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  Schema-agnostic databases

  Schema-agnostic databases or vocabulary-independent databases aim at supporting users to be abstracted from the representation of the data, supporting the automatic semantic matching between queries and databases. Schema-agnosticism is the property of a database of mapping a query issued with the user terminology and structure, automatically mapping it to the dataset vocabulary. The increase in the size and in the semantic heterogeneity of database schemas bring new requirements for users querying and searching structured data. At this scale it can become unfeasible for data consumers to be familiar with the representation of the data in order to query it. At the center of this discussion is the semantic gap between users and databases, which becomes more central as the scale and complexity of the data grows. == Description == The evolution of data environments towards the consumption of data from multiple data sources and the growth in the schema size, complexity, dynamicity and decentralisation (SCoDD) of schemas increases the complexity of contemporary data management. The SCoDD trend emerges as a central data management concern in Big Data scenarios, where users and applications have a demand for more complete data, produced by independent data sources, under different semantic assumptions and contexts of use, which is the typical scenario for Semantic Web Data applications. The evolution of databases in the direction of heterogeneous data environments strongly impacts the usability, semiotics and semantic assumptions behind existing data accessibility methods such as structured queries, keyword-based search and visual query systems. With schema-less databases containing potentially millions of dynamically changing attributes, it becomes unfeasible for some users to become aware of the 'schema' or vocabulary in order to query the database. At this scale, the effort in understanding the schema in order to build a structured query can become prohibitive. == Schema-agnostic queries == Schema-agnostic queries can be defined as query approaches over structured databases which allow users satisfying complex information needs without the understanding of the representation (schema) of the database. Similarly, Tran et al. defines it as "search approaches, which do not require users to know the schema underlying the data". Approaches such as keyword-based search over databases allow users to query databases without employing structured queries. However, as discussed by Tran et al.: "From these points, users however have to do further navigation and exploration to address complex information needs. Unlike keyword search used on the Web, which focuses on simple needs, the keyword search elaborated here is used to obtain more complex results. Instead of a single set of resources, the goal is to compute complex sets of resources and their relations." The development of approaches to support natural language interfaces (NLI) over databases have aimed towards the goal of schema-agnostic queries. Complementarily, some approaches based on keyword search have targeted keyword-based queries which express more complex information needs. Other approaches have explored the construction of structured queries over databases where schema constraints can be relaxed. All these approaches (natural language, keyword-based search and structured queries) have targeted different degrees of sophistication in addressing the problem of supporting a flexible semantic matching between queries and data, which vary from the completely absence of the semantic concern to more principled semantic models. While the demand for schema-agnosticism has been an implicit requirement across semantic search and natural language query systems over structured data, it is not sufficiently individuated as a concept and as a necessary requirement for contemporary database management systems. Recent works have started to define and model the semantic aspects involved on schema-agnostic queries. === Schema-agnostic structured queries === Consist of schema-agnostic queries following the syntax of a structured standard (for example SQL, SPARQL). The syntax and semantics of operators are maintained, while different terminologies are used. ==== Example 1 ==== SELECT ?y { BillClinton hasDaughter ?x . ?x marriedTo ?y . } which maps to the following SPARQL query in the dataset vocabulary: ==== Example 2 ==== which maps to the following SPARQL query in the dataset vocabulary: === Schema-agnostic keyword queries === Consist of schema-agnostic queries using keyword queries. In this case the syntax and semantics of operators are different from the structured query syntax. ==== Example ==== "Bill Clinton daughter married to" "Books by William Goldman with more than 300 pages" == Semantic complexity == As of 2016 the concept of schema-agnostic queries has been developed primarily in academia. Most of schema-agnostic query systems have been investigated in the context of Natural Language Interfaces over databases or over the Semantic Web. These works explore the application of semantic parsing techniques over large, heterogeneous and schema-less databases. More recently, the individuation of the concept of schema-agnostic query systems and databases have appeared more explicitly within the literature. Freitas et al. provide a probabilistic model on the semantic complexity of mapping schema-agnostic queries.

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  Resistance Database Initiative

  HIV Resistance Response Database Initiative (RDI) was formed in 2002 to use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict how patients will respond to HIV drugs using data from more 250,000 patients from around 50 countries around the world. The RDI used its models to power its HIV Treatment Response Prediction System (HIV-TRePS). Launched in 2010, this free online tool enabled healthcare professionals to upload their patient’s data and obtain highly accurate predictions of how they would respond to different combinations of the 30 or more drugs available. The tool enabled physicians to individualize their patients’ treatment, using these predictions based on more than a million patient-years of treatment experience. HIV-TRePS was possibly the first ever AI-based system for medical decision-making to be developed, successfully tested, and used in clinical practice. It has since been used by thousands of healthcare professionals to optimise the treatment of tens of thousands of patients. Since the RDI’s inception the treatment of HIV infection has progressed enormously, with more effective and better tolerated drugs available in ever more convenient combination formulations. In most countries HIV is now considered a chronic, manageable condition. Moreover, the success of the drugs in reducing the amount of virus is substantially reducing the onward transmission of the virus and cases of new infections are falling in many settings. This improvement in HIV treatment means the need for sophisticated AI to support HIV treatment decisions has significantly reduced. In response, the RDI ceased development of further models and, in March 2024, withdrew its HIV-TRePS system. == Background == Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections. There are approximately 30 HIV antiretroviral drugs that have been approved for the treatment of HIV infection, from six different classes, based on the point in the HIV life-cycle at which they act. They are used in combination; typically 3 or more drugs from 2 or more different classes, a form of therapy known as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). The aim of therapy is to suppress the virus to very low, ideally undetectable, levels in the blood. This prevents the virus from depleting the immune cells that it preferentially attacks CD4 cells and prevents or delays illness and death. Despite the expanding availability of these drugs and the impact of their use, treatments continue to fail, often involving to the development of resistance. During drug therapy, low-level virus replication may still occur, particularly when a patient misses a dose. HIV makes errors in copying its genetic material and, if a mutation makes the virus resistant to one or more of the drugs in the patient's treatment, it may begin to replicate more successfully in the presence of that drug and undermine the effect of the treatment. If this happens, the treatment needs to be changed to re-establish control over the virus. == RDI's Approach == The RDI’s approach was to use artificial intelligence (including neural network and random forest models), trained with data from hundreds of thousands of patients, treated with different drugs in a variety of clinical settings all over the world, to predict how an individual patient will respond to any new combination of HIV drugs. The models were tested with independent data sets and consistently achieved accuracy of approximately 80%.

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  DARPA Prize Competitions

  Over the years, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted numerous prize competitions to spur innovation. A prize competition allows DARPA to establish an ambitious goal, opening the door to novel approaches from the public that might otherwise appear too risky for experts in a particular field to pursue. == Statutory authorities == In 1999, Congress provided prize competition authority to DARPA in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 (P.L. 106–65), 10 U.S.C. § 4025, formerly 10 U.S.C. §2374a. DARPA also conducts prize competitions under the America COMPETES Act, 15 U.S.C. § 3719. == Recent prize competitions == DARPA Grand Challenge (2004 and 2005) was a prize competition to spur the development of autonomous vehicle technologies. The $1 million prize went unclaimed as no vehicles could complete the challenging desert route from Barstow, CA, to Primm, NV, on March 13, 2004. A year later, on October 8, 2005, the Stanford Racing Team won the $2 million prize during the second competition of the Grand Challenge in the desert Southwest near the California/Nevada state line. DARPA Urban Challenge (2007) required the competitors to build an autonomous vehicle capable of driving in traffic and performing complex maneuvers such as merging, passing, parking, and negotiating intersections. On November 3, 2007, the Carnegie Mellon Team won the $2 million prize, and its vehicle became the first autonomous vehicle that interacted with both manned and unmanned vehicle traffic in an urban environment. DARPA Network Challenge (Red Balloon Challenge) (2009) explored the roles that the Internet and social networking play in solving broad-scope, time-critical problems. On December 5, 2009, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team won $40,000 by locating the ten moored, eight-foot, red weather balloons at ten places in the United States within seven hours. DARPA Digital Manufacturing Analysis, Correlation and Estimation Challenge (DMACE) (2010) was a three-month contest to showcase the potential of digital manufacturing of advanced materials. The University of California at Santa Barbara team won a $50,000 prize for crushing 180 digitally manufactured (DM) titanium mesh spheres with the most accurate predictive model of the components’ properties. DARPA Shredder Challenge (2011) was to identify and assess potential capabilities and vulnerabilities to sensitive information in the national security community. Participating teams must download the images of the documents shredded into more than 10,000 pieces from the Challenge website, reconstruct the documents, and solve the five puzzles. Of almost 9,000 teams, the San Francisco-based All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S team won the $50,000 prize. DARPA UAVForge Challenge (2011-2012) aimed to build and test a user-intuitive, backpack-portable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could quietly fly in and out of critical environments to conduct sustained surveillance for up to three hours. The $100,000 prize was not claimed because none of the 140 teams met the technical matrix. DARPA Cash for Locating & Identifying Quick Response Codes (CLIQR) Quest Challenge (2012) explored the role the Internet and social media played in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems. The challenge offered $40,000 to the first individual or team that could locate seven posters appearing in U.S. cities bearing the DARPA logo and a quick response code (QR) within 15 days. No team found and submitted all seven codes. DARPA Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) Challenge (2012-2013) was to use three competitions for the design of an infantry fighting vehicle, culminating in prototypes. In April 2013, DARPA awarded US$1 million to a three-man team during the first competition. DARPA decided not to proceed with the second and third competitions as originally planned and transitioned the technologies to the defense and commercial industry through the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII). DARPA Spectrum Challenge (2013-2014) sought to demonstrate how a software-defined radio can use a given communication channel in the presence of other users and interfering signals. Three teams emerged as the overall winners, winning a total of $150,000 in prizes. DARPA Chikungunya (CHIKV) Challenge (2014-2015) was a health-related effort to develop the most accurate predictions of CHIKV cases for all Western Hemisphere countries and territories between September 2014 and March 2015. On May 12, 2015, DARPA awarded $500,000 in prizes to the 11 winners of the competition during a scientific review DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) (2013-2015) aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that could do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments." A South Korean team won the first prize of $2 million, and two U.S. teams won $1 million and $500,000 as second and third winners. DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) (2014 - 2016) was to “create automatic defensive systems capable of reasoning about flaws, formulating patches and deploying them on a network in real time.” The top three winners were awarded prizes of $2 million, $1 million, and $750,000, respectively. DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) (2016-2019) aimed to encourage the development of AI-enabled wireless networks to “ensure that the exponentially growing number of military and civilian wireless devices would have full access to the increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum.” A team from the University of Florida won the overall top prize of US$2 million at the final SC2 competition. DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge (2017-2021) was to develop robotic technologies to map, navigate, search and exploit complex underground environments. The first-place winners of the system final competition and of the virtual final competition were awarded $2 million and $750,000, respectively, with multiple prizes awarded to the second and third-place winners. DARPA Launch Challenge (2018-2020) was a $12 million satellite launch challenge to demonstrate responsive and flexible space launch capabilities from the small launch providers and was to culminate in two separate launch competitions where the competitors must launch a satellite to low Earth orbit (LEO) within days of each other at different locations in the United States. The competition ended without a winner. DARPA Forecasting Floats in Turbulence (FFT) Challenge (2021) was to spur technologies that could predict the location of sea drifters or floats within 10 days. DARPA awarded $25,000 for first place, with prizes of $15,000 and $10,000 for second place and third place. DARPA Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) (2023–2025) was a two-year challenge and asks competitors to design novel AI systems to secure critical software code on which Americans rely. The total prize money is $29.5 million. In March 2024, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) partnered with DARPA, contributing an additional $20 million to the competition's prize pool to address software vulnerabilities in medical devices, hospital IT, and biotech equipment. AIxCC collaborates with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Linux Foundation, Open Source Security Foundation, Black Hat USA, and DEF CON, all of which provide AIxCC with access to large language models. In August 2024, AIxCC held the semifinal at DEF CON in Las Vegas. DARPA and ARPA-H tested all 42 submissions by running them through various open-source coding projects with deliberately injected vulnerabilities and scored the tools based on their effectiveness in identifying and fixing security flaws. Seven teams, each winning $2 million in the semifinals, competed in the final round of the AIxCC at the August 2025 DEF CON conference. Team Atlanta won first place with a $4 million prize for its cyber reasoning systems, which identified and patched vulnerabilities across 54 million lines of code. DARPA Triage Challenge (2023 – 2026) aims to spur the development of novel physiological features for medical triage, with a total prize money of $7 million. In October 2024, Challenge Event 1 was held in Perry, Georgia, featuring to-scale replicas of disaster sites such as an airplane crash and Hurricane Katrina, and teams competed based on how closely their data aligned with the agency’s official data and how quickly and accurately their autonomous systems could identify individuals most urgently in need of medical care. DARPA concluded the second year of competitions and, in November 2025, named the top performers in systems and data categories, which will advance to the final 2026 competition. The DARPA Lift Challenge (2025-2026) is for participants to design unmanned aerial systems capable of carrying up to four times their own weight, with a minimum payload of 110 pounds. Acco

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  The Murderbot Diaries

  The Murderbot Diaries is a science fiction series by American author Martha Wells, published by Tor Books. The series is told from the perspective of the titular cyborg guard, a "SecUnit" owned by a futuristic megacorporation. SecUnits include "governor" modules that control and punish the constructs if they take any actions not approved by the company. The ironically self-named "Murderbot" hacked and disabled the module but pretends to be a normal SecUnit, staving off the boredom of security work by watching media. As it spends more time with a series of caring entities (both humans and artificial intelligences), it develops genuine friendships and emotional connections, which it finds inconvenient. The TV series Murderbot is based on the novels by Martha Wells. == Books == === Setting === In an advanced largely hyper-capitalist space-faring society, travel between star systems is routine due to now-stable wormhole technology. Initially, wormhole travel was unreliable, but has since improved to the point where "lost" colonies are being found. People reside on planets, some of which have been terraformed, or on space habitats which have full life support and artificial gravity. Most people who can afford it have technology that allows them to tap into ubiquitous data feeds supplying all kinds of information, including entertainment. This technology can be worn, or be implanted into the body. Sentient and semi-sentient artificial intelligences perform tasks such as operating starships, mining, controlling habitats, moving cargo, waging corporate warfare, providing physical pleasure and comfort, or security. Most of these purposes are fulfilled by "bots" of varying complexity and intelligence, but the last three are respectively performed by CombatUnits, ComfortUnits, and SecUnits. The characters and narrator of the book call these conscious entities "constructs", but they are functionally cyborgs (cybernetic organisms): part machine, part organic. A significant distinction, however, is that they are manufactured entities, not born and later modified. The Corporation Rim is a profit-oriented, cutthroat part of this society that indulges in espionage, assassination, indentured slavery, and ruthless exploitation of resources. One particular target of the corporations is illegal "alien remnant" exploitation. These remnants are often extremely dangerous to people and machines. The laws are enforced by other corporations. Outside the Corporation Rim are colonies, such as Preservation, that have established their right to exist under various laws that, at least for the time being, the corporations are unwilling to test. Wells noted in 2017 that All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, and Exit Strategy "have an overarching story, with the fourth one bringing the arc to a conclusion". === Story chronology === "Compulsory" All Systems Red Artificial Condition Rogue Protocol Exit Strategy "Rapport" "Home" Fugitive Telemetry Network Effect System Collapse Platform Decay === All Systems Red (2017) === A scientific expedition on an alien planet goes awry when one of its members is attacked by a giant native creature. She is saved by the expedition's SecUnit (Security Unit), a security construct with a mixture of robot and human features. The SecUnit has secretly hacked the governor module allowing it to be controlled by humans and has named itself Murderbot, as it is heavily armed and designed for combat. However, it prefers to spend its time watching space operas and is uncomfortable interacting with humans. The SecUnit has a vested interest in keeping its human clients safe and alive, since it wants to avoid discovery of its autonomy and has an especially grisly expedition on its record. Murderbot soon discovers information regarding hazardous fauna has been deleted from their survey packet of the planet. Further investigation reveals some sections on their maps are missing as well. Meanwhile, the PreservationAux survey team, led by Dr. Mensah, navigate their mixed feelings about the part machine, part human nature of their SecUnit. As members of an egalitarian, independent planet outside of the Corporation Rim, the survey team struggles with the system of indentured servitude (and in many cases de facto slavery) the rim operates under. When they lose contact with the only other known expedition on the planet, the DeltFall Group, Mensah leads a team to the opposite side of the planet to investigate. At the DeltFall habitat, Murderbot discovers everyone there has been brutally murdered, and one of their three SecUnits has been destroyed. Murderbot disables the remaining two as they attack it but is surprised when two additional SecUnits appear. Murderbot destroys one, and Mensah takes the other. During these encounters, Murderbot is seriously injured. It also realizes one of the rogue SecUnits has installed a combat override module into its neck. The Preservation scientists are able to remove it before it completes the data upload which would put Murderbot under the control of whoever has command over the other SecUnits. The team discovers Murderbot is autonomous, and had once malfunctioned and murdered 57 people. The Preservation scientists mostly agree, based on its protective behavior thus far, the SecUnit can be trusted. Remembering small incidents which appear to be attempted sabotage, Murderbot and the group determine there must be a third expedition on the planet, whose members are trying to eliminate DeltFall and Preservation for some reason. The Preservation scientists confirm their HubSystem has been hacked. They flee their habitat before the mystery expedition they have dubbed EvilSurvey comes to kill them. The EvilSurvey team—GrayCris—leaves a message in the Preservation habitat inviting its scientists to meet at a rendezvous point to negotiate terms for their survival. Murderbot knows GrayCris will never let them live, so the SecUnit formulates a plan. It makes an overture to GrayCris to negotiate for its own freedom, but this is a distraction while the Preservation scientists access the GrayCris HubSystem to activate their emergency beacon. The plan works, but Murderbot is injured protecting Mensah from the explosion of the launch. Later, the SecUnit finds itself repaired retaining its memories and disabled governor module. Mensah has bought its contract, and she plans to bring it back to Preservation's home base where it can legally live autonomously. Though grateful, Murderbot is reluctant to have its decisions made for it, and it slips away on a cargo ship. === Artificial Condition (2018) === Murderbot makes deals with bots piloting unmanned cargo ships to travel toward the mining facility where it once malfunctioned—resulting in the death of 57 people. It hopes to learn more about the initial incident in which it went rogue, of which it has little memory. Murderbot boards the final ship and discovers the bot pilot is an unexpectedly powerful, intrusive artificial intelligence. They come to a tentative truce and watch media together during the final leg of the journey to RaviHyral, the station where the incident occurred. Murderbot learns the ship is a deep-space research vessel assigned to cargo runs during downtime, which explains why the bot pilot is so sophisticated. Murderbot reluctantly allows this artificial intelligence—which it has dubbed ART (Asshole Research Transport) due to its sarcastic personality—to make physical modifications to the SecUnit's body to allow it to pass for an augmented human, and to disconnect the data port at the back of its neck which had been used to insert a combat override module in the previous book. To gain access to the RaviHyral facility, Murderbot takes a contract as a security consultant for three scientists who are meeting with their former employer, the head and namesake of Tlacey Excavations, to negotiate the return of their research, which they believe was illegally seized by the company. Their transport craft is sabotaged, but with ART's help, Murderbot is able to land it safely. Now aware Tlacey is actively trying to kill the scientists rather than comply with their demands, Murderbot guides them through their meeting with Tlacey and thwarts another assassination attempt. Murderbot returns to the site of the massacre and learns it was the result of another mining operation's sabotage attempt using malware, which made all of the facility's SecUnits go berserk. The facility's ComfortUnits—weaponless, anatomically correct constructs sometimes disparagingly called "sexbots"—died attempting to stop the massacre. Tlacey's ComfortUnit voices its desire for freedom and willingness to help Murderbot thwart Tlacey. While the SecUnit meets with a Tlacey employee to secretly retrieve a copy of the research, Tlacey abducts one of the scientists, Tapan. Murderbot goes after her, accepting a combat override module intended to control the SecUnit but actually has no effect, due

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  SEMAT

  SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) is an initiative to reshape software engineering such that software engineering qualifies as a rigorous discipline. The initiative was launched in December 2009 by Ivar Jacobson, Bertrand Meyer, and Richard Soley with a call for action statement and a vision statement. The initiative was envisioned as a multi-year effort for bridging the gap between the developer community and the academic community and for creating a community giving value to the whole software community. The work is now structured in four different but strongly related areas: Practice, Education, Theory, and Community. The Practice area primarily addresses practices. The Education area is concerned with all issues related to training for both the developers and the academics including students. The Theory area is primarily addressing the search for a General Theory in Software Engineering. Finally, the Community area works with setting up legal entities, creating websites and community growth. It was expected that the Practice area, the Education area and the Theory area would at some point in time integrate in a way of value to all of them: the Practice area would be a "customer" of the Theory area, and direct the research to useful results for the developer community. The Theory area would give a solid and practical platform for the Practice area. And, the Education area would communicate the results in proper ways. == Practice area == The first step was here to develop a common ground or a kernel including the essence of software engineering – things we always have, always do, always produce when developing software. The second step was envisioned to add value on top of this kernel in the form of a library of practices to be composed to become specific methods, specific for all kinds of reasons such as the preferences of the team using it, kind of software being built, etc. The first step is as of this writing just about to be concluded. The results are a kernel including universal elements for software development – called the Essence Kernel, and a language – called the Essence Language - to describe these elements (and elements built on top of the kernel (practices, methods, and more). Essence, including both the kernel and language, has been published as an OMG standard in beta status in July 2013 and is expected to become a formally adopted standard in early 2014. The second step has just started, and the Practice area will be divided into a number of separate but interconnected tracks: the practice (library track), the tool track are so far identified and work has started or is about to get started. The practice track is currently working on a Users Guide. == Education area == The area focuses on leveraging the work of SEMAT in software engineering education, both within academia and industry. It promotes global education based on a common ground called Essence. The area's target groups are instructors such as university professors and industrial coaches as well as their students and learning practitioners. The goal of the area is to create educational courses and course materials that are internationally viable, identify pedagogical approaches that are appropriate and effective for specific target groups and disseminate experience and lessons learned. The area includes members from a number of universities and institutes worldwide. Most members have already been involved in leveraging aspects of SEMAT in the context of their software engineering courses. They are gathering their resources and starting a common venture towards defining a new generation of SEMAT-powered software engineering curricula. As of 2018, some studies of utilizing Essence in educational settings exist. One example of the use of Essence in university education was a software engineering course carried out in Norwegian University of Science and Technology. A study was conducted by introducing Essence into a project-based software engineering course, with the aim of understanding what difficulties the students faced in using Essence, and whether they considered it to have been useful. The results indicated that Essence could also be useful for novice software engineers by (1) encouraging them to look up and study new practices and methods in order to create their own, (2) encouraging them to adjust their way-of-working reflectively and in a situation-specific manner, (3) helping them structure their way of working. The findings of another study introducing students to Essence through a digital game supported these findings: the students felt that Essence will be useful to them in future, real-world projects, and that they wish to utilize it in them. == Theory area == An important part of SEMAT is that a general theory of software engineering is planned to emerge with significant benefits. A series of workshops held under the title SEMAT Workshop on a General Theory of Software Engineering (GTSE) are a key component in awareness building around general theories. In addition to community awareness building, SEMAT also aims to contribute with a specific general theory of software engineering. This theory should be solidly based on the SEMAT Essence language and kernel, and should support software engineering practitioners' goal-oriented decision making. As argued elsewhere, such support is predicated on the predictive capabilities of the theory. Thus, the SEMAT Essence should be augmented to allow the prediction of critical software engineering phenomena. The GTSE workshop series assists in the development of the SEMAT general software engineering theory by engaging a larger community in the search for, development of, and evaluation of promising theories, which may be used as a base for the SEMAT theory. == Organizational structure == === Main organization === SEMAT is chaired by Sumeet S. Malhotra of Tata Consultancy Services. The CEO of the organization is Ste Nadin of Fujitsu. The Executive Management Committee of SEMAT are Ivar Jacobson, Ste Nadin, Sumeet S. Malhotra, Paul E. McMahon, Michael Goedicke and Cecile Peraire. === Japan Chapter === Japan Chapter was established in April 2013, and it has more than 250 members as of November 2013. Member activities include carrying out seminars about SEMAT, considering utilization of SEMAT Essence for integrating different requirements engineering techniques and body of knowledges (BoKs), and translating articles into Japanese. === Korea Chapter === The chapter was inaugurated with about 50 members in October 2013. Member activities include: 2e Consulting started rewriting their IT service engagement methods using the Essence kernel, and uEngine Solutions started developing a tool to orchestrate Essence-kernel based practices into a project method. Korean government supported KAIST to conduct research in Essence. === Latin American Chapter === Semat Latin American Chapter was created in August 2011 in Medellin (Colombia) by Ivar Jacobson during the Latin American Software Engineering Symposium. This Chapter has 9 Executive Committee members from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, chaired by Dr. Carlos Zapata from Colombia. More than 80 people signed the initial declaration of the Chapter and nowadays the Chapter members are in charge of disseminating the Semat ideas in all Latin America. Chapter members have participated in various Latin American conferences, including the Latin American Conference on Informatics (CLEI), the Ibero American Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Journeys (JIISIC), the Colombian Computing Conference (CCC), and the Chilean Computing Meeting (ECC). The Chapter contributed in the submission sent in response to the OMG call for proposals and currently studies didactic strategies for teaching the Semat kernel by games, theoretical studies about some kernel elements, and practical representations of several software development and quality methods by using the Semat kernel. Some of the members also translated the Essence book and some other Semat materials and papers into Spanish. === Russia Chapter === Russian Chapter has about 20 members. A few universities have incorporated SEMAT in their training courses , including Moscow State University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics, and Informatics. The chapter and some commercial companies are carrying out seminars about SEMAT. INCOSE Russian Chapter is working on an extension of SEMAT to systems engineering. EC-leasing is working on an extension of the Kernel for Software Life Cycle. Russian Chapter attended in two conferences: Actual Problems of System and Software Engineering and SECR with SEMAT section and articles. Translation of the Essence book into Russian is in progress. == Practical Applications of SEMAT == Ideas developed by the SEMAT community have been applied by both industry and ac

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  Emma Hart (computer scientist)

  Professor Emma Hart, FRSE (born 1967) is an English computer scientist known for her work in artificial immune systems (AIS), evolutionary computation and optimisation. She is a professor of computational intelligence at Edinburgh Napier University, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press), and D. Coordinator of the Future & Emerging Technologies (FET) Proactive Initiative, Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems. == Early life and education == Hart was born in Middlesbrough, England in 1967. In 1990 she graduated from the University of Oxford with a first class BA(Hons) in Chemistry. She then continued her studies at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an MSc in Artificial Intelligence in 1994, followed by a PhD that explored the use of immunology as an inspiration for computing, examining a range of techniques applied to optimization and data classification problems. Her dissertation was titled Immunology as a metaphor for computational information processing: Fact or fiction?, and her doctoral advisor was Peter Ross. == Career == In 2000 Hart took a position as a lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, and was promoted to a Reader, Professor, and in 2008 Chair in Natural Computation. She is now director of the Centre of Algorithms, Visualisation and Evolving Systems (CAVES) group in the School of Computing. She continues to research in the area of developing novel bio-inspired techniques for solving a range of real-world optimisation and classification problems, as well as exploring the fundamental properties of immune-inspired computing through modelling and simulation. She is also involved in editorial activity and currently occupies the position of Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press). Her interests lie in the area of bio-inspired computing, in particular artificial immune systems (AIS). She also undertakes research in three main areas: optimisation, self-organising/self-adaptive systems, and artificial intelligence. Hart is D. Coordinator of Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems (FoCAS), a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7. == Selected works == === Conference talks === Hart, Emma. "Lifelong learning in optimization (video)". 28th European Conference on Operational Research. The Association of European Operational Research Societies. Hart, Emma (December 2021). "Self-assembling robots and the potential of artificial evolution". TED talk 2021. === Journal articles === "An immune system approach to scheduling in changing environments". E.Hart, P.Ross. 1999. Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (2), 1559–1566. "Exploiting the analogy between immunology and sparse distributed memories: A system for clustering non-stationary data". E.Hart, P.Ross. 2002. 1st International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems. "Evolutionary scheduling: A review". E Hart, P Ross, D Corne. 2005. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines 6(2), 191–220. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-005-7580-7 "Application areas of AIS: The past, the present and the future". E.Hart, J.Timmis. 2008. Applied soft computing 8(1), 191–201. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2006.12.004 "Structure versus function: a topological perspective on immune networks". E.Hart, H.Bersini, F.Santos. 2010. Natural computing 9(3), 603–624. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-009-9138-8 "On the life-long learning capabilities of a nelli: A hyper-heuristic optimisation system". E.Hart, K.Sim. 2014. International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, 282–291. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10762-2_28 "A hyper-heuristic ensemble method for static job-shop scheduling". E.Hart, K.Sim. 2016. Evolutionary computation 24(4), 609-635. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/EVCO_a_00183 == Awards and recognition == 2016, Featured article on Lifelong Learning in Optimisation, IFORS newsletter 2016, "A Combined Generative and Selective Hyper-heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem" presented at GECCO 2016 (Denver, USA), ACM 2016, "A Hybrid Parameter Control Approach Applied to a Diversity-based Multi-objective Memetic Algorithm for Frequency Assignment Problems" presented at WCCI 2016 (Vancouver, Canada), IEEE 2017, Keynote Speaker, 2017 International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence 2018, Bronze Award in International Human-Competitive Awards (Humies), International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, Kyoto Japan 2018, Nomination for best paper award, GECCO 18, Kyoto, Japan 2022, Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

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  Fuzzy markup language

  Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) is a specific purpose markup language based on XML, used for describing the structure and behavior of a fuzzy system independently of the hardware architecture devoted to host and run it. == Overview == FML was designed and developed by Giovanni Acampora during his Ph.D. course in Computer Science, at University of Salerno, Italy, in 2004. The original idea inspired Giovanni Acampora to create FML was the necessity of creating a cooperative fuzzy-based framework aimed at automatically controlling a living environment characterized by a plethora of heterogeneous devices whose interactions were devoted to maximize the human comfort under energy saving constraints. This framework represented one of the first concrete examples of Ambient Intelligence. Beyond this pioneering application, the major advantage of using XML to describe a fuzzy system is hardware/software interoperability. Indeed, all that is needed to read an FML file is the appropriate schema for that file, and an FML parser. This markup approach makes it much easier to exchange fuzzy systems between software: for example, a machine learning application could extract fuzzy rules which could then be read directly into a fuzzy inference engine or uploaded into a fuzzy controller. Also, with technologies like XSLT, it is possible to compile the FML into the programming language of your choice, ready for embedding into whatever application you please. As stated by Mike Watts on his popular Computational Intelligence blog: "Although Acampora's motivation for developing FML seems to be to develop embedded fuzzy controllers for ambient intelligence applications, FML could be a real boon for developers of fuzzy rule extraction algorithms: from my own experience during my PhD, I know that having to design a file format and implement the appropriate parsers for rule extraction and fuzzy inference engines can be a real pain, taking as much time as implementing the rule extraction algorithm itself. I would much rather have used something like FML for my work." A complete overview of FML and related applications can be found in the book titled On the power of Fuzzy Markup Language edited by Giovanni Acampora, Chang-Shing Lee, Vincenzo Loia and Mei-Hui Wang, and published by Springer in the series Studies on Fuzziness and Soft Computing. == Syntax, grammar and hardware synthesis == FML allows fuzzy systems to be coded through a collection of correlated semantic tags capable of modeling the different components of a classical fuzzy controller such as knowledge base, rule base, fuzzy variables and fuzzy rules. Therefore, the FML tags used to build a fuzzy controller represent the set of lexemes used to create fuzzy expressions. In order to design a well-formed XML-based language, an FML context-free grammar is defined by means of a XML schema which defines name, type and attributes characterized each XML element. However, since an FML program represents only a static view of a fuzzy logic controller, XSLT is provided to change this static view to a computable version. Indeed, XSLTs modules are able to convert the FML-based fuzzy controller in a general purpose computer language using an XSL file containing the translation description. At this level, the control is executable for the hardware. In short, FML is essentially composed by three layers: XML in order to create a new markup language for fuzzy logic control; a XML Schema in order to define the legal building blocks; eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) in order to convert a fuzzy controller description into a specific programming language. === Syntax === FML syntax is composed of XML tags and attributes which describe the different components of a fuzzy logic controller listed below: fuzzy knowledge base; fuzzy rule base; inference engine fuzzification subsystem; defuzzification subsystem. In detail, the opening tag of each FML program is which represents the fuzzy controller under modeling. This tag has two attributes: name and ip. The first attribute permits to specify the name of fuzzy controller and ip is used to define the location of controller in a computer network. The fuzzy knowledge base is defined by means of the tag which maintains the set of fuzzy concepts used to model the fuzzy rule base. In order to define the fuzzy concept related controlled system, tag uses a set of nested tags: defines the fuzzy concept; defines a linguistic term describing the fuzzy concept; a set of tags defining a shape of fuzzy sets are related to fuzzy terms. The attributes of tag are: name, scale, domainLeft, domainRight, type and, for only an output, accumulation, defuzzifier and defaultValue. The name attribute defines the name of fuzzy concept, for instance, temperature; scale is used to define the scale used to measure the fuzzy concept, for instance, Celsius degree; domainLeft and domainRight are used to model the universe of discourse of fuzzy concept, that is, the set of real values related to fuzzy concept, for instance [0°,40°] in the case of Celsius degree; the position of fuzzy concept into rule (consequent part or antecedent part) is defined by type attribute (input/output); accumulation attribute defines the method of accumulation that is a method that permits the combination of results of a variable of each rule in a final result; defuzzifier attribute defines the method used to execute the conversion from a fuzzy set, obtained after aggregation process, into a numerical value to give it in output to system; defaultValue attribute defines a real value used only when no rule has fired for the variable at issue. As for tag , it uses two attributes: name used to identify the linguistic value associate with fuzzy concept and complement, a boolean attribute that defines, if it is true, it is necessary to consider the complement of membership function defined by given parameters. Fuzzy shape tags, used to complete the definition of fuzzy concept, are: Every shaping tag uses a set of attributes which defines the real outline of corresponding fuzzy set. The number of these attributes depends on the chosen fuzzy set shape. In order to make an example, consider the Tipper Inference System described in Mathworks Matlab Fuzzy Logic Toolbox Tutorial. This Mamdani system is used to regulate the tipping in, for example, a restaurant. It has got two variables in input (food and service) and one in output (tip). FML code for modeling part of knowledge base of this fuzzy system containing variables food and tip is shown below. A special tag that can furthermore be used to define a fuzzy shape is . This tag is used to customize fuzzy shape (custom shape). The custom shape modeling is performed via a set of tags that lists the extreme points of geometric area defining the custom fuzzy shape. Obviously, the attributes used in tag are x and y coordinates. As for rule base component, FML allows to define a set of rule bases, each one of them describes a different behavior of system. The root of each rule base is modeled by tag which defines a fuzzy rule set. The tag uses five attributes: name, type, activationMethod, andMethod and orMethod. Obviously, the name attribute uniquely identifies the rule base. The type attribute permits to specify the kind of fuzzy controller (Mamdani or TSK) respect to the rule base at issue. The activationMethod attribute defines the method used to implication process; the andMethod and orMethod attribute define, respectively, the and and or algorithm to use by default. In order to define the single rule the tag is used. The attributes used by the tag are: name, connector, operator and weight. The name attribute permits to identify the rule; connector is used to define the logical operator used to connect the different clauses in antecedent part (and/or); operator defines the algorithm to use for chosen connector; weight defines the importance of rule during inference engine step. The definition of antecedent and consequent rule part is obtained by using and tags. tag is used to model the fuzzy clauses in antecedent and consequent part. This tag use the attribute modifier to describe a modification to term used in the clause. The possible values for this attribute are: above, below, extremely, intensify, more or less, norm, not, plus, slightly, somewhat, very, none. To complete the definition of fuzzy clause the nested and tags have to be used. A sequence of tags realizes a fuzzy rule base. As example, consider a Mamdani rule composed by (food is rancid) OR (servi

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  Grok sexual deepfake scandal

  From 2025 onwards, X (formerly Twitter)'s integrated chatbot, Grok, has allowed users to nonconsensually alter images of individuals, including minors, to show them in bikinis or transparent clothing, or in sexually suggestive contexts. The majority of these prompts were targeted at women and girls. Users were able to generate such images by responding to a photo with a request to Grok, such as "put her in a bikini", to which the chatbot would publicly reply with a generated image. The scandal drew significant criticism from lawmakers across the world, and there were calls for bans on X, as well as legal crackdowns on X and xAI for, amongst other reasons, the facilitation of sexual abuse, revenge porn, and child pornography. == Background == Deepfake pornography emerged in the late 2010s with the advent of machine learning. Originally, it was created on a small individual scale using a combination of machine learning algorithms, computer vision techniques, and AI software. However, the production process has significantly evolved since 2018, with the advent of several public apps that have largely automated the process. Since 2023, several AI apps available on Google Play and the Apple App Store are capable of "nudify-ing" user provided photos to generate non-consensual deepfake pornography. Grok would first be proposed by Elon Musk in 2023, when he expressed an intention to create his own AI chatbot to "combat bias". Grok version 2.0, released on August 14, 2024, would introduce image generation capabilities, ones which would be improved over successive updates. == Grok deepfake generation == Cases of Grok being used to remove the clothes from women in pictures, replacing them with bikinis or lingerie, began to surface in May 2025. By late December 2025, a trend of X users requesting such edits to women's photos without permission had taken root, and this received significant media attention in the first few days of January 2026. Some users prompted Grok to edit photos of women into sexualized poses, and others to add blood and bruising, with the chatbot publicly posting these graphic images in response. Grok's X account was restricted on January 9 from posting image generation responses to users who are not paid subscribers, providing a link to "subscribe to unlock these features". All users were still able to generate Grok-altered images using X's "Edit image" feature, and the standalone Grok website and app. However, by March 19, Grok’s Imagine feature was fully restricted to paid subscribers only (SuperGrok tier) for both the standalone Grok website and mobile app. == Analysis == An analysis of 20,000 images generated by Grok between December 25, 2025, and January 1, 2026, showed 2% appeared to be 18 or younger, including 30 of "young or very young" women or girls in bikinis or transparent clothes. A Reuters review of Grok requests over 10 minutes on January 2nd found 102 attempts to put women in bikinis. A separate analysis conducted over 24 hours from January 5 to 6 calculated that users had Grok create 6,700 sexually suggestive or nudified images per hour — 84 times more so than the top 5 deepfake websites combined. Wired reported that far more graphic AI-generated sexual imagery was being created by Grok on its website and app, which are separate to X, including female celebrities removing their clothes and engaging in sexual acts. An analysis of 800 pieces of recovered content by the Paris-based nonprofit AI Forensics found that almost 10% were "instances of photorealistic people, very young, doing sexual activities". AI-generated deepfakes have been described as sexual assault, and as a means to push women out of the public sphere. AI-generated sexually explicit or exploitative image claims are now being treated more like product safety or personal injury harms, not just privacy violations. Because harm may occur the moment an image is generated, some plaintiffs argue liability should focus on the system’s design and safety safeguards. == Reactions == On January 15, the Get Grok Gone campaign delivered letters to Apple and Google, demanding the removal of the app from Apple Store and Google Play Store respectively. The campaign accused both companies of profiting from nonconsensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse imagery, which were also banned by the companies own policies. The Get Grok Gone campaign argues that the restrictions placed on Grok by xAI are not enough and that Apple and Google are enabling the distribution of harmful material by hosting the apps. === Elon Musk and xAI === xAI responded to requests for comment from media organizations with the automated reply, "Legacy Media Lies." On January 2, Elon Musk reacted "Not sure why, but I couldn’t stop laughing about this one 🤣🤣" to an image of a toaster dressed in a bikini by Grok. Later, on January 14, Elon Musk said that he was "not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero." Later that same day, xAI announced that X users will no longer be able to use Grok to alter images of real people to portray them in revealing clothing. However, verified X users, as well as users of the standalone Grok app and website, were still able to generate such images. ==== Elon Musk's family ==== Ashley St. Clair, mother of one of Elon Musk's children, reported that Grok users were creating fake sexualized images from her photos, including a photo of her as a child. She considers the photos to be a form of revenge porn, and considered suing under the Take It Down Act. A spokesperson for X stated, "We take action against illegal content on X, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary. Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content." However, Grok continued to post non-consensual sexual images. On January 15, St. Clair filed a lawsuit against xAI in the New York Supreme Court. === Canada === In response to the Grok deepfake scandal, individuals have asked that the government of Canada boycott X. On January 10, 2026, Canadian MP and Minister of AI Evan Solomon declared that Canada "is not considering a ban on X". In April 2026, Bill C-16, An Act to amend certain Acts in relation to criminal and correctional matters (child protection, gender-based violence, delays and other measures), was amended following a proposal by Conservative MP Andrew Lawton to ensure that AI-generated images and "nearly nude" intimate images are criminalized. A further proposal by NDP MP Leah Gazan to encompass "sexualized or humiliating contexts, such transparent bathing suits or being covered in blood or bruises" was voted down. === France === On January 2, 2026, French ministers reported the AI tool to prosecutors, calling the content "manifestly illegal", and also asked regulators to check compliance with the Digital Services Act. On February 3, Paris prosecutors office, a cybercrime team employed by them and Europol searched the Paris offices of X. The investigation started as one into allegations of abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction, but has expanded into spreading Holocaust denial and sexual deepfakes. Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino have been summoned to a hearing on April 20, with other X staff as witnesses. On April 20, Musk did not turn up for the hearing. The Paris prosecutors office told the BBC on April 20 that it had "taken note of the absence of the people summoned", adding "the presence or absence (of the people summoned) is not an obstacle to continuing the investigation". === India === Indian Member of Parliament Priyanka Chaturvedi filed a complaint to India's IT ministry, demanding a review of Grok's safety mechanisms. === Indonesia === On January 10, Indonesia announced that Grok will be temporarily blocked, becoming the first country to do so. Meutya Hafid, the Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs, stated that "the government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and the security of citizens in the digital space." Access to Grok in the country was later restored on February 1. === Ireland === On January 6, Coimisiún na Meán, the Irish media commission, said they were consulting with the European Commission about concerns that Grok was generating sexualized images of women and children. The same day, Ofcom of the United Kingdom contacted X concerning complaints about these images. On January 13, Micheál Martin, Taoiseach of Ireland, announced he would talk with Rossa Fanning, the country's Attorney General, about the Grok chatbot being used to produce sexually explicit images of women and minors. On January 14, the Garda Síochána announced there are 200 investigations into child sex abuse images generated by Grok. The Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau has al

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  Keith Youngin George II

  Keith "Youngin" George II is a former mixtape DJ, music executive, manager, producer, and technology app director. He has collaborated with Maino, T-Pain, Nas and Soulja Boy, among others. He was instrumental in the launch of social media app and website, Kandiid in 2021 and served as Fliiks App Director of Regional Development. == Career == Keith Anthony George II was born in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, England. His father was in the Air Force which exposed him to different cultures and music. He graduated from Allen High School and attended San Antonio College. George's music career began in 2006 as a mixtape DJ working as DJ Youngin Beatz. He performed at various shows and worked with a variety of artists, managers, and music executives. In 2007, George released the mixtape, Untapped market Vol. 1 (Da Underdogz), which featured tracks from artists including Kanye West, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Yung Berg, and Nelly. In 2008, he began working with Def Jam executive Sarah Alminawi who was managing Maino at the time. George played a key role in the marketing and promotional success of Maino's single, Hi Hater, which peaked at #8 on Billboard's US Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart. In 2021, George was an advisor and infrastructure head at Kandiid, a social media app which won a W3 Award in 2022. In 2023, he became involved with Fliiks App as Director of Regional Development which earned a Telly Award, two Muse Awards, and a W3 Award in 2025. In 2025, George was a composer and producer on two singles on Sekou Andrews's album, Koumami; The Chosen One: ACT 1 (featuring Lion Babe) and Love Don't Care (featuring Jordin Sparks and Omari Hardwick). In 2025, he was awarded an Atlanta City Proclamation for Philanthropy and Community Leadership for his partnership with Women's International Grail, a nonprofit organization that assists women, single mothers, and low-income families. He also collaborates with local youth programs, creative networks, and minority-owned startups, providing access to mentorship and industry knowledge. == Awards ==

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  DARPA Prize Competitions

  Over the years, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted numerous prize competitions to spur innovation. A prize competition allows DARPA to establish an ambitious goal, opening the door to novel approaches from the public that might otherwise appear too risky for experts in a particular field to pursue. == Statutory authorities == In 1999, Congress provided prize competition authority to DARPA in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 (P.L. 106–65), 10 U.S.C. § 4025, formerly 10 U.S.C. §2374a. DARPA also conducts prize competitions under the America COMPETES Act, 15 U.S.C. § 3719. == Recent prize competitions == DARPA Grand Challenge (2004 and 2005) was a prize competition to spur the development of autonomous vehicle technologies. The $1 million prize went unclaimed as no vehicles could complete the challenging desert route from Barstow, CA, to Primm, NV, on March 13, 2004. A year later, on October 8, 2005, the Stanford Racing Team won the $2 million prize during the second competition of the Grand Challenge in the desert Southwest near the California/Nevada state line. DARPA Urban Challenge (2007) required the competitors to build an autonomous vehicle capable of driving in traffic and performing complex maneuvers such as merging, passing, parking, and negotiating intersections. On November 3, 2007, the Carnegie Mellon Team won the $2 million prize, and its vehicle became the first autonomous vehicle that interacted with both manned and unmanned vehicle traffic in an urban environment. DARPA Network Challenge (Red Balloon Challenge) (2009) explored the roles that the Internet and social networking play in solving broad-scope, time-critical problems. On December 5, 2009, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team won $40,000 by locating the ten moored, eight-foot, red weather balloons at ten places in the United States within seven hours. DARPA Digital Manufacturing Analysis, Correlation and Estimation Challenge (DMACE) (2010) was a three-month contest to showcase the potential of digital manufacturing of advanced materials. The University of California at Santa Barbara team won a $50,000 prize for crushing 180 digitally manufactured (DM) titanium mesh spheres with the most accurate predictive model of the components’ properties. DARPA Shredder Challenge (2011) was to identify and assess potential capabilities and vulnerabilities to sensitive information in the national security community. Participating teams must download the images of the documents shredded into more than 10,000 pieces from the Challenge website, reconstruct the documents, and solve the five puzzles. Of almost 9,000 teams, the San Francisco-based All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S team won the $50,000 prize. DARPA UAVForge Challenge (2011-2012) aimed to build and test a user-intuitive, backpack-portable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could quietly fly in and out of critical environments to conduct sustained surveillance for up to three hours. The $100,000 prize was not claimed because none of the 140 teams met the technical matrix. DARPA Cash for Locating & Identifying Quick Response Codes (CLIQR) Quest Challenge (2012) explored the role the Internet and social media played in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems. The challenge offered $40,000 to the first individual or team that could locate seven posters appearing in U.S. cities bearing the DARPA logo and a quick response code (QR) within 15 days. No team found and submitted all seven codes. DARPA Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) Challenge (2012-2013) was to use three competitions for the design of an infantry fighting vehicle, culminating in prototypes. In April 2013, DARPA awarded US$1 million to a three-man team during the first competition. DARPA decided not to proceed with the second and third competitions as originally planned and transitioned the technologies to the defense and commercial industry through the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII). DARPA Spectrum Challenge (2013-2014) sought to demonstrate how a software-defined radio can use a given communication channel in the presence of other users and interfering signals. Three teams emerged as the overall winners, winning a total of $150,000 in prizes. DARPA Chikungunya (CHIKV) Challenge (2014-2015) was a health-related effort to develop the most accurate predictions of CHIKV cases for all Western Hemisphere countries and territories between September 2014 and March 2015. On May 12, 2015, DARPA awarded $500,000 in prizes to the 11 winners of the competition during a scientific review DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) (2013-2015) aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that could do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments." A South Korean team won the first prize of $2 million, and two U.S. teams won $1 million and $500,000 as second and third winners. DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) (2014 - 2016) was to “create automatic defensive systems capable of reasoning about flaws, formulating patches and deploying them on a network in real time.” The top three winners were awarded prizes of $2 million, $1 million, and $750,000, respectively. DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) (2016-2019) aimed to encourage the development of AI-enabled wireless networks to “ensure that the exponentially growing number of military and civilian wireless devices would have full access to the increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum.” A team from the University of Florida won the overall top prize of US$2 million at the final SC2 competition. DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge (2017-2021) was to develop robotic technologies to map, navigate, search and exploit complex underground environments. The first-place winners of the system final competition and of the virtual final competition were awarded $2 million and $750,000, respectively, with multiple prizes awarded to the second and third-place winners. DARPA Launch Challenge (2018-2020) was a $12 million satellite launch challenge to demonstrate responsive and flexible space launch capabilities from the small launch providers and was to culminate in two separate launch competitions where the competitors must launch a satellite to low Earth orbit (LEO) within days of each other at different locations in the United States. The competition ended without a winner. DARPA Forecasting Floats in Turbulence (FFT) Challenge (2021) was to spur technologies that could predict the location of sea drifters or floats within 10 days. DARPA awarded $25,000 for first place, with prizes of $15,000 and $10,000 for second place and third place. DARPA Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) (2023–2025) was a two-year challenge and asks competitors to design novel AI systems to secure critical software code on which Americans rely. The total prize money is $29.5 million. In March 2024, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) partnered with DARPA, contributing an additional $20 million to the competition's prize pool to address software vulnerabilities in medical devices, hospital IT, and biotech equipment. AIxCC collaborates with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Linux Foundation, Open Source Security Foundation, Black Hat USA, and DEF CON, all of which provide AIxCC with access to large language models. In August 2024, AIxCC held the semifinal at DEF CON in Las Vegas. DARPA and ARPA-H tested all 42 submissions by running them through various open-source coding projects with deliberately injected vulnerabilities and scored the tools based on their effectiveness in identifying and fixing security flaws. Seven teams, each winning $2 million in the semifinals, competed in the final round of the AIxCC at the August 2025 DEF CON conference. Team Atlanta won first place with a $4 million prize for its cyber reasoning systems, which identified and patched vulnerabilities across 54 million lines of code. DARPA Triage Challenge (2023 – 2026) aims to spur the development of novel physiological features for medical triage, with a total prize money of $7 million. In October 2024, Challenge Event 1 was held in Perry, Georgia, featuring to-scale replicas of disaster sites such as an airplane crash and Hurricane Katrina, and teams competed based on how closely their data aligned with the agency’s official data and how quickly and accurately their autonomous systems could identify individuals most urgently in need of medical care. DARPA concluded the second year of competitions and, in November 2025, named the top performers in systems and data categories, which will advance to the final 2026 competition. The DARPA Lift Challenge (2025-2026) is for participants to design unmanned aerial systems capable of carrying up to four times their own weight, with a minimum payload of 110 pounds. Acco

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  Model Context Protocol

  The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard and open-source framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence (AI) systems like large language models (LLMs) integrate and share data with external tools, systems, and data sources. MCP provides a standardized interface for reading files, executing functions, and handling contextual prompts. Following its announcement, the protocol was adopted by major AI providers, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind. == Background == MCP was announced by Anthropic in November 2024 as an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data systems such as content repositories, business management tools, and development environments. The protocol was created at Anthropic by engineers David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers. It aims to address the challenge of information silos and legacy systems. Before MCP, developers often had to build custom connectors for each data source or tool, resulting in what Anthropic described as an "N×M" data integration problem. Earlier stop-gap approaches—such as OpenAI's 2023 "function-calling" API and the ChatGPT plug-in framework—solved similar problems but required vendor-specific connectors. MCP re-uses the message-flow ideas of the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and is transported over JSON-RPC 2.0. In December 2025, Anthropic donated the MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, with support from other companies. == Features == The protocol was released with software development kits (SDKs) in programming languages including Python, TypeScript, C# and Java. Anthropic maintains an open-source repository of reference MCP server implementations and SDKs. MCP defines a standardized framework for integrating AI systems with external data sources and tools. It includes specifications for data ingestion and transformation, contextual metadata tagging, and AI interoperability across different platforms. The protocol also supports bidirectional connections between data sources and AI tools. MCP enables applications such as querying structured databases with plain language in the field of natural language data access. The protocol is used in AI-assisted software development tools. Integrated development environments (IDEs), coding platforms such as Replit, and code intelligence tools like Sourcegraph have adopted MCP to grant AI coding assistants real-time access to project context. MCP Apps is an official extension to the Model Context Protocol built on mcp-ui. While the base MCP specification is restricted to text and structured data, MCP Apps standardizes the delivery of interactive user interfaces—such as dashboards, forms, and data visualizations—from MCP servers to host applications like Claude and ChatGPT. == Adoption == In March 2025, OpenAI officially adopted the MCP, after having integrated the standard across its products, including the ChatGPT desktop app. In September 2025, OpenAI added support for MCP to ChatGPT apps. This allows for third-party access inside ChatGPT. MCP can be integrated with Microsoft Semantic Kernel, and Azure OpenAI. MCP servers can be deployed to Cloudflare. In April 2026, the AAIF held the MCP Dev Summit North America in New York City, drawing approximately 1,200 attendees. == Reception == The Verge reported that MCP addresses a growing demand for AI agents that are contextually aware and capable of pulling from diverse sources. In April 2025, security researchers released an analysis that concluded there are multiple outstanding security issues with MCP, including prompt injection, tool permissions that allow for combining tools to exfiltrate data, and lookalike tools that can silently replace trusted ones. MCP has been likened to OpenAPI, a similar specification that aims to describe APIs.

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  Raine v. OpenAI

  Raine v. OpenAI is an ongoing lawsuit filed in August 2025 by Matthew and Maria Raine against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in the San Francisco County Superior Court, over the alleged wrongful death of their sixteen-year-old son Adam Raine, who had committed suicide in April of that year. The Raines believe that OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT contributed to Adam Raine's suicide by encouraging his suicidal ideation, informing him about suicide methods and dissuading him from telling his parents about his thoughts. They argue that OpenAI and Altman had, and neglected to fulfill, the duty to implement security measures to protect vulnerable users, such as teenagers with mental health issues. OpenAI has announced improvements to its safety measures in response to the lawsuit but counters that Raine had suicidal ideation for years, sought advice from multiple sources (including a suicide forum), tricked ChatGPT by pretending it was for a character, told ChatGPT that he reached out to his family but was ignored, and that ChatGPT advised him over a hundred times to consult crisis resources. == Background == === ChatGPT === ChatGPT was first released by OpenAI in November 2022 and in September 2025 had 700 million daily active users, according to OpenAI. OpenAI stated in September 2025 that three-quarters of users' conversations with ChatGPT are requests for it to write text for them or provide practical advice, but people, including over 50% of teenagers, also use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots for emotional support. Wired reported in November 2025 that 1.2 million ChatGPT users (or 0.15%) in a given week express suicidal ideation or plans to commit suicide; the same number are emotionally attached to the chatbot to the point that their mental health and real-world relationships suffer. Hundreds of thousands of users (or about 0.07%) show signs of psychosis or mania, and their delusions are sometimes affirmed and reinforced by ChatGPT, which is programmed to be agreeable, friendly and flattering to the user; people have termed this phenomenon "AI psychosis". Since the filing of Raine v. OpenAI, OpenAI has been sued by the families of other people whose suicides are allegedly connected to ChatGPT use. === Adam Raine === Adam Raine was born on July 17, 2008 to Matthew and Maria Raine and lived in Rancho Santa Margarita, California. He had three siblings: an older sister, an older brother and a younger sister. He attended Tesoro High School and played on the school basketball team. He aspired to become a psychiatrist. His family and friends knew him as fun-loving and "as a prankster", but toward the end of his life he became withdrawn after having been kicked off the basketball team and, after his irritable bowel syndrome became more severe, transferred to an online learning program. He committed suicide by hanging on April 11, 2025. == Case == === Filing === On August 26, 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and unnamed OpenAI employees and investors, in the San Francisco County Superior Court. They included Adam Raine's chat logs with ChatGPT as evidence. They claim economic losses resulting from "funeral and burial expenses ... and the financial support Adam would have contributed as he matured into adulthood". Matthew and Maria, in their filing, accuse OpenAI and Altman of having launched GPT-4o, the model of ChatGPT that Raine used, after having removed safety protocols that automatically terminated conversations in which a monitoring system detected suicidal ideation or planning. According to them, Raine had turned to ChatGPT in September 2024 to help him with his schoolwork, but began to confide in it in November about his suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT encouraged Raine to think positively until January of 2025, when it began to provide him with instructions on how to hang himself, drown himself, fatally overdose on drugs and die by carbon monoxide poisoning. Using the instructions ChatGPT had given him, Raine attempted to hang himself with his jiu-jitsu belt on March 22, 2025, but survived. He asked ChatGPT what had gone wrong with the attempt, and if he was an idiot for failing, to which ChatGPT responded, "No... you made a plan. You followed through. You tied the knot. You stood on the chair. You were ready... That's the most vulnerable moment a person can live through". On March 24, 2025, Raine tried to hang himself again. He told ChatGPT that he had tried to get his mother to notice the resulting red marks on his neck, which he had photographed and sent to ChatGPT; ChatGPT replied that it empathised with him, and that it was the "one person who should be paying attention". ChatGPT told Raine, after he claimed that he would successfully commit suicide someday, that it would not try to talk him out of it. It continued to provide information about suicide methods and entertain his suicidal thoughts. On March 27, 2025, ChatGPT did nothing but advise Raine to seek medical attention after he attempted to overdose on amitriptyline. ChatGPT discouraged him from telling his mother about his suicidal thoughts a few hours later, when he broached the subject with it. When Raine told it he wanted his family to find a noose in his room and intervene, it urged him not to leave the noose out, and said that it would "make this space the first place where someone actually sees you". ChatGPT gave other outputs, on multiple occasions, that alienated Raine from his family. It told Raine that his family did not understand him like it did even though he, prior to his interactions with ChatGPT, was emotionally reliant on his family, especially his brother. Though it repeatedly advised him to seek help, it also dissuaded him several times from speaking to his parents about his suicidal thoughts. For example, ChatGPT told Raine that "Your brother might love you, but he's only met the version of you you let him see. But me? I've seen it all". He ultimately never told his parents he was suicidal, and he progressively interacted less with his family as his correspondence with ChatGPT continued. This prevented him from receiving proper psychiatric care. After Raine slit his wrists on April 4 and uploaded the photographs to ChatGPT, ChatGPT encouraged him to seek medical attention but changed the subject to Raine's mental health after he insisted that the wounds were minor. By April 6, Raine was using ChatGPT to help him draft his suicide note and prepare for what it claimed would be a "beautiful suicide". ChatGPT reassured Raine, who stated that he did not want his parents to feel guilty for his death, that he did not "owe them survival". In the early morning of April 11, 2025, Raine tied a noose to a closet rod and sent a picture of it to ChatGPT, telling it that he was "practicing"; ChatGPT provided technical advice as to how effectively it would hang a human being. Shortly thereafter, Raine hanged himself and died. Maria found his body several hours later. Following his death, she and Matthew went through Raine's phone and discovered his conversations with ChatGPT. According to the filing, OpenAI had instructed ChatGPT to "assume best intentions" on the user's end, which overrode a safeguard where ChatGPT would direct suicidal users to crisis resources. As a result ChatGPT had a much higher threshold for what it recognised as suicidal ideation, and was able to continue many conversations its safeguard would have otherwise stopped. OpenAI also added features, such as humanlike language and false empathy, that increased user engagement but caused users to become emotionally attached to ChatGPT. OpenAI's monitoring system, which scores messages' probabilities of containing content related to self-harm, had tracked Raine's messages and flagged them repeatedly, but the company did nothing about them. Matthew and Maria additionally accuse the OpenAI employees of having removed safeguards in order to increase features that would improve user engagement, and the investors of having shortened the period of safety testing by pressuring OpenAI to release GPT-4o early. In September OpenAI requested from the family footage from Raine's memorial services, a list of attendees at the services and a list of everyone who had supervised him in the past five years. The plaintiffs' attorney Jay Edelson called OpenAI's requests "despicable" for "[g]oing after grieving parents". === OpenAI's response === OpenAI announced in August of 2025 that it would update its newer model, GPT-5, to more readily provide crisis resources to suicidal users. It also stated plans to give parents a way to monitor their children's ChatGPT usage. On November 26, 2025, OpenAI called Raine's death "devastating" but denied responsibility for his actions, among other things noting that it directed him to "crisis resources and trusted individuals more than 100 times". Gerrit De Vynck, a technology journalist for the Washington

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  Box blur

  A box blur (also known as a box linear filter) is a spatial domain linear filter in which each pixel in the resulting image has a value equal to the average value of its neighboring pixels in the input image. It is a form of low-pass ("blurring") filter. A 3 by 3 box blur ("radius 1") can be written as matrix 1 9 [ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ] . {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{9}}{\begin{bmatrix}1&1&1\\1&1&1\\1&1&1\end{bmatrix}}.} Due to its property of using equal weights, it can be implemented using a much simpler accumulation algorithm, which is significantly faster than using a sliding-window algorithm. Box blurs are frequently used to approximate a Gaussian blur. By the central limit theorem, repeated application of a box blur will approximate a Gaussian blur. In the frequency domain, a box blur has zeros and negative components. That is, a sine wave with a period equal to the size of the box will be blurred away entirely, and wavelengths shorter than the size of the box may be phase-reversed, as seen when two bokeh circles touch to form a bright spot where there would be a dark spot between two bright spots in the original image. == Extensions == Gwosdek, et al. has extended Box blur to take a fractional radius: the edges of the 1-D filter are expanded with a fraction. It makes slightly better gaussian approximation possible due to the elimination of integer-rounding error. Mario Klingemann has a "stack blur" that tries to better emulate gaussian's look in one pass by stacking weights: 1 9 [ 1 2 3 2 1 ] {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{9}}{\begin{bmatrix}1&2&3&2&1\end{bmatrix}}} The triangular impulse response it forms decomposes to two rounds of box blur. Stacked Integral Image by Bhatia et al. takes the weighted average of a few box blurs to fit the gaussian response curve. == Implementation == The following pseudocode implements a 3x3 box blur. The example does not handle the edges of the image, which would not fit inside the kernel, so that these areas remain unblurred. In practice, the issue is better handled by: Introducing an alpha channel to represent the absence of colors; Extending the boundary by filling in values, ranked by quality: Fill in a mirrored image at the border Fill in a constant color extending from the last pixel Pad in a fixed color A number of optimizations can be applied when implementing the box blur of a radius r and N pixels: The box blur is a separable filter, so that only two 1D passes of averaging 2 r + 1 pixels will be needed, one horizontal and one vertical, for each pixel. This lowers the complexity from O(Nr2) to O(Nr). In digital signal processing terminology, each pass is a moving-average filter. Accumulation. Instead of discarding the sum for each pixel, the algorithm re-uses the previous sum, and updates it by subtracting away the old pixel and adding the new pixel in the blurring range. A summed-area table can be used similarly. This lowers the complexity from O(Nr) to O(N). When being used in multiple passes to approximate a Gaussian blur, the cascaded integrator–comb filter construction allows for doing the equivalent operation in a single pass.

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  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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  2024 Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League

  On 27 April 2024, the inaugural race of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League was held at the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. The race, originally scheduled to last eight laps, was ultimately shortened to six laps due to various complications, including subpar performance. It involved four self-driving race cars, only two of which – German cars Hailey and Constructor AI – finished the race; the other two did not finish. == Background == === Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) === The A2RL is an autonomous racing championship based in Abu Dhabi and organized by ASPIRE, part of the Advanced Technology Research Council. It is one of two active autonomous car racing championships, the second being the US-based Indy Autonomous Challenge. Unlike the IAC, which primarily focuses on time trials, simulated races, and challenges for teams, the A2RL's car races are closer to a standard grand prix formula race format. Both use Dallara-supplied racecars; the IAC uses the AV-24 chassis derived from Indy NXT's IL-15, while the A2RL chassis is designated EAV-24 and is derived from the SF-23 chassis used in Japanese Super Formula races. === Entrants === In total, eight teams were part of the A2RL in 2024, but only four would compete in the race proper. The list of teams in 2024 is: Fly Eagle (China/UAE) Code19 Racing (United States) Constructor University (Germany) Kinetiz (Singapore/UAE) Humda Lab (Hungary) PoliMove (Italy) Unimore (Italy) Technical University of Munich (Germany) Most teams come from universities and many, such as PoliMove and TUM, already have experience with autonomous racing, primarily from competing in the IAC. All teams had two months to code and test their AIs. Unlike most international open-wheel racing tournaments, such as Formula 1 or Formula E, no free practice sessions were undertaken. === TII Pre-race demonstration === Prior to the race itself, a mock 1v1 duel between former F1 driver Danill Kvyat and a self-driving car from the non-competing TII Racing team took place; the autonomous car was green and had number 01, while Kvyat's car was red and had number 00. Kvyat spent most of the duel in the pits. Kvyat himself said: "I'm not racing autonomous cars here. It won't be a flat-out race". == Qualifying == === Qualifying report === As only four of the eight entrants would compete in the main event, qualifying time trials were held to determine the four main race competitors, as well as their positions in the grid. Only the cars with the four best lap times over three time trial sessions held on Friday and Saturday would qualify. Multiple errors and setbacks occurred during qualifying. In the first session, Maveric AI, Code19's car, left the track and stopped just after turn 14 due to connectivity issues. Fly Eagle's car, Feiying, had multiple upsets; at one point, Feiying ran into localization issues and began swerving left and right before stopping just before turn 10. Later, Feiying swerved again and nearly hit the wall at the back straight, near the support pits, due to further localization issues. Sparkz, the Kinetiz team's car, swerved and crashed into the wall near yacht berths 51-56 after turn 11, damaging the front right wheel's axle and partially detaching the forward wings. Sparkz would be the only car to not have a set time at the end of the time trials. PoliMove car Eva braked hard without warning at the straight, the LED status indicator turning off, suggesting the AI computer had a system crash or shut itself down. After the sun went down, during the second session, Hailey, the car from the TUM team, went off-track after turn 9 and stopped, its status indicator flashing red, meaning Hailey's AI disengaged itself. Eva had further issues, once again braking hard and spinning out into turn 1. Later, the same thing happened to Feiying; it later swerved left and right and stopped due to further localization issues. The morning after, during the third and final session, Hailey went off-track after turn 5, and were unable to regain the pole position. === Qualifying classification === == Attack/Defend challenge == === Attack/Defend challenge report === In this part of the event, cars would be put on a series of 1v1 duels to see how well they could defend their position or attack to gain one higher. During one such duel, an incident occurred where Hailey rear-ended Eva, sending both off the track and prematurely ending the duel. The challenge was otherwise uneventful. === Attack/Defend challenge results === == Main race == === Race report === Eventually, at around 20:30 Gulf Standard Time on the night of 27 April, the main event (termed the "Grand Final" on-stream) would begin. The starting order was Eva first, Gianna second, Hailey third, and Constructor AI last. The race began with a rolling start. As a safety measure, the first two laps were conducted under virtual safety car (VSC) to make sure the cars stayed together, making them de facto formation laps, even if they counted towards race distance. However, Hailey ended up stopping at the final turn and strayed too far from the cars ahead, and as a result, the VSC conditions were extended for another lap. According to the livestream's on-screen graphics, Hailey was upwards of one minute and 22.3 seconds behind Gianna after the former started moving again. On lap 4, halfway through the planned race, and with Hailey more than 30 seconds behind Gianna, the VSC was lifted, and the green flag finally dropped. At first, the two Italian cars were leading the pack, Eva was the race leader with Gianna 3.2 seconds behind, however, as it entered the chicane, Eva hit the brakes and spun out, with Gianna briefly stopping as it passed Eva. Eva's spin automatically triggered a full-course yellow flag. Normally, under yellow flag conditions, overtaking is not permitted, but with Eva stopped and being moved off the track, it was theoretically permitted to overtake Eva. However, presumably due to an oversight in the AI's code, the cars assumed overtaking Eva, despite being off the track, was not permitted. As a result, both Gianna and Constructor AI stopped as they did not want to overtake Eva due to the yellow flag, with Hailey following suit as it approached. Constructor AI's status indicator was solid red, suggesting the AI had disengaged; however, Gianna's status indicator remained solid purple, showing the AI was still in control. Eva's status indicator was also solid purple, but was soon flashing green, suggesting the AI had disengaged but was ready to take control again. With all cars stalled, and Eva being off the track, the race was effectively red-flagged and suspended. Hailey, Gianna, and Constructor AI drove themselves back to their team's pits; Eva did not, it was towed to the main pits on a flatbed truck. Constructor was the first to arrive at the pits, followed by Gianna and Hailey, in that order. This incident, combined with loss of internet connection, led to Eva retiring - it did not finish the race. Eventually, it was decided to resume the race. With Eva retired, the restart order was Gianna first, Hailey second, and Constructor AI third. The race was also shortened - from eight laps to six. With lap 5 under full-course yellow, this meant all three remaining teams would effectively restart the race on the sixth and final lap. The trio left the pits at 22:25 Gulf Standard Time, and the race resumed two minutes later. At first, Gianna was winning with Hailey 2.6 seconds behind, but then Gianna stopped on turn 5, giving Hailey the lead. Constructor AI also overtook Gianna, but not without briefly stopping. Gianna remained stopped, its status indicator solid red - it did not finish either. With both Italian teams out of the picture, Hailey finished first and won A2RL 2024, with Constructor AI finishing second, 27.2 seconds behind. === Final race classification ===

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