AI Essay Detector Grammarly

AI Essay Detector Grammarly — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

AstroPay

AstroPay is a global digital wallet that provides users with a way to pay, send, and receive money. The app provides online payments, virtual and physical debit cards, peer-to-peer money transfers, and more. == History == AstroPay was founded in Uruguay in 2009 as a payment processing company. Over time, it expanded its services across Latin America, EMEA, and APAC. A significant milestone occurred in 2016, when AstroPay spun off dLocal, focusing on cross-border payments for emerging markets. dLocal became Uruguay's first unicorn and eventually went public through a successful IPO. In 2020, AstroPay spun off its payment processing services into a new entity, D24, to focus on mobile wallet for cross border. Between 2023 and 2024 the Company brought new leadership to guide its transition towards becoming a fully focused global digital multicurrency wallet where users save, send, and spend globally. This shift introduced enhanced features, including loyalty prepaid cards and multicurrency accounts. == Services == AstroPay offers three main products: AstroPay Wallet, AstroPay check-out, and AstroPay Platform. AstroPay Wallet is a digital wallet for consumers, where they have multicurrency accounts, prepaid card and marketplace. With AstroPay check-out, businesses can tap into AstroPay's wallet user base by accepting AstroPay as a payment method in their check-out options. Lastly, AstroPay Platform enables other businesses to use the AstroPay network to launch their own global wallet. == Brand endorsements, partnerships == AstroPay's marketing strategy has included the development of co-branded products with sports teams and other brand. The company sponsored Burnley Football Club during the 2018–19 Premier League season, renewing the partnership for the 2021–22 Premier League season when it became the club's official payment service partner. In August 2021, AstroPay entered into a partnership with the Wolverhampton Wanderers for the 2021-22 Premier League season, and the following year, became the team's shirt sponsor. Later, in September 2021, AstroPay expanded its partnership with Wolverhampton Wanderers, which included becoming the team's official payment partner and later, in 2023, co-launching a co-branded card. Other partnerships include Newcastle United in 2021 in the English Premier League. AstroPay made arrangements to ensure that branding and logo would be visible on the pitch-side LED advertising during Premier League matches. Furthermore, in June 2022, the company renewed it's partnership with Wolverhampton Wanderers for the 2022-23 Premier League season and launched its Wolves debit card in February 2023. Some other notable partnerships include: Universidad de Chile in 2024, Tottenham Hotspurs in 2023-25, and even a collaboration with Lionel Messi across all of Latin America. == Recent developments == AstroPay has refocused its strategy since 2023, pivoting from payment processing to concentrate on its global digital wallet. This move reflects a broader effort to redefine the company's market positioning by emphasizing global user-friendly financial services, while separating its identity from previous operations managed by dLocal and D24.
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Ranking SVM

In machine learning, a ranking SVM is a variant of the support vector machine algorithm, which is used to solve certain ranking problems (via learning to rank). The ranking SVM algorithm was published by Thorsten Joachims in 2002. The original purpose of the algorithm was to improve the performance of an internet search engine. However, it was found that ranking SVM also can be used to solve other problems such as Rank SIFT. == Description == The ranking SVM algorithm is a learning retrieval function that employs pairwise ranking methods to adaptively sort results based on how 'relevant' they are for a specific query. The ranking SVM function uses a mapping function to describe the match between a search query and the features of each of the possible results. This mapping function projects each data pair (such as a search query and clicked web-page, for example) onto a feature space. These features are combined with the corresponding click-through data (which can act as a proxy for how relevant a page is for a specific query) and can then be used as the training data for the ranking SVM algorithm. Generally, ranking SVM includes three steps in the training period: It maps the similarities between queries and the clicked pages onto a certain feature space. It calculates the distances between any two of the vectors obtained in step 1. It forms an optimization problem which is similar to a standard SVM classification and solves this problem with the regular SVM solver. == Background == === Ranking method === Suppose C {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} } is a data set containing N {\displaystyle N} elements c i {\displaystyle c_{i}} . r {\displaystyle r} is a ranking method applied to C {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} } . Then the r {\displaystyle r} in C {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} } can be represented as a N × N {\displaystyle N\times N} binary matrix. If the rank of c i {\displaystyle c_{i}} is higher than the rank of c j {\displaystyle c_{j}} , i.e. r c i < r c j {\displaystyle r\ c_{i} Read more →
Best AI Customer-support Bots in 2026

In search of the best AI customer-support bot? An AI customer-support bot is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI customer-support bot slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.
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Best AI Code Generators in 2026

Comparing the best AI code generator? An AI code generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it lowers the barrier so anyone can produce professional output. Privacy matters too: check whether your data trains the model and whether a no-log or enterprise tier is available. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI code generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.
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Vulnerability assessment (computing)

Vulnerability assessment is a process of defining, identifying and classifying the security holes in information technology systems. An attacker can exploit a vulnerability to violate the security of a system. Some known vulnerabilities are Authentication Vulnerability, Authorization Vulnerability and Input Validation Vulnerability. == Purpose == Before deploying a system, it first must go through from a series of vulnerability assessments that will ensure that the build system is secure from all the known security risks. When a new vulnerability is discovered, the system administrator can again perform an assessment, discover which modules are vulnerable, and start the patch process. After the fixes are in place, another assessment can be run to verify that the vulnerabilities were actually resolved. This cycle of assess, patch, and re-assess has become the standard method for many organizations to manage their security issues. The primary purpose of the assessment is to find the vulnerabilities in the system, but the assessment report conveys to stakeholders that the system is secured from these vulnerabilities. If an intruder gained access to a network consisting of vulnerable Web servers, it is safe to assume that he gained access to those systems as well. Because of assessment report, the security administrator will be able to determine how intrusion occurred, identify compromised assets and take appropriate security measures to prevent critical damage to the system. == Assessment types == Depending on the system a vulnerability assessment can have many types and level. === Host assessment === A host assessment looks for system-level vulnerabilities such as insecure file permissions, application level bugs, backdoor and Trojan horse installations. It requires specialized tools for the operating system and software packages being used, in addition to administrative access to each system that should be tested. Host assessment is often very costly in term of time, and thus is only used in the assessment of critical systems. Tools like COPS and Tiger are popular in host assessment. === Network assessment === In a network assessment one assess the network for known vulnerabilities. It locates all systems on a network, determines what network services are in use, and then analyzes those services for potential vulnerabilities. This process does not require any configuration changes on the systems being assessed. Unlike host assessment, network assessment requires little computational cost and effort. == Vulnerability assessment vs penetration testing == Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing are two different testing methods. They are differentiated on the basis of certain specific parameters. == Regulatory requirements == Vulnerability assessments are mandated or strongly recommended by several regulatory frameworks. In the United States healthcare sector, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule requires covered entities to conduct periodic evaluations of their security posture, and a December 2024 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking would explicitly require vulnerability scanning at least every six months for systems containing electronic protected health information. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requires quarterly vulnerability scans for organizations that process credit card transactions, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework includes vulnerability assessment as a core component of its Identify function.
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Jun'ichi Tsujii

Jun'ichi Tsujii (辻井潤一, Tsujii Jun'ichi; born 7 February 1949) is a Japanese computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and text mining, particularly in the field of biology and bioinformatics. == Education == Tsujii received his Bachelor of Engineering, Master of Engineering and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Kyoto University in 1971, 1973, and 1978 respectively. He was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Kyoto University, before accepting a position as Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 1988. He was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2006, and has been a permanent member of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) since 1992, and the chair of the committee since 2014. == Research == Since May 2015, Tsujii has been the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Center at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan. Tsujii was previously a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). Before joining MSRA, he was a professor at the University of Tokyo, where he belonged to both the School of Inter-faculty Initiative on Informatics and the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. Tsujii is also a Visiting Professor and Scientific Advisor at the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. == Awards == On 14 May 2010, Tsujii was awarded the Medals of Honor with Purple Ribbon, one of Japan's highest awards, presented to influential contributors in the fields of art, academics or sports. In September 2014, Tsujii was awarded the FUNAI Achievement Award at the Forum on Information Technology (FIT), which took place at the University of Tsukuba. The award is presented to distinguished individuals engaged in research or related business activities in the field of Information Technology who have produced excellent achievements in the field, are still active in leading positions and have strong impact on young students and researchers. In December 2014, Tsujii was named as an ACL Fellow, in recognition of his significant contributions to MT, parsing by unification-based grammar and text mining for biology. In March 2016, Tsujii was awarded Okawa Prize for his contribution to the field of Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation and Text Mining, together with Professor Jaime Carbonnel of CMU. In August 2021, Tsujii received ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, which is considered the most prestigious award in the field of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. In May 2022, Tsujii received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays and Neck Ribbon, from the Japanese government. In October 2024, Tsujii was designated a Person of Cultural Merit. == Selected publications == Oiwa, Hidekazu; Tsujii, Jun'ichi (2014). Common Space Embedding of Primal-Dual Relation Semantic Spaces. COLING 2014. Dublin. pp. 1579–1590. Taura, K.; Matsuzaki, T.; Miwa, M.; Kamoshida, Y.; Yokoyama, D.; Dun, N.; Shibata, T.; Jun, C. S.; Tsujii, J. (2013). "Design and implementation of GXP make – A workflow system based on make". Future Generation Computer Systems. 29 (2): 662–672. doi:10.1016/j.future.2011.05.026. S2CID 31627886. Sun, X.; Zhang, Y.; Matsuzaki, T.; Tsuruoka, Y.; Tsujii, J. (2013). "Probabilistic Chinese word segmentation with non-local information and stochastic training". Information Processing & Management. 49 (3): 626–636. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2012.12.003. Mu, T.; Goulermas, J. Y.; Tsujii, J.; Ananiadou, S. (2012). "Proximity-Based Frameworks for Generating Embeddings from Multi-Output Data". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 34 (11): 2216–2232. Bibcode:2012ITPAM..34.2216M. doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2012.20. PMID 23289130. S2CID 711467. Miwa, M.; Sætre, R.; Kim, J. D.; Tsujii, J. (2010). "Event Extraction with Complex Event Classification Using Rich Features". Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. 08 (1): 131–146. doi:10.1142/S0219720010004586. PMID 20183879. Kim, J. D.; Ohta, T.; Tsujii, J. (2008). "Corpus annotation for mining biomedical events from literature". BMC Bioinformatics. 9 10. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-10. PMC 2267702. PMID 18182099. Miyao, Y.; Tsujii, J. (2008). "Feature Forest Models for Probabilistic HPSG Parsing". Computational Linguistics. 34: 35–80. doi:10.1162/coli.2008.34.1.35. S2CID 885002. Sagae, Kenji; Tsujii, Jun'ichi (2007). Dependency Parsing and Domain Adaptation with LR Models and Parser Ensembles. EMNLP-CoNLL. pp. 1044–1050. Ananiadou, S; Pyysalo, S; Tsujii, J; Kell, D. B. (2010). "Event extraction for systems biology by text mining the literature". Trends in Biotechnology. 28 (7): 381–90. doi:10.1016/j.tibtech.2010.04.005. PMID 20570001. Tsuruoka, Y.; Tateishi, Y.; Kim, J. D.; Ohta, T.; McNaught, J.; Ananiadou, S.; Tsujii, J. (2005). "Developing a Robust Part-of-Speech Tagger for Biomedical Text". Advances in Informatics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3746. p. 382. doi:10.1007/11573036_36. ISBN 978-3-540-29673-7. S2CID 206592413. Tsuruoka, Y.; Tsujii, J. (2005). Bidirectional inference with the easiest-first strategy for tagging sequence data. Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - HLT '05. pp. 467–474. doi:10.3115/1220575.1220634. Tsujii, J.; Ananiadou, S. (2005). "Thesaurus or Logical Ontology, Which One Do We Need for Text Mining?". Language Resources and Evaluation. 39: 77–90. doi:10.1007/s10579-005-2697-0. S2CID 3204827. Kazama, J. I.; Tsujii, J. I. (2005). "Maximum Entropy Models with Inequality Constraints: A Case Study on Text Categorization". Machine Learning. 60 (1–3): 159–194. doi:10.1007/s10994-005-0911-3. hdl:10119/3305. Matsuzaki, T.; Miyao, Y.; Tsujii, J. I. (2005). Probabilistic CFG with latent annotations. 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics - ACL '05. p. 75. doi:10.3115/1219840.1219850. Kim, J. -D.; Ohta, T.; Tateisi, Y.; Tsujii, J. (2003). "GENIA corpus--a semantically annotated corpus for bio-textmining". Bioinformatics. 19: i180–i182. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btg1023. PMID 12855455. Hirschman, L.; Park, J. C.; Tsujii, J.; Wong, L.; Wu, C. H. (2002). "Accomplishments and challenges in literature data mining for biology". Bioinformatics. 18 (12): 1553–1561. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/18.12.1553. PMID 12490438. Torisawa, K.; Tsujii, J. I. (1996). Computing phrasal-signs in HPSG prior to parsing. 16th conference on Computational linguistics -. Vol. 2. p. 949. doi:10.3115/993268.993332.
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Paul Christiano

Paul Christiano is an American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on AI alignment, which is the subfield of AI safety research that aims to steer AI systems toward human interests. He serves as the Head of Safety for the Center for AI Standards and Innovation inside NIST. He formerly led the language model alignment team at OpenAI and became founder and head of the non-profit Alignment Research Center (ARC), which works on theoretical AI alignment and evaluations of machine learning models. In 2023, Christiano was named as one of the TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI (TIME100 AI). In September 2023, Christiano was appointed to the UK government's Frontier AI Taskforce advisory board. Before working at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, he was an initial trustee on Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust. == Education == Christiano attended the Harker School in San Jose, California. He competed on the U.S. team and won a silver medal at the 49th International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in 2008. In 2012, Christiano graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in mathematics. At MIT, he researched data structures, quantum cryptography, and combinatorial optimization. He then went on to complete a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Christiano collaborated with researcher Katja Grace on AI Impacts, co-developing a preliminary methodology for comparing supercomputers to brains, using traversed edges per second (TEPS). He also experimented with putting Carl Shulman's donor lottery theory into practice, raising nearly $50,000 in a pool to be donated to a single charity. == Career == At OpenAI, Christiano co-authored the paper "Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences" (2017) and other works developing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). He is considered one of the principal architects of RLHF, which in 2017 was "considered a notable step forward in AI safety research", according to The New York Times. Other works such as "AI safety via debate" (2018) focus on the problem of scalable oversight – supervising AIs in domains where humans would have difficulty judging output quality. Christiano left OpenAI in 2021 to work on more conceptual and theoretical issues in AI alignment and subsequently founded the Alignment Research Center to focus on this area. One subject of study is the problem of eliciting latent knowledge from advanced machine learning models. ARC also develops techniques to identify and test whether an AI model is potentially dangerous. In April 2023, Christiano told The Economist that ARC was considering developing an industry standard for AI safety. As of April 2024, Christiano was listed as the head of AI safety for the US AI Safety Institute at NIST. One month earlier in March 2024, staff members and scientists at the institute threatened to resign upon being informed of Christiano's pending appointment to the role, stating that his ties to the effective altruism movement may jeopardize the AI Safety Institute's objectivity and integrity. === Views on AI risks === He is known for his views on the potential risks of advanced AI. In 2017, Wired magazine stated that Christiano and his colleagues at OpenAI weren't worried about the destruction of the human race by "evil robots", explaining that "[t]hey’re more concerned that, as AI progresses beyond human comprehension, the technology’s behavior may diverge from our intended goals." However, in a widely quoted interview with Business Insider in 2023, Christiano said that there is a “10–20% chance of AI takeover, [with] many [or] most humans dead.” He also conjectured a “50/50 chance of doom shortly after you have AI systems that are human level.” == Personal life == Christiano is married to Ajeya Cotra, a member of METR's technical staff.
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András Kornai

András Kornai (born 1957 in Budapest) is a mathematical linguist. == Education == Kornai is the son of economist János Kornai. He earned two PhDs with the first being in mathematics in 1983 from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where his advisor was Miklós Ajtai. His second was in linguistics in 1991 from Stanford University, where his advisor was Paul Kiparsky. == Career == He is a professor in the Department of Algebra at the Budapest Institute of Technology, where he works on an open source Hungarian morphological analyzer. He was Chief Scientist at MetaCarta, where he worked on information extraction before the company was acquired by Nokia. Prior to MetaCarta, he was Chief Scientist at Northern Light. He is on the board of the journal Grammars and YourAmigo PLC. His research interests include all mathematical aspects of natural language processing, speech recognition, and OCR. As area editor he was responsible for the Mathematical Linguistics area of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, and his joint work with Geoffrey Pullum, "The X-bar Theory of Phrase Structure", formally reconstructed that then-popular linguistic theory. == Awards and honors == 2009: ACM Distinguished Member == Monographs == Semantics. Springer Nature, 2020. ISBN 978-3-319-65644-1 Mathematical Linguistics. Springer Verlag, in the series Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing, November 2007. ISBN 978-1-84628-985-9 Hardbound, approximately 300 pages. See description. Formal Phonology. In the series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics, Garland Publishing, 1994, ISBN 0-8153-1730-1, hardbound, 240 pages Contents, Preface, Introduction (20 pages) On Hungarian Morphology. In the series Linguistica, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1994, ISBN 963-8461-73-X, paperbound, 174 pages Contents, Preface, Introduction (10 pages) == Books edited == Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Mathematical Linguistics Area Editor under Editor in Chief William Frawley). 4 volumes, Oxford University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-19-513977-8. Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL Workshop on the Analysis of Geographic References. Jointly with Beth Sundheim. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2003, ISBN 1-932432-04-3 (WS9), paperbound, vi+81 pages. See related material. Extended Finite State Models of Language (editor). In the series Studies in Natural Language Processing, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-521-63198-X, hardbound, x+278 pages Contents, Introduction (7 pages). == Selected papers == Digital Language Death. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77056, 2012. [1] Hunmorph: open source word analysis (Jointly with V. Tron, Gy. Gyepesi, P. Halacsy, L. Nemeth, and D. Varga). In Proc. ACL 2005 Software Workshop 77-85 [2] Leveraging the open source ispell codebase for minority language analysis (Jointly with P. Halacsy, L. Nemeth, A. Rung, I. Szakadat, and V. Tron). In J. Carson-Berndsen (ed): Proc. SALTMIL 2004 56-59 [3] Explicit Finitism, International Journal of Theoretical Physics 2003/2 301-307 [4] Mathematical Linguistics (Jointly with G.K. Pullum) In W. Frawley (ed): Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press 2003, v3 17-20 [5] Optical Character Recognition, In W. Frawley (ed): Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press 2003, v3 33-34 [6] How many words are there? Glottometrics 2002/4 61-86 [7] Zipf's law outside the middle range Proc. Sixth Meeting on Mathematics of Language University of Central Florida, 1999 347-356 [8] A Robust, Language-Independent OCR System. (Jointly with Z. Lu, I. Bazzi, J. Makhoul, P. Natarajan, and R. Schwartz) In: Robert J. Mericsko (ed): Proc. 27th AIPR Workshop: Advances in Computer-Assisted Recognition SPIE Proceedings 3584 1999 [9] Quantitative Comparison of Languages. Grammars 1998/2 155-165 [10] The generative power of feature geometry. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 8 1993 37-46 [11] The X-bar Theory of Phrase Structure. (Jointly with G.K. Pullum) Language 66 1990 24-50 [12]
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Talking Angela

Talking Angela is a mobile game (formerly a chatbot), developed by Slovenian studio Outfit7 as part of the Talking Tom & Friends series. It was released on 13 November 2012 and December 2012 for iPhone, iPod and iPad, January 2013 for Android, and January 2014 for Google Play. The game's successor, the My Talking Angela game, was released in December 2014. The game takes place in a café in Paris and allows players to interact with Angela, an anthropomorphic white cat in different ways. Players can use coins to purchase makeup, accessories and items, as well as drinks that will trigger different visual effects. The fortune cookie button causes Angela to read out a fortune cookie, while the bird icon will prompt birds to fly around the screen, or have Angela feed them. Players can also pet or poke Angela, as well the café's sign. Prior to their removal, the game featured a chat system and a camera button. Users can engage in conversations with Angela, ask for quizzes or initiate a short snippet of the song "That's Falling In Love". If the player was to type in "Who is an idiot?", Angela would respond with a random swear word. Additionally, inquiring Angela about sexual topics would cause her to reply with "Do you want to talk about sex?", though she will quickly change the topic regardless of what the player writes next. A hoax claiming that Angela's eyes were hidden cameras that enabled hackers or paedophiles to watch children was spread. Despite the claims, Snopes and The Guardian found no evidence. Due to the hoax, Angela received a blue dress, as well as an altered eye asset with a different reflection, and later the chat and camera functions were removed altogether. == Hoaxes == In February 2014, Talking Angela was the subject of an Internet hoax alleging that the application was a front for child predators to exploit children. The rumor, which was widely circulated on Facebook and various websites claiming to be dedicated to parenting, claims that a sinister sexual predator or hacker, asked children for private personal information using the game's text-chat feature. Other versions of the rumour even attributed the disappearance of a child to the game; one news report claimed that a seven year old boy disappeared after downloading the app. Another variation included that it was run by a paedophile ring, citing a man that could be seen in Angela's eyes. The app's developers, Outfit7, later gave a statement refuting the hoaxes. The hoax was eventually debunked by Snopes, a fact-checking website. The site's owners, Barbara and David Mikkelson, reported that they had tried to "prompt" it to give responses asking for private information, but were unsuccessful, even when asking it explicitly sexual questions. While it is true that, in the game with child mode off, Angela does ask for the user's name, age and personal preferences to determine conversation topics, Outfit7 has said that this information is all "anonymized" and all personal information is removed from it. It is also impossible for a person to take control of what Angela says in the game, since the game is based on chatbot software. When the mode was turned on, the chat feature was disabled, meaning no personal questions could be asked. In 2015, the hoax was revived on Facebook, which prompted online security company Sophos and The Guardian to debunk it again. Sophos employee Paul Ducklin wrote that the message being posted on Facebook promoting the hoax was "close to 600 rambling, repetitious words, despite claiming at the start that it didn't have words to describe the situation. It's ill-written, and borders on being illiterate and incomprehensible." Bruce Wilcox, one of the game's programmers, attributed the hoax's popularity to the fact that the chatbot program in Talking Angela aimed to sound realistic. Concern was raised that the game's child mode may have been too easy for children to turn off. It allowed them to purchase "coins", premium currency in the game, via iTunes, and enabled the chat feature. While not "connecting your children to paedophiles", this still raised concerns according to The Guardian. === Impact === The scare significantly boosted the game's popularity, and was credited with helping the app enter the top 10 free iPhone apps soon after the hoax became widely known in February 2015,In the truth the reason there is a man in Angela’s eyes is because of pareidoila, the ability to see through diamonds and other minerals and water bodies and shiny objects,which is the reason why players notice a man in her eyes,The truth is that being Angela’s eyes simply serve as a reflective surface,Because of the low quality of this reflection the reflection was mistaken for a humanoid figure. oref>Smith, Josh (19 February 2014). "Talking Angela App Scare Skyrockets App to Top of Charts". GottaBeMobile.com. Archived from the original on 2 April 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2014. and third most popular for all iPhone apps at the start of the following month. In 2016, Outfit7 removed the chat feature along with the camera function from the app due to this controversy, though this decision was met with criticism.
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Best AI Photo Editors in 2026

Shopping for the best AI photo editor? An AI photo editor is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI photo editor slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.
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Sparse dictionary learning

Sparse dictionary learning (also known as sparse coding or SDL) is a representation learning method which aims to find a sparse representation of the input data in the form of a linear combination of basic elements as well as those basic elements themselves. These elements are called atoms, and they compose a dictionary. Atoms in the dictionary are not required to be orthogonal, and they may be an over-complete spanning set. This problem setup also allows the dimensionality of the signals being represented to be higher than any one of the signals being observed. These two properties lead to having seemingly redundant atoms that allow multiple representations of the same signal, but also provide an improvement in sparsity and flexibility of the representation. One of the most important applications of sparse dictionary learning is in the field of compressed sensing or signal recovery. In compressed sensing, a high-dimensional signal can be recovered with only a few linear measurements, provided that the signal is sparse or near-sparse. Since not all signals satisfy this condition, it is crucial to find a sparse representation of that signal such as the wavelet transform or the directional gradient of a rasterized matrix. Once a matrix or a high-dimensional vector is transferred to a sparse space, different recovery algorithms like basis pursuit, CoSaMP, or fast non-iterative algorithms can be used to recover the signal. One of the key principles of dictionary learning is that the dictionary has to be inferred from the input data. The emergence of sparse dictionary learning methods was stimulated by the fact that in signal processing, one typically wants to represent the input data using a minimal amount of components. Before this approach, the general practice was to use predefined dictionaries such as Fourier or wavelet transforms. However, in certain cases, a dictionary that is trained to fit the input data can significantly improve the sparsity, which has applications in data decomposition, compression, and analysis, and has been used in the fields of image denoising and classification, and video and audio processing. Sparsity and overcomplete dictionaries have immense applications in image compression, image fusion, and inpainting. == Problem statement == Given the input dataset X = [ x 1 , . . . , x K ] , x i ∈ R d {\displaystyle X=[x_{1},...,x_{K}],x_{i}\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}} we wish to find a dictionary D ∈ R d × n : D = [ d 1 , . . . , d n ] {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} \in \mathbb {R} ^{d\times n}:D=[d_{1},...,d_{n}]} and a representation R = [ r 1 , . . . , r K ] , r i ∈ R n {\displaystyle R=[r_{1},...,r_{K}],r_{i}\in \mathbb {R} ^{n}} such that both ‖ X − D R ‖ F 2 {\displaystyle \|X-\mathbf {D} R\|_{F}^{2}} is minimized and the representations r i {\displaystyle r_{i}} are sparse enough. This can be formulated as the following optimization problem: argmin D ∈ C , r i ∈ R n ∑ i = 1 K ‖ x i − D r i ‖ 2 2 + λ ‖ r i ‖ 0 {\displaystyle {\underset {\mathbf {D} \in {\mathcal {C}},r_{i}\in \mathbb {R} ^{n}}{\text{argmin}}}\sum _{i=1}^{K}\|x_{i}-\mathbf {D} r_{i}\|_{2}^{2}+\lambda \|r_{i}\|_{0}} , where C ≡ { D ∈ R d × n : ‖ d i ‖ 2 ≤ 1 ∀ i = 1 , . . . , n } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {C}}\equiv \{\mathbf {D} \in \mathbb {R} ^{d\times n}:\|d_{i}\|_{2}\leq 1\,\,\forall i=1,...,n\}} , λ > 0 {\displaystyle \lambda >0} C {\displaystyle {\mathcal {C}}} is required to constrain D {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} } so that its atoms would not reach arbitrarily high values allowing for arbitrarily low (but non-zero) values of r i {\displaystyle r_{i}} . λ {\displaystyle \lambda } controls the trade off between the sparsity and the minimization error. The minimization problem above is not convex because of the ℓ0-"norm" and solving this problem is NP-hard. In some cases L1-norm is known to ensure sparsity and so the above becomes a convex optimization problem with respect to each of the variables D {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} } and R {\displaystyle \mathbf {R} } when the other one is fixed, but it is not jointly convex in ( D , R ) {\displaystyle (\mathbf {D} ,\mathbf {R} )} . === Properties of the dictionary === The dictionary D {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} } defined above can be "undercomplete" if n < d {\displaystyle n d {\displaystyle n>d} with the latter being a typical assumption for a sparse dictionary learning problem. The case of a complete dictionary does not provide any improvement from a representational point of view and thus isn't considered. Undercomplete dictionaries represent the setup in which the actual input data lies in a lower-dimensional space. This case is strongly related to dimensionality reduction and techniques like principal component analysis which require atoms d 1 , . . . , d n {\displaystyle d_{1},...,d_{n}} to be orthogonal. The choice of these subspaces is crucial for efficient dimensionality reduction, but it is not trivial. And dimensionality reduction based on dictionary representation can be extended to address specific tasks such as data analysis or classification. However, their main downside is limiting the choice of atoms. Overcomplete dictionaries, however, do not require the atoms to be orthogonal (they will never have a basis anyway) thus allowing for more flexible dictionaries and richer data representations. An overcomplete dictionary which allows for sparse representation of signal can be a famous transform matrix (wavelets transform, fourier transform) or it can be formulated so that its elements are changed in such a way that it sparsely represents the given signal in a best way. Learned dictionaries are capable of giving sparser solutions as compared to predefined transform matrices. == Algorithms == As the optimization problem described above can be solved as a convex problem with respect to either dictionary or sparse coding while the other one of the two is fixed, most of the algorithms are based on the idea of iteratively updating one and then the other. The problem of finding an optimal sparse coding R {\displaystyle R} with a given dictionary D {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} } is known as sparse approximation (or sometimes just sparse coding problem). A number of algorithms have been developed to solve it (such as matching pursuit and LASSO) and are incorporated in the algorithms described below. === Method of optimal directions (MOD) === The method of optimal directions (or MOD) was one of the first methods introduced to tackle the sparse dictionary learning problem. The core idea of it is to solve the minimization problem subject to the limited number of non-zero components of the representation vector: min D , R { ‖ X − D R ‖ F 2 } s.t. ∀ i ‖ r i ‖ 0 ≤ T {\displaystyle \min _{\mathbf {D} ,R}\{\|X-\mathbf {D} R\|_{F}^{2}\}\,\,{\text{s.t.}}\,\,\forall i\,\,\|r_{i}\|_{0}\leq T} Here, F {\displaystyle F} denotes the Frobenius norm. MOD alternates between getting the sparse coding using a method such as matching pursuit and updating the dictionary by computing the analytical solution of the problem given by D = X R + {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} =XR^{+}} where R + {\displaystyle R^{+}} is a Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse. After this update D {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} } is renormalized to fit the constraints and the new sparse coding is obtained again. The process is repeated until convergence (or until a sufficiently small residue). MOD has proved to be a very efficient method for low-dimensional input data X {\displaystyle X} requiring just a few iterations to converge. However, due to the high complexity of the matrix-inversion operation, computing the pseudoinverse in high-dimensional cases is in many cases intractable. This shortcoming has inspired the development of other dictionary learning methods. === K-SVD === K-SVD is an algorithm that performs SVD at its core to update the atoms of the dictionary one by one and basically is a generalization of K-means. It enforces that each element of the input data x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} is encoded by a linear combination of not more than T 0 {\displaystyle T_{0}} elements in a way identical to the MOD approach: min D , R { ‖ X − D R ‖ F 2 } s.t. ∀ i ‖ r i ‖ 0 ≤ T 0 {\displaystyle \min _{\mathbf {D} ,R}\{\|X-\mathbf {D} R\|_{F}^{2}\}\,\,{\text{s.t.}}\,\,\forall i\,\,\|r_{i}\|_{0}\leq T_{0}} This algorithm's essence is to first fix the dictionary, find the best possible R {\displaystyle R} under the above constraint (using Orthogonal Matching Pursuit) and then iteratively update the atoms of dictionary D {\displaystyle \mathbf {D} } in the following manner: ‖ X − D R ‖ F 2 = | X − ∑ i = 1 K d i x T i | F 2 = ‖ E k − d k x T k ‖ F 2 {\displaystyle \|X-\mathbf {D} R\|_{F}^{2}=\left|X-\sum _{i=1}^{K}d_{i}x_{T}^{i}\right|_{F}^{2}=\|E_{k}-d_{k}x_{T}^{k}\|_{F}^{2}} The next steps of the algorithm include rank-1 approximation of the residual matrix E k {\displaystyle E_{k}} , updating d k {\displaystyle d_{k}} and enforcing the s
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Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by text corpus (plural corpora). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a given linguistic variety. Today, corpora are generally machine-readable data collections. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. Large collections of text, though corpora may also be small in terms of running words, allow linguists to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts that may be difficult to test in a qualitative manner. The text-corpus method uses the body of texts in any natural language to derive the set of abstract rules which govern that language. Those results can be used to explore the relationships between that subject language and other languages which have undergone a similar analysis. The first such corpora were manually derived from source texts, but now that work is automated. Corpora have not only been used for linguistics research, they have been increasingly used to compile dictionaries (starting with The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language in 1969) and reference grammars, with A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, published in 1985, as a first. Experts in the field have differing views about the annotation of a corpus. These views range from John McHardy Sinclair, who advocates minimal annotation so texts speak for themselves, to the Survey of English Usage team (University College, London), who advocate annotation as allowing greater linguistic understanding through rigorous recording. == History == Some of the earliest efforts at grammatical description were based at least in part on corpora of particular religious or cultural significance. For example, Prātiśākhya literature described the sound patterns of Sanskrit as found in the Vedas, and Pāṇini's grammar of classical Sanskrit was based at least in part on analysis of that same corpus. Similarly, the early Arabic grammarians paid particular attention to the language of the Quran. In the Western European tradition, scholars prepared concordances to allow detailed study of the language of the Bible and other canonical texts. === English corpora === A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication of Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English in 1967. Written by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis, the work was based on an analysis of the Brown Corpus, which is a structured and balanced corpus of one million words of American English from the year 1961. The corpus comprises 2000 text samples, from a variety of genres. The Brown Corpus was the first computerized corpus designed for linguistic research. Kučera and Francis subjected the Brown Corpus to a variety of computational analyses and then combined elements of linguistics, language teaching, psychology, statistics, and sociology to create a rich and variegated opus. A further key publication was Randolph Quirk's "Towards a description of English Usage" in 1960 in which he introduced the Survey of English Usage. Quirk's corpus was the first modern corpus to be built with the purpose of representing the whole language. Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kučera to supply a million-word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary, the first dictionary compiled using corpus linguistics. The AHD took the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language should be used) with descriptive information (how it actually is used). Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' COBUILD monolingual learner's dictionary, designed for users learning English as a foreign language, was compiled using the Bank of English. The Survey of English Usage Corpus was used in the development of one of the most important Corpus-based Grammars, which was written by Quirk et al. and published in 1985 as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. The Brown Corpus has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the LOB Corpus (1960s British English), Kolhapur (Indian English), Wellington (New Zealand English), Australian Corpus of English (Australian English), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s American English), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many languages, varieties and modes, and include the International Corpus of English, and the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities (Oxford and Lancaster) and the British Library. For contemporary American English, work has stalled on the American National Corpus, but the 400+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–present) is now available through a web interface. The first computerized corpus of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project, containing one million words, which inspired Shana Poplack's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area. === Multilingual corpora === In the 1990s, many of the notable early successes on statistical methods in natural-language programming (NLP) occurred in the field of machine translation, due especially to work at IBM Research. These systems were able to take advantage of existing multilingual textual corpora that had been produced by the Parliament of Canada and the European Union as a result of laws calling for the translation of all governmental proceedings into all official languages of the corresponding systems of government. There are corpora in non-European languages as well. For example, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Japan has built a number of corpora of spoken and written Japanese. Sign language corpora have also been created using video data. === Ancient languages corpora === Besides these corpora of living languages, computerized corpora have also been made of collections of texts in ancient languages. An example is the Andersen-Forbes database of the Hebrew Bible, developed since the 1970s, in which every clause is parsed using graphs representing up to seven levels of syntax, and every segment tagged with seven fields of information. The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated corpus for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran. This is a recent project with multiple layers of annotation including morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar. The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS) is a "Sandhi-split corpus of Sanskrit texts with full morphological and lexical analysis... designed for text-historical research in Sanskrit linguistics and philology." === Corpora from specific fields === Besides pure linguistic inquiry, researchers had begun to apply corpus linguistics to other academic and professional fields, such as the emerging sub-discipline of Law and Corpus Linguistics, which seeks to understand legal texts using corpus data and tools. The DBLP Discovery Dataset concentrates on computer science, containing relevant computer science publications with sentient metadata such as author affiliations, citations, or study fields. A more focused dataset was introduced by NLP Scholar, a combination of papers of the ACL Anthology and Google Scholar metadata. Corpora can also aid in translation efforts or in teaching foreign languages. == Methods == Corpus linguistics has generated a number of research methods, which attempt to trace a path from data to theory. Wallis and Nelson (2001) first introduced what they called the 3A perspective: Annotation, Abstraction and Analysis. Annotation consists of the application of a scheme to texts. Annotations may include structural markup, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and numerous other representations. Abstraction consists of the translation (mapping) of terms in the scheme to terms in a theoretically motivated model or dataset. Abstraction typically includes linguist-directed search but may include e.g., rule-learning for parsers. Analysis consists of statistically probing, manipulating and generalising from the dataset. Analysis might include statistical evaluations, optimisation of rule-bases or knowledge discovery methods. Most lexical corpora today are part-of-speech-tagged (POS-tagged). However even corpus linguists who work with 'unannotated plain text' inevitably apply some method to isolate salient terms. In such situations annotation and abstraction are combined in a lexical search. The advantage of publishing an annotated corpus is that other users can then perform experiments on the corpus (through corpus managers). Linguists with other interests and differing perspectives than the originators' can exploit this work. By sharing data
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Thai QR Payment

Thai QR Payment or PromptPay (พร้อมเพย์) is a real-time payment system in Thailand that allows money transfers through digital channels using identifiers linked to a bank account, including a mobile phone number, citizen identification number, tax identification number or bank account number. The system was introduced in 2016 as part of Thailand's national e-payment infrastructure and was developed under the National e-Payment Master Plan, a government programme intended to expand digital payment infrastructure and reduce the use of cash in everyday transactions. It is owned by National ITMX ltd and Bank of Thailand and developed by Vocalink, a group by Mastercard == History == PromptPay (originally AnyID) is one of the National e-Payment projects and policies by Thailand, to regulate and standardize electronic payments to follow the technologies with internet and smartphones that is expanding and bringing technology into Finance and Commerce. By 22 December 2015, The First Prayut cabinet have approved the project as a national infastructure PromptPay has also been used in cross-border payment linkages with other real-time payment systems in Southeast Asia. In April 2021, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand launched a linkage between Singapore's PayNow and Thailand's PromptPay, allowing customers of participating banks to send money between the two countries using a mobile phone number. In June 2021, the central banks of Thailand and Malaysia launched a cross-border QR payment linkage between PromptPay and Malaysia's DuitNow system. == Services == PromptPay's Services have included Encrypted Transactions and Payment between Two Individuals (C2C) Government Infrastructure Payment Tax Returns Individual PromptPay e-Wallet Thai QR Payment Pay Alert e-Donation Cross Border QR Payment
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Small language model

Small language models or compact language models are artificial intelligence language models designed for human natural language processing including language and text generation. They are smaller in scale and scope than large language models. A large language model typically contains hundreds of billions of training parameters, with some models exceeding a trillion parameters. This substantial parameter count enables the model to encode vast amounts of information, thereby improving the generalizability and accuracy of its outputs. However, training such models demands enormous computational resources, rendering it infeasible for an individual to do so using a single computer and graphics processing unit. Small language models, on the other hand, use far fewer parameters, typically ranging from a few thousand to a few hundred million. This make them more feasible to train and host in resource-constrained environments such as a single computer or even a mobile device. Most contemporary (2020s) small language models use the same architecture as a large language model, but with a smaller parameter count and sometimes lower arithmetic precision. Parameter count is reduced by a combination of knowledge distillation and pruning. Precision can be reduced by quantization. Work on large language models mostly translate to small language models: pruning and quantization are also widely used to speed up large language models. == Models == Some notable models are: Below 1B parameters: Llama-Prompt-Guard-2-22M (detects prompt injection and jailbreaking, based on DeBERTa-xsmall), SmolLM2-135M, SmolLM2-360M 1–4B parameters: Llama3.2-1B, Qwen2.5-1.5B, DeepSeek-R1-1.5B, SmolLM2-1.7B, SmolVLM-2.25B, Phi-3.5-Mini-3.8B, Phi-4-Mini-3.8B, Gemma3-4B; closed-weights ones include Gemini Nano 4–14B parameters: Mistral 7B, Gemma 9B, Phi-4 14B. Phi-4 14B is marginally "small" at best, but Microsoft does market it as a small model. == Language model with small pre-training dataset == Traditional AI language systems need enormous computers and vast amounts of data. Pre-training matters, even tiny models show significant performance improvements when pre-trained performance increases with larger pre-training datasets. Classification accuracy improves when pre-training and test datasets share similar tokens. Shallow architectures can replicate deep model performance through collaborative learning.
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Markov property

In probability theory and statistics, the Markov property is the memoryless property of a stochastic process, which means that its future evolution is independent of its history. It is named after the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov. The term strong Markov property is similar to the Markov property, except that the meaning of "present" is defined in terms of a random variable known as a stopping time. The term Markov assumption is used to describe a model where the Markov property is assumed to hold, such as a hidden Markov model. A Markov random field extends this property to two or more dimensions or to random variables defined for an interconnected network of items. An example of a model for such a field is the Ising model. A discrete-time stochastic process satisfying the Markov property is known as a Markov chain. == Introduction == A stochastic process has the Markov property if the conditional probability distribution of future states of the process (conditional on both past and present values) depends only upon the present state; that is, given the present, the future does not depend on the past. A process with this property is said to be Markov or Markovian and known as a Markov process. Two famous classes of Markov process are the Markov chain and Brownian motion. Note that there is a subtle, often overlooked and very important point that is often missed in the plain English statement of the definition: the statespace of the process is constant through time. The conditional description involves a fixed "bandwidth". For example, without this restriction we could augment any process to one which includes the complete history from a given initial condition and it would be made to be Markovian. But the state space would be of increasing dimensionality over time and does not meet the definition. == History == == Definition == Let ( Ω , F , P ) {\displaystyle (\Omega ,{\mathcal {F}},P)} be a probability space with a filtration ( F s , s ∈ I ) {\displaystyle ({\mathcal {F}}_{s},\ s\in I)} , for some (totally ordered) index set I {\displaystyle I} ; and let ( S , Σ ) {\displaystyle (S,\Sigma )} be a measurable space. An ( S , Σ ) {\displaystyle (S,\Sigma )} -valued stochastic process X = { X t : Ω → S } t ∈ I {\displaystyle X=\{X_{t}:\Omega \to S\}_{t\in I}} adapted to the filtration is said to possess the Markov property if, for each A ∈ Σ {\displaystyle A\in \Sigma } and each s , t ∈ I {\displaystyle s,t\in I} with s < t {\displaystyle s Read more →