architecture, storage devices can be added to increase storage capacity. However, the server through which the storage devices are accessed is a single point of failure, and a large part of the LAN network bandwidth is used for accessing, storing and backing up data. To solve the single point of failure issue, a direct-attached shared storage architecture was implemented, where several servers could access the same storage device. DAS was the first network storage system and is still widely used where data storage requirements are not very high. Out of it developed the network-attached storage (NAS) architecture, where one or more dedicated file server or storage devices are made available in a LAN. Therefore, the transfer of data, particularly for backup, still takes place over the existing LAN. If more than a terabyte of data was stored at any one time, LAN bandwidth became a bottleneck. Therefore, SANs were developed, where a dedicated storage network was attached to the LAN, and terabytes of data are transferred over a dedicated high speed and bandwidth network. Within the SAN, storage devices are interconnected. Transfer of data between storage devices, such as for backup, happens behind the servers and is meant to be transparent. In a NAS architecture data is transferred using the TCP and IP protocols over Ethernet. Distinct protocols were developed for SANs, such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Infiniband. Therefore, SANs often have their own network and storage devices, which have to be bought, installed, and configured. This makes SANs inherently more expensive than NAS architectures. == Components == SANs have their own networking devices, such as SAN switches. To access the SAN, so-called SAN servers are used, which in turn connect to SAN host adapters. Within the SAN, a range of data storage devices may be interconnected, such as SAN-capable disk arrays, JBODs and tape libraries. === Host layer === Servers that allow access to the SAN and its storage devices are said to form the host layer of the SAN. Such servers have host adapters, which are cards that attach to slots on the server motherboard (usually PCI slots) and run with a corresponding firmware and device driver. Through the host adapters the operating system of the server can communicate with the storage devices in the SAN. In Fibre channel deployments, a cable connects to the host adapter through the gigabit interface converter (GBIC). GBICs are also used on switches and storage devices within the SAN, and they convert digital bits into light impulses that can then be transmitted over the Fibre Channel cables. Conversely, the GBIC converts incoming light impulses back into digital bits. The predecessor of the GBIC was called gigabit link module (GLM). === Fabric layer === The fabric layer consists of SAN networking devices that include SAN switches, routers, protocol bridges, gateway devices, and cables. SAN network devices move data within the SAN, or between an initiator, such as an HBA port of a server, and a target, such as the port of a storage device. When SANs were first built, hubs were the only devices that were Fibre Channel capable, but Fibre Channel switches were developed and hubs are now rarely found in SANs. Switches have the advantage over hubs that they allow all attached devices to communicate simultaneously, as a switch provides a dedicated link to connect all its ports with one another. When SANs were first built, Fibre Channel had to be implemented over copper cables, these days multimode optical fibre cables are used in SANs. SANs are usually built with redundancy, so SAN switches are connected with redundant links. SAN switches connect the servers with the storage devices and are typically non-blocking allowing transmission of data across all attached wires at the same time. SAN switches are for redundancy purposes set up in a meshed topology. A single SAN switch can have as few as 8 ports and up to 32 ports with modular extensions. So-called director-class switches can have as many as 128 ports. In switched SANs, the Fibre Channel switched fabric protocol FC-SW-6 is used under which every device in the SAN has a hardcoded World Wide Name (WWN) address in the host bus adapter (HBA). If a device is connected to the SAN its WWN is registered in the SAN switch name server. In place of a WWN, or worldwide port name (WWPN), SAN Fibre Channel storage device vendors may also hardcode a worldwide node name (WWNN). The ports of storage devices often have a WWN starting with 5, while the bus adapters of servers start with 10 or 21. === Storage layer === The serialized Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) protocol is often used on top of the Fibre Channel switched fabric protocol in servers and SAN storage devices. The Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) over Ethernet and the Infiniband protocols may also be found implemented in SANs, but are often bridged into the Fibre Channel SAN. However, Infiniband and iSCSI storage devices, in particular, disk arrays, are available. The various storage devices in a SAN are said to form the storage layer. It can include a variety of hard disk and magnetic tape devices that store data. In SANs, disk arrays are joined through a RAID which makes a lot of hard disks look and perform like one big storage device. Every storage device, or even partition on that storage device, has a logical unit number (LUN) assigned to it. This is a unique number within the SAN. Every node in the SAN, be it a server or another storage device, can access the storage by referencing the LUN. The LUNs allow for the storage capacity of a SAN to be segmented and for the implementation of access controls. A particular server, or a group of servers, may, for example, be only given access to a particular part of the SAN storage layer, in the form of LUNs. When a storage device receives a request to read or write data, it will check its access list to establish whether the node, identified by its LUN, is allowed to access the storage area, also identified by a LUN. LUN masking is a technique whereby the host bus adapter and the SAN software of a server restrict the LUNs for which commands are accepted. In doing so LUNs that should never be accessed by the server are masked. Another method to restrict server access to particular SAN storage devices is fabric-based access control, or zoning, which is enforced by the SAN networking devices and servers. Under zoning, server access is restricted to storage devices that are in a particular SAN zone. == Network protocols == A mapping layer to other protocols is used to form a network: ATA over Ethernet (AoE), mapping of AT Attachment (ATA) over Ethernet Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), a mapping of SCSI over Fibre Channel Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) ESCON over Fibre Channel (FICON), used by mainframe computers HyperSCSI, mapping of SCSI over Ethernet iFCP or SANoIP mapping of FCP over IP iSCSI, mapping of SCSI over TCP/IP iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), mapping of iSCSI over InfiniBand Network block device, mapping device node requests on UNIX-like systems over stream sockets like TCP/IP SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP), another SCSI implementation for remote direct memory access (RDMA) transports Storage networks may also be built using Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) technologies. SAS evolved from SCSI direct-attached storage. SATA evolved from Para

    Read more →
  • List of artificial intelligence projects

    List of artificial intelligence projects

    The following is a list of current and past, non-classified notable artificial intelligence projects. == Specialized projects == === Brain-inspired === Blue Brain Project, an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level. Google Brain, a deep learning project part of Google X attempting to have intelligence similar or equal to human-level. Human Brain Project, ten-year scientific research project, based on exascale supercomputers. === Cognitive architectures === 4CAPS, developed at Carnegie Mellon University under Marcel A. Just ACT-R, developed at Carnegie Mellon University under John R. Anderson. AIXI, Universal Artificial Intelligence developed by Marcus Hutter at IDSIA and ANU. CALO, a DARPA-funded, 25-institution effort to integrate many artificial intelligence approaches (natural language processing, speech recognition, machine vision, probabilistic logic, planning, reasoning, many forms of machine learning) into an AI assistant that learns to help manage your office environment. CHREST, developed under Fernand Gobet at Brunel University and Peter C. Lane at the University of Hertfordshire. CLARION, developed under Ron Sun at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and University of Missouri. CoJACK, an ACT-R inspired extension to the JACK multi-agent system that adds a cognitive architecture to the agents for eliciting more realistic (human-like) behaviors in virtual environments. Copycat, by Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell at the Indiana University. DUAL, developed at the New Bulgarian University under Boicho Kokinov. FORR developed by Susan L. Epstein at The City University of New York. IDA and LIDA, implementing Global Workspace Theory, developed under Stan Franklin at the University of Memphis. OpenCog Prime, developed using the OpenCog Framework. Procedural Reasoning System (PRS), developed by Michael Georgeff and Amy L. Lansky at SRI International. Psi-Theory developed under Dietrich Dörner at the Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg, Germany. Soar, developed under Allen Newell and John Laird at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan. Society of Mind and its successor The Emotion Machine proposed by Marvin Minsky. Subsumption architectures, developed e.g. by Rodney Brooks (though it could be argued whether they are cognitive). === Games === AlphaGo, software developed by Google that plays the Chinese board game Go. Chinook, a computer program that plays English draughts; the first to win the world champion title in the competition against humans. Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by IBM which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Halite, an artificial intelligence programming competition created by Two Sigma in 2016. Libratus, a poker AI that beat world-class poker players in 2017, intended to be generalisable to other applications. The Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine (sometimes called the Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine or MENACE) was a mechanical computer made from 304 matchboxes designed and built by artificial intelligence researcher Donald Michie in 1961. Quick, Draw!, an online game developed by Google that challenges players to draw a picture of an object or idea and then uses a neural network to guess what the drawing is. The Samuel Checkers-playing Program (1959) was among the world's first successful self-learning programs, and as such a very early demonstration of the fundamental concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Stockfish AI, an open source chess engine currently ranked the highest in many computer chess rankings. TD-Gammon, a program that learned to play world-class backgammon partly by playing against itself (temporal difference learning with neural networks). === Internet activism === Serenata de Amor, project for the analysis of public expenditures and detect discrepancies. === Knowledge and reasoning === Alice (Microsoft), a project from Microsoft Research Lab aimed at improving decision-making in Economics Braina, an intelligent personal assistant application with a voice interface for Windows OS. Cyc, an attempt to assemble an ontology and database of everyday knowledge, enabling human-like reasoning. Eurisko, a language by Douglas Lenat for solving problems which consists of heuristics, including some for how to use and change its heuristics. Google Now, an intelligent personal assistant with a voice interface in Google's Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS, as well as Google Chrome web browser on personal computers. Holmes a new AI created by Wipro. Microsoft Cortana, an intelligent personal assistant with a voice interface in Microsoft's various Windows 10 editions. MindsDB, is an AI automation platform for building AI/ML powered features and applications. Mycin, an early medical expert system. Open Mind Common Sense, a project based at the MIT Media Lab to build a large common sense knowledge base from online contributions. Siri, an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator with a voice-interface in Apple Inc.'s iOS and macOS. SNePS, simultaneously a logic-based, frame-based, and network-based knowledge representation, reasoning, and acting system. Viv (software), a new AI by the creators of Siri. Wolfram Alpha, an online service that answers queries by computing the answer from structured data. === Motion and manipulation === AIBO, the robot pet for the home, grew out of Sony's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL). Cog, a robot developed by MIT to study theories of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, now discontinued. === Music === Melomics, a bioinspired technology for music composition and synthesization of music, where computers develop their own style, rather than mimic musicians. === Natural language processing === AIML, an XML dialect for creating natural language software agents. Apache Lucene, a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. Apache OpenNLP, a machine learning based toolkit for the processing of natural language text. It supports the most common NLP tasks, such as tokenization, sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity extraction, chunking and parsing. Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (A.L.I.C.E.), a natural language processing chatterbot. ChatGPT, a chatbot built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 family of large language models. Claude, a family of large language models developed by Anthropic and launched in 2023. Claude LLMs achieved high coding scores in several recognized LLM benchmarks. Cleverbot, successor to Jabberwacky, now with 170m lines of conversation, Deep Context, fuzziness and parallel processing. Cleverbot learns from around 2 million user interactions per month. DeepSeek: Chinese chatbot funded by hedge fund High-Flyer. DBRX, 136 billion parameter open sourced large language model developed by Mosaic ML and Databricks. ELIZA, a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which parodied person-centered therapy. FreeHAL, a self-learning conversation simulator (chatterbot) which uses semantic nets to organize its knowledge to imitate a very close human behavior within conversations. Gemini, a family of multimodal large language model developed by Google's DeepMind. Drives the Gemini chatbot, formerly known as Bard. GigaChat, a chatbot by Russian Sberbank. GPT-3, a 2020 language model developed by OpenAI that can produce text difficult to distinguish from that written by a human. Jabberwacky, a chatbot by Rollo Carpenter, aiming to simulate natural human chat. LaMDA, a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google. LLaMA, a 2023 language model family developed by Meta that includes 7, 13, 33 and 65 billion parameter models.[1] Mycroft, a free and open-source intelligent personal assistant that uses a natural language user interface. PARRY, another early chatterbot, written in 1972 by Kenneth Colby, attempting to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic. SHRDLU, an early natural language processing computer program developed by Terry Winograd at MIT from 1968 to 1970. SYSTRAN, a machine translation technology by the company of the same name, used by Yahoo!, AltaVista and Google, among others. === Speech recognition === CMU Sphinx, a group of speech recognition systems developed at Carnegie Mellon University. DeepSpeech, an open-source Speech-To-Text engine based on Baidu's deep speech research paper. Whisper, an open-source speech recognition system developed at OpenAI. === Speech synthesis === 15.ai, a real-time artificial intelligence text-to-speech tool developed by an anonymous researcher from MIT. Amazon Polly, a speech synthesis software by Amazon. Festival Speech Synthesis System, a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh. WaveNet, a deep neural network for generating raw audio. === Video === CapCut is a video editor tool, developed

    Read more →
  • Scriptella

    Scriptella

    Scriptella is an open source extract transform load (ETL) and script execution tool written in Java. It allows the use of SQL or another scripting language suitable for the data source to perform required transformations. Scriptella does not offer any graphical user interface. == Typical use == Database migration. Database creation/update scripts. Cross-database ETL operations, import/export. Alternative for Ant task. Automated database schema upgrade. == Features == Simple XML syntax for scripts. Add dynamics to your existing SQL scripts by creating a thin wrapper XML file: Support for multiple datasources (or multiple connections to a single database) in an ETL file. Support for many useful JDBC features, e.g. parameters in SQL including file blobs and JDBC escaping. Performance and low memory usage are one of the primary goals. Support for evaluated expressions and properties (JEXL syntax) Support for cross-database ETL scripts by using elements Transactional execution Error handling via elements Conditional scripts/queries execution (similar to Ant if/unless attributes but more powerful) Easy-to-Use as a standalone tool or Ant task, without deployment or installation. Easy-To-Run ETL files directly from Java code. Built-in adapters for popular databases for a tight integration. Support for any database with JDBC/ODBC compliant driver. Service Provider Interface (SPI) for interoperability with non-JDBC DataSources and integration with scripting languages. Out of the box support for JSR 223 (Scripting for the Java Platform) compatible languages. Built-in CSV, TEXT, XML, LDAP, Lucene, Velocity, JEXL and Janino providers. Integration with Java EE, Spring Framework, JMX and JNDI for enterprise ready scripts.

    Read more →
  • VSCO

    VSCO

    VSCO ( ), formerly known as VSCO Cam, is a photography mobile app available for iOS and Android devices. The app was created by Joel Flory and Greg Lutze. The VSCO app allows users to capture photos in the app and edit them, using preset filters and editing tools. == History == Visual Supply Company was founded by Joel Flory and Greg Lutze in California, in 2011. VSCO was launched in 2012. It raised $40 million from investors in May 2014. In 2017, VSCO launched a subscription model. As of 2018, Visual Supply Company has $90 million in funding from investors and over 2 million paying members. In 2019, VSCO acquired Rylo, a video editing startup founded by the original developer of Instagram’s Hyperlapse. Visual Supply Company has locations in Oakland, California, where it is headquartered, and Chicago, Illinois. In December 2020 VSCO acquired AI-powered video editing app Trash. In April 2018, VSCO reached over 30 million users. In September 2023, Eric Wittman was appointed as the new CEO and co-founder Joel Flory became executive chairman. == Usage == Users must register an account to use the app. Photos can be taken or imported from the camera roll, as well as short videos or animated GIFs (known in the app as DSCO; iOS only). The user can edit their photos through various preset filters, or through the "toolkit" feature which allows finer adjustments to fade, clarity, skin tone, tint, sharpness, saturation, contrast, temperature, exposure, and other properties. Users have the option of posting their photos to their profile, where they can also add captions and hashtags. Photos can also be exported back into the camera roll or shared with other social networking services. The users also have an option to edit their own videos from their camera roll with the VSCO yearly membership, but they are not able to post camera roll as VSCO Film X videos to their account on VSCO. JPEG and raw image files can be used. Research on image based social media platforms has found that engagement with posting, editing, and interacting with images can influence users' mood, self esteem, and body satisfaction. Studies also suggest that greater emotional investment in social media content is associated with increased negative psychological outcomes including stress and depressive symptoms. == In popular culture == VSCO's Oakland headquarters was a key filming location for Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You.

    Read more →
  • AVT Statistical filtering algorithm

    AVT Statistical filtering algorithm

    AVT Statistical filtering algorithm is an approach to improving quality of raw data collected from various sources. It is most effective in cases when there is inband noise present. In those cases AVT is better at filtering data then, band-pass filter or any digital filtering based on variation of. Conventional filtering is useful when signal/data has different frequency than noise and signal/data is separated/filtered by frequency discrimination of noise. Frequency discrimination filtering is done using Low Pass, High Pass and Band Pass filtering which refers to relative frequency filtering criteria target for such configuration. Those filters are created using passive and active components and sometimes are implemented using software algorithms based on Fast Fourier transform (FFT). AVT filtering is implemented in software and its inner working is based on statistical analysis of raw data. When signal frequency/(useful data distribution frequency) coincides with noise frequency/(noisy data distribution frequency) we have inband noise. In this situations frequency discrimination filtering does not work since the noise and useful signal are indistinguishable and where AVT excels. To achieve filtering in such conditions there are several methods/algorithms available which are briefly described below. == Averaging algorithm == Collect n samples of data Calculate average value of collected data Present/record result as actual data == Median algorithm == Collect n samples of data Sort the data in ascending or descending order. Note that order does not matter Select the data that happen to be in n/2 position and present/record it as final result representing data sample == AVT algorithm == AVT algorithm stands for Antonyan Vardan Transform and its implementation explained below. Collect n samples of data Calculate the standard deviation and average value Drop any data that is greater or less than average ± one standard deviation Calculate average value of remaining data Present/record result as actual value representing data sample This algorithm is based on amplitude discrimination and can easily reject any noise that is not like actual signal, otherwise statistically different than 1 standard deviation of the signal. Note that this type of filtering can be used in situations where the actual environmental noise is not known in advance. Notice that it is preferable to use the median in above steps than average. Originally the AVT algorithm used average value to compare it with results of median on the data window. == Filtering algorithms comparison == Using a system that has signal value of 1 and has noise added at 0.1% and 1% levels will simplify quantification of algorithm performance. The R script is used to create pseudo random noise added to signal and analyze the results of filtering using several algorithms. Please refer to "Reduce Inband Noise with the AVT Algorithm" article for details. This graphs show that AVT algorithm provides best results compared with Median and Averaging algorithms while using data sample size of 32, 64 and 128 values. Note that this graph was created by analyzing random data array of 10000 values. Sample of this data is graphically represented below. From this graph it is apparent that AVT outperforms other filtering algorithms by providing 5% to 10% more accurate data when analyzing same datasets. Considering random nature of noise used in this numerical experiment that borderlines worst case situation where actual signal level is below ambient noise the precision improvements of processing data with AVT algorithm are significant. == AVT algorithm variations == === Cascaded AVT === In some situations better results can be obtained by cascading several stages of AVT filtering. This will produce singular constant value which can be used for equipment that has known stable characteristics like thermometers, thermistors and other slow acting sensors. === Reverse AVT === Collect n samples of data Calculate the standard deviation and average value Drop any data that is within one standard deviation ± average band Calculate average value of remaining data Present/record result as actual data This is useful for detecting minute signals that are close to background noise level. == Possible applications and uses == Use to filter data that is near or below noise level Used in planet detection to filter out raw data from the Kepler space telescope Filter out noise from sound sources where all other filtering methods (Low-pass filter, High-pass filter, Band-pass filter, Digital filter) fail. Pre-process scientific data for data analysis (Smoothness) before plotting see (Plot (graphics)) Used in SETI (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence) for detecting/distinguishing extraterrestrial signals from cosmic background Use AVT as image filtering algorithm to detect altered images. This image of Jupiter generated from this program, detecting alterations in original picture that was modified to be visually appealing by applying filters. Another version of this comparison is the Reverse AVT filter applied to the same original Jupiter Image, where we only see that altered portion as Noise that was eliminated by AVT algorithm. Use AVT as image filtering algorithm to estimate data density from images. Picture of Pillars of Creation Nebula shows data density in filtered images from Hubble and Webb. Note that image on the left has big patches of missing data marked with simpler color patterns.

    Read more →
  • Knowledge graph

    Knowledge graph

    In knowledge representation and reasoning, a knowledge graph is a knowledge base that uses a graph-structured data model or topology to represent and operate on data. Knowledge graphs are often used to store interlinked descriptions of entities – objects, events, situations or abstract concepts – while also encoding the free-form semantics or relationships underlying these entities. Since the development of the Semantic Web, knowledge graphs have often been associated with linked open data projects, focusing on the connections between concepts and entities. They are also historically associated with and used by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo; knowledge engines and question-answering services such as WolframAlpha, Apple's Siri, and Amazon Alexa; and social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Recent developments in data science and machine learning, particularly in graph neural networks, representation learning, and machine learning, have broadened the scope of knowledge graphs beyond their traditional use in search engines and recommender systems. They are increasingly used in scientific research, with notable applications in fields such as genomics, proteomics, and systems biology. == History == The term was coined as early as 1972 by the Austrian linguist Edgar W. Schneider, in a discussion of how to build modular instructional systems for courses. In the late 1980s, the University of Groningen and University of Twente jointly began a project called Knowledge Graphs, focusing on the design of semantic networks with edges restricted to a limited set of relations, to facilitate algebras on the graph. In subsequent decades, the distinction between semantic networks and knowledge graphs was blurred. Some early knowledge graphs were topic-specific. In 1985, Wordnet was founded, capturing semantic relationships between words and meanings – an application of this idea to language itself. In 2005, Marc Wirk founded Geonames to capture relationships between different geographic names and locales and associated entities. In 1998, Andrew Edmonds of Science in Finance Ltd in the UK created a system called ThinkBase that offered fuzzy-logic based reasoning in a graphical context. In 2007, both DBpedia and Freebase were founded as graph-based knowledge repositories for general-purpose knowledge. DBpedia focused exclusively on data extracted from Wikipedia, while Freebase also included a range of public datasets. Neither described themselves as a 'knowledge graph' but developed and described related concepts. In 2012, Google introduced their Knowledge Graph, building on DBpedia and Freebase among other sources. They later incorporated RDFa, Microdata, JSON-LD content extracted from indexed web pages, including the CIA World Factbook, Wikidata, and Wikipedia. Entity and relationship types associated with this knowledge graph have been further organized using terms from the schema.org vocabulary. The Google Knowledge Graph became a complement to string-based search within Google, and its popularity online brought the term into more common use. Since then, several large multinationals have advertised their use of knowledge graphs, further popularising the term. These include Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber and eBay. In 2019, IEEE combined its annual international conferences on "Big Knowledge" and "Data Mining and Intelligent Computing" into the International Conference on Knowledge Graph. The development of large language models expanded interest in knowledge graphs as a way to structure information from unstructured text, with advances in language processing enabling their automatic or semi-automatic generation and expansion. The term knowledge graph has since broadened to include the dynamically constructed and adaptive graph structures, which support retrieval, reasoning, and summarization in generative systems. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG (2024) exemplified this development by integrating LLM-generated graphs into retrieval-augmented generation. == Definitions == There is no single commonly accepted definition of a knowledge graph. Most definitions view the topic through a Semantic Web lens and include these features: Flexible relations among knowledge in topical domains: A knowledge graph (i) defines abstract classes and relations of entities in a schema, (ii) mainly describes real world entities and their interrelations, organized in a graph, (iii) allows for potentially interrelating arbitrary entities with each other, and (iv) covers various topical domains. General structure: A network of entities, their semantic types, properties, and relationships. To represent properties, categorical or numerical values are often used. Supporting reasoning over inferred ontologies: A knowledge graph acquires and integrates information into an ontology and applies a reasoner to derive new knowledge. There are, however, many knowledge graph representations for which some of these features are not relevant. For those knowledge graphs, this simpler definition may be more useful: A digital structure that represents knowledge as concepts and the relationships between them (facts). A knowledge graph can include an ontology that allows both humans and machines to understand and reason about its contents. === Implementations === In addition to the above examples, the term has been used to describe open knowledge projects such as YAGO and Wikidata; federations like the Linked Open Data cloud; a range of commercial search tools, including Yahoo's semantic search assistant Spark, Google's Knowledge Graph, and Microsoft's Satori; and the LinkedIn and Facebook entity graphs. The term is also used in the context of note-taking software applications that allow a user to build a personal knowledge graph. The popularization of knowledge graphs and their accompanying methods have led to the development of graph databases such as Neo4j, GraphDB and AgensGraph. These graph databases allow users to easily store data as entities and their interrelationships, and facilitate operations such as data reasoning, node embedding, and ontology development on knowledge bases. In contrast, virtual knowledge graphs do not store information in specialized databases. They rely on an underlying relational database or data lake to answer queries on the graph. Such a virtual knowledge graph system must be properly configured in order to answer the queries correctly. This specific configuration is done through a set of mappings that define the relationship between the elements of the data source and the structure and ontology of the virtual knowledge graph. == Using a knowledge graph for reasoning over data == A knowledge graph formally represents semantics by describing entities and their relationships. Knowledge graphs may make use of ontologies as a schema layer. By doing this, they allow logical inference for retrieving implicit knowledge rather than only allowing queries requesting explicit knowledge. In order to allow the use of knowledge graphs in various machine learning tasks, several methods for deriving latent feature representations of entities and relations have been devised. These knowledge graph embeddings allow them to be connected to machine learning methods that require feature vectors like word embeddings. This can complement other estimates of conceptual similarity. Models for generating useful knowledge graph embeddings are commonly the domain of graph neural networks (GNNs). GNNs are deep learning architectures that comprise edges and nodes, which correspond well to the entities and relationships of knowledge graphs. The topology and data structures afforded by GNNs provide a convenient domain for semi-supervised learning, wherein the network is trained to predict the value of a node embedding (provided a group of adjacent nodes and their edges) or edge (provided a pair of nodes). These tasks serve as fundamental abstractions for more complex tasks such as knowledge graph reasoning and alignment. === Entity alignment === As new knowledge graphs are produced across a variety of fields and contexts, the same entity will inevitably be represented in multiple graphs. However, because no single standard for the construction or representation of knowledge graph exists, resolving which entities from disparate graphs correspond to the same real world subject is a non-trivial task. This task is known as knowledge graph entity alignment, and is an active area of research. Strategies for entity alignment generally seek to identify similar substructures, semantic relationships, shared attributes, or combinations of all three between two distinct knowledge graphs. Entity alignment methods use these structural similarities between generally non-isomorphic graphs to predict which nodes correspond to the same entity. In 2023, researchers found success in using large language models (LLMs) in the task of entity alignment. This was in particul

    Read more →
  • Social information architecture

    Social information architecture

    Social information architecture, also known as social iA, is a sub-domain of information architecture which deals with the social aspects of conceptualizing, modeling and organizing information. It has become more relevant because of the rise of social media and Web 2.0 in recent times. == Approach == There are different approaches to the explanation of social information architecture. === Architecture model (internal space) === Architects designing a physical community space, have to consider how the architecture will shape social interactions. A long hallway of offices creates an utterly different dynamic than desks with arranged in an open space. One might foster individuality, privacy, propriety; the other: collaboration, distraction, communalism. Still, physical spaces can be flexibly repurposed and worked around if the inhabitants desire a social dynamic not instantly afforded by the space. Office doors can be left open to invite easier interaction. Partitions can be raised between adjacent desks to limit distraction and increase privacy. That's physical architecture. The information architectures of online communities are far more deterministic and far less flexible. They literally define the social architecture by pre-specifying in immutable computer code what information you have access to, who you can talk to, where you can go. In the online world, information architecture = social architecture. === Social dialogue and information model (external space) === All major brands use information architecture to market their products online, it is then commonly wrapped under the umbrella phrase 'digital strategy'. Information architecture used for strategic purposes encompasses brand SEO, strategic placement of virals, social media presence etc. Charities, news outlets and social dialogue forums can make a much more specific use of the same tools for positive and important social purposes. Social Information Architecture is perceived as the socially conscious wing of commercial information architecture and function to exchange information and ideas between people and groups. Social iA can pick up on conflicting issues that are treated with misunderstanding between cultures and leaves individuals and societies vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation. Since the net has such a far reach it is obvious to use it for meaningful and coordinated social dialogue. Example of such issues are faith, environment, politics, climate change, war, injustice and other social challenges. Information architecture can help create frameworks in which sharing information brings people together, inspires and encourages them to participate in a forward thinking and unfragmented way. One of its core activities is to spread messages that bring people from opposite sites of social and cultural spectrums together and to confront uncomfortable subject head on. == How does social information architecture work? == Social iA utilizes a variety of Web2.0 applications to filter relevant or valuable information and weave them in appropriate information repository or provide feedback to interesting channels. Social iA makes strategic use of Search Engines, Social Media, Google Algorithms, as well as websites, video & news channels. It ‘reads’ or 'listens' to social conversations and search engine queries and engages with the net actively to gather clues about the world's pulse on the internet. It assesses data, social & political trends, and respond with targeted campaigns to give people ideas, as well as help people with making sense of information. == Principals == Dan Brown in his paper 8 Principals of Social Information Architecture enlists the following principals: 1. The principle of objects: Treat content as a living, breathing thing, with a lifecycle, behaviors and attributes. 2. The principle of choices: Create pages that offer meaningful choices to users, keeping the range of choices available focused on a particular task. 3. The principle of disclosure: Show only enough information to help people understand what kinds of information they'll find as they dig deeper. 4. The principle of exemplars: Describe the contents of categories by showing examples of the contents. 5. The principle of front doors: Assume at least half of the website's visitors will come through some page other than the home page. 6. The principle of multiple classification: Offer users several different classification schemes to browse the site's content. 7. The principle of focused navigation: Don't mix apples and oranges in your navigation scheme. 8. The principle of growth: Assume the content you have today is a small fraction of the content you will have tomorrow. == What can social information architecture achieve? == Social information architecture has many potentials in terms of fostering social connections and how information is shared in social spaces on the web.

    Read more →
  • Diagnostically acceptable irreversible compression

    Diagnostically acceptable irreversible compression

    Diagnostically acceptable irreversible compression (DAIC) is the amount of lossy compression which can be used on a medical image to produce a result that does not prevent the reader from using the image to make a medical diagnosis. The term was first introduced at a workshop on irreversible compression convened by the European Society of Radiology (ESR) in Palma de Mallorca October 13, 2010, the results of which were reported in a subsequent position paper. == Determination == The "amount of compression" in irreversible compression used to be determined by the compression ratio, where the acceptable minimum is determined by the algorithm (typically JPEG or J2K) and the data type (body part and imaging method). Such a definition is easy to follow, and has been used by medical bodies in 2010 around the world. However, its downside is obvious: the compression ratio tells nothing about the real quality of the image, as different compressors can produce vastly different qualities under the same file size. For example, the JPEG format of 1992 can perform as well as many modern formats given newer techniques exploited in mozjpeg and ISO libjpeg, yet they would be lumped together with the legacy encoders in such a scheme. The image compression community has long used objective quality metrics like SSIM to measure the effects of compression. In the absence of good data regarding SSIM, the ESR review of 2010 concluded that it is still difficult to establish a criterion for whether a particular irreversible compression scheme applied with particular parameters to a particular individual image, or category of images, avoids the introduction of some quantifiable risk of a diagnostic error for any particular diagnostic task. A 2017 study showed that a SSIM variant called 4-G-r (4-component, gradient, structural component of SSIM) best reflects changes in images that affect the decision of radiologists out of 16 SSIM variants. A 2020 study shows that visual information fidelity (VIF), feature similarity index (FSIM), and noise quality metric (NQM) best reflect radiologist preferences out of ten metrics. It also mentions that the original version of SSIM works as poorly as a basic root-mean-square distance (RMSD) for this purpose, a result echoed by the 2017 study. The 4-G-r modification is not tested in the study.

    Read more →
  • Emotion recognition

    Emotion recognition

    Emotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Generally, the technology works best if it uses multiple modalities in context. To date, the most work has been conducted on automating the recognition of facial expressions from video, spoken expressions from audio, written expressions from text, and physiology as measured by wearables. == Human == Humans show a great deal of variability in their abilities to recognize emotion. A key point to keep in mind when learning about automated emotion recognition is that there are several sources of "ground truth", or truth about what the real emotion is. Suppose we are trying to recognize the emotions of Alex. One source is "what would most people say that Alex is feeling?" In this case, the 'truth' may not correspond to what Alex feels, but may correspond to what most people would say it looks like Alex feels. For example, Alex may actually feel sad, but he puts on a big smile and then most people say he looks happy. If an automated method achieves the same results as a group of observers it may be considered accurate, even if it does not actually measure what Alex truly feels. Another source of 'truth' is to ask Alex what he truly feels. This works if Alex has a good sense of his internal state, and wants to tell you what it is, and is capable of putting it accurately into words or a number. However, some people are alexithymic and do not have a good sense of their internal feelings, or they are not able to communicate them accurately with words and numbers. In general, getting to the truth of what emotion is actually present can take some work, can vary depending on the criteria that are selected, and will usually involve maintaining some level of uncertainty. == Automatic == Decades of scientific research have been conducted developing and evaluating methods for automated emotion recognition. There is now an extensive literature proposing and evaluating hundreds of different kinds of methods, leveraging techniques from multiple areas, such as signal processing, machine learning, computer vision, and speech processing. Different methodologies and techniques may be employed to interpret emotion such as Bayesian networks. , Gaussian Mixture models and Hidden Markov Models and deep neural networks. === Approaches === The accuracy of emotion recognition is usually improved when it combines the analysis of human expressions from multimodal forms such as texts, physiology, audio, or video. Different emotion types are detected through the integration of information from facial expressions, body movement and gestures, and speech. The technology is said to contribute in the emergence of the so-called emotional or emotive Internet. The existing approaches in emotion recognition to classify certain emotion types can be generally classified into three main categories: knowledge-based techniques, statistical methods, and hybrid approaches. ==== Knowledge-based techniques ==== Knowledge-based techniques (sometimes referred to as lexicon-based techniques), utilize domain knowledge and the semantic and syntactic characteristics of text and potentially spoken language in order to detect certain emotion types. In this approach, it is common to use knowledge-based resources during the emotion classification process such as WordNet, SenticNet, ConceptNet, and EmotiNet, to name a few. One of the advantages of this approach is the accessibility and economy brought about by the large availability of such knowledge-based resources. A limitation of this technique on the other hand, is its inability to handle concept nuances and complex linguistic rules. Knowledge-based techniques can be mainly classified into two categories: dictionary-based and corpus-based approaches. Dictionary-based approaches find opinion or emotion seed words in a dictionary and search for their synonyms and antonyms to expand the initial list of opinions or emotions. Corpus-based approaches on the other hand, start with a seed list of opinion or emotion words, and expand the database by finding other words with context-specific characteristics in a large corpus. While corpus-based approaches take into account context, their performance still vary in different domains since a word in one domain can have a different orientation in another domain. ==== Statistical methods ==== Statistical methods commonly involve the use of different supervised machine learning algorithms in which a large set of annotated data is fed into the algorithms for the system to learn and predict the appropriate emotion types. Machine learning algorithms generally provide more reasonable classification accuracy compared to other approaches, but one of the challenges in achieving good results in the classification process, is the need to have a sufficiently large training set. Some of the most commonly used machine learning algorithms include Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naive Bayes, and Maximum Entropy. Deep learning, which is under the unsupervised family of machine learning, is also widely employed in emotion recognition. Well-known deep learning algorithms include different architectures of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). The popularity of deep learning approaches in the domain of emotion recognition may be mainly attributed to its success in related applications such as in computer vision, speech recognition, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). ==== Hybrid approaches ==== Hybrid approaches in emotion recognition are essentially a combination of knowledge-based techniques and statistical methods, which exploit complementary characteristics from both techniques. Some of the works that have applied an ensemble of knowledge-driven linguistic elements and statistical methods include sentic computing and iFeel, both of which have adopted the concept-level knowledge-based resource SenticNet. The role of such knowledge-based resources in the implementation of hybrid approaches is highly important in the emotion classification process. Since hybrid techniques gain from the benefits offered by both knowledge-based and statistical approaches, they tend to have better classification performance as opposed to employing knowledge-based or statistical methods independently. A downside of using hybrid techniques however, is the computational complexity during the classification process. === Datasets === Data is an integral part of the existing approaches in emotion recognition and in most cases it is a challenge to obtain annotated data that is necessary to train machine learning algorithms. For the task of classifying different emotion types from multimodal sources in the form of texts, audio, videos or physiological signals, the following datasets are available: HUMAINE: provides natural clips with emotion words and context labels in multiple modalities Belfast database: provides clips with a wide range of emotions from TV programs and interview recordings SEMAINE: provides audiovisual recordings between a person and a virtual agent and contains emotion annotations such as angry, happy, fear, disgust, sadness, contempt, and amusement IEMOCAP: provides recordings of dyadic sessions between actors and contains emotion annotations such as happiness, anger, sadness, frustration, and neutral state eNTERFACE: provides audiovisual recordings of subjects from seven nationalities and contains emotion annotations such as happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, and fear DEAP: provides electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and face video recordings, as well as emotion annotations in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance of people watching film clips DREAMER: provides electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) recordings, as well as emotion annotations in terms of valence, dominance of people watching film clips MELD: is a multiparty conversational dataset where each utterance is labeled with emotion and sentiment. MELD provides conversations in video format and hence suitable for multimodal emotion recognition and sentiment analysis. MELD is useful for multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition, dialogue systems and emotion recognition in conversations. MuSe: provides audiovisual recordings of natural interactions between a person and an object. It has discrete and continuous emotion annotations in terms of valence, arousal and trustworthiness as well as speech topics useful for multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. UIT-VSMEC: is a standard Vietnamese Social Media Emotion Corpus (UIT-VSMEC) with about 6,927 human-annotated sentences with six emotion labels, contributing to emotion recognition research in Vietnamese

    Read more →
  • Metadata

    Metadata

    Metadata (or metainformation) is data (or information) that defines and describes the characteristics of other data. It often helps to describe, explain, locate, or otherwise make data easier to retrieve, use, or manage. For example, the title, author, and publication date of a book are metadata about the book. But, while a data asset is finite, its metadata is infinite. As such, efforts to define, classify types, or structure metadata are expressed as examples in the context of its use. The term "metadata" has a history dating to the 1960s where it occurred in computer science and in popular culture. Different types of metadata serve different functions. For example, descriptive metadata for a document might include the author, creation date, file size and keywords. Metadata has various purposes. It can help users find relevant information and discover resources. It can also help organize electronic resources, provide digital identification, and archive and preserve resources. Metadata allows users to access resources by "allowing resources to be found by relevant criteria, identifying resources, bringing similar resources together, distinguishing dissimilar resources, and giving location information". Metadata of telecommunication activities including Internet traffic is very widely collected by various national governmental organizations. This data is used for the purposes of traffic analysis and can be used for mass surveillance. Unique metadata standards exist for different disciplines (e.g., museum collections, digital audio files, websites, etc.). Describing the contents and context of data or data files increases its usefulness. For example, a web page may include metadata specifying what software language the page is written in (e.g., HTML), what tools were used to create it, what subjects the page is about, and where to find more information about the subject. This metadata can automatically improve the reader's experience and make it easier for users to find the web page online. A CD may include metadata providing information about the musicians, singers, and songwriters whose work appears on the disc. In many countries, government organizations routinely store metadata about emails, telephone calls, web pages, video traffic, IP connections, and cell phone locations. == Types == There are many distinct types of metadata, including: Descriptive metadata – the descriptive information about a resource. It is used for discovery and identification. It includes elements such as title, abstract, author, and keywords. Structural metadata – metadata about containers of data and indicates how compound objects are put together, for example, how pages are ordered to form chapters. It describes the types, versions, relationships, and other characteristics of digital materials. Administrative metadata – the information to help manage a resource, like resource type, and permissions, and when and how it was created. Reference metadata – the information about the contents and quality of statistical data. Statistical metadata – also called process data, may describe processes that collect, process, or produce statistical data. Legal metadata – provides information about the creator, copyright holder, and public licensing, if provided. Metadata is not strictly bound to one of these categories, as it can describe a piece of data in many other ways. While the metadata application is manifold, covering a large variety of fields, there are specialized and well-accepted models to specify types of metadata. Bretherton & Singley (1994) distinguish between two distinct classes: structural/control metadata and guide metadata. Structural metadata describes the structure of database objects such as tables, columns, keys and indexes. Guide metadata helps humans find specific items and is usually expressed as a set of keywords in a natural language. According to Ralph Kimball, metadata can be divided into three categories: technical metadata (or internal metadata), business metadata (or external metadata), and process metadata. Dan Linstedt, creator of the data vault methodology, says business metadata "...provide[s] definition of the functionality, definition of the data, definition of the elements, and definition of how the data is used within business...business metadata includes business requirements, time-lines, business metrics, business process flows, and business terminology." Business metadata is important because it can greatly facilitate the usefulness of the data to business people. A simple example of business metadata is a glossary entry. Hover functionality in an application or web form can enable a glossary definition to be shown when cursor is on a field or term. Other examples of business metadata include annotation ability within applications. For example, a business user may be viewing a business intelligence (BI) report and notice a trend in the data. The user may have background knowledge as to why this trend occurs. Some business intelligence tools enable the user to create an annotation within the report that explains the trend. Such an annotation can enhance other users' understanding of the data. This example is especially powerful because it is created by a business user for the use of other business people. NISO distinguishes three types of metadata: descriptive, structural, and administrative. Descriptive metadata is typically used for discovery and identification, as information to search and locate an object, such as title, authors, subjects, keywords, and publisher. Structural metadata describes how the components of an object are organized. An example of structural metadata would be how pages are ordered to form chapters of a book. Finally, administrative metadata gives information to help manage the source. Administrative metadata refers to the technical information, such as file type, or when and how the file was created. Two sub-types of administrative metadata are rights management metadata and preservation metadata. Rights management metadata explains intellectual property rights, while preservation metadata contains information to preserve and save a resource. Statistical data repositories have their own requirements for metadata in order to describe not only the source and quality of the data but also what statistical processes were used to create the data, which is of particular importance to the statistical community in order to both validate and improve the process of statistical data production. An additional type of metadata beginning to be more developed is accessibility metadata. Accessibility metadata is not a new concept to libraries; however, advances in universal design have raised its profile. Projects like Cloud4All and GPII identified the lack of common terminologies and models to describe the needs and preferences of users and information that fits those needs as a major gap in providing universal access solutions. Those types of information are accessibility metadata. The Schema.org website has incorporated several accessibility properties based on IMS Global Access for All Information Model Data Element Specification. While the efforts to describe and standardize the varied accessibility needs of information seekers are beginning to become more robust, their adoption into established metadata schemas has not been as developed. For example, while Dublin Core (DC)'s "audience" and MARC 21's "reading level" could be used to identify resources suitable for users with dyslexia and DC's "format" could be used to identify resources available in braille, audio, or large print formats, there is more work to be done. == History == Metadata was traditionally used in the card catalogs of libraries until the 1980s when libraries converted their catalog data to digital databases. In the 2000s, as data and information were increasingly stored digitally, this digital data was described using metadata standards. An early description of "meta data" for computer systems was written by David Griffel and Stuart McIntosh at the MIT Center for International Studies in 1967: "In summary then, we have statements in an object language about subject descriptions of data and token codes for the data. We also have statements in a meta language describing the data relationships and transformations, and ought/is relations between norm and data." == Definition == Metadata means "data about data". Metadata is defined as the data providing information about one or more aspects of the data; it is used to summarize basic information about data that can make tracking and working with specific data easier. Some examples include: Means of creation of the data Source of the data Time and date of creation Creator or author of the data Location on a computer network where the data was created Standards used Data quality For example, a digital image may include metadata that describes the size of the image, its color depth, resolution,

    Read more →
  • Point-in-time recovery

    Point-in-time recovery

    Point-in-time recovery (PITR) in the context of computers involves systems, often databases, whereby an administrator can restore or recover a set of data or a particular setting from a time in the past. Note for example Windows's capability to restore operating-system settings from a past date (for instance, before data corruption occurred). Time Machine for macOS provides another example of point-in-time recovery. Once PITR logging starts for a PITR-capable database, a database administrator can restore that database from backups to the state that it had at any time since.

    Read more →
  • Spreading activation

    Spreading activation

    Spreading activation is a method for searching associative networks, biological and artificial neural networks, or semantic networks. The search process is initiated by labeling a set of source nodes (e.g. concepts in a semantic network) with weights or "activation" and then iteratively propagating or "spreading" that activation out to other nodes linked to the source nodes. Most often these "weights" are real values that decay as activation propagates through the network. When the weights are discrete this process is often referred to as marker passing. Activation may originate from alternate paths, identified by distinct markers, and terminate when two alternate paths reach the same node. However brain studies show that several different brain areas play an important role in semantic processing. Spreading activation in semantic networks as a model were invented in cognitive psychology to model the fan out effect. Spreading activation can also be applied in information retrieval, by means of a network of nodes representing documents and terms contained in those documents. == Cognitive psychology == As it relates to cognitive psychology, spreading activation is the theory of how the brain iterates through a network of associated ideas to retrieve specific information. The spreading activation theory presents the array of concepts within our memory as cognitive units, each consisting of a node and its associated elements or characteristics, all connected together by edges. A spreading activation network can be represented schematically, in a sort of web diagram with shorter lines between two nodes meaning the ideas are more closely related and will typically be associated more quickly to the original concept. In memory psychology, the spreading activation model holds that people organize their knowledge of the world based on their personal experiences, which in turn form the network of ideas that is the person's knowledge of the world. When a word (the target) is preceded by an associated word (the prime) in word recognition tasks, participants seem to perform better in the amount of time that it takes them to respond. For instance, subjects respond faster to the word "doctor" when it is preceded by "nurse" than when it is preceded by an unrelated word like "carrot". This semantic priming effect with words that are close in meaning within the cognitive network has been seen in a wide range of tasks given by experimenters, ranging from sentence verification to lexical decision and naming. As another example, if the original concept is "red" and the concept "vehicles" is primed, they are much more likely to say "fire engine" instead of something unrelated to vehicles, such as "cherries". If instead "fruits" was primed, they would likely name "cherries" and continue on from there. The activation of pathways in the network has everything to do with how closely linked two concepts are by meaning, as well as how a subject is primed. == Algorithm == A directed graph is populated by Nodes[ 1...N ] each having an associated activation value A [ i ] which is a real number in the range [0.0 ... 1.0]. A Link[ i, j ] connects source node[ i ] with target node[ j ]. Each edge has an associated weight W [ i, j ] usually a real number in the range [0.0 ... 1.0]. Parameters: Firing threshold F, a real number in the range [0.0 ... 1.0] Decay factor D, a real number in the range [0.0 ... 1.0] Steps: Initialize the graph setting all activation values A [ i ] to zero. Set one or more origin nodes to an initial activation value greater than the firing threshold F. A typical initial value is 1.0. For each unfired node [ i ] in the graph having an activation value A [ i ] greater than the node firing threshold F: For each Link [ i, j ] connecting the source node [ i ] with target node [ j ], adjust A [ j ] = A [ j ] + (A [ i ] W [ i, j ] D) where D is the decay factor. If a target node receives an adjustment to its activation value so that it would exceed 1.0, then set its new activation value to 1.0. Likewise maintain 0.0 as a lower bound on the target node's activation value should it receive an adjustment to below 0.0. Once a node has fired it may not fire again, although variations of the basic algorithm permit repeated firings and loops through the graph. Nodes receiving a new activation value that exceeds the firing threshold F are marked for firing on the next spreading activation cycle. If activation originates from more than one node, a variation of the algorithm permits marker passing to distinguish the paths by which activation is spread over the graph The procedure terminates when either there are no more nodes to fire or in the case of marker passing from multiple origins, when a node is reached from more than one path. Variations of the algorithm that permit repeated node firings and activation loops in the graph, terminate after a steady activation state, with respect to some delta, is reached, or when a maximum number of iterations is exceeded. == Examples ==

    Read more →
  • Voiceverse NFT plagiarism scandal

    Voiceverse NFT plagiarism scandal

    In January 2022, 15—the pseudonymous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) artificial intelligence researcher and creator of the non-commercial generative artificial intelligence voice synthesis research project 15.ai—discovered that the blockchain-based technology company Voiceverse had plagiarized from their platform. Voiceverse marketed itself as a service that offered AI voice cloning technology that could be purchased and traded as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Amid heightened controversy over NFTs in the gaming industry, voice actor Troy Baker (who has been described as one of the most famous voice actors in video games) announced his partnership with Voiceverse on January 14, 2022, triggering immediate backlash over concerns about the environmental impact of NFTs, potential for fraud, predatory monetization in video games, and the potential of AI displacing jobs for human voice actors. Later that same day, 15 revealed through server logs that Voiceverse had generated voice lines using 15's free text-to-speech platform, pitch-shifted the audio to make them unrecognizable, and falsely marketed the samples as their own technology before selling them as NFTs. Within an hour of being confronted with evidence, Voiceverse confessed and stated that their marketing team had used 15.ai without proper attribution while rushing to create a technology demo to coincide with Baker's partnership announcement, further exacerbating the already negative reception to the original announcement. In response, 15 replied "Go fuck yourself"; the interaction went viral and garnered a large amount of support for the developer. News publications universally characterized this incident as Voiceverse having "stolen" from 15.ai. The next day, Baker appeared on a podcast and stated that his motivation had been to help independent creators who were unable to afford professional voice actors. Following continued backlash and the plagiarism revelation, Baker ended his partnership with Voiceverse on January 31, 2022. Subsequently, the incident was documented in multiple AI ethics databases, criticisms of predatory monetization in video games, and retrospectives as one of the earliest instances of plagiarism and theft stemming from artificial intelligence during the AI boom. == Background == === Troy Baker === Troy Baker is a prominent voice actor in the video game industry best known for his performances as Joel Miller in The Last of Us franchise. Baker has been described as "ubiquitous" by Polygon, "one of the most high-profile and prolific voice actors in video games" by Eurogamer, and "arguably the most famous voice actor in the gaming industry" by GameGuru. His other prominent roles include voicing Agent John "Jonesy" Jones in Fortnite, Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinite, and both Batman and Joker in multiple Batman video games. As of October 2025, Baker holds the record for the most acting nominations at the BAFTA Games Awards, with five between 2013 and 2021. === Voiceverse === Voiceverse is a blockchain-based startup founded by the Bored Ape Yacht Club that marketed itself as offering AI voice cloning technology in the form of NFTs. Prior to the announcement of their partnership with Baker, Voiceverse had partnered with LOVO, Inc., an AI voice platform that, according to LOVO, could generate human-like voices. Voiceverse stated that any user who purchases a voice NFT would have unlimited and perpetual access to the voice model, which could be used to create content such as audiobooks, YouTube videos, podcasts, e-learning materials, in-game voice chat, and Zoom calls. Voiceverse promised that buyers would "OWN [sic] all of the IP" of content they created using these voices. Voiceverse's roadmap included plans to release 8,888 initial voice NFTs, a feature to add emotions to existing voices, and the ability for users to mint their own voices as NFTs. Prior to Baker's partnership, Voiceverse had also partnered with voice actors Charlet Chung, who voices D.Va in Overwatch, and Andy Milonakis of The Andy Milonakis Show. === 15.ai === 15.ai is a free web application launched in 2020 that uses artificial intelligence to generate text-to-speech voices of fictional characters from popular media. Created by a pseudonymous artificial intelligence researcher known as 15, who began developing the technology as a freshman during their undergraduate research at MIT, it was an early example of an application of generative artificial intelligence during the initial stages of the AI boom. The platform showed that deep neural networks could generate emotionally expressive speech with only 15 seconds of speech; the name "15.ai" references the creator's statement that a voice can be convincingly cloned with just 15 seconds of audio, as opposed to the tens of hours of data previously required. 15.ai became an Internet phenomenon in early 2021 when content utilizing it went viral on social media and quickly gained widespread use among various Internet fandoms. 15 has emphasized that it remain free and non-commercial; it only requires users to give proper credit when using the service for content creation. === NFTs in the video game industry === By early 2022, NFTs had become highly controversial within the gaming industry. Critics raised concerns about their environmental impact due to the significant energy consumption of blockchain technology. In addition, the prevalence of scams, fraud, and potential money laundering associated with NFT sales, as well as fears that NFTs were a new form of predatory monetization following the increasing frequency of loot boxes, caused vocal pushback from the gaming community. Several major gaming companies had begun exploring NFT integration into their products, though fan backlash had already forced some projects to be cancelled. On December 16, 2021, the developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl announced that they would be including NFTs in the game, but cancelled within an hour of the announcement due to immediate universal backlash. Simultaneously, the rise of AI voice technology raised concerns among voice actors about potential job displacement and the devaluation of their work amidst the voice acting industry's ongoing struggles for better compensation and working conditions. == Partnership announcement and backlash == On January 14, 2022, 1:02 a.m. EST, Baker announced on Twitter that he was partnering with Voiceverse "to explore ways where together we might bring new tools to new creators to make new things, and allow everyone a chance to own & invest in the IP's they create." The announcement concluded with the statement "You can hate. Or you can create." Baker's specific role with Voiceverse remained unclear at the time of the announcement. Along with Baker's announcement, Voiceverse promoted their supposed voice AI technology on Twitter by posting animated videos that featured a cat character created by NFT firm Chubbiverse. The videos concluded with text that read "The Voice Powered By Voiceverse"; Voiceverse stated on Twitter that the voices in the animations had been generated using their own AI voice synthesis technology and presented the videos as a technology demonstration of their voice NFT capabilities. The announcement provoked immediate and widespread backlash from the gaming community. Baker's tweet received thousands of replies and quote retweets (the vast majority of which were negative), far more than the number of likes; Michael McWhertor of Polygon described it as a "textbook example of being ratioed" and commented that reactions had been amplified by the final part of Baker's announcement. Michael Beckwith of Metro called Baker's approach "bizarrely aggressive". Later that day, Baker responded to the backlash by apologizing for his choice of words. He said he appreciated people's thoughts and acknowledged that the "hate/create part might have been a bit antagonistic," calling it a "bad attempt to bring levity". Despite the apology, Baker and his fellow voice actors did not distance themselves from Voiceverse at this point. At the same time, Voiceverse attempted to address the criticisms, stating that they were working to move to more environmentally friendly blockchain technology and that voice actors would receive royalties from NFT sales, with actors benefiting from any increase in NFT value. == Plagiarism revelation == On December 13, 2021, amidst the increasingly negative reactions toward NFTs among the general public, the creator of 15.ai (known pseudonymously as 15) announced that they had "no interest in incorporating NFTs into any aspect of [their] work." On January 14, 2022, 11:17 a.m. EST (10 hours after Baker's initial announcement), 15 commented on the Voiceverse venture, stating that it "sounds like a scam". Two hours later, at 1:20 p.m., 15 explicitly accused Voiceverse of "actively attempting to appropriate [15's] work for [Voiceverse's] own benefit." 15 provided evidence through

    Read more →
  • Document

    Document

    A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The etymology of the word "document" derives from the Latin documentum, which denotes a "teaching" or "lesson": the verb doceō denotes "to teach". Historically, the term "document" was usually used to indicate written proof useful as evidence of a truth or fact. In the Computer Age, the term "document" typically refers to a primarily textual computer file, encompassing its structural and format elements, such as fonts, colors, and images. In the contemporary era, the definition of "document" has expanded beyond its traditional medium, such as paper, to encompass electronic documents as well. History, events, examples, opinions, stories, and creativity can all be expressed in documents. "Documentation" is distinct because it has more denotations than "document". Documents are also distinguished from "realia", which are three-dimensional objects that would otherwise satisfy the definition of "document" because they memorialize or represent thought. Documents are usually considered to be two-dimensional representations. == Abstract definitions == The concept of "document" has been defined by Suzanne Briet as "any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental." An often-cited article concludes that "the evolving notion of document" among Jonathan Priest, Paul Otlet, Briet, Walter Schürmeyer, and the other documentalists increasingly emphasized whatever functioned as a document rather than traditional physical forms of documents. The shift to digital technology would seem to make this distinction even more important. David M. Levy has said that an emphasis on the technology of digital documents has impeded our understanding of digital documents as documents. A conventional document, such as a mail message or a technical report, exists physically in digital technology as a string of bits, as does everything else in a digital environment. As an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence by those who study it. "Document" is defined in library and information science and documentation science as a fundamental, abstract idea: the word denotes everything that may be represented or memorialized to serve as evidence. The classic example provided by Briet is an antelope: "An antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document[;] she rules. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence being used by those who study it. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents, since the antelope itself is the primary document." This opinion has been interpreted as an early expression of actor–network theory. == Kinds == A document can be structured, like tabular documents, lists, forms, or scientific charts, semi-structured like a book or a newspaper article, or unstructured like a handwritten note. Documents are sometimes classified as secret, private, or public. They may also be described as drafts or proofs. When a document is copied, the source is denominated the "original". Documents are used in numerous fields, e.g.: Academia: manuscript, thesis, paper, journal, chart, and technical drawing Media: mock-up, script, image, photography, and newspaper article Administration, law, and politics: application, brief, certificate, commission, constitutional document, form, gazette, identity document, license, manifesto, summons, census, and white paper Business: invoice, request for proposal, proposal, contract, packing slip, manifest, report (detailed and summary), spreadsheet, material safety data sheet, waybill, bill of lading, financial statement, nondisclosure agreement (NDA), mutual nondisclosure agreement, and user guide Geography and planning: topographic map, cadastre, legend, and architectural plan Such standard documents can be drafted based on a template. == Drafting == The page layout of a document is how information is graphically arranged in the space of the document, e.g., on a page. If the appearance of the document is of concern, the page layout is generally the responsibility of a graphic designer. Typography concerns the design of letter and symbol forms and their physical arrangement in the document (see typesetting). Information design concerns the effective communication of information, especially in industrial documents and public signs. Simple textual documents may not require visual design and may be drafted only by an author, clerk, or transcriber. Forms may require a visual design for their initial fields, but not to complete the forms. == Media == Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applied to it in ink, either by handwriting (to make a manuscript) or by a mechanical process (e.g., a printing press or laser printer). Today, some short documents also may consist of sheets of paper stapled together. Historically, documents were inscribed with ink on papyrus (starting in ancient Egypt) or parchment; scratched as runes or carved on stone using a sharp tool, e.g., the Tablets of Stone described in the Bible; stamped or incised in clay and then baked to make clay tablets, e.g., in the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilizations. The papyrus or parchment was often rolled into a scroll or cut into sheets and bound into a codex (book). Contemporary electronic means of memorializing and displaying documents include: Monitor of a desktop computer, laptop, tablet; optionally with a printer to produce a hard copy; Personal digital assistant; Dedicated e-book device; Electronic paper, typically, using the Portable Document Format (PDF); Information appliance; Digital audio player; and Radio and television service provider. Digital documents usually require a specific file format to be presentable in a specific medium. == In law == Documents in all forms frequently serve as material evidence in criminal and civil proceedings. The forensic analysis of such a document is within the scope of questioned document examination. To catalog and manage the large number of documents that may be produced during litigation, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents in the lawsuit so that each document has a unique, arbitrary, identification number.

    Read more →