AI Content Generator

AI Content Generator — hands-on reviews, top picks, pricing, pros and cons and a practical how-to guide on Aizhi.

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  Rabbit r1

  The Rabbit r1 is an artificial intelligence personal assistant device developed by the American technology startup Rabbit Inc and co-designed by Teenage Engineering. It was announced at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show as a handheld device intended to perform digital tasks through voice commands, touch interaction, and web-based AI agents. The r1 was marketed around Rabbit's concept of a "large action model" (LAM), which the company described as software able to operate websites and services on behalf of users. The device runs rabbitOS, an operating system based on the Android Open Source Project. Its services have included AI search, image recognition, voice interaction, music playback, rideshare and food-ordering integrations, and later experimental web-agent features such as LAM Playground and teach mode. Initial reviews were largely negative, with reviewers criticizing the device's limited functionality, bugs, and unclear advantages over a smartphone. Critics also questioned Rabbit's claims after the r1 software was shown to run on an Android phone. Rabbit continued to issue software updates after launch, including rabbitOS 2 in September 2025, which introduced a redesigned card-based interface, gesture navigation, and a "creations" feature for generating small software tools and experiences on the device. Rabbit Inc was founded by Jesse Lyu Cheng. == Hardware == Display: A 2.88-inch touchscreen for interactive user input. Input: push-to-talk button to activate voice commands; scroll wheel; Gyroscope; Magnetometer; Accelerometer; GPS. Camera: 8 MP single camera, with a resolution of 3264x2448, allowing for the connected external AI to use computer vision. Audio: Equipped with a speaker and dual microphones for audio interaction. Connectivity: Supports Wi-Fi and cellular connections via a SIM card slot to access internet services. Processor: Runs on a 2.3GHz MediaTek Helio P35 processor. Memory: Contains 4GB of RAM for operational tasks. Storage: Offers 128GB of internal storage for data. Ports: Utilizes a USB-C port for charging and data connections. == Software == The Rabbit r1 runs rabbitOS, which is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), specifically Android 13. Rabbit founder Jesse Lyu described rabbitOS as a "very bespoke AOSP" after reports that the r1's software could be run on a conventional Android phone. Rabbit described the r1 as using a large action model (LAM), a type of AI agent intended to perform tasks across software interfaces rather than only answer questions. At launch, the device supported a limited set of services, including AI search, vision features, music playback, and some third-party integrations. Perplexity.ai was one of the AI services used to answer user queries. In 2024, Rabbit released several software updates that added features and attempted to address early criticism of the device. In July 2024, the company launched "beta rabbit", an advanced search and conversation mode for more complex queries. In October 2024, it released LAM Playground, a web-based agent feature intended to let the r1 operate websites on behalf of users. Reviewers found the feature experimental; Android Authority reported that it could perform some navigation tasks but struggled with CAPTCHAs, loops, and unintended behavior. In November 2024, Rabbit introduced a beta "teach mode", which allowed users to demonstrate web-based tasks in the Rabbithole web portal and later ask the r1 to repeat them. The company described teach mode as experimental, and The Verge noted that Rabbit warned users that results could be unpredictable and that CAPTCHA-protected sites could cause problems. Rabbit released rabbitOS 2 in September 2025. The update redesigned the interface around a card-based layout, added additional touchscreen gestures, and introduced "creations", a feature that lets users generate simple software tools, games, and interfaces through natural-language prompts. Coverage of the update described it as a major software overhaul rather than new hardware. == Reception == === Funding === Rabbit raised $20 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Synergis Capital and Kakao Investment in October 2023. The company announced an additional $10 million in funding in December 2023. === Sales === Following its announcement at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, 130,000 units were sold. On August 13, 2024, Rabbit announced that sales of r1 had expanded to the entire European Union (except Malta) and United Kingdom. On August 21, 2024, sales of r1 expanded to Singapore. === Reviews === The r1 was met with strong criticism immediately after Rabbit began shipping the device. Some reviews questioned what the device was able to do that a smartphone could not, while comparing it to the similar Humane Ai Pin. YouTuber Marques Brownlee called the device "barely reviewable". Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman managed to install Rabbit r1's software on a Pixel 6a smartphone, after a tipster shared an APK file. The Verge echoed the claims made by Rahman. In response, Lyu published statements confirming its use of Android, but denying that the r1 is an Android app. Mashable called its Vision features impressive, but said that "these praise-worthy features are overshadowed by buggy performance". Ars Technica wrote a blog post claiming "the company is blocking access from bootleg APKs". TechCrunch gave a slightly more positive review, calling the device a "fun peep at a possible future", but could not "advise anyone to buy one now." Shortly after the launch of r1, Rabbit began a weekly cadence of software updates to address much of the criticism from the early reviews, including "battery and GPS performance, time zone selection, and more". Digital Trends said the Magic Camera feature "takes the most mundane, ordinary, and badly composed photos and makes something fun and eye-catching from them." Mashable said the "beta rabbit" feature "makes Rabbit R1 more conversational and intelligent". Later coverage noted that Rabbit continued to update the r1 after its poorly received launch. The Verge reported in September 2024 that about 5,000 of roughly 100,000 purchasers were using the device at any given moment, citing Lyu, and described the product as having launched before it was ready. In 2025, coverage of rabbitOS 2 described the update as an attempt to reset the device's software experience after the criticism of its original release. == Controversies == === GAMA project === Rabbit Inc has garnered attention due to allegations surrounding its funding and the company's past projects. The company came under scrutiny when Stephen Findeisen, known as Coffeezilla on YouTube, published a video in May 2024, alleging that Rabbit Incorporation was "built on a scam". Rabbit Incorporation, initially named Cyber Manufacturing Co, rebranded just two months before launching the Rabbit R1. The company, under its former name, raised $6 million in November 2021 for a project called GAMA, described as a "Next Generation NFT Project." Jesse Lyu, the CEO of Rabbit Incorporation, referred to GAMA as a "fun little project." Coffeezilla, who investigates influencer scams, highlighted old Clubhouse recordings of Jesse Lyu discussing the GAMA project. In these recordings, Lyu emphasized the substantial funding behind GAMA and its potential to be a revolutionary, carbon-negative cryptocurrency. Coffeezilla questioned the whereabouts of the funds raised for GAMA, estimating that approximately $1 million in refunds to investors remained unresolved. He suggested that the rebranding to Rabbit Incorporation and the shift to developing the Rabbit R1 were attempts to divert from the GAMA project's issues. In response to Coffeezilla's inquiries, Rabbit Incorporation stated that the $6 million raised was used for the GAMA project. The company said that NFTs cannot be refunded unless the owner agrees to "burn" them on the blockchain. Rabbit Incorporation also said that the GAMA project was open-sourced and returned to the community, aligning with community feedback. They also mentioned that efforts to buy back NFTs were made to counteract malicious trading and maintain market stability. === Security === In June 2024, Engadget reported that the Rabbitude team, a community reverse engineering project, had gained access to the r1's codebase revealing that r1's software contained several hardcoded API keys in its code for ElevenLabs, Microsoft Azure, Yelp, and Google Maps, potentially allowing unauthorized access to r1 responses, including those containing the users' personal information. For a short time, Rabbit immediately began revoking and rotating those secrets and confirmed that the code was leaked by an employee who had "been terminated and remains under investigation". In July 2024, the company revealed that all user chats and device pairing data were logged on the r1 with no ability to delete them. This meant that lost or stolen devices could be used to extract user

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  Chinese speech synthesis

  Chinese speech synthesis is the application of speech synthesis to the Chinese language (usually Standard Chinese). It poses additional difficulties due to Chinese characters frequently having different pronunciations in different contexts and the complex prosody, which is essential to convey the meaning of words, and sometimes the difficulty in obtaining agreement among native speakers concerning what the correct pronunciation is of certain phonemes. == Concatenation (Ekho and KeyTip) == Recordings can be concatenated in any desired combination, but the joins sound forced (as is usual for simple concatenation-based speech synthesis) and this can severely affect prosody; these synthesizers are also inflexible in terms of speed and expression. However, because these synthesizers do not rely on a corpus, there is no noticeable degradation in performance when they are given more unusual or awkward phrases. Ekho is an open source TTS which simply concatenates sampled syllables. It currently supports Cantonese, Mandarin, and experimentally Korean. Some of the Mandarin syllables have been pitched-normalised in Praat. A modified version of these is used in Gradint's "synthesis from partials". cjkware.com used to ship a product called KeyTip Putonghua Reader which worked similarly; it contained 120 Megabytes of sound recordings (GSM-compressed to 40 Megabytes in the evaluation version), comprising 10,000 multi-syllable dictionary words plus single-syllable recordings in 6 different prosodies (4 tones, neutral tone, and an extra third-tone recording for use at the end of a phrase). == Lightweight synthesizers (eSpeak and Yuet) == The lightweight open-source speech project eSpeak, which has its own approach to synthesis, has experimented with Mandarin and Cantonese. eSpeak was used by Google Translate from May 2010 until December 2010. The commercial product "Yuet" is also lightweight (it is intended to be suitable for resource-constrained environments like embedded systems); it was written from scratch in ANSI C starting from 2013. Yuet claims a built-in NLP model that does not require a separate dictionary; the speech synthesised by the engine claims clear word boundaries and emphasis on appropriate words. Communication with its author is required to obtain a copy. Both eSpeak and Yuet can synthesis speech for Cantonese and Mandarin from the same input text, and can output the corresponding romanisation (for Cantonese, Yuet uses Yale and eSpeak uses Jyutping; both use Pinyin for Mandarin). eSpeak does not concern itself with word boundaries when these don't change the question of which syllable should be spoken. == Corpus-based == A "corpus-based" approach can sound very natural in most cases but can err in dealing with unusual phrases if they can't be matched with the corpus. The synthesiser engine is typically very large (hundreds or even thousands of megabytes) due to the size of the corpus. === iFlyTek === Anhui USTC iFlyTek Co., Ltd (iFlyTek) published a W3C paper in which they adapted Speech Synthesis Markup Language to produce a mark-up language called Chinese Speech Synthesis Markup Language (CSSML) which can include additional markup to clarify the pronunciation of characters and to add some prosody information. The amount of data involved is not disclosed by iFlyTek but can be seen from the commercial products that iFlyTek have licensed their technology to; for example, Bider's SpeechPlus is a 1.3 Gigabyte download, 1.2 Gigabytes of which is used for the highly compressed data for a single Chinese voice. iFlyTek's synthesiser can also synthesise mixed Chinese and English text with the same voice (e.g. Chinese sentences containing some English words); they claim their English synthesis to be "average". The iFlyTek corpus appears to be heavily dependent on Chinese characters, and it is not possible to synthesize from pinyin alone. It is sometimes possible by means of CSSML to add pinyin to the characters to disambiguate between multiple possible pronunciations, but this does not always work. === NeoSpeech === There is an online interactive demonstration for NeoSpeech speech synthesis, which accepts Chinese characters and also pinyin if it's enclosed in their proprietary "VTML" markup. === Mac OS === Mac OS had Chinese speech synthesizers available up to version 9. This was removed in 10.0 and reinstated in 10.7 (Lion). === Historical corpus-based synthesizers (no longer available) === A corpus-based approach was taken by Tsinghua University in SinoSonic, with the Harbin dialect voice data taking 800 Megabytes. This was planned to be offered as a download but the link was never activated. Nowadays, only references to it can be found on Internet Archive. Bell Labs' approach, which was demonstrated online in 1997 but subsequently removed, was described in a monograph "Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis: The Bell Labs Approach" (Springer, October 31, 1997, ISBN 978-0-7923-8027-6), and the former employee who was responsible for the project, Chilin Shih (who subsequently worked at the University of Illinois) put some notes about her methods on her website.

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  Ubiquitous robot

  Ubiquitous robot is a term used in an analogous way to ubiquitous computing. Software useful for "integrating robotic technologies with technologies from the fields of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, sensor networks, and ambient intelligence". The emergence of mobile phone, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing makes it likely that human beings will live in a ubiquitous world in which all devices are fully networked. The existence of ubiquitous space resulting from developments in computer and network technology will provide motivations to offer desired services by any IT device at any place and time through user interactions and seamless applications. This shift has hastened the ubiquitous revolution, which has further manifested itself in the new multidisciplinary research area, ubiquitous robotics. It initiates the third generation of robotics following the first generation of the industrial robot and the second generation of the personal robot. Ubiquitous robot (Ubibot) is a robot incorporating three components including virtual software robot or avatar, real-world mobile robot and embedded sensor system in surroundings. Software robot within a virtual world can control a real-world robot as a brain and interact with human beings. Researchers of KAIST, Korea describe these three components as a Sobot (Software robot), Mobot (Mobile robot), and Embot (Embedded robot).

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  Media aggregation platform

  A Media Aggregation Platform or Media Aggregation Portal (MAP) is an over the top service for distributing web-based streaming media content from multiple sources to a large audience. MAPs consist of networks of sources who host their own content which viewers can choose and access directly from a larger variety of content to choose from than a single source can offer. The service is used by content providers, looking to extend the reach of their content. Unlike multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) or multiple-system operators (MSO), MAPs rely on the Internet rather than cables or satellite. As more network television channels have moved online in the early 21st century, joining web-native channels like Netflix, MAPs aggregate content the way that MSOs and MVPDs have used cable, and to a lesser extent satellite and IPTV infrastructure. There are companies that offer a similar service for free, including Yidio and StreamingMoviesRight, while others charge a subscription fee like as FreeCast Inc's Rabbit TV Plus. When compared with MSOs and MVPDs, MAP networks have much lower costs due to lack of physical infrastructure. The majority of revenue from MAP services are retained by the content creators, and revenue is instead collected from advertisements, pay-per-view, and subscription-based content offerings instead of licensing and reselling content. MAP service consumers interact and purchase content directly from its source, without the markup added by a middleman.

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  Pixel-art scaling algorithms

  Pixel art scaling algorithms are graphical filters that attempt to enhance the appearance of hand-drawn 2D pixel art graphics. These algorithms are a form of automatic image enhancement. Pixel art scaling algorithms employ methods significantly different than the common methods of image rescaling, which have the goal of preserving the appearance of images. As pixel art graphics are commonly used at very low resolutions, they employ careful coloring of individual pixels. This results in graphics that rely on a high amount of stylized visual cues to define complex shapes. Several specialized algorithms have been developed to handle re-scaling of such graphics. These specialized algorithms can improve the appearance of pixel-art graphics, but in doing so they introduce changes. Such changes may be undesirable, especially if the goal is to faithfully reproduce the original appearance. Since a typical application of this technology is improving the appearance of fourth-generation and earlier video games on arcade and console emulators, many pixel art scaling algorithms are designed to run in real-time for sufficiently small input images at 60-frames per second. This places constraints on the type of programming techniques that can be used for this sort of real-time processing. Many work only on specific scale factors. 2× is the most common scale factor, while 3×, 4×, 5×, and 6× exist but are less used. == Algorithms == === SAA5050 'Diagonal Smoothing' === The Mullard SAA5050 Teletext character generator chip (1980) used a primitive pixel scaling algorithm to generate higher-resolution characters on the screen from a lower-resolution representation from its internal ROM. Internally, each character shape was defined on a 5 × 9 pixel grid, which was then interpolated by smoothing diagonals to give a 10 × 18 pixel character, with a characteristically angular shape, surrounded to the top and the left by two pixels of blank space. The algorithm only works on monochrome source data, and assumes the source pixels will be logically true or false depending on whether they are 'on' or 'off'. Pixels 'outside the grid pattern' are assumed to be off. The algorithm works as follows: A B C --\ 1 2 D E F --/ 3 4 1 = B | (A & E & !B & !D) 2 = B | (C & E & !B & !F) 3 = E | (!A & !E & B & D) 4 = E | (!C & !E & B & F) Note that this algorithm, like the Eagle algorithm below, has a flaw: If a pattern of 4 pixels in a hollow diamond shape appears, the hollow will be obliterated by the expansion. The SAA5050's internal character ROM carefully avoids ever using this pattern. The degenerate case: becomes: === EPX/Scale2×/AdvMAME2× === Eric's Pixel Expansion (EPX) is an algorithm developed by Eric Johnston at LucasArts around 1992, when porting the SCUMM engine games from the IBM PC (which ran at 320 × 200 × 256 colors) to the early color Macintosh computers, which ran at more or less double that resolution. The algorithm works as follows, expanding P into 4 new pixels based on P's surroundings: 1=P; 2=P; 3=P; 4=P; IF C==A => 1=A IF A==B => 2=B IF D==C => 3=C IF B==D => 4=D IF of A, B, C, D, three or more are identical: 1=2=3=4=P Later implementations of this same algorithm (as AdvMAME2× and Scale2×, developed around 2001) are slightly more efficient but functionally identical: 1=P; 2=P; 3=P; 4=P; IF C==A AND C!=D AND A!=B => 1=A IF A==B AND A!=C AND B!=D => 2=B IF D==C AND D!=B AND C!=A => 3=C IF B==D AND B!=A AND D!=C => 4=D AdvMAME2× is available in DOSBox via the scaler=advmame2x dosbox.conf option. The AdvMAME4×/Scale4× algorithm is just EPX applied twice to get 4× resolution. ==== Scale3×/AdvMAME3× and ScaleFX ==== The AdvMAME3×/Scale3× algorithm (available in DOSBox via the scaler=advmame3x dosbox.conf option) can be thought of as a generalization of EPX to the 3× case. The corner pixels are calculated identically to EPX. 1=E; 2=E; 3=E; 4=E; 5=E; 6=E; 7=E; 8=E; 9=E; IF D==B AND D!=H AND B!=F => 1=D IF (D==B AND D!=H AND B!=F AND E!=C) OR (B==F AND B!=D AND F!=H AND E!=A) => 2=B IF B==F AND B!=D AND F!=H => 3=F IF (H==D AND H!=F AND D!=B AND E!=A) OR (D==B AND D!=H AND B!=F AND E!=G) => 4=D 5=E IF (B==F AND B!=D AND F!=H AND E!=I) OR (F==H AND F!=B AND H!=D AND E!=C) => 6=F IF H==D AND H!=F AND D!=B => 7=D IF (F==H AND F!=B AND H!=D AND E!=G) OR (H==D AND H!=F AND D!=B AND E!=I) => 8=H IF F==H AND F!=B AND H!=D => 9=F There is also a variant improved over Scale3× called ScaleFX, developed by Sp00kyFox, and a version combined with Reverse-AA called ScaleFX-Hybrid. === Eagle === Eagle works as follows: for every in pixel, we will generate 4 out pixels. First, set all 4 to the color of the pixel we are currently scaling (as nearest-neighbor). Next look at the three pixels above, to the left, and diagonally above left: if all three are the same color as each other, set the top left pixel of our output square to that color in preference to the nearest-neighbor color. Work similarly for all four pixels, and then move to the next one. Assume an input matrix of 3 × 3 pixels where the centermost pixel is the pixel to be scaled, and an output matrix of 2 × 2 pixels (i.e., the scaled pixel) first: |Then . . . --\ CC |S T U --\ 1 2 . C . --/ CC |V C W --/ 3 4 . . . |X Y Z | IF V==S==T => 1=S | IF T==U==W => 2=U | IF V==X==Y => 3=X | IF W==Z==Y => 4=Z Thus if we have a single black pixel on a white background it will vanish. This is a bug in the Eagle algorithm but is solved by other algorithms such as EPX, 2xSaI, and HQ2x. === 2×SaI === 2×SaI, short for 2× Scale and Interpolation engine, was inspired by Eagle. It was designed by Derek Liauw Kie Fa, also known as Kreed, primarily for use in console and computer emulators, and it has remained fairly popular in this niche. Many of the most popular emulators, including ZSNES and VisualBoyAdvance, offer this scaling algorithm as a feature. Several slightly different versions of the scaling algorithm are available, and these are often referred to as Super 2×SaI and Super Eagle. The 2xSaI family works on a 4 × 4 matrix of pixels where the pixel marked A below is scaled: I E F J G A B K --\ W X H C D L --/ Y Z M N O P For 16-bit pixels, they use pixel masks which change based on whether the 16-bit pixel format is 565 or 555. The constants colorMask, lowPixelMask, qColorMask, qLowPixelMask, redBlueMask, and greenMask are 16-bit masks. The lower 8 bits are identical in either pixel format. Two interpolation functions are described: INTERPOLATE(uint32 A, UINT32 B). -- linear midpoint of A and B if (A == B) return A; return ( ((A & colorMask) >> 1) + ((B & colorMask) >> 1) + (A & B & lowPixelMask) ); Q_INTERPOLATE(uint32 A, uint32 B, uint32 C, uint32 D) -- bilinear interpolation; A, B, C, and D's average x = ((A & qColorMask) >> 2) + ((B & qColorMask) >> 2) + ((C & qColorMask) >> 2) + ((D & qColorMask) >> 2); y = (A & qLowPixelMask) + (B & qLowPixelMask) + (C & qLowPixelMask) + (D & qLowPixelMask); y = (y >> 2) & qLowPixelMask; return x + y; The algorithm checks A, B, C, and D for a diagonal match such that A==D and B!=C, or the other way around, or if they are both diagonals or if there is no diagonal match. Within these, it checks for three or four identical pixels. Based on these conditions, the algorithm decides whether to use one of A, B, C, or D, or an interpolation among only these four, for each output pixel. The 2xSaI arbitrary scaler can enlarge any image to any resolution and uses bilinear filtering to interpolate pixels. Since Kreed released the source code under the GNU General Public License, it is freely available to anyone wishing to utilize it in a project released under that license. Developers wishing to use it in a non-GPL project would be required to rewrite the algorithm without using any of Kreed's existing code. It is available in DOSBox via scaler=2xsai option. === hqnx family === Maxim Stepin's hq2x, hq3x, and hq4x are for scale factors of 2:1, 3:1, and 4:1 respectively. Each work by comparing the color value of each pixel to those of its eight immediate neighbors, marking the neighbors as close or distant, and using a pre-generated lookup table to find the proper proportion of input pixels' values for each of the 4, 9 or 16 corresponding output pixels. The hq3x family will perfectly smooth any diagonal line whose slope is ±0.5, ±1, or ±2 and which is not anti-aliased in the input; one with any other slope will alternate between two slopes in the output. It will also smooth very tight curves. Unlike 2xSaI, it anti-aliases the output. hqnx was initially created for the Super NES emulator ZSNES. The author of bsnes has released a space-efficient implementation of hq2x to the public domain. A port to shaders, which has comparable quality to the early versions of xBR, is available. Before the port, a shader called "scalehq" has often been confused for hqx. === xBR family === There are 6 filters in this family: xBR , xBRZ, xBR-Hybrid, Super xBR, xBR+3D and Super xBR+3D. xBR ("scale by rules"), cre

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  Metadirectory

  A metadirectory system provides for the flow of data between one or more directory services and databases in order to maintain synchronization of that data. It is an important part of identity management systems. The data being synchronized typically are collections of entries that contain user profiles and possibly authentication or policy information. Most metadirectory deployments synchronize data into at least one LDAP-based directory server, to ensure that LDAP-based applications such as single sign-on and portal servers have access to recent data, even if the data is mastered in a non-LDAP data source. Metadirectory products support filtering and transformation of data in transit. Most identity management suites from commercial vendors include a metadirectory product, or a user provisioning product.

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  Ontology (information science)

  In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of terms and relational expressions that represent the entities in that subject area. The field which studies ontologies so conceived is sometimes referred to as applied ontology. Every academic discipline or field, in creating its terminology, thereby lays the groundwork for an ontology. Each uses ontological assumptions to frame explicit theories, research and applications. Improved ontologies may improve problem solving within that domain, interoperability of data systems, and discoverability of data. Translating research papers within every field is a problem made easier when experts from different countries maintain a controlled vocabulary of jargon between each of their languages. For instance, the definition and ontology of economics is a primary concern in Marxist economics, but also in other subfields of economics. An example of economics relying on information science occurs in cases where a simulation or model is intended to enable economic decisions, such as determining what capital assets are at risk and by how much (see risk management). What ontologies in both information science and philosophy have in common is the attempt to represent entities, including both objects and events, with all their interdependent properties and relations, according to a system of categories. In both fields, there is considerable work on problems of ontology engineering (e.g., Quine and Kripke in philosophy, Sowa and Guarino in information science), and debates concerning to what extent normative ontology is possible (e.g., foundationalism and coherentism in philosophy, BFO and Cyc in artificial intelligence). Applied ontology is considered by some as a successor to prior work in philosophy. However many current efforts are more concerned with establishing controlled vocabularies of narrow domains than with philosophical first principles, or with questions such as the mode of existence of fixed essences or whether enduring objects (e.g., perdurantism and endurantism) may be ontologically more primary than processes. Artificial intelligence has retained considerable attention regarding applied ontology in subfields like natural language processing within machine translation and knowledge representation, but ontology editors are being used often in a range of fields, including biomedical informatics and industry. Such efforts often use ontology editing tools such as Protégé. == Ontology in philosophy == Ontology is a branch of philosophy and intersects areas such as metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language, as it considers how knowledge, language, and perception relate to the nature of reality. Metaphysics deals with questions like "what exists?" and "what is the nature of reality?". One of five traditional branches of philosophy, metaphysics is concerned with exploring existence through properties, entities and relations such as those between particulars and universals, intrinsic and extrinsic properties, or essence and existence. Metaphysics has been an ongoing topic of discussion since recorded history. == Etymology == The compound word ontology combines onto-, from the Greek ὄν, on (gen. ὄντος, ontos), i.e. "being; that which is", which is the present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, i.e. "to be, I am", and -λογία, -logia, i.e. "logical discourse", see classical compounds for this type of word formation. While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself, the Neo-Latin form ontologia, appeared in 1606 in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius). The first occurrence in English of ontology as recorded by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, 2008) came in Archeologia Philosophica Nova or New Principles of Philosophy (1663) by Gideon Harvey. == Formal ontology == Since the mid-1970s, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have recognized that knowledge engineering is the key to building large and powerful AI systems. AI researchers argued that they could create new ontologies as computational models that enable certain kinds of automated reasoning, which was only marginally successful. In the 1980s, the AI community began to use the term ontology to refer to both a theory of a modeled world and a component of knowledge-based systems. In particular, David Powers introduced the word ontology to AI to refer to real world or robotic grounding, publishing in 1990 literature reviews emphasizing grounded ontology in association with the call for papers for a AAAI Summer Symposium Machine Learning of Natural Language and Ontology, with an expanded version published in SIGART Bulletin and included as a preface to the proceedings. Some researchers, drawing inspiration from philosophical ontologies, viewed computational ontology as a kind of applied philosophy. In 1993, the widely cited web page and paper "Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing" by Tom Gruber used ontology as a technical term in computer science closely related to earlier idea of semantic networks and taxonomies. Gruber introduced the term as a specification of a conceptualization: An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can formally exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set of concept definitions, but more general. And it is a different sense of the word than its use in philosophy. Attempting to distance ontologies from taxonomies and similar efforts in knowledge modeling that rely on classes and inheritance, Gruber stated (1993): Ontologies are often equated with taxonomic hierarchies of classes, class definitions, and the subsumption relation, but ontologies need not be limited to these forms. Ontologies are also not limited to conservative definitions, that is, definitions in the traditional logic sense that only introduce terminology and do not add any knowledge about the world (Enderton, 1972). To specify a conceptualization, one needs to state axioms that do constrain the possible interpretations for the defined terms. Recent experimental ontology frameworks have also explored resonance-based AI-human co-evolution structures, such as IAMF (Illumination AI Matrix Framework), OntoMotoOS (a meta-operating system concept for ethical and ontological AI–human co-evolution), and PSRT (Phase-Structural Reality Theory across multi-scale ontological layers). Though not yet widely adopted in academic discourse, such models propose phased approaches to ethical harmonization and structural emergence. As refinement of Gruber's definition Feilmayr and Wöß (2016) stated: "An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization that is characterized by high semantic expressiveness required for increased complexity." == Formal ontology components == Contemporary ontologies share many structural similarities, regardless of the language in which they are expressed. Most ontologies describe individuals (instances), classes (concepts), attributes and relations. === Types === ==== Domain ontology ==== A domain ontology (or domain-specific ontology) represents concepts which belong to a realm of the world, such as biology or politics. Each domain ontology typically models domain-specific definitions of terms. For example, the word card has many different meanings. An ontology about the domain of poker would model the "playing card" meaning of the word, while an ontology about the domain of computer hardware would model the "punched card" and "video card" meanings. Since domain ontologies are written by different people, they represent concepts in very specific and unique ways, and are often incompatible within the same project. As systems that rely on domain ontologies expand, they often need to merge domain ontologies by hand-tuning each entity or using a combination of software merging and hand-tuning. This presents a challenge to the ontology designer. Different ontologies in the same domain arise due to different languages, different intended usage of the ontologies, and different perceptions of the domain (based on cultural background, education, ideology, etc.). At present, merging ontologies that are not developed from a common upper ontology is a largely manual process and therefore time-consuming and expensive. Domain ontologies that use the same upper ontology to provide a set of basic elements with which to specify the meanings of the domain ontology entities can be merged with less effo

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  Algorithmic Puzzles

  Algorithmic Puzzles is a book of puzzles based on computational thinking. It was written by computer scientists Anany and Maria Levitin, and published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. == Topics == The book begins with a "tutorial" introducing classical algorithm design techniques including backtracking, divide-and-conquer algorithms, and dynamic programming, methods for the analysis of algorithms, and their application in example puzzles. The puzzles themselves are grouped into three sets of 50 puzzles, in increasing order of difficulty. A final two chapters provide brief hints and more detailed solutions to the puzzles, with the solutions forming the majority of pages of the book. Some of the puzzles are well known classics, some are variations of known puzzles making them more algorithmic, and some are new. They include: Puzzles involving chessboards, including the eight queens puzzle, knight's tours, and the mutilated chessboard problem Balance puzzles River crossing puzzles The Tower of Hanoi Finding the missing element in a data stream The geometric median problem for Manhattan distance == Audience and reception == The puzzles in the book cover a wide range of difficulty, and in general do not require more than a high school level of mathematical background. William Gasarch notes that grouping the puzzles only by their difficulty and not by their themes is actually an advantage, as it provides readers with fewer clues about their solutions. Reviewer Narayanan Narayanan recommends the book to any puzzle aficionado, or to anyone who wants to develop their powers of algorithmic thinking. Reviewer Martin Griffiths suggests another group of readers, schoolteachers and university instructors in search of examples to illustrate the power of algorithmic thinking. Gasarch recommends the book to any computer scientist, evaluating it as "a delight".

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  Data cube

  In computer programming, a data cube (or datacube) is a multi-dimensional array of values. Typically, the term "data cube" is applied in contexts where these arrays are massively larger than the hosting computer's main memory; examples include multi-terabyte/petabyte data warehouses and time series of image data. Even though it is called a cube, a data cube generally is a multi-dimensional concept which can be 1-dimensional, 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional, or higher-dimensional. The data cube is used to represent data (sometimes called facts) along some dimensions of interest. In satellite image timeseries, dimensions would be latitude and longitude coordinates and time; a fact (sometimes called measure) would be a pixel at a given space and time as taken by the satellite. For example, in online analytical processing, an OLAP cube about a company would have dimensions that could be the company subsidiaries, the company products, and time; in this setup, a fact would be a sales event where a particular product has been sold in a particular subsidiary at a particular time. In any case, every dimension divides data into groups of cells whereas each cell in the cube represents a single measure of interest. Sometimes cubes hold only a few values with the rest being empty, i.e. undefined, while sometimes most or all cube coordinates hold a cell value. In the first case such data are called sparse, and in the second case they are called dense, although there is no hard delineation between the two. Data cubes may be stored in database management systems (DBMS) as part of array DBMS. Spatio-temporal databases and geospatial databases may also be represented as coverage data. == History == Multi-dimensional arrays have long been familiar in programming languages. Fortran offers arbitrarily-indexed 1-D arrays and arrays of arrays, which allows the construction of higher-dimensional arrays, up to 15 dimensions. APL supports n-D arrays with a rich set of operations. All these have in common that arrays must fit into the main memory and are available only while the particular program maintaining them (such as image processing software) is running. A series of data exchange formats support storage and transmission of data cube-like data, often tailored towards particular application domains. Examples include MDX for statistical (in particular, business) data, Zarr and Hierarchical Data Format for general scientific data, and TIFF for imagery. In 1992, Peter Baumann introduced management of massive data cubes with high-level user functionality combined with an efficient software architecture. Datacube operations include subset extraction, processing, fusion, and in general queries in the spirit of data manipulation languages like SQL. Some years after, the data cube concept was applied to describe time-varying business data as data cubes by Jim Gray, et al., and by Venky Harinarayan, Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman. Around that time, a working group on Multi-Dimensional Databases ("Arbeitskreis Multi-Dimensionale Datenbanken") was established at German Gesellschaft für Informatik. Datacube Inc. was an image processing company selling hardware and software applications for the PC market in 1996, however without addressing data cubes as such. The EarthServer initiative has established geo data cube service requirements. == Standardization == In 2018, the ISO SQL database language was extended with data cube functionality as "SQL – Part 15: Multi-dimensional arrays (SQL/MDA)". Web Coverage Processing Service is a geo data cube analytics language issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. In addition to the common data cube operations, the language knows about the semantics of space and time and supports both regular and irregular grid data cubes, based on the concept of coverage data. An industry standard for querying business data cubes, originally developed by Microsoft, is MultiDimensional eXpressions. == Implementation == Many high-level computer languages treat data cubes and other large arrays as single entities distinct from their contents. These languages, of which Fortran, APL, IDL, NumPy, PDL, and S-Lang are examples, allow the programmer to manipulate complete film clips and other data en masse with simple expressions derived from linear algebra and vector mathematics. Some languages (such as PDL) distinguish between a list of images and a data cube, while many (such as IDL) do not. Array DBMSs (Database Management Systems) offer a data model which generically supports definition, management, retrieval, and manipulation of n-dimensional data cubes. This database category has been pioneered by the rasdaman system since 1994. == Applications == Multi-dimensional arrays can meaningfully represent spatio-temporal sensor, image, and simulation data, but also statistics data where the semantics of dimensions is not necessarily of spatial or temporal nature. Generally, any kind of axis can be combined with any other into a data cube. === Mathematics === In mathematics, a one-dimensional array corresponds to a vector, a two-dimensional array resembles a matrix; more generally, a tensor may be represented as an n-dimensional data cube. === Science and engineering === For a time sequence of color images, the array is generally four-dimensional, with the dimensions representing image X and Y coordinates, time, and RGB (or other color space) color plane. For example, the EarthServer initiative unites data centers from different continents offering 3-D x/y/t satellite image timeseries and 4-D x/y/z/t weather data for retrieval and server-side processing through the Open Geospatial Consortium WCPS geo data cube query language standard. A data cube is also used in the field of imaging spectroscopy, since a spectrally-resolved image is represented as a three-dimensional volume. Earth observation data cubes combine satellite imagery such as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 with Geographic information system analytics. === Business intelligence === In online analytical processing (OLAP), data cubes are a common arrangement of business data suitable for analysis from different perspectives through operations like slicing, dicing, pivoting, and aggregation.

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  Automatic image annotation

  Automatic image annotation (also known as automatic image tagging or linguistic indexing) is the process by which a computer system automatically assigns metadata in the form of captioning or keywords to a digital image. This application of computer vision techniques is used in image retrieval systems to organize and locate images of interest from a database. This method can be regarded as a type of multi-class image classification with a very large number of classes - as large as the vocabulary size. Typically, image analysis in the form of extracted feature vectors and the training annotation words are used by machine learning techniques to attempt to automatically apply annotations to new images. The first methods learned the correlations between image features and training annotations. Subsequently, techniques were developed using machine translation to attempt to translate the textual vocabulary into the 'visual vocabulary,' represented by clustered regions known as blobs. Subsequent work has included classification approaches, relevance models, and other related methods. The advantages of automatic image annotation versus content-based image retrieval (CBIR) are that queries can be more naturally specified by the user. At present, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) generally requires users to search by image concepts such as color and texture or by finding example queries. However, certain image features in example images may override the concept that the user is truly focusing on. Traditional methods of image retrieval, such as those used by libraries, have relied on manually annotated images, which is expensive and time-consuming, especially given the large and constantly growing image databases in existence.

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  How to Solve it by Computer

  How to Solve it by Computer is a computer science book by R. G. Dromey, first published by Prentice-Hall in 1982. It is occasionally used as a textbook, especially in India. It is an introduction to the whys of algorithms and data structures. Features of the book: The design factors associated with problems, The creative process behind coming up with innovative solutions for algorithms and data structures, The line of reasoning behind the constraints, factors and the design choices made. The very fundamental algorithms portrayed by this book are mostly presented in pseudocode and/or Pascal notation.

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  Mathematical knowledge management

  Mathematical knowledge management (MKM) is the study of how society can effectively make use of the vast and growing literature on mathematics. It studies approaches such as databases of mathematical knowledge, automated processing of formulae and the use of semantic information, and artificial intelligence. Mathematics is particularly suited to a systematic study of automated knowledge processing due to the high degree of interconnectedness between different areas of mathematics.

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  Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

  Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is a technique for training a pair of neural network models, one for image understanding and one for text understanding, using a contrastive objective. This method has enabled broad applications across multiple domains, including cross-modal retrieval, text-to-image generation, and aesthetic ranking. == Algorithm == The CLIP method trains a pair of models contrastively. One model takes in a piece of text as input and outputs a single vector representing its semantic content. The other model takes in an image and similarly outputs a single vector representing its visual content. The models are trained so that the vectors corresponding to semantically similar text-image pairs are close together in the shared vector space, while those corresponding to dissimilar pairs are far apart. To train a pair of CLIP models, one would start by preparing a large dataset of image-caption pairs. During training, the models are presented with batches of N {\displaystyle N} image-caption pairs. Let the outputs from the text and image models be respectively v 1 , . . . , v N , w 1 , . . . , w N {\displaystyle v_{1},...,v_{N},w_{1},...,w_{N}} . Two vectors are considered "similar" if their dot product is large. The loss incurred on this batch is the multi-class N-pair loss, which is a symmetric cross-entropy loss over similarity scores: − 1 N ∑ i ln ⁡ e v i ⋅ w i / T ∑ j e v i ⋅ w j / T − 1 N ∑ j ln ⁡ e v j ⋅ w j / T ∑ i e v i ⋅ w j / T {\displaystyle -{\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{i}\ln {\frac {e^{v_{i}\cdot w_{i}/T}}{\sum _{j}e^{v_{i}\cdot w_{j}/T}}}-{\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{j}\ln {\frac {e^{v_{j}\cdot w_{j}/T}}{\sum _{i}e^{v_{i}\cdot w_{j}/T}}}} In essence, this loss function encourages the dot product between matching image and text vectors ( v i ⋅ w i {\displaystyle v_{i}\cdot w_{i}} ) to be high, while discouraging high dot products between non-matching pairs. The parameter T > 0 {\displaystyle T>0} is the temperature, which is parameterized in the original CLIP model as T = e − τ {\displaystyle T=e^{-\tau }} where τ ∈ R {\displaystyle \tau \in \mathbb {R} } is a learned parameter. Other loss functions are possible. For example, Sigmoid CLIP (SigLIP) proposes the following loss function: L = 1 N ∑ i , j ∈ 1 : N f ( ( 2 δ i , j − 1 ) ( e τ w i ⋅ v j + b ) ) {\displaystyle L={\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{i,j\in 1:N}f((2\delta _{i,j}-1)(e^{\tau }w_{i}\cdot v_{j}+b))} where f ( x ) = ln ⁡ ( 1 + e − x ) {\displaystyle f(x)=\ln(1+e^{-x})} is the negative log sigmoid loss, and the Dirac delta symbol δ i , j {\displaystyle \delta _{i,j}} is 1 if i = j {\displaystyle i=j} else 0. == CLIP models == While the original model was developed by OpenAI, subsequent models have been trained by other organizations as well. === Image model === The image encoding models used in CLIP are typically vision transformers (ViT). The naming convention for these models often reflects the specific ViT architecture used. For instance, "ViT-L/14" means a "vision transformer large" (compared to other models in the same series) with a patch size of 14, meaning that the image is divided into 14-by-14 pixel patches before being processed by the transformer. The size indicator ranges from B, L, H, G (base, large, huge, giant), in that order. Other than ViT, the image model is typically a convolutional neural network, such as ResNet (in the original series by OpenAI), or ConvNeXt (in the OpenCLIP model series by LAION). Since the output vectors of the image model and the text model must have exactly the same length, both the image model and the text model have fixed-length vector outputs, which in the original report is called "embedding dimension". For example, in the original OpenAI model, the ResNet models have embedding dimensions ranging from 512 to 1024, and for the ViTs, from 512 to 768. Its implementation of ViT was the same as the original one, with one modification: after position embeddings are added to the initial patch embeddings, there is a LayerNorm. Its implementation of ResNet was the same as the original one, with 3 modifications: In the start of the CNN (the "stem"), they used three stacked 3x3 convolutions instead of a single 7x7 convolution, as suggested by. There is an average pooling of stride 2 at the start of each downsampling convolutional layer (they called it rect-2 blur pooling according to the terminology of ). This has the effect of blurring images before downsampling, for antialiasing. The final convolutional layer is followed by a multiheaded attention pooling. ALIGN a model with similar capabilities, trained by researchers from Google used EfficientNet, a kind of convolutional neural network. === Text model === The text encoding models used in CLIP are typically Transformers. In the original OpenAI report, they reported using a Transformer (63M-parameter, 12-layer, 512-wide, 8 attention heads) with lower-cased byte pair encoding (BPE) with 49152 vocabulary size. Context length was capped at 76 for efficiency. Like GPT, it was decoder-only, with only causally-masked self-attention. Its architecture is the same as GPT-2. Like BERT, the text sequence is bracketed by two special tokens [SOS] and [EOS] ("start of sequence" and "end of sequence"). Take the activations of the highest layer of the transformer on the [EOS], apply LayerNorm, then a final linear map. This is the text encoding of the input sequence. The final linear map has output dimension equal to the embedding dimension of whatever image encoder it is paired with. These models all had context length 77 and vocabulary size 49408. ALIGN used BERT of various sizes. == Dataset == === WebImageText === The CLIP models released by OpenAI were trained on a dataset called "WebImageText" (WIT) containing 400 million pairs of images and their corresponding captions scraped from the internet. The total number of words in this dataset is similar in scale to the WebText dataset used for training GPT-2, which contains about 40 gigabytes of text data. The dataset contains 500,000 text-queries, with up to 20,000 (image, text) pairs per query. The text-queries were generated by starting with all words occurring at least 100 times in English Wikipedia, then extended by bigrams with high mutual information, names of all Wikipedia articles above a certain search volume, and WordNet synsets. The dataset is private and has not been released to the public, and there is no further information on it. ==== Data preprocessing ==== For the CLIP image models, the input images are preprocessed by first dividing each of the R, G, B values of an image by the maximum possible value, so that these values fall between 0 and 1, then subtracting by [0.48145466, 0.4578275, 0.40821073], and dividing by [0.26862954, 0.26130258, 0.27577711]. The rationale was that these are the mean and standard deviations of the images in the WebImageText dataset, so this preprocessing step roughly whitens the image tensor. These numbers slightly differ from the standard preprocessing for ImageNet, which uses [0.485, 0.456, 0.406] and [0.229, 0.224, 0.225]. If the input image does not have the same resolution as the native resolution (224×224 for all except ViT-L/14@336px, which has 336×336 resolution), then the input image is first scaled by bicubic interpolation, so that its shorter side is the same as the native resolution, then the central square of the image is cropped out. === Others === ALIGN used over one billion image-text pairs, obtained by extracting images and their alt-tags from online crawling. The method was described as similar to how the Conceptual Captions dataset was constructed, but instead of complex filtering, they only applied a frequency-based filtering. Later models trained by other organizations had published datasets. For example, LAION trained OpenCLIP with published datasets LAION-400M, LAION-2B, and DataComp-1B. == Training == In the original OpenAI CLIP report, they reported training 5 ResNet and 3 ViT (ViT-B/32, ViT-B/16, ViT-L/14). Each was trained for 32 epochs. The largest ResNet model took 18 days to train on 592 V100 GPUs. The largest ViT model took 12 days on 256 V100 GPUs. All ViT models were trained on 224×224 image resolution. The ViT-L/14 was then boosted to 336×336 resolution by FixRes, resulting in a model. They found this was the best-performing model. In the OpenCLIP series, the ViT-L/14 model was trained on 384 A100 GPUs on the LAION-2B dataset, for 160 epochs for a total of 32B samples seen. == Applications == === Cross-modal retrieval === CLIP's cross-modal retrieval enables the alignment of visual and textual data in a shared latent space, allowing users to retrieve images based on text descriptions and vice versa, without the need for explicit image annotations. In text-to-image retrieval, users input descriptive text, and CLIP retrieves images with matching embeddings. In image-to-text retrieval, images are used to find related text content. CLIP’s ability to connect vis

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  Information history

  Information history may refer to the history of each of the categories listed below (or to combinations of them). It should be recognized that the understanding of, for example, libraries as information systems only goes back to about 1950. The application of the term information for earlier systems or societies is a retronym. == Academic discipline == Information history is an emerging discipline related to, but broader than, library history. An important introduction and review was made by Alistair Black (2006). A prolific scholar in this field is also Toni Weller, for example, Weller (2007, 2008, 2010a and 2010b). As part of her work Toni Weller has argued that there are important links between the modern information age and its historical precedents. A description from Russia is Volodin (2000). Alistair Black (2006, p. 445) wrote: "This chapter explores issues of discipline definition and legitimacy by segmenting information history into its various components: The history of print and written culture, including relatively long-established areas such as the histories of libraries and librarianship, book history, publishing history, and the history of reading. The history of more recent information disciplines and practice, that is to say, the history of information management, information systems, and information science. The history of contiguous areas, such as the history of the information society and information infrastructure, necessarily enveloping communication history (including telecommunications history) and the history of information policy. The history of information as social history, with emphasis on the importance of informal information networks." "Bodies influential in the field include the American Library Association’s Round Table on Library History, the Library History Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and, in the U.K., the Library and Information History Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). Each of these bodies has been busy in recent years, running conferences and seminars, and initiating scholarly projects. Active library history groups function in many other countries, including Germany (The Wolfenbuttel Round Table on Library History, the History of the Book and the History of Media, located at the Herzog August Bibliothek), Denmark (The Danish Society for Library History, located at the Royal School of Library and Information Science), Finland (The Library History Research Group, University of Tamepere), and Norway (The Norwegian Society for Book and Library History). Sweden has no official group dedicated to the subject, but interest is generated by the existence of a museum of librarianship in Bods, established by the Library Museum Society and directed by Magnus Torstensson. Activity in Argentina, where, as in Europe and the U.S., a "new library history" has developed, is described by Parada (2004)." (Black (2006, p. 447). === Journals === Information & Culture (previously Libraries & the Cultural Record, Libraries & Culture) Library & Information History (until 2008: Library History; until 1967: Library Association. Library History Group. Newsletter) == Information technology (IT) == The term IT is ambiguous although mostly synonym with computer technology. Haigh (2011, pp. 432-433) wrote "In fact, the great majority of references to information technology have always been concerned with computers, although the exact meaning has shifted over time (Kline, 2006). The phrase received its first prominent usage in a Harvard Business Review article (Haigh, 2001b; Leavitt & Whisler, 1958) intended to promote a technocratic vision for the future of business management. Its initial definition was at the conjunction of computers, operations research methods, and simulation techniques. Having failed initially to gain much traction (unlike related terms of a similar vintage such as information systems, information processing, and information science) it was revived in policy and economic circles in the 1970s with a new meaning. Information technology now described the expected convergence of the computing, media, and telecommunications industries (and their technologies), understood within the broader context of a wave of enthusiasm for the computer revolution, post-industrial society, information society (Webster, 1995), and other fashionable expressions of the belief that new electronic technologies were bringing a profound rupture with the past. As it spread broadly during the 1980s, IT increasingly lost its association with communications (and, alas, any vestigial connection to the idea of anybody actually being informed of anything) to become a new and more pretentious way of saying "computer". The final step in this process is the recent surge in references to "information and communication technologies" or ICTs, a coinage that makes sense only if one assumes that a technology can inform without communicating". Some people use the term information technology about technologies used before the development of the computer. This is however to use the term as a retronym. =

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  Traité de Documentation

  Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique is a landmark book by Belgian author Paul Otlet, first published in 1934. == Legacy == The book is considered a landmark in the history of information science, with concepts predicting the rise of the World Wide Web and search engines. In [Otlet's] most famous publication of 1934, Traité de Documentation, he wrote of a desk in the form of a wheel from which different projects (workspaces) could be switched as they rotated — foreshadowing the multiple desktops and tabs of contemporary computer interfaces. Inspired by the arrival of radio, phonograph, cinema, and television, Otlet also posited that there were as yet many “inventions to be discovered,” including the reading and annotation of remote documents and computer speech.

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