AI Data Center Zoning

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  • Rule-based machine translation

    Rule-based machine translation

    Rule-based machine translation (RBMT) is a classical approach of machine translation systems based on linguistic information about source and target languages. Such information is retrieved from (unilingual, bilingual or multilingual) dictionaries and grammars covering the main semantic, morphological, and syntactic regularities of each language. Having input sentences, an RBMT system generates output sentences on the basis of analysis of both the source and the target languages involved. RBMT has been progressively superseded by more efficient methods, particularly neural machine translation. == History == The first RBMT systems were developed in the early 1970s. The most important steps of this evolution were the emergence of the following RBMT systems: Systran Japanese MT systems Today, other common RBMT systems include: Apertium GramTrans == Types of RBMT == There are three different types of rule-based machine translation systems: Direct Systems (Dictionary Based Machine Translation) map input to output with basic rules. Transfer RBMT Systems (Transfer Based Machine Translation) employ morphological and syntactical analysis. Interlingual RBMT Systems (Interlingua) use an abstract meaning. RBMT systems can also be characterized as the systems opposite to Example-based Systems of Machine Translation (Example Based Machine Translation), whereas Hybrid Machine Translations Systems make use of many principles derived from RBMT. == Basic principles == The main approach of RBMT systems is based on linking the structure of the given input sentence with the structure of the demanded output sentence, necessarily preserving their unique meaning. The following example can illustrate the general frame of RBMT: A girl eats an apple. Source Language = English; Demanded Target Language = German Minimally, to get a German translation of this English sentence one needs: A dictionary that will map each English word to an appropriate German word. Rules representing regular English sentence structure. Rules representing regular German sentence structure. And finally, we need rules according to which one can relate these two structures together. Accordingly, we can state the following stages of translation: 1st: getting basic part-of-speech information of each source word: a = indef.article; girl = noun; eats = verb; an = indef.article; apple = noun 2nd: getting syntactic information about the verb "to eat": NP-eat-NP; here: eat – Present Simple, 3rd Person Singular, Active Voice 3rd: parsing the source sentence: (NP an apple) = the object of eat Often only partial parsing is sufficient to get to the syntactic structure of the source sentence and to map it onto the structure of the target sentence. 4th: translate English words into German a (category = indef.article) => ein (category = indef.article) girl (category = noun) => Mädchen (category = noun) eat (category = verb) => essen (category = verb) an (category = indef. article) => ein (category = indef.article) apple (category = noun) => Apfel (category = noun) 5th: Mapping dictionary entries into appropriate inflected forms (final generation): A girl eats an apple. => Ein Mädchen isst einen Apfel. == Ontologies == An ontology is a formal representation of knowledge that includes the concepts (such as objects, processes etc.) in a domain and some relations between them. If the stored information is of linguistic nature, one can speak of a lexicon. In NLP, ontologies can be used as a source of knowledge for machine translation systems. With access to a large knowledge base, rule-based systems can be enabled to resolve many (especially lexical) ambiguities on their own. In the following classic examples, as humans, we are able to interpret the prepositional phrase according to the context because we use our world knowledge, stored in our lexicons:I saw a man/star/molecule with a microscope/telescope/binoculars.Since the syntax does not change, a traditional rule-based machine translation system may not be able to differentiate between the meanings. With a large enough ontology as a source of knowledge however, the possible interpretations of ambiguous words in a specific context can be reduced. === Building ontologies === The ontology generated for the PANGLOSS knowledge-based machine translation system in 1993 may serve as an example of how an ontology for NLP purposes can be compiled: A large-scale ontology is necessary to help parsing in the active modules of the machine translation system. In the PANGLOSS example, about 50,000 nodes were intended to be subsumed under the smaller, manually-built upper (abstract) region of the ontology. Because of its size, it had to be created automatically. The goal was to merge the two resources LDOCE online and WordNet to combine the benefits of both: concise definitions from Longman, and semantic relations allowing for semi-automatic taxonomization to the ontology from WordNet. A definition match algorithm was created to automatically merge the correct meanings of ambiguous words between the two online resources, based on the words that the definitions of those meanings have in common in LDOCE and WordNet. Using a similarity matrix, the algorithm delivered matches between meanings including a confidence factor. This algorithm alone, however, did not match all meanings correctly on its own. A second hierarchy match algorithm was therefore created which uses the taxonomic hierarchies found in WordNet (deep hierarchies) and partially in LDOCE (flat hierarchies). This works by first matching unambiguous meanings, then limiting the search space to only the respective ancestors and descendants of those matched meanings. Thus, the algorithm matched locally unambiguous meanings (for instance, while the word seal as such is ambiguous, there is only one meaning of seal in the animal subhierarchy). Both algorithms complemented each other and helped constructing a large-scale ontology for the machine translation system. The WordNet hierarchies, coupled with the matching definitions of LDOCE, were subordinated to the ontology's upper region. As a result, the PANGLOSS MT system was able to make use of this knowledge base, mainly in its generation element. == Components == The RBMT system contains: a SL morphological analyser - analyses a source language word and provides the morphological information; a SL parser - is a syntax analyser which analyses source language sentences; a translator - used to translate a source language word into the target language; a TL morphological generator - works as a generator of appropriate target language words for the given grammatica information; a TL parser - works as a composer of suitable target language sentences; Several dictionaries - more specifically a minimum of three dictionaries: a SL dictionary - needed by the source language morphological analyser for morphological analysis, a bilingual dictionary - used by the translator to translate source language words into target language words, a TL dictionary - needed by the target language morphological generator to generate target language words. The RBMT system makes use of the following: a Source Grammar for the input language which builds syntactic constructions from input sentences; a Source Lexicon which captures all of the allowable vocabulary in the domain; Source Mapping Rules which indicate how syntactic heads and grammatical functions in the source language are mapped onto domain concepts and semantic roles in the interlingua; a Domain Model/Ontology which defines the classes of domain concepts and restricts the fillers of semantic roles for each class; Target Mapping Rules which indicate how domain concepts and semantic roles in the interlingua are mapped onto syntactic heads and grammatical functions in the target language; a Target Lexicon which contains appropriate target lexemes for each domain concept; a Target Grammar for the target language which realizes target syntactic constructions as linearized output sentences. == Advantages == No bilingual texts are required. This makes it possible to create translation systems for languages that have no texts in common, or even no digitized data whatsoever. Domain independent. Rules are usually written in a domain independent manner, so the vast majority of rules will "just work" in every domain, and only a few specific cases per domain may need rules written for them. No quality ceiling. Every error can be corrected with a targeted rule, even if the trigger case is extremely rare. This is in contrast to statistical systems where infrequent forms will be washed away by default. Total control. Because all rules are hand-written, you can easily debug a rule-based system to see exactly where a given error enters the system, and why. Reusability. Because RBMT systems are generally built from a strong source language analysis that is fed to a transfer step and target language generator, the source language analysis and targe

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  • Five safes

    Five safes

    The Five Safes is a framework for helping make decisions about making effective use of data which is confidential or sensitive. It is mainly used to describe or design research access to statistical data held by government and health agencies, and by data archives such as the UK Data Service. It is not an internationally accepted standard. Two of the Five Safes refer to statistical disclosure control, and so the Five Safes is usually used to contrast statistical and non-statistical controls when comparing data management options. == Concept == The Five Safes proposes that data management decisions be considered as solving problems in five 'dimensions': projects, people, settings, data and outputs. The combination of the controls leads to 'safe use'. These are most commonly expressed as questions, for example: These dimensions are scales, not limits. That is, solutions can have a mix of more or fewer controls in each dimension, but the overall aim of 'safe use' independent of the particular mix. For example, a public use file available for open download cannot control who uses it, where or for what purpose, and so all the control (protection) must be in the data itself. In contrast, a file which is only accessed through a secure environment with certified users can contain very sensitive information: the non-statistical controls allow the data to be 'unsafe'. One academic likened the process to a graphic equalizer, where bass and treble can be combined independently to produce a sound the listener likes, which has proven to be a very useful metaphor. This 2023 Data Foundation webinar is an expert discussion of how the elements interact, including an excellent introductory representation. There is no 'order' to the Five Safes, in that one is necessarily more important than the others. However, Ritchie argued that the 'managerial' controls (projects, people, setting) should be addressed before the 'statistical' controls (data, output). The Five Safes concept is associated with other topics which developed from the same programme at ONS, although these are not necessarily implemented. Safe people is associated with 'active researcher management', while safe outputs is linked with principles-based output statistical disclosure control. The Five Safes is a positive framework, describing what is and is not. The EDRU ('evidence-based, default-open, risk-managed, user-centred') attitudinal model is sometimes used to give a normative context == The 'data access spectrum' == From 2003 the Five Safes was also represented in a simpler form as a 'Data Access Spectrum'. The non-data controls (project, people, setting, outputs) tend to work together, in that organisations often see these as a complementary set of restrictions on access. These can then be contrasted with choices about data anonymisation to present a linear representation of data access options. This presentation is consistent with the idea of 'data as a residual', as well as data protection laws of the time which often characterised data simply as anonymous or not anonymous. A similar idea had already been developed independently in 2001 by Chuck Humphrey of the Canadian RDC network, the 'continuum of access'. More recently, The Open Data Institute has developed a 'Data Spectrum toolkit' which includes industry-specific examples. == History and terminology == The Five Safes was devised in the winter of 2002/2003 by Felix Ritchie at the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) to describe its secure remote-access Virtual Microdata Laboratory (VML). It was described at this time as the 'VML Security Model'. This was adopted by the NORC data enclave, and more widely in the US, as the 'portfolio model' (although this is now also used to refer to a slightly different legal/statistical/educational breakdown). In 2012 the framework as was still being referred to as the 'VML security model', but its increasing use among non-UK organisations led to the adoption of the more general and informative phrase 'Five Safes'. The original framework only had four safes (projects, people, settings and outputs): the framework was used to describe highly detailed data access through a secure environment, and so the 'data' dimension was irrelevant. From 2007 onwards, 'safe data' was included as the framework was used to a describe a wider range of ONS activities. As the US version was based upon the 2005 specification, some US iterations uses have the original four dimensions (eg). Some discussions, such as the OECD, use the term 'secure' instead 'safe'. However, the use of both these terms can cause presentational problems: less control in a particular dimension could be seen to imply 'unsafe users' or 'insecure settings', for example, which distracts from the main message. Hence, the Australian government uses the term "five data sharing principles". The 'Anonymisation Decision-Making Framework' uses a framework based on the Five Safes but relabelling "projects", "people", and "settings" as "governance", "agency" and "infrastructure", respectively; "Output" is omitted, and "safe use" becomes "functional anonymisation". There is no reference to the Five Safes or any associated literature. The Australian version was required to include references to the Five Safes, and presented it as an alternative without comment. == Application == The framework has had three uses: pedagogical, descriptive, and design. Since 2016, it has also been used, directly and indirectly in legislation. See for more detailed examples. === Pedagogy === The first significant use of the framework, other than internal administrative use, was to structure researcher training courses at the UK Office for National Statistics from 2003. UK Data Archive, Administrative Data Research Network, Eurostat, Statistics New Zealand, the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography, NORC, Statistics Canada and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, amongst others, have also used this framework. Most of these courses are for researchers using restricted-access facilities; the Eurostat courses are unusual in that they are designed for all users of sensitive data. === Description === The framework is often used to describe existing data access solutions (e.g. UK HMRC Data Lab, UK Data Service, Statistics New Zealand) or planned/conceptualised ones (e.g. Eurostat in 2011). An early use was to help identify areas where ONS' still had 'irreducible risks' in its provision of secure remote access. The framework is mostly used for confidential social science data. To date it appears to have made little impact on medical research planning, although it is now included in the revised guidelines on implementing HIPAA regulations in the US, and by Cancer Research UK and the Health Foundation in the UK. It has also been used to describe a security model for the Scottish Health Informatics Programme. === Design === In general the Five Safes has been used to describe solutions post-factum, and to explain/justify choices made, but an increasing number of organisations have used the framework to design data access solutions. For example, the Hellenic Statistical Agency developed a data strategy built around the Five Safes in 2016; the UK Health Foundation used the Five Safes to design its data management and training programmes. Use in the private sector is less common but some organisations have incorporated the Five Safes into consulting services. In 2015 the UK Data Service organized a workshop to encourage data users from the academic and private sectors to think about how to manage confidential research data, using the Five Safes to demonstrate alternative options and best practice. Early adopters for strategic design use were in Australia: both the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Department of Social Service used the Five Safes as an ex ante design tool. In 2017 the Australian Productivity Commission recommended adopting a version of the framework to support cross-government data sharing and re-use. This underwent extensive consultation and culminated in the DAT Act 2022. Since 2020 the Five Safes has been the overriding framework for the design of new secure facilities and data sharing arrangements in the UK for public health and social sciences. This has been promoted by the Office for Statistics Regulation, the UK Statistics Authority, NHS DIgital, and the research funding bodies Administrative Data Research UK and DARE UK. === Regulation and legislation === Three laws have incorporated the Fives Safes. They are explicit in the South Australian Public Sector (Data Sharing) Act 2016, and implicit in the research provisions of the UK Digital Economy Act 2017. The Australian Data Availability and Transparency Act 2022 renames the Five Safes as the Five Data Sharing Principles.A 2025 statutory review of the DAT Act 2022 found "that the DAT Act has not been effective in achieving its objectives.". The review includes specific referen

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  • Object storage

    Object storage

    Object storage (also known as object-based storage or blob storage) is a computer data storage approach that manages data as "blobs" or "objects", as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems, which manage data as a file hierarchy, and block storage, which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Each object is typically associated with a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level (object-storage device), the system level, and the interface level. In each case, object storage seeks to enable capabilities not addressed by other storage architectures, like interfaces that are directly programmable by the application, a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware, and data-management functions like data replication and data distribution at object-level granularity. Object storage systems allow retention of massive amounts of unstructured data in which data is written once and read once (or many times). Object storage is used for purposes such as storing objects like videos and photos on Facebook, songs on Spotify, or files in online collaboration services, such as Dropbox. One of the limitations with object storage is that it is not intended for transactional data, as object storage was not designed to replace NAS file access and sharing; it does not support the locking and sharing mechanisms needed to maintain a single, accurately updated version of a file. == History == === Origins === Jim Starkey coined the term blob working at Digital Equipment Corporation to refer to opaque data entities. The terminology was adopted for Rdb/VMS. Blob is often humorously explained to be an abbreviation for binary large object. According to Starkey, this backronym arose when Terry McKiever, working in marketing at Apollo Computer felt that the term needed to be an abbreviation. McKiever began using the expansion basic large object. This was later eclipsed by the retroactive explanation of blobs as binary large objects. According to Starkey, "Blob don't stand for nothin'." Rejecting the acronym, he explained his motivation behind the coinage, saying, "A blob is the thing that ate Cincinnatti [sic], Cleveland, or whatever", referring to the 1958 science fiction film The Blob. In 1995, research led by Garth Gibson on Network-Attached Secure Disks first promoted the concept of splitting less common operations, like namespace manipulations, from common operations, like reads and writes, to optimize the performance and scale of both. In the same year, a Belgian company – FilePool – was established to build the basis for archiving functions. Object storage was proposed at Gibson's Carnegie Mellon University lab as a research project in 1996. Another key concept was abstracting the writes and reads of data to more flexible data containers (objects). Fine grained access control through object storage architecture was further described by one of the NASD team, Howard Gobioff, who later was one of the inventors of the Google File System. Other related work includes the Coda filesystem project at Carnegie Mellon, which started in 1987, and spawned the Lustre file system. There is also the OceanStore project at UC Berkeley, which started in 1999 and the Logistical Networking project at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, which started in 1998. In 1999, Gibson founded Panasas to commercialize the concepts developed by the NASD team. === Development === Seagate Technology played a central role in the development of object storage. According to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), "Object storage originated in the late 1990s: Seagate specifications from 1999 Introduced some of the first commands and how operating system effectively removed from consumption of the storage." A preliminary version of the "OBJECT BASED STORAGE DEVICES Command Set Proposal" dated 10/25/1999 was submitted by Seagate as edited by Seagate's Dave Anderson and was the product of work by the National Storage Industry Consortium (NSIC) including contributions by Carnegie Mellon University, Seagate, IBM, Quantum, and StorageTek. This paper was proposed to INCITS T-10 (International Committee for Information Technology Standards) with a goal to form a committee and design a specification based on the SCSI interface protocol. This defined objects as abstracted data, with unique identifiers and metadata, how objects related to file systems, along with many other innovative concepts. Anderson presented many of these ideas at the SNIA conference in October 1999. The presentation revealed an IP Agreement that had been signed in February 1997 between the original collaborators (with Seagate represented by Anderson and Chris Malakapalli) and covered the benefits of object storage, scalable computing, platform independence, and storage management. == Architecture == === Abstraction of storage === One of the design principles of object storage is to abstract some of the lower layers of storage away from the administrators and applications. Thus, data is exposed and managed as objects instead of blocks or (exclusively) files. Objects contain additional descriptive properties which can be used for better indexing or management. Administrators do not have to perform lower-level storage functions like constructing and managing logical volumes to utilize disk capacity or setting RAID levels to deal with disk failure. Object storage also allows the addressing and identification of individual objects by more than just file name and file path. Object storage adds a unique identifier within a bucket, or across the entire system, to support much larger namespaces and eliminate name collisions. === Inclusion of rich custom metadata within the object === Object storage explicitly separates file metadata from data to support additional capabilities. As opposed to fixed metadata in file systems (filename, creation date, type, etc.), object storage provides for full function, custom, object-level metadata in order to: Capture application-specific or user-specific information for better indexing purposes Support data-management policies (e.g. a policy to drive object movement from one storage tier to another) Centralize management of storage across many individual nodes and clusters Optimize metadata storage (e.g. encapsulated, database or key value storage) and caching/indexing (when authoritative metadata is encapsulated with the metadata inside the object) independently from the data storage (e.g. unstructured binary storage) Additionally, in some object-based file-system implementations: The file system clients only contact metadata servers once when the file is opened and then get content directly via object-storage servers (vs. block-based file systems which would require constant metadata access) Data objects can be configured on a per-file basis to allow adaptive stripe width, even across multiple object-storage servers, supporting optimizations in bandwidth and I/O Object-based storage devices (OSD) as well as some software implementations (e.g., DataCore Swarm) manage metadata and data at the storage device level: Instead of providing a block-oriented interface that reads and writes fixed sized blocks of data, data is organized into flexible-sized data containers, called objects Each object has both data (an uninterpreted sequence of bytes) and metadata (an extensible set of attributes describing the object); physically encapsulating both together benefits recoverability. The command interface includes commands to create and delete objects, write bytes and read bytes to and from individual objects, and to set and get attributes on objects Security mechanisms provide per-object and per-command access control === Programmatic data management === Object storage provides programmatic interfaces to allow applications to manipulate data. At the base level, this includes Create, read, update and delete (CRUD) functions for basic read, write and delete operations. Some object storage implementations go further, supporting additional functionality like object/file versioning, object replication, life-cycle management and movement of objects between different tiers and types of storage. Most API implementations are REST-based, allowing the use of many standard HTTP calls. == Implementation == === Cloud storage === The vast majority of cloud storage available in the market leverages an object-storage architecture. Some notable examples are Amazon S3, which debuted in March 2006, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage, Rackspace Cloud Files (whose code was donated in 2010 to Openstack project and released as OpenStack Swift), and Google Cloud Storage released in May 2010. === Object-based file systems === Some distributed file systems use an object-based architecture, where file metadata is stored in metadata servers and file data is stored i

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  • External memory algorithm

    External memory algorithm

    In computing, external memory algorithms or out-of-core algorithms are algorithms that are designed to process data that are too large to fit into a computer's main memory at once. Such algorithms must be optimized to efficiently fetch and access data stored in slow bulk memory (auxiliary memory) such as hard drives or tape drives, or when memory is on a computer network. External memory algorithms are analyzed in the external memory model. == Model == External memory algorithms are analyzed in an idealized model of computation called the external memory model (or I/O model, or disk access model). The external memory model is an abstract machine similar to the RAM machine model, but with a cache in addition to main memory. The model captures the fact that read and write operations are much faster in a cache than in main memory, and that reading long contiguous blocks is faster than reading randomly using a disk read-and-write head. The running time of an algorithm in the external memory model is defined by the number of reads and writes to memory required. The model was introduced by Alok Aggarwal and Jeffrey Vitter in 1988. The external memory model is related to the cache-oblivious model, but algorithms in the external memory model may know both the block size and the cache size. For this reason, the model is sometimes referred to as the cache-aware model. The model consists of a processor with an internal memory or cache of size M, connected to an unbounded external memory. Both the internal and external memory are divided into blocks of size B. One input/output or memory transfer operation consists of moving a block of B contiguous elements from external to internal memory, and the running time of an algorithm is determined by the number of these input/output operations. == Algorithms == Algorithms in the external memory model take advantage of the fact that retrieving one object from external memory retrieves an entire block of size B. This property is sometimes referred to as locality. Searching for an element among N objects is possible in the external memory model using a B-tree with branching factor B. Using a B-tree, searching, insertion, and deletion can be achieved in O ( log B ⁡ N ) {\displaystyle O(\log _{B}N)} time (in Big O notation). Information theoretically, this is the minimum running time possible for these operations, so using a B-tree is asymptotically optimal. External sorting is sorting in an external memory setting. External sorting can be done via distribution sort, which is similar to quicksort, or via a M B {\displaystyle {\tfrac {M}{B}}} -way merge sort. Both variants achieve the asymptotically optimal runtime of O ( N B log M B ⁡ N B ) {\displaystyle O\left({\frac {N}{B}}\log _{\frac {M}{B}}{\frac {N}{B}}\right)} to sort N objects. This bound also applies to the fast Fourier transform in the external memory model. The permutation problem is to rearrange N elements into a specific permutation. This can either be done either by sorting, which requires the above sorting runtime, or inserting each element in order and ignoring the benefit of locality. Thus, permutation can be done in O ( min ( N , N B log M B ⁡ N B ) ) {\displaystyle O\left(\min \left(N,{\frac {N}{B}}\log _{\frac {M}{B}}{\frac {N}{B}}\right)\right)} time. == Applications == The external memory model captures the memory hierarchy, which is not modeled in other common models used in analyzing data structures, such as the random-access machine, and is useful for proving lower bounds for data structures. The model is also useful for analyzing algorithms that work on datasets too big to fit in internal memory. A typical example is geographic information systems, especially digital elevation models, where the full data set easily exceeds several gigabytes or even terabytes of data. This methodology extends beyond general purpose CPUs and also includes GPU computing as well as classical digital signal processing. In general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), powerful graphics cards (GPUs) with little memory (compared with the more familiar system memory, which is most often referred to simply as RAM) are utilized with relatively slow CPU-to-GPU memory transfer (when compared with computation bandwidth). == History == An early use of the term "out-of-core" as an adjective is in 1962 in reference to devices that are other than the core memory of an IBM 360. An early use of the term "out-of-core" with respect to algorithms appears in 1971.

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  • Elowan

    Elowan

    Elowan is a plant-robot cyborg. Using its own internal bioelectrical signals, The plant has a robotic extension that makes it move towards light sources. Electrodes are inserted into the leaves, stem, and ground to detect the faint bioelectrical signals the plant produces. Then they are amplified so the robot can read them. So when the plant "wants" to go to light, the cyborg automatically goes to the nearest light source. Future extensions of the robot could provide: Protection, growth frameworks, and nutrients. Other factors that could make the cyborg move are temperature, soil, and gravity conditions Elowan is one in a series of plant-electronic hybrid experiments.

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  • March algorithm

    March algorithm

    The March algorithm is a widely used algorithm that tests SRAM memory by filling all its entries test patterns. It carries out several passes through an SRAM checking the patterns and writing new patterns. The SRAM read and write operations performed on each pass are called a March element and each element is repeated for each entry. The March algorithm is often used to find functional faults in SRAM during testing such as: Stuck-at Faults (SAFs) Transition Faults (TFs) Address Decoder Faults (AFs) Coupling Faults (CFs), such as Inversion (CFin), Idempotent (CFid), and State (CFst) coupling faults It has been suggested to test SRAM modules using the algorithm before sale using a built-in self-test mechanism. == Notation == Each pass in a test sequence is represented by an "element". An element consists of a vertical arrow to indicate the direction in which the memory is scanned followed by a list of read/write operations to be applied to each memory cell. Multiple elements can be listed, separated by semicolons, to form a "test". For example, { ⇕ ( w 0 ) ; ⇑ ( r 0 , w 1 ) ; ⇓ ( r 1 , w 0 , r 0 ) } {\displaystyle \{\Updownarrow (w0);\Uparrow (r0,w1);\Downarrow (r1,w0,r0)\}} specifies to: Scan in both directions, writing 0. Scan from lowest to highest address, reading 0 and writing 1. Scan from highest to lowest address, reading 1, writing 0 and reading 0. == Variants == Many variants of the March algorithm exist with different sequences of tests. Each variant makes a different tradeoff between what faults it can detect and the complexity of the algorithm. Several variants have been given names:

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  • Web data integration

    Web data integration

    Web data integration (WDI) is the process of aggregating and managing data from different websites into a single, homogeneous workflow. This process includes data access, transformation, mapping, quality assurance and fusion of data. Data that is sourced and structured from websites is referred to as "web data". WDI is an extension and specialization of data integration that views the web as a collection of heterogeneous databases. Data integration techniques in the context of the web, forms the foundation for businesses taking advantage of data available on the ever-increasing number of publicly-accessible websites. Corporate spending on this area amounted to about USD 2.5bn in 2017, and it is expected that by 2020 the market will reach almost USD 7bn.

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  • Informedia Digital Library

    Informedia Digital Library

    The Informedia Digital Library is an ongoing research program at Carnegie Mellon University to build search engines and information visualization technology for many types of media. The program has carried out research on spoken document retrieval, video information retrieval, video segmentation, face recognition, and cross-language information retrieval. The Lycos search engine was an early product of the Informedia Digital Library Project. The project is led by Howard Wactlar. Researchers on the project have included: Michael Mauldin, Alex Hauptmann, Michael Christel, Michael Witbrock, Raj Reddy, Takeo Kanade and Scott Stevens.

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  • Hugging Face

    Hugging Face

    Hugging Face, Inc., is an American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. Its transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform allow users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work. == History == === Founding === The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. The company was named after the U+1F917 🤗 HUGGING FACE emoji. After open sourcing the model behind the chatbot, the company pivoted to focus on being a platform for machine learning. === AI boom === On April 28, 2021, the company launched the BigScience Research Workshop in collaboration with several other research groups to release an open large language model. In 2022, the workshop concluded with the announcement of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters. In February 2023, the company announced partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would allow Hugging Face's products to be available to AWS customers to use them as the building blocks for their custom applications. The company also said the next generation of BLOOM will be run on Trainium, a proprietary machine learning chip created by AWS. In June 2024, the company announced, along with Meta and Scaleway, their launch of a new AI accelerator program for European startups. The initiative aimed to help startups integrate open foundation models into their products, accelerating the EU AI ecosystem. The program, based at STATION F in Paris, ran from September 2024 to February 2025. Selected startups received mentoring, and access to AI models and tools and Scaleway's computing power. On September 23, 2024, to further the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, Hugging Face teamed up with Meta and UNESCO to launch a new online language translator. It was built on Meta's No Language Left Behind open-source AI model, enabling free text translation across 200 languages, including many low-resource languages. In April 2025, Hugging Face announced that they acquired a humanoid robotics startup, Pollen Robotics, based in France and founded by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet in 2016. In an X tweet, Delangue shared his vision to "make Artificial Intelligence robotics Open Source". === Cyberattacks === In early 2026, hackers hijacked the Hugging Face platform to launch Android-targeted attacks involving "powerful malware" which could completely take over a compromised target.

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  • Research data archiving

    Research data archiving

    Research data archiving is the long-term storage of scholarly research data, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and life sciences. The various academic journals have differing policies regarding how much of their data and methods researchers are required to store in a public archive, and what is actually archived varies widely between different disciplines. Similarly, the major grant-giving institutions have varying attitudes towards public archiving of data. In general, the tradition of science has been for publications to contain sufficient information to allow fellow researchers to replicate and therefore test the research. In recent years this approach has become increasingly strained as research in some areas depends on large datasets which cannot easily be replicated independently. Data archiving is more important in some fields than others. In a few fields, all of the data necessary to replicate the work is already available in the journal article. In drug development, a great deal of data is generated and must be archived so researchers can verify that the reports the drug companies publish accurately reflect the data. Often used interchangeably, Data preservation and data archiving are both about protecting data for the long term, but they serve different purposes. Data preservation focuses on preventing data from being lost, damaged, or destroyed by creating backups, storing data in secure locations, and ensuring it remains accessible when needed. Data archiving, on the other hand, involves moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage location for long-term keeping. Archived data is often combined and compressed, and while it can still be accessed, it is not intended for regular use or frequent updates. The requirement of data archiving is a recent development in the history of science. It was made possible by advances in information technology allowing large amounts of data to be stored and accessed from central locations. For example, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) adopted their first policy on data archiving in 1993, about three years after the beginning of the WWW. This policy mandates that datasets cited in AGU papers must be archived by a recognised data center; it permits the creation of "data papers"; and it establishes AGU's role in maintaining data archives. But it makes no requirements on paper authors to archive their data. Prior to organized data archiving, researchers wanting to evaluate or replicate a paper would have to request data and methods information from the author. The academic community expects authors to share supplemental data. This process was recognized as wasteful of time and energy and obtained mixed results. Information could become lost or corrupted over the years. In some cases, authors simply refuse to provide the information. The need for data archiving and due diligence is greatly increased when the research deals with health issues or public policy formation. == Selected policies by journals == === Biotropica === Biotropica requires, as a condition for publication, that the data supporting the results in the paper and metadata describing them must be archived in an appropriate public archive such as Dryad, Figshare, GenBank, TreeBASE, or NCBI. Authors may elect to make the data publicly available as soon as the article is published or, if the technology of the archive allows, embargo access to the data up to three years after article publication. A statement describing Data Availability will be included in the manuscript as described in the instructions to authors. Exceptions to the required archiving of data may be granted at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief for studies that include sensitive information (e.g., the location of endangered species). Our Editorial explaining the motivation for this policy can be found here. A more comprehensive list of data repositories is available here. Promoting a culture of collaboration with researchers who collect and archive data: The data collected by tropical biologists are often long-term, complex, and expensive to collect. The Board of Editors of Biotropica strongly encourages authors who re-use data archives archived data sets to include as fully engaged collaborators the scientists who originally collected them. We feel this will greatly enhance the quality and impact of the resulting research by drawing on the data collector’s profound insights into the natural history of the study system, reducing the risk of errors in novel analyses, and stimulating the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration and training for which the ATBC and Biotropica are widely recognized. NB: Biotropica is one of only two journals that pays the fees for authors depositing data at Dryad. === The American Naturalist === The American Naturalist requires authors to deposit the data associated with accepted papers in a public archive. For gene sequence data and phylogenetic trees, deposition in GenBank or TreeBASE, respectively, is required. There are many possible archives that may suit a particular data set, including the Dryad repository for ecological and evolutionary biology data. All accession numbers for GenBank, TreeBASE, and Dryad must be included in accepted manuscripts before they go to Production. If the data is deposited somewhere else, please provide a link. If the data is culled from published literature, please deposit the collated data in Dryad for the convenience of your readers. Any impediments to data sharing should be brought to the attention of the editors at the time of submission so that appropriate arrangements can be worked out. === Journal of Heredity === The primary data underlying the conclusions of an article are critical to the verifiability and transparency of the scientific enterprise, and should be preserved in usable form for decades in the future. For this reason, Journal of Heredity requires that newly reported nucleotide or amino acid sequences, and structural coordinates, be submitted to appropriate public databases (e.g., GenBank; the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database; DNA Database of Japan; the Protein Data Bank; and Swiss-Prot). Accession numbers must be included in the final version of the manuscript. For other forms of data (e.g., microsatellite genotypes, linkage maps, images), the Journal endorses the principles of the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) in encouraging all authors to archive primary datasets in an appropriate public archive, such as Dryad, TreeBASE, or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Authors are encouraged to make data publicly available at time of publication or, if the technology of the archive allows, opt to embargo access to the data for a period up to a year after publication. The American Genetic Association also recognizes the vast investment of individual researchers in generating and curating large datasets. Consequently, we recommend that this investment be respected in secondary analyses or meta-analyses in a gracious collaborative spirit. === Molecular Ecology === Molecular Ecology expects that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive, such as GenBank, Gene Expression Omnibus, TreeBASE, Dryad, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, your own institutional or funder repository, or as Supporting Information on the Molecular Ecology web site. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allows, may opt to embargo access to the data for a period up to a year after publication. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor, especially for sensitive information such as human subject data or the location of endangered species. === Nature === Such material must be hosted on an accredited independent site (URL and accession numbers to be provided by the author), or sent to the Nature journal at submission, either uploaded via the journal's online submission service, or if the files are too large or in an unsuitable format for this purpose, on CD/DVD (five copies). Such material cannot solely be hosted on an author's personal or institutional web site. Nature requires the reviewer to determine if all of the supplementary data and methods have been archived. The policy advises reviewers to consider several questions, including: "Should the authors be asked to provide supplementary methods or data to accompany the paper online? (Such data might include source code for modelling studies, detailed experimental protocols or mathematical derivations.) === Science === Science supports the efforts of databases that aggregate published data for the use of the scientific community. Therefore, before publication, large data sets (including microarray data, protein or DNA sequences, and atomic c

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  • Artificial empathy

    Artificial empathy

    Artificial empathy or computational empathy is the development of AI systems—such as companion robots or virtual agents—that can detect emotions and respond to them in an empathic way. Although such technology can be perceived as scary or threatening, it could also have a significant advantage over humans for roles in which emotional expression can be important, such as in the health care sector. An October 2025 review and meta-analysis in the British Medical Bulletin found that AI chatbots were rated as showing more empathy than human healthcare professionals in 13 of 15 studies that compared them. Care-givers who perform emotional labor above and beyond the requirements of paid labor can experience chronic stress or burnout, and can become desensitized to patients. Artificial empathy could also help the socialization of care-givers, or serve as role model for emotional detachment. A broader definition of artificial empathy is "the ability of nonhuman models to predict a person's internal state (e.g., cognitive, affective, physical) given the signals (s)he emits (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture) or to predict a person's reaction (including, but not limited to internal states) when he or she is exposed to a given set of stimuli (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture, graphics, music, etc.)". A 2025 study reported that some multimodal large language models can recognize basic facial expressions with human-level accuracy on a commonly used research dataset of posed facial expressions. == Areas of research == There are a variety of philosophical, theoretical, and applicative questions related to artificial empathy. For example: Which conditions would have to be met for a robot to respond competently to a human emotion? What models of empathy can or should be applied to Social and Assistive Robotics? Must the interaction of humans with robots imitate affective interaction between humans? Can a robot help science learn about affective development of humans? Would robots create unforeseen categories of inauthentic relations? What relations with robots can be considered authentic? How can we assess artificial empathy in AI systems? == Examples of artificial empathy research and practice == People often communicate and make decisions based on inferences about each other's internal states (e.g., emotional, cognitive, and physical states) that are in turn based on signals emitted by the person such as facial expression, body gesture, voice, and words. Broadly speaking, artificial empathy focuses on developing non-human models that achieve similar objectives using similar data. === Streams of artificial empathy research === Artificial empathy has been applied in various research disciplines, including artificial intelligence and business. Two main streams of research in this domain are: the use of nonhuman models to predict a person's internal state (e.g., cognitive, affective, physical) given the signals he or she emits (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture) the use of nonhuman models to predict a person's reaction when he or she is exposed to a given set of stimuli (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture, graphics, music, etc.). Research on affective computing, such as emotional speech recognition and facial expression detection, falls within the first stream of artificial empathy. Contexts that have been studied include oral interviews, call centers, human-computer interaction, sales pitches, and financial reporting. The second stream of artificial empathy has been researched more in marketing contexts, such as advertising, branding, customer reviews, in-store recommendation systems, movies, and online dating. === Artificial empathy applications in practice === With the increasing volume of visual, audio, and text data in commerce, many business applications for artificial empathy have followed. For example, Affectiva analyses viewers' facial expressions from video recordings while they are watching video advertisements in order to optimize the content design of video ads. Software like HireVue, BarRaiser, a hiring intelligence firm, helps firms make recruitment decisions by analyzing audio and video information from candidates' video interviews. Lapetus Solutions develops a model to estimate an individual's longevity, health status, and disease susceptibility from a face photo. Their technology has been applied in the insurance industry. == Artificial empathy and human services == Although artificial intelligence cannot yet replace social workers themselves, the technology has been deployed in that field. Florida State University published a study about Artificial Intelligence being used in the human services field. The research used computer algorithms to analyze health records for combinations of risk factors that could predict a future suicide attempt. The article reports, "machine learning—a future frontier for artificial intelligence—can predict with 80% to 90% accuracy whether someone will attempt suicide as far off as two years into the future. The algorithms become even more accurate as a person's suicide attempt gets closer. For example, the accuracy climbs to 92% one week before a suicide attempt when artificial intelligence focuses on general hospital patients". Such algorithmic machines can help social workers. Social work operates on a cycle of engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation with clients. Earlier assessment for risk of suicide can lead to earlier interventions and prevention, therefore saving lives. The system would learn, analyze, and detect risk factors, alerting the clinician of a patient's suicide risk score (analogous to a patient's cardiovascular risk score). Then, social workers could step in for further assessment and preventive intervention.

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  • Semantic translation

    Semantic translation

    Semantic translation is the process of using semantic information to aid in the translation of data in one representation or data model to another representation or data model. Semantic translation takes advantage of semantics that associate meaning with individual data elements in one dictionary to create an equivalent meaning in a second system. An example of semantic translation is the conversion of XML data from one data model to a second data model using formal ontologies for each system such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This is frequently required by intelligent agents that wish to perform searches on remote computer systems that use different data models to store their data elements. The process of allowing a single user to search multiple systems with a single search request is also known as federated search. Semantic translation should be differentiated from data mapping tools that do simple one-to-one translation of data from one system to another without actually associating meaning with each data element. Semantic translation requires that data elements in the source and destination systems have "semantic mappings" to a central registry or registries of data elements. The simplest mapping is of course where there is equivalence. There are three types of Semantic equivalence: Class Equivalence - indicating that class or "concepts" are equivalent. For example: "Person" is the same as "Individual" Property Equivalence - indicating that two properties are equivalent. For example: "PersonGivenName" is the same as "FirstName" Instance Equivalence - indicating that two individual instances of objects are equivalent. For example: "Dan Smith" is the same person as "Daniel Smith" Semantic translation is very difficult if the terms in a particular data model do not have direct one-to-one mappings to data elements in a foreign data model. In that situation, an alternative approach must be used to find mappings from the original data to the foreign data elements. This problem can be alleviated by centralized metadata registries that use the ISO-11179 standards such as the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

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  • Automated Lip Reading

    Automated Lip Reading

    Automated Lip Reading (ALR) is a software technology developed by speech recognition expert Frank Hubner. A video image of a person talking can be analysed by the software. The shapes made by the lips can be examined and then turned into sounds. The sounds are compared to a dictionary to create matches to the words being spoken. The technology was used successfully to analyse silent home movie footage of Adolf Hitler taken by Eva Braun at their Bavarian retreat Berghof. The video, with words, was included in a documentary titled "Hitler's Private World", Revealed Studios, 2006 Source: New Technology catches Hitler off guard

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  • Evidence-based library and information practice

    Evidence-based library and information practice

    Evidence-based library and information practice (EBLIP) or evidence-based librarianship (EBL) is the use of evidence-based practices (EBP) in the field of library and information science (LIS). This means that all practical decisions made within LIS should 1) be based on research studies and 2) that these research studies are selected and interpreted according to some specific norms characteristic for EBP. Typically such norms disregard theoretical studies and qualitative studies and consider quantitative studies according to a narrow set of criteria of what counts as evidence. If such a narrow set of methodological criteria are not applied, it is better instead to speak of research based library and information practice. == Characteristics == Evidence-based practice in general has been characterised as a positivist approach; EBLIP is therefore also a positivist approach to LIS. As such, EBLIP is an approach in contrast to other approaches to LIS. The use of statistical approaches known as meta-analysis to conclude what evidence has been reported in the literature is one among other methods which is typical for the evidence-based approach. In 2002, Booth noted the three schools of EBILP had some commonalities, including the context of day-to-day decision-making, an emphasis on improving the quality of professional practice, a pragmatic focus on the 'best available evidence', incorporation of the user perspective, the acceptance of a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research designs, and access, either first-hand or second-hand, to the (process of) evidence-based practice and its products. He added one more, that EBILP is concerned with getting the best value for money. == The role of library and information science in EBP == Evidence-based practice in general is based on a very thorough search of the scientific literature and a very thorough selection and analysis of the retrieved literature. A close familiarity with database searching is needed, and library and information professionals have important roles to play in this respect. Therefore LIS professionals should be well suited to help professionals in other disciplines doing EBP. EBLIP is the application of this approach on LIS itself. It should be mentioned, however, that EBP started in medicine as evidence-based medicine (EBM) from which it spread to other fields. Only slowly and to a limited extent has EBP moved on to LIS. The EBLIP process can be applied to a variety of scenarios in LIS, including customer service, collection development, library management and information literacy instruction. In general, quantitative methods are used in LIS research. A 2010 study revealed five categories that capture the different ways library and information professionals experience evidence-based practice: Evidence-based practice is experienced as irrelevant; Evidence-based practice is experienced as learning from published research; Evidence-based practice is experienced as service improvement; Evidence-based practice is experienced as a way of being; Evidence-based practice is experienced as a weapon.

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  • Recommender system

    Recommender system

    A recommender system, also called a recommendation algorithm, recommendation engine, or recommendation platform, is a type of information filtering system that suggests items most relevant to a particular user. The value of these systems becomes particularly evident in scenarios where users must select from a large number of options, such as products, media, or content. Major social media platforms and streaming services rely on recommender systems that employ machine learning to analyze user behavior and preferences, thereby enabling personalized content feeds. Typically, the suggestions refer to a variety decision-making processes, including the selection of a product, musical selection, or online news source to read. The implementation of recommender systems is pervasive, with commonly recognised examples including the generation of playlist for video and music services, the provision of product recommendations for e-commerce platforms, and the recommendation of content on social media platforms and the open web. These systems can operate using a single type of input, such as music, or multiple inputs from diverse platforms, including news, books and search queries. Additionally, popular recommender systems have been developed for specific topics, such as restaurants and online dating services. Recommender systems have also been developed to explore research articles and experts, collaborators, and financial services. A content discovery platform is a software recommendation platform that employs recommender system tools. It utilizes user metadata in order to identify and suggest relevant content, whilst reducing ongoing maintenance and development costs. A content discovery platform delivers personalized content to websites, mobile devices, and set-top boxes. A large range of content discovery platforms currently exist for various forms of content ranging from news articles and academic journal articles to television. As operators compete to serve as the gateway to home entertainment, personalized television emerges as a key service differentiator. Academic content discovery has recently become another area of interest, the emergence of numerous companies dedicated to assisting academic researchers in keeping up to date with relevant academic content and facilitating serendipitous discovery of new content. == Overview == Recommender systems usually make use of either or both collaborative filtering and content-based filtering, as well as other systems such as knowledge-based systems. Collaborative filtering approaches build a model from a user's past behavior (e.g., items previously purchased or selected and/or numerical ratings given to those items) as well as similar decisions made by other users. This model is then used to predict items (or ratings for items) that the user may have an interest in. Content-based filtering approaches utilize a series of discrete, pre-tagged characteristics of an item in order to recommend additional items with similar properties. === Example === The differences between collaborative and content-based filtering can be demonstrated by comparing two early music recommender systems, Last.fm and Pandora Radio. We can also look at how these methods are applied in e-commerce, for example, on platforms like Amazon. Last.fm creates a "station" of recommended songs by observing what bands and individual tracks the user has listened to on a regular basis and comparing those against the listening behavior of other users. Last.fm will play tracks that do not appear in the user's library, but are often played by other users with similar interests. As this approach leverages the behavior of users, it is an example of a collaborative filtering technique. Pandora uses the properties of a song or artist (a subset of the 450 attributes provided by the Music Genome Project) to seed a "station" that plays music with similar properties. User feedback is used to refine the station's results, deemphasizing certain attributes when a user "dislikes" a particular song and emphasizing other attributes when a user "likes" a song. This is an example of a content-based approach. In e-commerce, Amazon's well-known "customers who bought X also bought Y" feature is a prime example of collaborative filtering. It also uses content-based filtering when it recommends a book by the same author you've previously read or a pair of shoes in a similar style to ones you've viewed. Each type of system has its strengths and weaknesses. In the above example, Last.fm requires a large amount of information about a user to make accurate recommendations. This is an example of the cold start problem, and is common in collaborative filtering systems. Whereas Pandora needs very little information to start, it is far more limited in scope (for example, it can only make recommendations that are similar to the original seed). === Alternative implementations === Recommender systems are a useful alternative to search algorithms since they help users discover items they might not have found otherwise. Of note, recommender systems are often implemented using search engines indexing non-traditional data. In some cases, like in the Gonzalez v. Google Supreme Court case, may argue that search and recommendation algorithms are different technologies. Recommender systems have been the focus of several granted patents, and there are more than 50 software libraries that support the development of recommender systems including LensKit, RecBole, ReChorus and RecPack. == History == Elaine Rich created the first recommender system in 1979, called Grundy. She looked for a way to recommend users books they might like. Her idea was to create a system that asks users specific questions and classifies them into classes of preferences, or "stereotypes", depending on their answers. Depending on users' stereotype membership, they would then get recommendations for books they might like. Another early recommender system, called a "digital bookshelf", was described in a 1990 technical report by Jussi Karlgren at Columbia University, and implemented at scale and worked through in technical reports and publications from 1994 onwards by Jussi Karlgren, then at SICS, and research groups led by Pattie Maes at MIT, Will Hill at Bellcore, and Paul Resnick, also at MIT, whose work with GroupLens was awarded the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award. Montaner provided the first overview of recommender systems from an intelligent agent perspective. Adomavicius provided a new, alternate overview of recommender systems. Herlocker provides an additional overview of evaluation techniques for recommender systems, and Beel et al. discussed the problems of offline evaluations. Beel et al. have also provided literature surveys on available research paper recommender systems and existing challenges. == Approaches == === Collaborative filtering === One approach to the design of recommender systems that has wide use is collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering is based on the assumption that people who agreed in the past will agree in the future, and that they will like similar kinds of items as they liked in the past. The system generates recommendations using only information about rating profiles for different users or items. By locating peer users/items with a rating history similar to the current user or item, they generate recommendations using this neighborhood. This approach is a cornerstone for e-commerce sites that analyze the purchasing patterns of thousands of users to suggest what you might like. Collaborative filtering methods are classified as memory-based and model-based. A well-known example of memory-based approaches is the user-based algorithm, while that of model-based approaches is matrix factorization (recommender systems). A key advantage of the collaborative filtering approach is that it does not rely on machine analyzable content and therefore it is capable of accurately recommending complex items such as movies without requiring an "understanding" of the item itself. Many algorithms have been used in measuring user similarity or item similarity in recommender systems. For example, the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) approach and the Pearson Correlation as first implemented by Allen. When building a model from a user's behavior, a distinction is often made between explicit and implicit forms of data collection. Examples of explicit data collection include the following: Asking a user to rate an item on a sliding scale. Asking a user to search. Asking a user to rank a collection of items from favorite to least favorite. Presenting two items to a user and asking him/her to choose the better one of them. Asking a user to create a list of items that he/she likes (see Rocchio classification or other similar techniques). Examples of implicit data collection include the following: Observing the items that a user views in an online store, media library, or other repository of med

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