AI Email Body Generator

AI Email Body Generator — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Color picker

    Color picker

    A color picker (also color chooser or color tool) is a graphical user interface widget, usually found within graphics software or online, used to select colors and, in some cases, to create color schemes (the color picker might be more sophisticated than the palette included with the program). Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or macOS have a system color picker, which can be used by third-party programs (e.g., Adobe Photoshop). == History == The concept of color pickers dates back to the early days of computer graphics and digital design. Early versions were rudimentary, often featuring basic color palettes and limited functionality. One of the first drawing programs to include a color picker was SketchPad (also referred to as LisaSketch), designed by Bill Atkinson in 1983 to showcase LisaGraf's capabilities. It used a black and white pattern system, using dithering to create the illusion of color depth. With the increased popularity of personal computers with color graphics, there soon came software similar to SketchPad that supported more than two colors, like Broderbund's Dazzle Draw for the Apple II or Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint. However, the color pickers present in those programs relied on indexed colors. Color pickers, resembling ones used in modern software with support for direct, 24-bit color, appeared soon after the release of the Macintosh II, with the release of programs like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. As the increase of color depth allowed the choice of significantly more colors, the shape and form of color pickers started to diverge. For example, Adobe Photoshop used a hue-saturation color wheel with a slider for brightness in version 0.63, later on switching to a rectangular design accompanied by a hue slider. Corel Painter pioneered the triangular saturation and brightness picker with a hue ring around it, aiming to better represent the continuity of the hue spectrum and the relationship between saturation and brightness. == Purpose == A color picker is used to select and adjust color values. In graphic design and image editing, users typically choose colors via an interface with a visual representation of a color—organized with quasi-perceptually-relevant hue, saturation and lightness dimensions (HSL) – instead of keying in alphanumeric text values. Because color appearance depends on comparison of neighboring colors (see color vision), many interfaces attempt to clarify the relationships between colors. == Interface == Color tools can vary in their interface. Some may use sliders, buttons, text boxes for color values, or direct manipulation. Often a two-dimensional square is used to create a range of color values (such as lightness and saturation) that can be clicked on or selected in some other manner. Drag and drop, color droppers, and various other forms of interfaces are commonly used as well. Usually, color values are also displayed numerically, so they can be precisely remembered and keyed-in later, such as three values of 0-255 representing red, green, and blue, respectively. === Eyedropper === The eyedropper is a tool present in most color pickers and graphics software that allows a user to read a color at a specific point in an image, or position on a display. This enables the color to be transferred to other applications particularly quickly. Modern implementations of eyedropper tools are also available as browser extensions, allowing users to pick colors directly from web pages, such as in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. == Working == A color picker has two main parts, first a color slider and second a color canvas. The color slider has a linear or radial gradient of the seven rainbow colors i.e. Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. It allows one to choose any of the seven primary colors. The color value chosen from the color slider instantly reflects in the color canvas. The color canvas is a mixture of two linear color gradients. First a linear gradient of the current chosen color and second a linear gradient of the black color. This mixture of color gradients lets one choose a lighter and darker version of the current chosen color from the color slider.

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  • Legal expert system

    Legal expert system

    A legal expert system is a domain-specific expert system that uses artificial intelligence to emulate the decision-making abilities of a human expert in the field of law. Legal expert systems employ a rule base or knowledge base and an inference engine to accumulate, reference and produce expert knowledge on specific subjects within the legal domain. == Purpose == It has been suggested that legal expert systems could help to manage the rapid expansion of legal information and decisions that began to intensify in the late 1960s. Many of the first legal expert systems were created in the 1970s and 1980s. Lawyers were originally identified as primary target users of legal expert systems. Potential motivations for this work included: quicker delivery of legal advice; reduced time spent in repetitive, labour-intensive legal tasks; development of knowledge management techniques that were not dependent on staff; reduced overhead and labour costs and higher profitability for law firms; and reduced fees for clients. Some early development work was oriented toward the creation of automated judges. One of the first use cases was the encoding of the British Nationality Act at Imperial College carried out under the supervision of Marek Sergot and Robert Kowalski. Lance Elliot wrote: "The British Nationality Act was passed in 1981 and shortly thereafter was used as a means of showcasing the efficacy of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and technologies, doing so to explore how the at-the-time newly enacted statutory law might be encoded into a computerized logic-based formalization." The authors’ seminal article, "The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program," published in 1986 in the Communications of the ACM journal, is one of the first and best-known works in computational law, and one of the most widely cited papers in the field. In 2021, the Inaugural CodeX Prize was awarded to Robert Kowalski, Fariba Sadri, and Marek Sergot in acknowledgment of their groundbreaking work on the application of logic programming to the formalization and analysis of the British Nationality Act. Later work on legal expert systems has identified potential benefits to non-lawyers as a means to increase access to legal knowledge. Legal expert systems can also support administrative processes, facilitate decision-making processes, automate rule-based analyses, and exchange information directly with citizen-users. == Types == === Architectural variations === Rule-based expert systems rely on a model of deductive reasoning that utilizes "If A, then B" rules. In a rule-based legal expert system, information is represented in the form of deductive rules within the knowledge base. In rule-based legal expert systems, logic programming has historically been applied to automate complex compliance paperwork. A notable early example designed for high-volume regulatory filings was the 1999 Intelligent Filing Manager (INTELLIFM), which utilized Prolog rules as its core inference engine to automate the generation, publishing, and population of structured forms via distributed COM interfaces. Case-based reasoning models, which store and manipulate examples or cases, hold the potential to emulate an analogical reasoning process thought to be well-suited for the legal domain. This model effectively draws on known experiences our outcomes for similar problems. A neural net relies on a computer model that mimics that structure of a human brain, and operates in a very similar way to the case-based reasoning model. This expert system model is capable of recognizing and classifying patterns within the realm of legal knowledge and dealing with imprecise inputs. Fuzzy logic models attempt to create 'fuzzy' concepts or objects that can then be converted into quantitative terms or rules that are indexed and retrieved by the system. In the legal domain, fuzzy logic can be used for rule-based and case-based reasoning models. === Theoretical variations === Some legal expert system architects have adopted a very practical approach, employing scientific modes of reasoning within a given set of rules or cases. Others have opted for a broader philosophical approach inspired by jurisprudential reasoning modes emanating from established legal theoreticians. === Functional variations === Some legal expert systems aim to arrive at a particular conclusion in law, while others are designed to predict a particular outcome. An example of a predictive system is one that predicts the outcome of judicial decisions, the value of a case, or the outcome of litigation. == Reception == Many forms of legal expert systems have become widely used and accepted by both the legal community and the users of legal services. == Challenges == === Domain-related problems === The inherent complexity of law as a discipline raises immediate challenges for legal expert system knowledge engineers. Legal matters often involve interrelated facts and issues, which further compound the complexity. Factual uncertainty may also arise when there are disputed versions of factual representations that must be input into an expert system to begin the reasoning process. === Computerized problem solving === The limitations of most computerized problem solving techniques inhibit the success of many expert systems in the legal domain. Expert systems typically rely on deductive reasoning models that have difficulty according degrees of weight to certain principles of law or importance to previously decided cases that may or may not influence a decision in an immediate case or context. === Representation of legal knowledge === Expert legal knowledge can be difficult to represent or formalize within the structure of an expert system. For knowledge engineers, challenges include: Open texture: Law is rarely applied in an exact way to specific facts, and exact outcomes are rarely a certainty. Statutes may be interpreted according to different linguistic interpretations, reliance on precedent cases or other contextual factors including a particular judge's conception of fairness. The balancing of reasons: Many arguments involve considerations or reasons that are not easily represented in a logical way. For instance, many constitutional legal issues are said to balance independently well-established considerations for state interests against individual rights. Such balancing may draw on extra-legal considerations that would be difficult to represent logically in an expert system. Indeterminacy of legal reasoning: In the adversarial arena of law, it is common to have two strong arguments on a single point. Determining the 'right' answer may depend on a majority vote among expert judges, as in the case of an appeal. === Time and cost effectiveness === Creating a functioning expert system requires significant investments in software architecture, subject matter expertise and knowledge engineering. Faced with these challenges, many system architects restrict the domain in terms of subject matter and jurisdiction. The consequence of this approach is the creation of narrowly focused and geographically restricted legal expert systems that are difficult to justify on a cost-benefit basis. Current applications of AI in the legal field utilize machines to review documents, particularly when a high level of completeness and confidence in the quality of document analysis is depended upon, such as in instances of litigation and where due diligence play a role. Among the numerically most quantifiable advantages of AI in the legal field are the time and money saving impact by freeing lawyers from having to spend inordinate amounts of their valuable time on routine tasks, aiding in setting free lawyers’ creative energy by reducing stress. This in turn increases the rate of case load reduction by accomplishing better results in less time, which unlocks potential additional revenue per unit of time spend on a case. The cost of setting up and maintaining AI systems in law is more than offset by the attained savings through increased efficacy; unbalanced cost can be assigned to clients. === Lack of correctness in results or decisions === Legal expert systems may lead non-expert users to incorrect or inaccurate results and decisions. This problem could be compounded by the fact that users may rely heavily on the correctness or trustworthiness of results or decisions generated by these systems. == Examples == ASHSD-II is a hybrid legal expert system that blends rule-based and case-based reasoning models in the area of matrimonial property disputes under English law. CHIRON is a hybrid legal expert system that blends rule-based and case-based reasoning models to support tax planning activities under United States tax law and codes. JUDGE is a rule-based legal expert system that deals with sentencing in the criminal legal domain for offences relating to murder, assault and manslaughter. Legislate is a knowledge graph powered contract management platform whi

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  • Blocks world

    Blocks world

    The blocks world is a planning domain in artificial intelligence. It consists of a set of wooden blocks of various shapes and colors sitting on a table. The goal is to build one or more vertical stacks of blocks. Only one block may be moved at a time: it may either be placed on the table or placed atop another block. Because of this, any blocks that are, at a given time, under another block cannot be moved. Moreover, some kinds of blocks cannot have other blocks stacked on top of them. The simplicity of this toy world lends itself readily to classical symbolic artificial intelligence approaches, in which the world is modeled as a set of abstract symbols which may be reasoned about. == Motivation == Artificial Intelligence can be researched in theory and with practical applications. The problem with most practical applications is that the engineers don't know how to program an AI system. Instead of rejecting the challenge at all the idea is to invent an easy to solve domain which is called a toy problem. Toy problems were invented with the aim to program an AI which can solve it. The blocks world domain is an example of a toy problem. Its major advantage over more realistic AI applications is that many algorithms and software programs are available which can handle the situation. This allows comparing different theories against each other. In its basic form, the blocks world problem consists of cubes of the same size which have all the color black. A mechanical robot arm has to pick and place the cubes. More complicated derivatives of the problem consist of cubes of different sizes, shapes and colors. From an algorithmic perspective, blocks world is an NP-hard search and planning problem. The task is to bring the system from an initial state into a goal state. Automated planning and scheduling problems are usually described in the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) notation which is an AI planning language for symbolic manipulation tasks. If something was formulated in the PDDL notation, it is called a domain. Therefore, the task of stacking blocks is a blocks world domain which stands in contrast to other planning problems like the dock worker robot domain and the monkey and banana problem. == Theses/projects which took place in a blocks world == Terry Winograd's SHRDLU Patrick Winston's Learning Structural Descriptions from Examples and Copy Demo Gerald Jay Sussman's Sussman anomaly Decision problem (Gupta and Nau, 1992): Given a starting Blocks World, an ending Blocks World, and an integer L > 0, is there a way to move the blocks to change the starting position to the ending position with L or less steps? This decision problem is NP-hard.

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  • AI@50

    AI@50

    AI@50, formally known as the "Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years" (July 13–15, 2006), was a conference organized by James H. Moor, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Dartmouth workshop which effectively inaugurated the history of artificial intelligence. Five of the original ten attendees were present: Marvin Minsky, Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, and John McCarthy. While sponsored by Dartmouth College, General Electric, and the Frederick Whittemore Foundation, a $200,000 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called for a report of the proceedings that would: Analyze progress on AI's original challenges during the first 50 years, and assess whether the challenges were "easier" or "harder" than originally thought and why Document what the AI@50 participants believe are the major research and development challenges facing this field over the next 50 years, and identify what breakthroughs will be needed to meet those challenges Relate those challenges and breakthroughs against developments and trends in other areas such as control theory, signal processing, information theory, statistics, and optimization theory. A summary report by the conference director, James H. Moor, was published in AI Magazine. == Conference Program and links to published papers == James H. Moor, conference Director, Introduction Carol Folt and Barry Scherr, Welcome Carey Heckman, Tonypandy and the Origins of Science === AI: Past, Present, Future === John McCarthy, What Was Expected, What We Did, and AI Today Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine === The Future Model of Thinking === Ron Brachman and Hector Levesque, A Large Part of Human Thought David Mumford, What is the Right Model for 'Thought'? Stuart Russell, The Approach of Modern AI === The Future of Network Models === Geoffrey Hinton & Simon Osindero, From Pandemonium to Graphical Models and Back Again Rick Granger, From Brain Circuits to Mind Manufacture === The Future of Learning & Search === Oliver Selfridge, Learning and Education for Software: New Approaches in Machine Learning Ray Solomonoff, Machine Learning — Past and Future Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Learning to be Intelligent Peter Norvig, Web Search as a Product of and Catalyst for AI === The Future of AI === Rod Brooks, Intelligence and Bodies Nils Nilsson, Routes to the Summit Eric Horvitz, In Pursuit of Artificial Intelligence: Reflections on Challenges and Trajectories === The Future of Vision === Eric Grimson, Intelligent Medical Image Analysis: Computer Assisted Surgery and Disease Monitoring Takeo Kanade, Artificial Intelligence Vision: Progress and Non-Progress Terry Sejnowski, A Critique of Pure Vision === The Future of Reasoning === Alan Bundy, Constructing, Selecting and Repairing Representations of Knowledge Edwina Rissland, The Exquisite Centrality of Examples Bart Selman, The Challenge and Promise of Automated Reasoning === The Future of Language and Cognition === Trenchard More The Birth of Array Theory and Nial Eugene Charniak, Why Natural Language Processing is Now Statistical Natural Language Processing Pat Langley, Intelligent Behavior in Humans and Machines === The Future of the Future === Ray Kurzweil, Why We Can Be Confident of Turing Test Capability Within a Quarter Century George Cybenko, The Future Trajectory of AI Charles J. Holland, DARPA's Perspective === AI and Games === Jonathan Schaeffer, Games as a Test-bed for Artificial Intelligence Research Danny Kopec, Chess and AI Shay Bushinsky, Principle Positions in Deep Junior's Development === Future Interactions with Intelligent Machines === Daniela Rus, Making Bodies Smart Sherry Turkle, From Building Intelligences to Nurturing Sensibilities === Selected Submitted Papers: Future Strategies for AI === J. Storrs Hall, Self-improving AI: An Analysis Selmer Bringsjord, The Logicist Manifesto Vincent C. Müller, Is There a Future for AI Without Representation? Kristinn R. Thórisson, Integrated A.I. Systems === Selected Submitted Papers: Future Possibilities for AI === Eric Steinhart, Survival as a Digital Ghost Colin T. A. Schmidt, Did You Leave That 'Contraption' Alone With Your Little Sister? Michael Anderson & Susan Leigh Anderson, The Status of Machine Ethics Marcello Guarini, Computation, Coherence, and Ethical Reasoning

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  • Natural language understanding

    Natural language understanding

    Natural language understanding (NLU) or natural language interpretation (NLI) is a subset of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. NLU has been considered an AI-hard problem. There is considerable commercial interest in the field because of its application to automated reasoning, machine translation, question answering, news-gathering, text categorization, voice-activation, archiving, and large-scale content analysis. == History == The program STUDENT, written in 1964 by Daniel Bobrow for his PhD dissertation at MIT, is one of the earliest known attempts at NLU by a computer. Eight years after John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence, Bobrow's dissertation (titled Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem Solving System) showed how a computer could understand simple natural language input to solve algebra word problems. A year later, in 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT wrote ELIZA, an interactive program that carried on a dialogue in English on any topic, the most popular being psychotherapy. ELIZA worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into canned phrases and Weizenbaum sidestepped the problem of giving the program a database of real-world knowledge or a rich lexicon. Yet ELIZA gained surprising popularity as a toy project and can be seen as a very early precursor to current commercial systems such as those used by Ask.com. In 1969, Roger Schank at Stanford University introduced the conceptual dependency theory for NLU. This model, partially influenced by the work of Sydney Lamb, was extensively used by Schank's students at Yale University, such as Robert Wilensky, Wendy Lehnert, and Janet Kolodner. In 1970, William A. Woods introduced the augmented transition network (ATN) to represent natural language input. Instead of phrase structure rules ATNs used an equivalent set of finite-state automata that were called recursively. ATNs and their more general format called "generalized ATNs" continued to be used for a number of years. In 1971, Terry Winograd finished writing SHRDLU for his PhD thesis at MIT. SHRDLU could understand simple English sentences in a restricted world of children's blocks to direct a robotic arm to move items. The successful demonstration of SHRDLU provided significant momentum for continued research in the field. Winograd continued to be a major influence in the field with the publication of his book Language as a Cognitive Process. At Stanford, Winograd would later advise Larry Page, who co-founded Google. In the 1970s and 1980s, the natural language processing group at SRI International continued research and development in the field. A number of commercial efforts based on the research were undertaken, e.g., in 1982 Gary Hendrix formed Symantec Corporation originally as a company for developing a natural language interface for database queries on personal computers. However, with the advent of mouse-driven graphical user interfaces, Symantec changed direction. A number of other commercial efforts were started around the same time, e.g., Larry R. Harris at the Artificial Intelligence Corporation and Roger Schank and his students at Cognitive Systems Corp. In 1983, Michael Dyer developed the BORIS system at Yale which bore similarities to the work of Roger Schank and W. G. Lehnert. The third millennium saw the introduction of systems using machine learning for text classification, such as the IBM Watson. However, experts debate how much "understanding" such systems demonstrate: e.g., according to John Searle, Watson did not even understand the questions. John Ball, cognitive scientist and inventor of the Patom Theory, supports this assessment. Natural language processing has made inroads for applications to support human productivity in service and e-commerce, but this has largely been made possible by narrowing the scope of the application. There are thousands of ways to request something in a human language that still defies conventional natural language processing. According to Wibe Wagemans, "To have a meaningful conversation with machines is only possible when we match every word to the correct meaning based on the meanings of the other words in the sentence – just like a 3-year-old does without guesswork." == Scope and context == The umbrella term "natural language understanding" can be applied to a diverse set of computer applications, ranging from small, relatively simple tasks such as short commands issued to robots, to highly complex endeavors such as the full comprehension of newspaper articles or poetry passages. Many real-world applications fall between the two extremes, for instance text classification for the automatic analysis of emails and their routing to a suitable department in a corporation does not require an in-depth understanding of the text, but needs to deal with a much larger vocabulary and more diverse syntax than the management of simple queries to database tables with fixed schemata. Throughout the years various attempts at processing natural language or English-like sentences presented to computers have taken place at varying degrees of complexity. Some attempts have not resulted in systems with deep understanding, but have helped overall system usability. For example, Wayne Ratliff originally developed the Vulcan program with an English-like syntax to mimic the English speaking computer in Star Trek. Vulcan later became the dBase system whose easy-to-use syntax effectively launched the personal computer database industry. Systems with an easy-to-use or English-like syntax are, however, quite distinct from systems that use a rich lexicon and include an internal representation (often as first order logic) of the semantics of natural language sentences. Hence the breadth and depth of "understanding" aimed at by a system determine both the complexity of the system (and the implied challenges) and the types of applications it can deal with. The "breadth" of a system is measured by the sizes of its vocabulary and grammar. The "depth" is measured by the degree to which its understanding approximates that of a fluent native speaker. At the narrowest and shallowest, English-like command interpreters require minimal complexity, but have a small range of applications. Narrow but deep systems explore and model mechanisms of understanding, but they still have limited application. Systems that attempt to understand the contents of a document such as a news release beyond simple keyword matching and to judge its suitability for a user are broader and require significant complexity, but they are still somewhat shallow. Systems that are both very broad and very deep are beyond the current state of the art. == Components and architecture == Regardless of the approach used, most NLU systems share some common components. The system needs a lexicon of the language and a parser and grammar rules to break sentences into an internal representation. The construction of a rich lexicon with a suitable ontology requires significant effort, e.g., the Wordnet lexicon required many person-years of effort. The system also needs theory from semantics to guide the comprehension. The interpretation capabilities of a language-understanding system depend on the semantic theory it uses. Competing semantic theories of language have specific trade-offs in their suitability as the basis of computer-automated semantic interpretation. These range from naive semantics or stochastic semantic analysis to the use of pragmatics to derive meaning from context. Semantic parsers convert natural-language texts into formal meaning representations. Advanced applications of NLU also attempt to incorporate logical inference within their framework. This is generally achieved by mapping the derived meaning into a set of assertions in predicate logic, then using logical deduction to arrive at conclusions. Therefore, systems based on functional languages such as Lisp need to include a subsystem to represent logical assertions, while logic-oriented systems such as those using the language Prolog generally rely on an extension of the built-in logical representation framework. The management of context in NLU can present special challenges. A large variety of examples and counter examples have resulted in multiple approaches to the formal modeling of context, each with specific strengths and weaknesses.

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  • Autonomic computing

    Autonomic computing

    Autonomic computing (AC) is distributed computing resources with self-managing characteristics, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. Initiated by IBM in 2001, this initiative ultimately aimed to develop computer systems capable of self-management, to overcome the rapidly growing complexity of computing systems management, and to reduce the barrier that complexity poses to further growth. == Description == The AC system concept is designed to make adaptive decisions, using high-level policies. It will constantly check and optimize its status and automatically adapt itself to changing conditions. An autonomic computing framework is composed of autonomic components (AC) interacting with each other. An AC can be modeled in terms of two main control schemes (local and global) with sensors (for self-monitoring), effectors (for self-adjustment), knowledge and planner/adapter for exploiting policies based on self- and environment awareness. This architecture is sometimes referred to as Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute (MAPE). Driven by such vision, a variety of architectural frameworks based on "self-regulating" autonomic components has been recently proposed. A similar trend has recently characterized significant research in the area of multi-agent systems. However, most of these approaches are typically conceived with centralized or cluster-based server architectures in mind and mostly address the need of reducing management costs rather than the need of enabling complex software systems or providing innovative services. Some autonomic systems involve mobile agents interacting via loosely coupled communication mechanisms. Autonomy-oriented computation is a paradigm proposed by Jiming Liu in 2001 that uses artificial systems imitating social animals' collective behaviours to solve difficult computational problems. For example, ant colony optimization could be studied in this paradigm. == Problem of growing complexity == Forecasts suggested that the computing devices in use would grow at 38% per year and the average complexity of each device was increasing. This volume and complexity was managed by highly skilled humans; but the demand for skilled IT personnel was already outstripping supply, with labour costs exceeding equipment costs by a ratio of up to 18:1. Computing systems have brought great benefits of speed and automation but there is now an overwhelming economic need to automate their maintenance. In a 2003 IEEE Computer article, Kephart and Chess warn that the dream of interconnectivity of computing systems and devices could become the "nightmare of pervasive computing" in which architects are unable to anticipate, design and maintain the complexity of interactions. They state the essence of autonomic computing is system self-management, freeing administrators from low-level task management while delivering better system behavior. A general problem of modern distributed computing systems is that their complexity, and in particular the complexity of their management, is becoming a significant limiting factor in their further development. Large companies and institutions are employing large-scale computer networks for communication and computation. The distributed applications running on these computer networks are diverse and deal with multiple tasks, ranging from internal control processes to presenting web content to customer support. Additionally, mobile computing is pervading these networks at an increasing speed: employees need to communicate with their companies while they are not in their office. They do so by using laptops, personal digital assistants, or mobile phones with diverse forms of wireless technologies to access their companies' data. This creates an enormous complexity in the overall computer network which is hard to control manually by human operators. Manual control is time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. The manual effort needed to control a growing networked computer-system tends to increase quickly. 80% of such problems in infrastructure happen at the client specific application and database layer. Most 'autonomic' service providers guarantee only up to the basic plumbing layer (power, hardware, operating system, network and basic database parameters). == Characteristics of autonomic systems == A possible solution could be to enable modern, networked computing systems to manage themselves without direct human intervention. The Autonomic Computing Initiative (ACI) aims at providing the foundation for autonomic systems. It is inspired by the autonomic nervous system of the human body. This nervous system controls important bodily functions (e.g. respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure) without any conscious intervention. In a self-managing autonomic system, the human operator takes on a new role: instead of controlling the system directly, he/she defines general policies and rules that guide the self-management process. For this process, IBM defined the following four types of property referred to as self-star (also called self-, self-x, or auto-) properties. Self-configuration: Automatic configuration of components; Self-healing: Automatic discovery, and correction of faults; Self-optimization: Automatic monitoring and control of resources to ensure the optimal functioning with respect to the defined requirements; Self-protection: Proactive identification and protection from arbitrary attacks. Others such as Poslad and Nami and Sharifi have expanded on the set of self-star as follows: Self-regulation: A system that operates to maintain some parameter, e.g., Quality of service, within a reset range without external control; Self-learning: Systems use machine learning techniques such as unsupervised learning which does not require external control; Self-awareness (also called Self-inspection and Self-decision): System must know itself. It must know the extent of its own resources and the resources it links to. A system must be aware of its internal components and external links in order to control and manage them; Self-organization: System structure driven by physics-type models without explicit pressure or involvement from outside the system; Self-creation (also called Self-assembly, Self-replication): System driven by ecological and social type models without explicit pressure or involvement from outside the system. A system's members are self-motivated and self-driven, generating complexity and order in a creative response to a continuously changing strategic demand; Self-management (also called self-governance): A system that manages itself without external intervention. What is being managed can vary dependent on the system and application. Self -management also refers to a set of self-star processes such as autonomic computing rather than a single self-star process; Self-description (also called self-explanation or Self-representation): A system explains itself. It is capable of being understood (by humans) without further explanation. IBM has set forth eight conditions that define an autonomic system: The system must know itself in terms of what resources it has access to, what its capabilities and limitations are and how and why it is connected to other systems; be able to automatically configure and reconfigure itself depending on the changing computing environment; be able to optimize its performance to ensure the most efficient computing process; be able to work around encountered problems by either repairing itself or routing functions away from the trouble; detect, identify and protect itself against various types of attacks to maintain overall system security and integrity; adapt to its environment as it changes, interacting with neighboring systems and establishing communication protocols; rely on open standards and cannot exist in a proprietary environment; anticipate the demand on its resources while staying transparent to users. Even though the purpose and thus the behaviour of autonomic systems vary from system to system, every autonomic system should be able to exhibit a minimum set of properties to achieve its purpose: Automatic: This essentially means being able to self-control its internal functions and operations. As such, an autonomic system must be self-contained and able to start-up and operate without any manual intervention or external help. Again, the knowledge required to bootstrap the system (Know-how) must be inherent to the system. Adaptive: An autonomic system must be able to change its operation (i.e., its configuration, state and functions). This will allow the system to cope with temporal and spatial changes in its operational context either long term (environment customisation/optimisation) or short term (exceptional conditions such as malicious attacks, faults, etc.). Aware: An autonomic system must be able to monitor (sense) its operational context as well as its internal state in order to be able to asses

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  • Mivar-based approach

    Mivar-based approach

    The Mivar-based approach is a mathematical tool for designing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Mivar (Multidimensional Informational Variable Adaptive Reality) was developed by combining production and Petri nets. The Mivar-based approach was developed for semantic analysis and adequate representation of humanitarian epistemological and axiological principles in the process of developing artificial intelligence. The Mivar-based approach incorporates computer science, informatics and discrete mathematics, databases, expert systems, graph theory, matrices and inference systems. The Mivar-based approach involves two technologies: Information accumulation is a method of creating global evolutionary data-and-rules bases with variable structure. It works on the basis of adaptive, discrete, mivar-oriented information space, unified data and rules representation, based on three main concepts: “object, property, relation”. Information accumulation is designed to store any information with possible evolutionary structure and without limitations concerning the amount of information and forms of its presentation. Data processing is a method of creating a logical inference system or automated algorithm construction from modules, services or procedures on the basis of a trained mivar network of rules with linear computational complexity. Mivar data processing includes logical inference, computational procedures and services. Mivar networks allow us to develop cause-effect dependencies (“If-then”) and create an automated, trained, logical reasoning system. Representatives of Russian association for artificial intelligence (RAAI) – for example, V. I. Gorodecki, doctor of technical science, professor at SPIIRAS and V. N. Vagin, doctor of technical science, professor at MPEI declared that the term is incorrect and suggested that the author should use standard terminology. == History == While working in the Russian Ministry of Defense, O. O. Varlamov started developing the theory of “rapid logical inference” in 1985. He was analyzing Petri nets and productions to construct algorithms. Generally, mivar-based theory represents an attempt to combine entity-relationship models and their problem instance – semantic networks and Petri networks. The abbreviation MIVAR was introduced as a technical term by O. O. Varlamov, Doctor of Technical Science, professor at Bauman MSTU in 1993 to designate a “semantic unit” in the process of mathematical modeling. The term has been established and used in all of his further works. The first experimental systems operating according to mivar-based principles were developed in 2000. Applied mivar systems were introduced in 2015. == Mivar == Mivar is the smallest structural element of discrete information space. == Object-property-relation == Object-Property-Relation (VSO) is a graph, the nodes of which are concepts and arcs are connections between concepts. Mivar space represents a set of axes, a set of elements, a set of points of space and a set of values of points. A = { a n } , n = 1 , … , N , {\displaystyle A=\{a_{n}\},n=1,\ldots ,N,} where: A {\displaystyle A} is a set of mivar space axis names; N {\displaystyle N} is a number of mivar space axes. Then: ∀ a n ∃ F n = { f n i n } , n = 1 , … , N , i n = 1 , … , I n , {\displaystyle \forall a_{n}\exists F_{n}=\{f_{{ni}_{n}}\},n=1,\ldots ,N,i_{n}=1,\ldots ,I_{n},} where: F n {\displaystyle F_{n}} is a set of axis a n {\displaystyle a_{n}} elements; i n {\displaystyle i_{n}} is a set F n {\displaystyle F_{n}} element identifier; I n = | F n | . {\displaystyle I_{n}=|F_{n}|.} F n {\displaystyle F_{n}} sets form multidimensional space: M = F 1 × F 2 × ⋯ × F n . {\displaystyle M=F_{1}\times F_{2}\times \cdots \times F_{n}.} m = ( i 1 , i 2 , … , i N ) , {\displaystyle m=(i_{1},i_{2},\ldots ,i_{N}),} where: m ∈ M {\displaystyle m\in M} ; m {\displaystyle m} is a point of multidimensional space; ( i 1 , i 2 , … , i N ) {\displaystyle (i_{1},i_{2},\ldots ,i_{N})} are coordinates of point m {\displaystyle m} . There is a set of values of multidimensional space points of M {\displaystyle M} : C M = { c i 1 , i 2 , … , i N ∣ i 1 = 1 , … , I 1 , i 2 = 1 , … , I 2 , … , i n = 1 , … , I N } , {\displaystyle C_{M}=\{c_{i_{1},i_{2},\ldots ,i_{N}}\mid i_{1}=1,\ldots ,I_{1},i_{2}=1,\ldots ,I_{2},\ldots ,i_{n}=1,\ldots ,I_{N}\},} where: c i 1 , i 2 , … , i N {\displaystyle c_{i_{1},i_{2},\ldots ,i_{N}}} is a value of the point of multidimensional space M {\displaystyle M} is a value of the point of multidimensional space ( i 1 , i 2 , … , i N ) {\displaystyle (i_{1},i_{2},\ldots ,i_{N})} . For every point of space M {\displaystyle M} there is a single value from C M {\displaystyle C_{M}} set or there is no such value. Thus, C M {\displaystyle C_{M}} is a set of data model state changes represented in multidimensional space. To implement a transition between multidimensional space and set of points values the relation μ {\displaystyle \mu } has been introduced: C x = μ ( M x ) , {\displaystyle C_{x}=\mu (M_{x}),} where: M x ⊆ M ; {\displaystyle M_{x}\subseteq M;} M x = F 1 x × F 2 x × ⋯ × F N x . {\displaystyle M_{x}=F_{1x}\times F_{2x}\times \cdots \times F_{Nx}.} To describe a data model in mivar information space it is necessary to identify three axes: The axis of relations « O {\displaystyle O} »; The axis of attributes (properties) « S {\displaystyle S} »; The axis of elements (objects) of subject domain « V {\displaystyle V} ». These sets are independent. The mivar space can be represented by the following tuple: ⟨ V , S , O ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle V,S,O\rangle } Thus, mivar is described by « V S O {\displaystyle VSO} » formula, in which « V {\displaystyle V} » denotes an object or a thing, « S {\displaystyle S} » denotes properties, « O {\displaystyle O} » variety of relations between other objects of a particular subject domain. The category “Relations” can describe dependencies of any complexity level: formulae, logical transitions, text expressions, functions, services, computational procedures and even neural networks. A wide range of capabilities complicates description of modeling interconnections, but can take into consideration all the factors. Mivar computations use mathematical logic. In a simplified form they can be represented as implication in the form of an "if…, then …” formula. The result of mivar modeling can be represented in the form of a bipartite graph binding two sets of objects: source objects and resultant objects. == Mivar network == Mivar network is a method for representing objects of the subject domain and their processing rules in the form of a bipartite directed graph consisting of objects and rules. A Mivar network is a bipartite graph that can be described in the form of a two-dimensional matrix, in that records information about the subject domain of the current task. Generally, mivar networks provide formalization and representation of human knowledge in the form of a connected multidimensional space. That is, a mivar network is a method of representing a piece of mivar space information in the form of a bipartite, directed graph. The mivar space information is formed by objects and connections, which in total represent the data model of the subject domain. Connections include rules for objects processing. Thus, a mivar network of a subject domain is a part of the mivar space knowledge for that domain. The graph can consist of objects-variables and rules-procedures. First, two lists are made that form two nonintersecting partitions: the list of objects and the list of rules. Objects are denoted by circles. Each rule in a mivar network is an extension of productions, hyper-rules with multi-activators or computational procedures. It is proved that from the perspective of further processing, these formalisms are identical and in fact are nodes of the bipartite graph, denoted by rectangles. === Multi-dimensional binary matrices === Mivar networks can be implemented on single computing systems or service-oriented architectures. Certain constraints restrict their application, in particular, the dimension of matrix of linear matrix method for determining logical inference path on the adaptive rule networks. The matrix dimension constraint is due to the fact that implementation requires sending a general matrix to multiple processors. Since every matrix value is initially represented in symbol form, the amount of sent data is crucial when obtaining, for example, 10000 rules/variables. Classical mivar-based method requires storing three values in each matrix cell: 0 – no value; x – input variable for the rule; y – output variable for the rule. The analysis of possibility of firing a rule is separated from determining output variables according to stages after firing the rule. Consequently, it is possible to use different matrices for “search for fired rules” and “setting values for output variables”. This allowsthe use of multidimensional binary m

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  • Taylor Swift deepfake pornography controversy

    Taylor Swift deepfake pornography controversy

    In late January 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake images of American musician Taylor Swift were proliferated on social media platforms 4chan and X (formerly Twitter). Several artificial images of Swift of a sexual or violent nature were quickly spread, with one post reported to have been seen over 47 million times before its eventual removal. The images led Microsoft to enhance Microsoft Designer's text-to-image model to prevent future abuse. Moreover, these images prompted responses from anti-sexual assault advocacy groups, US politicians, Swifties, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, among others, and it has been suggested that Swift's influence could result in new legislation regarding the creation of deepfake pornography. A similar controversy emerged in August 2025, when The Verge reported AI image and video tool Grok Imagine generated sexually explicit images and videos of Swift from an otherwise innocuous text prompt. == Background == American musician Taylor Swift has been the target of misogyny and slut-shaming throughout her career. American technology corporation Microsoft offers AI image creators called Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator, which employ censorship safeguards to prevent users from generating unsafe or objectionable content. Members of a Telegram group discussed ways to circumvent these censors to create pornographic images of celebrities. Graphika, a disinformation research firm, traced the creation of the images back to a 4chan community. == Reactions == For some, the deepfake images of Swift immediately became a source of controversy and outrage. Other internet users found them humorous and absurd, such as the image making it appear as though Swift was to engage in sexual intercourse with Oscar the Grouch. The images drew condemnations from Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network and SAG-AFTRA. The latter group, who had been following issues regarding AI-generated media prior to Swift's involvement, considered the images "upsetting, harmful and deeply concerning." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company's products were believed to be used to make these images, responded to the controversy as "alarming and terrible", further stating his belief that "we all benefit when the online world is a safe world." === Taylor Swift === A source close to Swift told the Daily Mail that she would be considering legal action, saying, "Whether or not legal action will be taken is being decided, but there is one thing that is clear: These fake AI-generated images are abusive, offensive, exploitative, and done without Taylor's consent and/or knowledge." === Politicians === White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre expressed concern over the counterfeit images, deeming them "alarming", and emphasized the obligation of social media platforms to curb the dissemination of misinformation. Several members of American politics called for legislation against AI-generated pornography. Later in the month, a bipartisan bill was introduced by US senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley. The bill would allow victims to sue individuals who produced or possessed "digital forgeries" with intent to distribute, or those who received the material knowing it was made without consent. The European Union struck a deal in February 2024 on a similar bill that would criminalize deepfake pornography, as well as online harassment and revenge porn, by mid-2027. === Social media platforms === X responded to the sharing of these images on their own website with claims they would suspend accounts that participated in their spread. Despite this, the photos continued to be reshared among accounts of X, and spread to other platforms including Instagram and Reddit. X enforces a "synthetic and manipulated media policy", which has been criticized for its efficacy. They briefly blocked searches of Swift's name on January 27, 2024, reinstating them two days later. === Swifties === Fans of Taylor Swift, known as Swifties, responded to the circulation of these images by pushing the hashtag #ProtectTaylorSwift to trend on X. They also flooded other hashtags related to the images with more positive images and videos of her live performances. == Cultural significance == Deepfake pornography has remained highly controversial and has affected figures from other celebrities to ordinary people, most of whom are women. Journalists have opined that the involvement of a prominent public figure such as Swift in the dissemination of AI-generated pornography could bring public awareness and political reform to the issue.

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  • Class activation mapping

    Class activation mapping

    Class activation mapping methods are explainable AI (XAI) techniques used to visualize the regions of an input image that are the most relevant for a particular task, especially image classification, in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These methods generate heatmaps by weighting the feature maps from a convolutional layer according to their relevance to the target class. In the field of artificial intelligence, generically defined as "the effort to automate intellectual tasks normally performed by humans", machine learning and deep learning were created. They both use statistical and computational methods to learn patterns from data, reducing the need for manually coded rules. Machine learning models are trained on input data and the known respective answers, learning the underlying patterns or structures present in the data. Traditional Machine learning algorithms employ manually designed feature sets, posing a direct link between machine learning designers and employed features. Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, based on the concept of successive layers of representation, in which the data is progressively unfolded in different ways, to extract relevant and informative patterns in data analysis. Deep learning algorithms are defined as feature learning algorithms automatically learning hierarchical feature representations from raw data, extracting increasingly abstract features through multiple layers. CNNs are a specific architecture of deep learning models, designed to process spatially structured data, such as images, exploiting a series of convolution, non-linear activation and pooling operations to extract relevant features, contained in the so-called feature maps from input data. CNNs have demonstrated to be highly effective in a variety of computer vision and image processing tasks. CNNs (and deep learning models more broadly) are described as black boxes due to their complex and non-transparent internal layers of representation. The need for clearer indications on its internal working and decision-making process gave birth to XAI techniques. Among the proposed XAI techniques for computer vision tasks, Class activation mapping methods can show which pixels in an input image are important to the predicted logit for a class of interest, in a classification task. Class activation mapping methods were originally developed for class-discriminative scenarios to visualize which parts of the input image influenced the classification decision, namely to visually highlight the regions of those feature maps that contribute most strongly to the prediction of a given class. More advanced versions of these methods are not limited to image classification tasks, but have been extended also to several vision-related tasks, such as object detection, image captioning, visual question answering and image segmentation. == Background == The following methods laid the groundwork for the class activation maps approaches, forming the conceptual basis of using gradients to highlight class-discriminative regions. === Class model visualization and saliency maps for convolutional neural networks === The class model visualization and image-specific saliency maps approaches have been presented in the foundational work "Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps" by Karen Simonyan, Andrea Vedaldi, and Andrew Zisserman and it generalizes the deconvnet method by Zeiler and Fergus. Class model visualization synthesizes an artificial input image that strongly activates the output neurons associated with a target class. Given a trained, fixed model, this method starts with a zero-initialized image, backpropagates the gradients from the class score to the image pixels, updates the image pixels increasing the specific class scores and it repeats the pixel updating process, showing an encoded (idealized version) prototype of the class of interest. Image-specific class saliency visualization method provides a visual explanation by highlighting the most relevant pixels in an image for predicting a certain class C of interest. This is done by computing the gradient of the class score with respect to the input image, I 0 , {\displaystyle I_{0},} w = ∂ S C ∂ I | I 0 {\displaystyle w=\left.{\frac {\partial S_{C}}{\partial I}}\right|_{I_{0}}} approximating the model locally (around I 0 {\displaystyle I_{0}} ) as linear, using a first-order Taylor expansion: S C ( I ) ≈ w C T I + b {\displaystyle S_{C}(I)\approx w_{C}^{T}I+b} . The magnitude of w C {\displaystyle w_{C}} , the gradient, indicates the importancy of the pixels: larger gradients suggest greater influence on the prediction. Once the gradient is known, the saliency map is defined as the maximum absolute gradient across the color channels: M i j = m a x C | ∂ S C ∂ I i j C | {\displaystyle M_{ij}=max_{C}\left|{\frac {\partial S_{C}}{\partial I_{ij}^{C}}}\right|} resulting in an saliency map (i.e. heatmap). === Guided backpropagation === The concept of guided backpropagation can be traced for the first time in the paper by Springenberg et al. "Striving For Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net" and also this method builds upon the work by Zeiler and Fergus "Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks". Guided backpropagation core is to understand what a CNN is learning, by visualizing the patterns that activate more strongly individual neurons (or filters), in architectures which do not rely on max-pooling layer. When propagating gradients back through a rectified linear unit (ReLU), guided backpropagation passes the gradient if and only if the input to the ReLU was positive (forward pass) and the output gradient is positive (backward signal), tackling both inactive neurons, negative gradients and suppressing the noise. The result displays sharper, high-resolution visualizations of what each neuron is responding to. Guided backpropagation represents a simple and practical method for model interpretability, helping understand how and where neural networks detect semantic concepts across layers. Moreover, it can be applied to any network architecture, due to its working principle. == Base versions == Class activation mapping and gradient-weighted class activation mapping are the original and most widely used methods for visual explanations in convolutional neural networks. These methods serve as the foundation for many later developments in explainable AI. Notation: In this article, the symbols i and j represent integer indices that disappear inside sums or averages, while x and y are the continuous (or up-sampled integer) coordinates of the final heat-map that is plotted. === Class activation mapping (CAM) === Class activation mapping (CAM) was the first, and the original, version of CAM methods, and it gave the name to the whole category. The approach was firstly introduced by Zhou et al. in their seminal work "Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization". This approach achieves class-specific heatmaps by modifying image classification CNN architectures, replacing fully-connected layers with convolutional layers and a final global average pooling layer. Its main scope is to localize and highlight discriminative regions of an input image that a CNN uses to identify a particular class, without needing explicit bounding box annotations. ==== Global average pooling (GAP) ==== Global average pooling (GAP) represents the key element in the original CAM approach. It is a dimensionality reduction technique and, similarly to other pooling layers, it allows the downsampling of the feature maps, calculating representative values for a specific region of the feature map. The particularity of GAP is that it calculates a single value for an entire feature map, significantly reducing the model dimensions. ==== Mathematical description ==== The mathematical description considers as its key the combination of convolutional and GAP layers. In CAM, it is mandatory to have the GAP layer after the last convolutional layer and before the final linear classifier layer. This last element of the architecture connects the output logits (the network predictions) y C {\displaystyle y^{C}} , to the GAP values, with its respective fine-tuned weights, w k C {\displaystyle w_{k}^{C}} . Considering A k {\displaystyle A^{k}} as the last feature maps of the last convolutional layer, GAP produces one value for each feature map, by averaging all the matrix elements (i, j) of the feature map: F k = 1 m n ∑ i = 1 m ∑ j = 1 n A i j k {\displaystyle F^{k}={\frac {1}{mn}}\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sum _{j=1}^{n}A_{ij}^{k}} with A k = [ A 11 k A 12 k ⋯ A 1 n k A 21 k A 22 k ⋯ A 2 n k ⋮ ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ A m 1 k A m 2 k ⋯ A m n k ] = { A i j k ∣ 1 ≤ i ≤ m , 1 ≤ j ≤ n } {\displaystyle A^{k}={\begin{bmatrix}A_{11}^{k}&A_{12}^{k}&\cdots &A_{1n}^{k}\\A_{21}^{k}&A_{22}^{k}&\cdots &A_{2n}^{k}\\\vdots &\vdots &\ddots &\vdots \\A_{m1}^{k}&A_{m2}^{k}&\cdots &A_{mn}^{k}\end{bmatrix}}=\left\{A_{

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  • Netflix Prize

    Netflix Prize

    The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users being identified except by numbers assigned for the contest. The competition was held by Netflix, a video streaming service, and was open to anyone who was neither connected with Netflix (current and former employees, agents, close relatives of Netflix employees, etc.) nor a resident of certain blocked countries (such as Cuba or North Korea). On September 21, 2009, the grand prize of US$1,000,000 was given to the BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos team which bested Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10.06%. == Problem and data sets == Netflix provided a training data set of 100,480,507 ratings that 480,189 users gave to 17,770 movies. Each training rating is a quadruplet of the form . The user and movie fields are integer IDs, while grades are from 1 to 5 (integer) stars. The qualifying data set contains over 2,817,131 triplets of the form , with grades known only to the jury. A participating team's algorithm must predict grades on the entire qualifying set, but they are informed of the score for only half of the data: a quiz set of 1,408,342 ratings. The other half is the test set of 1,408,789, and performance on this is used by the jury to determine potential prize winners. Only the judges know which ratings are in the quiz set, and which are in the test set—this arrangement is intended to make it difficult to hill climb on the test set. Submitted predictions are scored against the true grades in the form of root mean squared error (RMSE), and the goal is to reduce this error as much as possible. Note that, while the actual grades are integers in the range 1 to 5, submitted predictions need not be. Netflix also identified a probe subset of 1,408,395 ratings within the training data set. The probe, quiz, and test data sets were chosen to have similar statistical properties. In summary, the data used in the Netflix Prize looks as follows: Training set (99,072,112 ratings not including the probe set; 100,480,507 including the probe set) Probe set (1,408,395 ratings) Qualifying set (2,817,131 ratings) consisting of: Test set (1,408,789 ratings), used to determine winners Quiz set (1,408,342 ratings), used to calculate leaderboard scores For each movie, the title and year of release are provided in a separate dataset. No information at all is provided about users. In order to protect the privacy of the customers, "some of the rating data for some customers in the training and qualifying sets have been deliberately perturbed in one or more of the following ways: deleting ratings; inserting alternative ratings and dates; and modifying rating dates." The training set is constructed such that the average user rated over 200 movies, and the average movie was rated by over 5000 users. But there is wide variance in the data—some movies in the training set have as few as 3 ratings, while one user rated over 17,000 movies. There was some controversy as to the choice of RMSE as the defining metric. It has been claimed that even as small an improvement as 1% RMSE results in a significant difference in the ranking of the "top-10" most recommended movies for a user. == Prizes == Prizes were based on improvement over Netflix's own algorithm, called Cinematch, or the previous year's score if a team has made improvement beyond a certain threshold. A trivial algorithm that predicts for each movie in the quiz set its average grade from the training data produces an RMSE of 1.0540. Cinematch uses "straightforward statistical linear models with a lot of data conditioning." The performance of Cinematch had plateaued by 2006. Using only the training data, Cinematch scores an RMSE of 0.9514 on the quiz data, roughly a 10% improvement over the trivial algorithm. Cinematch has a similar performance on the test set, 0.9525. In order to win the grand prize of $1,000,000, a participating team had to improve this by another 10%, to achieve 0.8572 on the test set. Such an improvement on the quiz set corresponds to an RMSE of 0.8563. As long as no team won the grand prize, a progress prize of $50,000 was awarded every year for the best result thus far. However, in order to win this prize, an algorithm had to improve the RMSE on the quiz set by at least 1% over the previous progress prize winner (or over Cinematch, the first year). If no submission succeeded, the progress prize was not to be awarded for that year. To win a progress or grand prize a participant had to provide source code and a description of the algorithm to the jury within one week after being contacted by them. Following verification the winner also had to provide a non-exclusive license to Netflix. Netflix would publish only the description, not the source code, of the system. (To keep their algorithm and source code secret, a team could choose not to claim a prize.) The jury also kept their predictions secret from other participants. A team could send as many attempts to predict grades as they wish. Originally submissions were limited to once a week, but the interval was quickly modified to once a day. A team's best submission so far counted as their current submission. Once one of the teams succeeded in improving the RMSE by 10% or more, the jury would issue a last call, giving all teams 30 days to send their submissions. Only then, the team with the best submission was asked for the algorithm description, source code, and non-exclusive license, and, after successful verification; declared a grand prize winner. The contest would last until the grand prize winner was declared. Had no one received the grand prize, it would have lasted for at least five years (until October 2, 2011). After that date, the contest could have been terminated at any time at Netflix's sole discretion. == Progress over the years == The competition began on October 2, 2006. By October 8, a team called WXYZConsulting had already beaten Cinematch's results. By October 15, there were three teams who had beaten Cinematch, one of them by 1.06%, enough to qualify for the annual progress prize. By June 2007 over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets. Over the first year of the competition, a handful of front-runners traded first place. The more prominent ones were: WXYZConsulting, a team of Wei Xu and Yi Zhang. (A front runner during November–December 2006.) ML@UToronto A, a team from the University of Toronto led by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton. (A front runner during parts of October–December 2006.) Gravity, a team of four scientists from the Budapest University of Technology (A front runner during January–May 2007.) BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs. (A front runner since May 2007.) Dinosaur Planet, a team of three undergraduates from Princeton University. (A front runner on September 3, 2007 for one hour before BellKor snatched back the lead.) The algorithms used by the leading teams were usually an ensemble of singular value decomposition, k-nearest neighbor, neural networks, and so on. On August 12, 2007, many contestants gathered at the KDD Cup and Workshop 2007, held at San Jose, California. During the workshop all four of the top teams on the leaderboard at that time presented their techniques. The team from IBM Research—Yan Liu, Saharon Rosset, Claudia Perlich, and Zhenzhen Kou—won the third place in Task 1 and first place in Task 2. Over the second year of the competition, only three teams reached the leading position: BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs (front runner during May 2007 – September 2008) BigChaos, a team of Austrian scientists from Commendo Research & Consulting (single team front runner since October 2008) BellKor in BigChaos, a joint team of the two leading single teams (a front runner since September 2008) === 2007 Progress Prize === On September 2, 2007, the competition entered the "last call" period for the 2007 Progress Prize. Over 40,000 teams from 186 countries had entered the contest. They had thirty days to tender submissions for consideration. At the beginning of this period the leading team was BellKor, with an RMSE of 0.8728 (8.26% improvement), followed by Dinosaur Planet (RMSE = 0.8769; 7.83% improvement), and Gravity (RMSE = 0.8785; 7.66% improvement). In the last hour of the last call period, an entry by "KorBell" took first place. This turned out to be an alternate name for Team BellKor. On November 13, 2007, team KorBell (formerly BellKor) was declared the winner of the $50,000 Progress Prize with an RMSE of 0.8712 (8.43% improvement). The team consisted of three researchers from AT&T Labs, Yehuda Koren, Robert Bell, and Chris Volinsky. As required, they published a description of their a

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  • Full Dive

    Full Dive

    Full Dive, short for Full Dive: This Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG Is Even Shittier than Real Life! (Japanese: 究極進化したフルダイブRPGが現実よりもクソゲーだったら, Hepburn: Kyūkyoku Shinka shita Furu Daibu RPG ga Genjitsu yori mo Kusogē Dattara), is a Japanese light novel series written by Light Tuchihi and illustrated by Youta. Media Factory has published four volumes since August 2020 under their MF Bunko J imprint. A manga adaptation with art by Kino was serialized in Media Factory's seinen manga magazine Monthly Comic Alive from January 2021 to January 2022. An anime television series adaptation by ENGI aired from April to June 2021. == Plot == Hiroshi Yuki, with the player name of Hiro, is a high school boy who loves to play virtual reality MMORPGs (VRMMORPG) in order to escape reality. When a game store manager named Reona Kisaragi tricks him into buying the game Kiwame Quest, he soon discovers that it is not what it seems. Unlike regular games, it is a game that tries to pursue realism to a fanatical point. As such, Hiroshi struggles to eke out a niche. Despite the disadvantages, he is determined to complete the game. == Characters == === Main characters === Hiroshi Yuki (結城宏, Yūki Hiroshi) Voiced by: Daiki Yamashita, Riho Sugiyama (young) (Japanese); Johnny Yong Bosch, Michele Knotz (young) (English) Hiroshi is a high school student who is tricked into buying Kiwame Quest by game store manager, Reona Kisaragi. He is a former member of the track team who quit following an unfortunate incident and he likes to play VRMMORPGs in order to escape reality. His player name is Hiro. Reona Kisaragi (如月玲於奈, Kisaragi Reona) Voiced by: Ayana Taketatsu (Japanese); Natalie Van Sistine (English) Reona is a game store manager who tricks Hiroshi into buying Kiwame Quest. She likes to tease him and her in-game avatar is that of a fairy. Alicia (アリシア, Arishia) Voiced by: Fairouz Ai (Japanese); Kayli Mills (English) Alicia is one of Hiroshi's childhood friends in Kiwame Quest. She has an older brother named Martin in-game. Mizarisa (ミザリサ) Voiced by: Shiori Izawa (Japanese); Sarah Anne Williams (English) Mizarisa is the town inquisitor in Kiwame Quest. Kaede Yuki (結城楓, Yūki Kaede) Voiced by: Aoi Koga (Japanese); Kate Bristol (English) Kaede is Hiroshi's younger sister. She used to look up to her older brother, but their relationship has been strained ever since he quit the track team. === NPCs === Martin (マーチン, Māchin) Voiced by: Haruki Ishiya, Natsumi Fujiwara (young) (Japanese); Ben Lepley, Krystal LaPorte (young) (English) Martin is one of Hiroshi's childhood friends in Kiwame Quest. He is also Alicia's older brother in-game. Tesla (テスラ, Tesura) Voiced by: Satoshi Hino (Japanese); Jason Liebrecht (English) Tesla is the captain of the City Guard in Kiwame Quest. Govern (ガバン, Gaban) Voiced by: Shizuka Itō (Japanese); Lisa Ortiz (English) Govern is the queen of Ted in Kiwame Quest. === Other characters === Ginji (ギンジ) Voiced by: Katsuyuki Konishi (Japanese); Brent Mukai (English) Ginji is a veteran player of Kiwame Quest. Soichiro Kamui (神居宗一郎, Kamui Sōichirō) Voiced by: Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (Japanese); Samuel Drake (English) Kamui is the only known player who has successfully completed Kiwame Quest. == Media == === Light novels === Light Tuchihi launched the light novel series, with illustrations by Youta, under Media Factory's MF Bunko J label on August 25, 2020. ==== Volumes ==== === Manga === A manga adaptation by Kino was serialized in Media Factory's Monthly Comic Alive magazine from January 27, 2021, to January 27, 2022. Two tankōbon volumes were released from May 21, 2021, to January 21, 2022. ==== Volumes ==== === Anime === An anime television series adaptation was announced on December 4, 2020. The series was animated by ENGI and directed by Kazuya Miura, with Kenta Ihara writing the series' scripts, and Yūta Kevin Kenmotsu designing the characters. It ran from April 7 to June 23, 2021, on AT-X, Tokyo MX, SUN, KBS Kyoto, and BS11. Mayu Maeshima performed the opening theme "Answer", while Ayana Taketatsu, Fairouz Ai, Shiori Izawa, and Aoi Koga performed the ending theme "Kisuida!". It ran for 12 episodes. Funimation licensed and streamed the series. On June 8, 2021, Funimation announced that the series would receive an English dub, which premiered the following day. Following Sony's acquisition of Crunchyroll, the series was moved to Crunchyroll. ==== Episodes ====

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  • Statistical semantics

    Statistical semantics

    In linguistics, statistical semantics applies the methods of statistics to the problem of determining the meaning of words or phrases, ideally through unsupervised learning, to a degree of precision at least sufficient for the purpose of information retrieval. == History == The term statistical semantics was first used by Warren Weaver in his well-known paper on machine translation. He argued that word-sense disambiguation for machine translation should be based on the co-occurrence frequency of the context words near a given target word. The underlying assumption that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was advocated by J. R. Firth. This assumption is known in linguistics as the distributional hypothesis. Emile Delavenay defined statistical semantics as the "statistical study of the meanings of words and their frequency and order of recurrence". "Furnas et al. 1983" is frequently cited as a foundational contribution to statistical semantics. An early success in the field was latent semantic analysis. == Applications == Research in statistical semantics has resulted in a wide variety of algorithms that use the distributional hypothesis to discover many aspects of semantics, by applying statistical techniques to large corpora: Measuring the similarity in word meanings Measuring the similarity in word relations Modeling similarity-based generalization Discovering words with a given relation Classifying relations between words Extracting keywords from documents Measuring the cohesiveness of text Discovering the different senses of words Distinguishing the different senses of words Subcognitive aspects of words Distinguishing praise from criticism == Related fields == Statistical semantics focuses on the meanings of common words and the relations between common words, unlike text mining, which tends to focus on whole documents, document collections, or named entities (names of people, places, and organizations). Statistical semantics is a subfield of computational semantics, which is in turn a subfield of computational linguistics and natural language processing. Many of the applications of statistical semantics (listed above) can also be addressed by lexicon-based algorithms, instead of the corpus-based algorithms of statistical semantics. One advantage of corpus-based algorithms is that they are typically not as labour-intensive as lexicon-based algorithms. Another advantage is that they are usually easier to adapt to new languages or noisier new text types from e.g. social media than lexicon-based algorithms are. However, the best performance on an application is often achieved by combining the two approaches.

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  • Indic computing

    Indic computing

    Indic Computing means "computing in Indic", i.e., Indian Scripts and Languages. It involves developing software in Indic Scripts/languages, Input methods, Localization of computer applications, web development, Database Management, Spell checkers, Speech to Text and Text to Speech applications and OCR in Indian languages. Unicode standard version 15.0 specifies codes for 9 Indic scripts in Chapter 12 titled "South and Central Asia-I, Official Scripts of India". The 9 scripts are Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu. A lot of Indic Computing projects are going on. They involve some government sector companies, some volunteer groups and individual people. == Government sector == Indian Union Government made it mandatory for Mobile phone companies whose handsets manufactured, stored, sold and distributed in India to have support for displaying and typing text using fonts for all 22 languages. This move has seen rise in use of Indian languages by millions of users. === TDIL === The Department of Electronics and Information Technology, India initiated the TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages) with the objective of developing Information Processing Tools and Techniques to facilitate human-machine interaction without a language barrier; creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources; and integrating them to develop innovative user products and services. In 2005, it started distributing language software tools developed by Government/Academic/Private companies in the form of CD for non commercial use. Some of the outcomes of TDIL program have been deployed on Indian Language Technology Proliferation & Deployment Centre. This Centre disseminates all the linguistic resources, tools & applications which have been developed under TDIL funding. This programme took to exponential expansion under the leadership of Dr. Swaran Lata who also created international foot-print of the programme. She has now retired. === C-DAC === C-DAC is an India based government software company which is involved in developing language related software. It is best known for developing InScript Keyboard, the standard keyboard for Indian languages. It has also developed lot of Indic language solutions including Word Processors, typing tools, text to speech software, OCR in Indian languages etc. ==== BharateeyaOO.org ==== The work developed out of CDAC, Bangalore (earlier known as NCST, Bangalore) became BharateeyaOO. OpenOffice 2.1 had support for over 10 Indian languages. ==== BOSS ==== BOSS linux was developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) to promote use of open-source software in India. == NGO and Volunteer groups == === Indlinux === Indlinux organisation helped organise the individual volunteers working on different indic language versions of Linux and its applications. === Sarovar === Sarovar.org is India's first portal to host projects under Free/Open source licenses. It is located in Trivandrum, India and hosted at Asianet data center. Sarovar.org is customised, installed and maintained by Linuxense as part of their community services and sponsored by River Valley Technologies. Sarovar.org is built on Debian Etch and GForge and runs off METTLE. === Pinaak === Pinaak is a non-government charitable society devoted to Indic language computing. It works for software localization, developing language software, localizing open source software, enriching online encyclopedias etc. In addition to this Pinaak works for educating people about computing, ethical use of Internet and use of Indian languages on Internet. === Ankur Group === Ankur Group is working toward supporting Bengali language (Bengali) on Linux operating system including localized Bengali GUI, Live CD, English-to-Bengali translator, Bengali OCR and Bengali Dictionary etc. === BhashaIndia === === SMC === SMC is a free software group, working to bridge the language divide in Kerala in the technology front and is today the biggest language computing community in India. == Input methods == === Full size keyboards === With the advent of Unicode inputting Indic text on computer has become very easy. A number of methods exist for this purpose, but the main ones are:- ==== InScript ==== Inscript is the standard keyboard for Indian languages. Developed by C-DAC and standardized by Government of India. Nowadays it comes inbuilt in all major operating systems including Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7), Linux and Macintosh. ==== Phonetic transliteration ==== This is a typing method in which, for instance, the user types text in an Indian language using Roman characters and it is phonetically converted to equivalent text in Indian script in real time. This type of conversion is done by phonetic text editors, word processors and software plugins. Building up on the idea, one can use phonetic IME tools that allow Indic text to be input in any application. Some examples of phonetic transliterators are Xlit, Google Indic Transliteration, BarahaIME, Indic IME, Rupantar, SMC's Indic Keyboard and Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool. SMC's Indic Keyboard has support for as many as 23 languages whereas Google Indic Keyboard only supports 11 Indian languages. They can be broadly classified as: Fixed transliteration scheme based tools – They work using a fixed transliteration scheme to convert text. Some examples are Indic IME, Rupantar and BarahaIME. Intelligent/Learning based transliteration tools – They compare the word with a dictionary and then convert it to the equivalent words in the target language. Some of the popular ones are Google Indic Transliteration, Xlit, Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool and QuillPad. ==== Remington (typewriter) ==== This layout was developed when computers had not been invented or deployed with Indic languages, and typewriters were the only means to type text in Indic scripts. Since typewriters were mechanical and could not include a script processor engine, each character had to be placed on the keyboard separately, which resulted in a very complex and difficult to learn keyboard layout. With the advent of Unicode, the Remington layout was added to various typing tools for sake of backward compatibility, so that old typists did not have to learn a new keyboard layout. Nowadays this layout is only used by old typists who are used to this layout due to several years of usage. One tool to include Remington layout is Indic IME. A font that is based on the Remington keyboard layout is Kruti Dev. Another online tool that very closely supports the old Remington keyboard layout using Kruti Dev is the Remington Typing tool. === Braille === IBus Sharada Braille, which supports seven Indian languages was developed by SMC. === Mobile phones with Numeric keyboards === Mobile/Hand/cell phone basic models have 12 keys like the plain old telephone keypad. Each key is mapped to 3 or 4 English letters to facilitate data entry in English. For inputting Indian languages with this kind of keypad, there are two ways to do so. First is the Multi-tap Method and second uses visual help from the screen like Panini Keypad. The primary usage is SMS. 140 characters size used for English/Roman languages can be used to accommodate only about 70 language characters when Unicode Proprietary compression is used some times to increase the size of single message for Complex script languages like Hindi. A research study of the available methods and recommendations of proposed standard was released by Broadband Wireless Consortium of India (BWCI). ==== Transliteration/Phonetic methods ==== English is used to type in Indian languages. QuillPad IndiSMS ==== Native methods ==== In native methods, the letters of the language are displayed on the screen corresponding to the numeral keys based on the probabilities of those letters for that language. Additional letters can be accessed by using a special key. When a word is partially typed, options are presented from which the user can make a selection. === Smart phones with Qwerty keyboards === Most smart phones have about 35 keys catering primarily to the English language. Numerals and some symbols are accessed with a special key called Alt. Indic input methods are yet to evolve for these types of phones, as support of Unicode for rendering is not widely available. === For Smart Phones with Soft/Virtual keyboards === Inscript is being adopted for smart phone usage. For Android phones which can render Indic languages, Swalekh Multilingual Keypad Multiling Keyboard app are available. Gboard offers support for several Indian languages. == Localization == Localization means translating software, operating systems, websites etc. various applications in Indian language. Various volunteers groups are working in this direction. === Mandrake Tamil Version === A notable example is the Tamil version of Mandrake linux(defunct since 2011). Tamil speakers in Toronto (Canada) released Mandrake,

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  • Computational law

    Computational law

    Computational law is the branch of legal informatics concerned with the automation of legal reasoning. What distinguishes Computational Law systems from other instances of legal technology is their autonomy, i.e. the ability to answer legal questions without additional input from human legal experts. While there are many possible applications of Computational Law, the primary focus of work in the field today is compliance management, i.e. the development and deployment of computer systems capable of assessing, facilitating, or enforcing compliance with rules and regulations. Some systems of this sort already exist. TurboTax is a good example. And the potential is particularly significant now due to recent technological advances – including the prevalence of the Internet in human interaction and the proliferation of embedded computer systems (such as smart phones, self-driving cars, and robots). There are also applications that do not involve governmental laws. The regulations can just as well be the terms of contracts (e.g. delivery schedules, insurance covenants, real estate transactions, financial agreements). They can be the policies of corporations (e.g. constraints on travel, expenditure reporting, pricing rules). They can even be the rules of games (embodied in computer game playing systems). == History == Speculation about potential benefits to legal practice through applying methods from computational science and AI research to automate parts of the law date back at least to the middle 1940s. Further, AI and law and computational law do not seem easily separable, as perhaps most of AI research focusing on the law and its automation appears to utilize computational methods. The forms that speculation took are multiple and not all related in ways to readily show closeness to one another. This history will sketch them as they were, attempting to show relationships where they can be found to have existed. By 1949, a minor academic field aiming to incorporate electronic and computational methods to legal problems had been founded by American legal scholars, called jurimetrics. Though broadly said to be concerned with the application of the "methods of science" to the law, these methods were actually of a quite specifically defined scope. Jurimetrics was to be "concerned with such matters as the quantitative analysis of judicial behavior, the application of communication and information theory to legal expression, the use of mathematical logic in law, the retrieval of legal data by electronic and mechanical means, and the formulation of a calculus of legal predictability". These interests led in 1959 to the founding a journal, Modern Uses of Logic in Law, as a forum wherein articles would be published about the applications of techniques such as mathematical logic, engineering, statistics, etc. to the legal study and development. In 1966, this Journal was renamed as Jurimetrics. Today, however, the journal and meaning of jurimetrics seems to have broadened far beyond what would fit under the areas of applications of computers and computational methods to law. Today the journal not only publishes articles on such practices as found in computational law, but has broadened jurimetrical concerns to mean also things like the use of social science in law or the "policy implications [of] and legislative and administrative control of science". Independently in 1958, at the Conference for the Mechanization of Thought held at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, UK, the French jurist Lucien Mehl presented a paper both on the benefits of using computational methods for law and on the potential means to use such methods to automate law for a discussion that included AI luminaries like Marvin Minsky. Mehl believed that the law could by automated by two basic distinct, though not wholly separable, types of machine. These were the "documentary or information machine", which would provide the legal researcher quick access to relevant case precedents and legal scholarship, and the "consultation machine", which would be "capable of answering any question put to it over a vast field of law". The latter type of machine would be able to basically do much of a lawyer's job by simply giving the "exact answer to a [legal] problem put to it". By 1970, Mehl's first type of machine, one that would be able to retrieve information, had been accomplished but there seems to have been little consideration of further fruitful intersections between AI and legal research. There were, however, still hopes that computers could model the lawyer's thought processes through computational methods and then apply that capacity to solve legal problems, thus automating and improving legal services via increased efficiency as well as shedding light on the nature of legal reasoning. By the late 1970s, computer science and the affordability of computer technology had progressed enough that the retrieval of "legal data by electronic and mechanical means" had been achieved by machines fitting Mehl's first type and were in common use in American law firms. During this time, research focused on improving the goals of the early 1970s occurred, with programs like Taxman being worked on in order to both bring useful computer technology into the law as practical aids and to help specify the exact nature of legal concepts. Nonetheless, progress on the second type of machine, one that would more fully automate the law, remained relatively inert. Research into machines that could answer questions in the way that Mehl's consultation machine would picked up somewhat in the late 1970s and 1980s. A 1979 convention in Swansea, Wales marked the first international effort solely to focus upon applying artificial intelligence research to legal problems in order to "consider how computers can be used to discover and apply the legal norms embedded within the written sources of the law". Considerable progress on the development of the second type of machine was made in the following decade, with the development of a variety of expert systems. According to Thorne McCarty, "these systems all have the following characteristics: They do backward chaining inference from a specified goal; they ask questions to elicit information from the user; and they produce a suggested answer along with a trace of the supporting legal rules." According to Prakken and Sartor the representation of the British Nationality Act as a logic program, which introduced this approach, was "hugely influential for the development of computational representations of legislation, showing how logic programming enables intuitively appealing representations that can be directly deployed to generate automatic inferences". In 2021, this work received the Inaugural CodeX Prize as "one of the first and best-known works in computational law, and one of the most widely cited papers in the field." In a 1988 review of Anne Gardner's book An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning (1987), the Harvard academic legal scholar and computer scientist Edwina Rissland wrote that "She plays, in part, the role of pioneer; artificial intelligence ("AI") techniques have not yet been widely applied to perform legal tasks. Therefore, Gardner, and this review, first describe and define the field, then demonstrate a working model in the domain of contract offer and acceptance." Eight years after the Swansea conference had passed, and still AI and law researchers merely trying to delineate the field could be described by their own kind as "pioneer[s]". In the 1990s and early 2000s more progress occurred. Computational research generated insights for law. The First International Conference on AI and the Law occurred in 1987, but it is in the 1990s and 2000s that the biannual conference began to build up steam and to delve more deeply into the issues involved with work intersecting computational methods, AI, and law. Classes began to be taught to undergraduates on the uses of computational methods to automating, understanding, and obeying the law. Further, by 2005, a team largely composed of Stanford computer scientists from the Stanford Logic group had devoted themselves to studying the uses of computational techniques to the law. Computational methods in fact advanced enough that members of the legal profession began in the 2000s to both analyze, predict and worry about the potential future of computational law and a new academic field of computational legal studies seems to be now well established. As insight into what such scholars see in the law's future due in part to computational law, here is quote from a recent conference about the "New Normal" for the legal profession: "Over the last 5 years, in the fallout of the Great Recession, the legal profession has entered the era of the New Normal. Notably, a series of forces related to technological change, globalization, and the pressure to do more with less (in both corpo

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  • Roborace

    Roborace

    Roborace was a competition with autonomously driving, electrically powered vehicles. Founded in 2015 by Denis Sverdlov, it aimed to be the first global championship for autonomous cars. From 2017 to 2019, the official CEO was 2016–17 Formula E champion, Lucas Di Grassi, who later became a member of Roborace’s supervisory board. The series tested their technology and race formats at FIA Formula E Championship events during 2016–2018. In 2019 Roborace organized Season Alpha, which consisted of 4 trial racing events with several independent teams competing against each other for the first time. In 2020–21 Roborace held Season Beta with 7 competing teams. All teams utilized the same chassis and powertrain, but they had to develop their own real-time computing algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies. In May 2022, Arrival, the owner of Roborace, confirmed that they were no longer continuing the Roborace programme, but that they were hoping to find alternative funding. In February 2024, after getting its stock delisted from the Nasdaq, Arrival's UK division entered administration, with future plans of a sale of Arrival and all of its affiliated assets. == Cars == === Robocar === The world's first purpose-built autonomous racing car, Robocar, was designed by Daniel Simon, who previously worked on vehicles for movies such as Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, as well as designing the livery for the 2011 HRT Formula One car. Michelin is the official tyre supplier, and the internal computing processors (Drive PX 2) are Nvidia. The chassis itself is shaped like a teardrop, improving aerodynamic efficiency. The car weighs around 1350 kg and is 4.8 metres (16 ft) long and 2 metres (6.6 ft) wide. It has four electric motors, each with a power of 135 kW producing over 500 hp combined, and utilizes a 840V battery. For navigation, it relies on a mixture of optical systems, radars, lidars and ultrasonic sensors. The vehicle has been demonstrated at speeds of almost 300 km/h (190 mph). === DevBot === Development of the Robocar started in early 2016, with a first outing of a test vehicle, the so-called DevBot, following in the summer of the same year. The test car consisted of the same internal units (battery, motor, electronics) used in the Robocar, but were placed in the chassis of a Ginetta LMP3 car without an engine cover in order to provide better cooling and access. DevBot saw its first public outing at the Formula E pre-season tests in Donington Park in August 2016. After battery issues in Hong Kong caused the development team to abandon their demonstration run, the DevBot successfully drove twelve laps around the Moulay El Hassan Formula E circuit in Marrakesh. Other test tracks included Michelin's testing ground in Ladoux and the Silverstone Stowe Circuit. During testing ahead of the 2017 Buenos Aires ePrix, two DevBot cars raced against each other autonomously, resulting in one of the vehicles crashing on a corner. During the 2017–18 Formula E season, Roborace pitched pro-drifter Ryan Tuerck against a DevBot at the Rome ePrix. At the Berlin ePrix, Roborace held the Human + Machine Challenge, the first race for combined teams of human drivers and AIs using a pair of Devbots. === DevBot 2.0 === An upgraded version of DevBot was announced in late 2018, and after private testing made its public debut in 2019 at the inaugural Season Alpha event. DevBot 2.0 uses the same technology as both Robocar and DevBot, with the main changes being a conversion to being driven on the rear axle only, a lower position for the driver for safety reasons and a bespoke composite bodywork. == Seasons == === Testing === ==== 2016–17 Formula E season ==== Roborace appeared at a number of Formula E events during the 2016–17 Formula E season. However, in this period only test drives with two different DevBots took place. Within the framework of the 2017 Buenos Aires ePrix both DevBot vehicles drove against each other on a race track for the first time. There were also DevBot demonstrations at the 2016 Marrakesh ePrix, 2017 Berlin ePrix, 2017 New York City ePrix and 2017 Montreal ePrix. At the 2017 Paris ePrix, the developers also let a Robocar onto the track for the first time, even though the vehicle only drove the track at walking speed. ==== 2017–18 Formula E season ==== At the start of the 2017/18 Formula E season, the Roborace developers once again tested the DevBot during a public time trial between the Roborace CI and the TV presenter Nicki Shields at the 2017 Hong Kong ePrix. As part of a similar time trial at the 2018 Rome ePrix, drift professional Ryan Tuerck also tested the DevBot. The Human + Machine Challenge was created for the Formula E race on the Berlin ePrix. A team of doctoral students from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Pisa programmed the software for the Devbot to drive autonomously around the circuit in Berlin. Afterwards both teams in combination with a human driver competed in a public time trial. The vehicle of the team of the Technical University of Munich finished the Human + Machine Challenge with an average lap time of 91.59 seconds, almost four seconds faster than that of the University of Pisa with 95.36 seconds and thus won the Challenge. At the Goodwood Festival of Speed, Robocar became the first ever fully autonomous race car to complete the Goodwood Hill Climb. The vehicle completed the first official autonomous run on 13 July 2018 within the framework of the event. === Season Alpha (2019) === Season Alpha took place at various locations in Europe and North America with the aim of testing several competition formats using the new DevBot 2.0. The first event was held at the Circuito Monteblanco in Spain, and featured the first race between two fully autonomous cars. The events were not broadcast live, instead short clips on YouTube were released. Two teams were competing: Arrival and the Technical University of Munich. On 7 July 2019, the Roborace DevBot 2.0 car set the first ever autonomous official timed run at Goodwood Festival of Speed, with a time of 66.96 s and a top speed of 162.8 km/h (101.2 mph). This is currently the record for autonomous vehicles. Roborace also set the Guinness World Record for having the fastest autonomous car in the world. The Robocar reached a speed of 282.42 km/h (175.49 mph). === Season Beta (2020–21) === The second testing season took place at various locations between September 2020 and October 2021, featuring 16 races and involving mixed reality elements dubbed "Roborace Metaverse", which is based on Roborace's patented technology. The program of Season Beta competitions has gradually complicating rules arranged in a progression of so-called missions. Each mission consists of two racing rounds — one round per day. A mission plan issued by Roborace for each mission defines its objectives, rules, and point-scoring system. The key objective of Season Beta is to come to the point when the majority of competing teams have developed sufficient capability for wheel-to-wheel racing in Season 1. There were 7 teams competing in Season Beta: Arrival Racing (UK/Russia), Autonomous Racing Graz (Austria), MIT Driverless (United States), Acronis SIT (Switzerland), University of Pisa (Italy), PoliMOVE (Italy), CMU (United States).

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