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  Computer appliance

  A computer appliance is a computer system with a combination of hardware, software, or firmware that is specifically designed to provide a particular computing resource. Such devices became known as appliances because of the similarity in role or management to a home appliance, which are generally closed and sealed, and are not serviceable by the user or owner. The hardware and software are delivered as an integrated product and may even be pre-configured before delivery to a customer, to provide a turn-key solution for a particular application. Unlike general purpose computers, appliances are generally not designed to allow the customers to change the software and the underlying operating system, or to flexibly reconfigure the hardware. Another form of appliance is the virtual appliance, which has similar functionality to a dedicated hardware appliance, but is distributed as a software virtual machine image for a hypervisor-equipped device. == Overview == Traditionally, software applications run on top of a general-purpose operating system, which uses the hardware resources of the computer (primarily memory, disk storage, processing power, and networking bandwidth) to meet the computing needs of the user. The main issue with the traditional model is related to complexity. It is complex to integrate the operating system and applications with a hardware platform, and complex to support it afterwards. By tightly constraining the variations of the hardware and software, the appliance becomes easily deployable, and can be used without nearly as wide (or deep) IT knowledge. Additionally, when problems and errors appear, the supporting staff very rarely needs to explore them deeply to understand the matter thoroughly. The staff needs merely training on the appliance management software to be able to resolve most of problems. In all forms of the computer appliance model, customers benefit from easy operations. The appliance has exactly one combination of hardware and operating system and application software, which has been pre-installed at the factory. This prevents customers from needing to perform complex integration work, and dramatically simplifies troubleshooting. In fact, this "turnkey operation" characteristic is the driving benefit that customers seek when purchasing appliances. To be considered an appliance, the (hardware) device needs to be integrated with software, and both are supplied as a package. This distinguishes appliances from "home grown" solutions, or solutions requiring complex implementations by integrators or value-added resellers (VARs). The appliance approach helps to decouple the various systems and applications, for example in the data center. Once a resource is decoupled, in theory it can be also centralized to become shared among many systems, centrally managed and optimized, all without requiring changes to any other system. == Tradeoffs of the computer appliance approach == The major disadvantage of deploying a computer appliance is that since they are designed to supply a specific resource, they most often include a customized operating system running over specialized hardware, neither of which are likely to be compatible with the other systems previously deployed. Customers lose flexibility. One may believe that a proprietary embedded operating system, or operating system within an application, can make the appliance much more secure from common cyber attacks. However, the opposite is true. Security by obscurity is a poor security decision, and appliances are often plagued by security issues as evidenced by the proliferation of IoT devices. == Types of appliances == The variety of computer appliances reflects the wide range of computing resources they provide to applications. Some examples: Storage appliances provide large amounts of storage, often available to many machines on the network. See Network-attached storage and Storage area network. Network appliances are general purpose routers which may also provide firewall protection, Transport Layer Security (TLS), messaging, access to specialized networking protocols (like the ebXML Message Service) and bandwidth multiplexing for the multiple systems they front-end. Backup and disaster recovery appliances computer appliances that are integrated backup software and backup targets, sometimes with hypervisors to support local DR of protected servers. They are often a gateway to a full DRaaS solution. Firewall and Security appliances Dedicated network appliances that are designed to protect computer networks from unwanted traffic. IIoT and MES Gateway appliances Computer appliances that are designed to translate data bidirectionally between control systems and enterprise systems. Proprietary, embedded, firmware applications running on the appliance use point-to-point connections to translate data between field devices in their native automation protocols and MES systems through their APIs, ODBC, or RESTful interfaces. Anti-spam appliances for e-mail spam Software appliances A single application server appliance, with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run. Virtual machine appliances consist of a "hypervisor style" embedded operating system running on appliance hardware. The hypervisor layer is matched to the hardware of the appliance, and cannot be varied by the customer, but the customer may load other operating systems and applications onto the appliance in the form of virtual machines. == Consumer appliances == Aside from its deployment within data centers, many computer appliances are directly used by the general public. These include: Digital video recorder Residential gateway Network-attached storage (NAS) Video game console Consumer uses stress the need for an appliance to have easy installation, configuration, and operation, with little or no technical knowledge being necessary. == Appliances in industrial automation == The world of industrial automation has been rich in appliances. These appliances have been hardened to withstand temperature and vibration extremes. These appliances are also highly configurable, enabling customization to meet a wide variety of applications. The key benefits of an appliance in automation are: Reduced downtime - a failed appliance is typically replaced with a COTS replacement and its task is quickly and easily reloaded from a backup. Highly scalable - appliances are typically targeted solutions for an area of a plant or process. As the requirements change, scalability is achieved through the installation of another appliance. Automation concepts are easily replicated throughout the enterprise by standardizing on appliances to perform the needed tasks, as opposed to the development of custom automation schemes for each task. Low TCO (total cost of ownership) - appliances are developed, tested and supported by automation product vendors and undergo a much broader level of quality testing than custom designed automation solutions. The use of appliances in automation reduce the level of testing needed in each individual application. Reduced design time - appliances perform specific functions and although they are highly configurable, they are typically self documenting. This enables appliance based solutions to be transferred from engineer to engineer with minimal need for training and documentation. Types of automation appliances: PLC (programmable logic controller) - Programmable logic controllers are appliances that are typically used for discrete control and offer a wide range of Input and Output options. They are configured through standardized programming languages such as IEC-1131. PID (proportional–integral–derivative controller) - PID controllers are appliances that monitor a process variable and, based on an error term, effect change on a control output (manipulated variable) to drive the process variable to a setpoint. PAC (programmable automation controller) - Programmable automation controllers are appliances that embody properties of both PLCs and PID controllers enabling the integration of both analog and discrete control. Universal gateway - A universal gateway appliance has the ability to communicate with a variety of devices through their respective communication protocols, and will affect data transactions between them. This in increasingly important as manufacturing strives to improve agility, quality, production rates, production costs and reduce downtime through enhanced M2M (machine to machine) communications. EATMs (Enterprise Appliance Transaction Modules) - Enterprise appliance transaction modules are appliances that affect data transactions from plant floor automation systems to enterprise business systems. They communicate to plant floor equipment through various vendor automation protocols, and communicate to business systems through database communication protocols such as JMS (Java Message Service) and SQL (Structured Query Language). == Internal structure == There are several

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  Language model

  A language model is a computational model that predicts sequences in natural language. Language models are useful for a variety of tasks, including speech recognition, machine translation, natural language generation (generating more human-like text), optical character recognition, route optimization, handwriting recognition, grammar induction, information retrieval and disaster response. Large language models (LLMs), currently their most advanced form as of 2026, are predominantly based on transformers trained on larger datasets (frequently using texts scraped from the public internet). They have superseded recurrent neural network-based models, which had previously superseded the purely statistical models, such as the word n-gram language model. == History == Noam Chomsky did pioneering work on language models in the 1950s by developing a theory of formal grammars. In 1980, statistical approaches were explored and found to be more useful for many purposes than rule-based formal grammars. Discrete representations like word n-gram language models, with probabilities for discrete combinations of words, made significant advances. In the 2000s, continuous representations for words, such as word embeddings, began to replace discrete representations. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes a word’s meaning such that words closer in vector space are similar in meaning and common relationships between words, such as plurality or gender, are preserved. == Pure statistical models == In 1980, the first significant statistical language model was proposed, and during the decade IBM performed 'Shannon-style' experiments, in which potential sources for language modeling improvement were identified by observing and analyzing the performance of human subjects in predicting or correcting text. === Models based on word n-grams === === Exponential === Maximum entropy language models encode the relationship between a word and the n-gram history using feature functions. The equation is P ( w m ∣ w 1 , … , w m − 1 ) = 1 Z ( w 1 , … , w m − 1 ) exp ⁡ ( a T f ( w 1 , … , w m ) ) {\displaystyle P(w_{m}\mid w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m-1})={\frac {1}{Z(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m-1})}}\exp(a^{T}f(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m}))} where Z ( w 1 , … , w m − 1 ) {\displaystyle Z(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m-1})} is the partition function, a {\displaystyle a} is the parameter vector, and f ( w 1 , … , w m ) {\displaystyle f(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m})} is the feature function. In the simplest case, the feature function is just an indicator of the presence of a certain n-gram. It is helpful to use a prior on a {\displaystyle a} or some form of regularization. The log-bilinear model is another example of an exponential language model. === Skip-gram model === == Neural models == === Recurrent neural network === Continuous representations or embeddings of words are produced in recurrent neural network-based language models (known also as continuous space language models). Such continuous space embeddings help to alleviate the curse of dimensionality, which is the consequence of the number of possible sequences of words increasing exponentially with the size of the vocabulary, further causing a data sparsity problem. Neural networks avoid this problem by representing words as non-linear combinations of weights in a neural net. === Large language models === Although sometimes matching human performance, it is not clear whether they are plausible cognitive models. At least for recurrent neural networks, it has been shown that they sometimes learn patterns that humans do not, but fail to learn patterns that humans typically do. == Evaluation and benchmarks == Evaluation of the quality of language models is mostly done by comparison to human created sample benchmarks created from typical language-oriented tasks. Other, less established, quality tests examine the intrinsic character of a language model or compare two such models. Since language models are typically intended to be dynamic and to learn from data they see, some proposed models investigate the rate of learning, e.g., through inspection of learning curves. Various data sets have been developed for use in evaluating language processing systems. These include: Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability GLUE benchmark Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Question Natural Language Inference Quora Question Pairs Recognizing Textual Entailment Semantic Textual Similarity Benchmark SQuAD question answering Test Stanford Sentiment Treebank Winograd NLI BoolQ, PIQA, SIQA, HellaSwag, WinoGrande, ARC, OpenBookQA, NaturalQuestions, TriviaQA, RACE, BIG-bench hard, GSM8k, RealToxicityPrompts, WinoGender, CrowS-Pairs

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  Ranking SVM

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

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  Michael Kearns (computer scientist)

  Michael Justin Kearns is an American computer scientist, professor and National Center Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, the founding director of Penn's Singh Program in Networked & Social Systems Engineering (NETS), the founding director of Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, and also holds secondary appointments in Penn's Wharton School and department of Economics. He is a leading researcher in computational learning theory and algorithmic game theory, and interested in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computational finance, algorithmic trading, computational social science and social networks. He previously led the Advisory and Research function in Morgan Stanley's Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence team, and is currently an Amazon Scholar within Amazon Web Services. == Biography == Kearns was born into an academic family, where his father David R Kearns is Professor Emeritus at University of California, San Diego in chemistry, who won Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, and his uncle Thomas R. Kearns is Professor Emeritus at Amherst College in Philosophy and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought. His paternal grandfather Clyde W. Kearns was a pioneer in insecticide toxicology and was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in Entomology, and his maternal grandfather Chen Shou-Yi (1899–1978) was a professor at Pomona College in history and literature, who was born in Canton (Guangzhou, China) into a family noted for their scholarship and educational leadership. Kearns received his B.S. degree at the University of California at Berkeley in math and computer science in 1985, and Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 1989, under the supervision of Turing Award winner Leslie Valiant. His doctoral dissertation was The Computational Complexity of Machine Learning, later published by MIT press as part of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Series in 1990. Before joining AT&T Bell Labs in 1991, he continued with postdoctoral positions at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT hosted by Ronald Rivest, and at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in UC Berkeley hosted by Richard M. Karp, both of whom are Turing Award winners. Kearns is currently a full professor and National Center Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, where his appointment is split across the Department of Computer and Information Science, and Statistics and Operations and Information Management in the Wharton School. Prior to joining the Penn faculty in 2002, he spent a decade (1991–2001) in AT&T Labs and Bell Labs, including as head of the AI department with colleagues including Michael L. Littman, David A. McAllester, and Richard S. Sutton; Secure Systems Research department; and Machine Learning department with members such as Michael Collins and the leader Fernando Pereira. Other AT&T Labs colleagues in Algorithms and Theoretical Computer Science included Yoav Freund, Ronald Graham, Mehryar Mohri, Robert Schapire, and Peter Shor, as well as Sebastian Seung, Yann LeCun, Corinna Cortes, and Vladimir Vapnik (the V in VC dimension). Kearns was named Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2014) for contributions to machine learning, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012). His former graduate students and postdoctoral visitors include Ryan W. Porter, John Langford, and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan. Kearns' work has been reported by media, such as MIT Technology Review (2014) Can a Website Help You Decide to Have a Kid?, Bloomberg News (2014) Schneiderman (and Einstein) Pressure High-Speed Trading and NPR audio (2012) Online Education Grows Up, And For Now, It's Free. == Academic life == === Computational learning theory === Kearns and Umesh Vazirani published An introduction to computational learning theory, which has been a standard text on computational learning theory since it was published in 1994. === Weak learnability and the origin of Boosting algorithms === The question "is weakly learnability equivalent to strong learnability?" posed by Kearns and Valiant (Unpublished manuscript 1988, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing 1989) is the origin of boosting machine learning algorithms, which got a positive answer by Robert Schapire (1990, proof by construction, not practical) and Yoav Freund (1993, by voting, not practical) and then they developed the practical AdaBoost (European Conference on Computational Learning Theory 1995, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 1997), an adaptive boosting algorithm that won the prestigious Gödel Prize (2003). == Honors and awards == 2021. Member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. 2014. ACM Fellow. For contributions to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic game theory and computational social science. 2012. American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow. == Selected works == 2019. The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design. (with Aaron Roth). Oxford University Press. 1994. An introduction to computational learning theory. (with Umesh Vazirani). MIT press. Widely used as a text book in computational learning theory courses. 1990. The computational complexity of machine learning. MIT press. Based on his 1989 doctoral dissertation; ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Series in 1990 Archived 2014-11-03 at the Wayback Machine 1989. Cryptographic limitations on learning Boolean formulae and finite automata. (with Leslie Valiant) Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (STOC'89). The open question: is weakly learnability equivalent to strong learnability?; The origin of boosting algorithms; Important publication in machine learning.

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  Film recorder

  A film recorder is a graphical output device for transferring images to photographic film from a digital source. In a typical film recorder, an image is passed from a host computer to a mechanism to expose film through a variety of methods, historically by direct photography of a high-resolution cathode-ray tube (CRT) display. The exposed film can then be developed using conventional developing techniques, and displayed with a slide or motion picture projector. The use of film recorders predates the current use of digital projectors, which eliminate the time and cost involved in the intermediate step of transferring computer images to film stock, instead directly displaying the image signal from a computer. Motion picture film scanners are the opposite of film recorders, copying content from film stock to a computer system. Film recorders can be thought of as modern versions of kinescopes. == Design == === Operation === All film recorders typically work in the same manner. The image is fed from a host computer as a raster stream over a digital interface. A film recorder exposes film through various mechanisms; flying spot (early recorders); photographing a high resolution video monitor; electron beam recorder (Sony HDVS); a CRT scanning dot (Celco); focused beam of light from a light valve technology (LVT) recorder; a scanning laser beam (Arrilaser); or recently, full-frame LCD array chips. For color image recording on a CRT film recorder, the red, green, and blue channels are sequentially displayed on a single gray scale CRT, and exposed to the same piece of film as a multiple exposure through a filter of the appropriate color. This approach yields better resolution and color quality than possible with a tri-phosphor color CRT. The three filters are usually mounted on a motor-driven wheel. The filter wheel, as well as the camera's shutter, aperture, and film motion mechanism are usually controlled by the recorder's electronics and/or the driving software. CRT film recorders are further divided into analog and digital types. The analog film recorder uses the native video signal from the computer, while the digital type uses a separate display board in the computer to produce a digital signal for a display in the recorder. Digital CRT recorders provide a higher resolution at a higher cost compared to analog recorders due to the additional specialized hardware. Typical resolutions for digital recorders were quoted as 2K and 4K, referring to 2048×1366 and 4096×2732 pixels, respectively, while analog recorders provided a resolution of 640×428 pixels in comparison. Higher-quality LVT film recorders use a focused beam of light to write the image directly onto a film loaded spinning drum, one pixel at a time. In one example, the light valve was a liquid-crystal shutter, the light beam was steered with a lens, and text was printed using a pre-cut optical mask. The LVT will record pixel beyond grain. Some machines can burn 120-res or 120 lines per millimeter. The LVT is basically a reverse drum scanner. The exposed film is developed and printed by regular photographic chemical processing. === Formats === Film recorders are available for a variety of film types and formats. The 35 mm negative film and transparencies are popular because they can be processed by any photo shop. Single-image 4×5 film and 8×10 are often used for high-quality, large format printing. Some models have detachable film holders to handle multiple formats with the same camera or with Polaroid backs to provide on-site review of output before exposing film. == Uses == Film recorders are used in digital printing to generate master negatives for offset and other bulk printing processes. For preview, archiving, and small-volume reproduction, film recorders have been rendered obsolete by modern printers that produce photographic-quality hardcopies directly on plain paper. They are also used to produce the master copies of movies that use computer animation or other special effects based on digital image processing. However, most cinemas nowadays use Digital Cinema Packages on hard drives instead of film stock. === Computer graphics === Film recorders were among the earliest computer graphics output devices; for example, the IBM 740 CRT Recorder was announced in 1954. Film recorders were also commonly used to produce slides for slide projectors; but this need is now largely met by video projectors that project images directly from a computer to a screen. The terms "slide" and "slide deck" are still commonly used in presentation programs. === Current uses === Currently, film recorders are primarily used in the motion picture film-out process for the ever increasing amount of digital intermediate work being done. Although significant advances in large venue video projection alleviates the need to output to film, there remains a deadlock between the motion picture studios and theater owners over who should pay for the cost of these very costly projection systems. This, combined with the increase in international and independent film production, will keep the demand for film recording steady for at least a decade. == Key manufacturers == Traditional film recorder manufacturers have all but vanished from the scene or have evolved their product lines to cater to the motion picture industry. Dicomed was one such early provider of digital color film recorders. Polaroid, Management Graphics, Inc, MacDonald-Detwiler, Information International, Inc., and Agfa were other producers of film recorders. Arri is the only current major manufacturer of film recorders. Kodak Lightning I film recorder. One of the first laser recorders. Needed an engineering staff to set up. Kodak Lightning II film recorder used both gas and diode laser to record on to film. The last LVT machines produced by Kodak / Durst-Dice stopped production in 2002. There are no LVT film recorders currently being produced. LVT Saturn 1010 uses a LED exposure (RGB) to 8"x10" film at 1000-3000ppi. LUX Laser Cinema Recorder from Autologic/Information International in Thousand Oaks, California. Sales end in March 2000. Used on the 1997 film “Titanic”. Arri produces the Arrilaser line of laser-based motion picture film recorders. MGI produced the Solitaire line of CRT-based motion picture film recorders. Matrix, originally ImaPRO, a branch of Agfa Division, produced the QCR line of CRT-based motion picture film recorders. CCG, formerly Agfa film recorders, has been a steady manufacturer of film recorders based in Germany. In 2004 CCG introduced Definity, a motion picture film recorder utilizing LCD technology. In 2010 CCG introduced the first full LED LCD film recorder as a new step in film recording. Cinevator was made by Cinevation AS, in Drammen, Norway. The Cinevator was a real-time digital film recorder. It could record IN, IP and prints with and without sound Oxberry produced the Model 3100 film recorder camera system, with interchangeable pin-registered movements (shuttles) for 35 mm (full frame/Silent, 1.33:1) and 16 mm (regular 16, "2R"), and others have adapted the Oxberry movements for CinemaScope, 1.85:1, 1.75:1, 1.66:1, as well as Academy/Sound (1.37:1) in 35 mm and Super-16 in 16 mm ("1R"). For instance, the "Solitaire" and numerous others employed the Oxberry 3100 camera system. == History == Before video tape recorders or VTRs were invented, TV shows were either broadcast live or recorded to film for later showing, using the kinescope process. In 1967, CBS Laboratories introduced the Electronic Video Recording format, which used video and telecined-to-video film sources, which were then recorded with an electron-beam recorder at CBS' EVR mastering plant at the time to 35mm film stock in a rank of 4 strips on the film, which was then slit down to 4 8.75 mm (0.344 in) film copies, for playback in an EVR player. All types of CRT recorders were (and still are) used for film recording. Some early examples used for computer-output recording were the 1954 IBM 740 CRT Recorder, and the 1962 Stromberg-Carlson SC-4020, the latter using a Charactron CRT for text and vector graphic output to either 16 mm motion picture film, 16 mm microfilm, or hard-copy paper output. Later 1970 and 80s-era recording to B&W (and color, with 3 separate exposures for red, green, and blue)) 16 mm film was done with an EBR (Electron Beam Recorder), the most prominent examples made by 3M), for both video and COM (Computer Output Microfilm) applications. Image Transform in Universal City, California used specially modified 3M EBR film recorders that could perform color film-out recording on 16 mm by exposing three 16 mm frames in a row (one red, one green and one blue). The film was then printed to color 16 mm or 35 mm film. The video fed to the recorder could either be NTSC, PAL or SECAM. Later, Image Transform used specially modified VTRs to record 24 frame for their "Image Vision" system. The modified 1 inch type B videotape VTRs would record

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  Is an AI Art Generator Worth It in 2026?

  Curious about the best AI art generator? An AI art generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI art generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  How to Choose an AI Blog Writer

  Curious about the best AI blog writer? An AI blog writer is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI blog writer slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.

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  Best Conversational AI Platforms in 2026

  Looking for the best conversational AI platform? An conversational AI platform is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it can save you hours every week by automating repetitive work. Most options offer a generous free tier, with paid plans unlocking higher limits, faster processing, and team features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right conversational AI platform slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  Computer vision dazzle

  Computer vision dazzle, also known as CV dazzle, dazzle makeup, or anti-surveillance makeup, is a type of camouflage used to hamper facial recognition software, inspired by dazzle camouflage used by vehicles such as ships and planes. == Methods == CV dazzle combines stylized makeup, asymmetric hair, and sometimes infrared lights built in to glasses or clothing to break up detectable facial patterns recognized by computer vision algorithms in much the same way that warships contrasted color and used sloping lines and curves to distort the structure of a vessel. It has been shown to be somewhat successful at defeating face detection software in common use, including that employed by Facebook. CV dazzle attempts to block detection by facial recognition technologies such as DeepFace "by creating an 'anti-face'". It uses occlusion, covering certain facial features; transformation, altering the shape or colour of parts of the face; and a combination of the two. Prominent artists employing this technique include Adam Harvey and Jillian Mayer. == Use in protests == Computer vision dazzle makeup has been used by protestors in several different protest movements. Its use as a protesting aid has often been found ineffective. It may be effective to thwart computer technology, but draws human attention, is easy for human monitors to spot on security cameras, and makes it hard for protestors to blend in within a crowd. Advances in facial recognition technology make dazzle makeup increasingly ineffective.

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  Comparison of machine translation applications

  Machine translation is an algorithm which attempts to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. == General information == Basic general information for popular machine translation applications. == Languages features comparison == The following table compares the number of languages which the following machine translation programs can translate between. (Moses and Moses for Mere Mortals allow you to train translation models for any language pair, though collections of translated texts (parallel corpus) need to be provided by the user. The Moses site provides links to training corpora.) This is not an all-encompassing list. Some applications have many more language pairs than those listed below. This is a general comparison of key languages only. A full and accurate list of language pairs supported by each product should be found on each of the product's websites. === Multi-pair translations === === Paired translations ===

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  Corpus linguistics

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

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  AI Art Generators: Free vs Paid (2026)

  In search of the best AI art generator? An AI art generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI art generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.

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  Networked Help Desk

  Networked Help Desk is an open standard initiative to provide a common API for sharing customer support tickets between separate instances of issue tracking, bug tracking, customer relationship management (CRM) and project management systems to improve customer service and reduce vendor lock-in. The initiative was created by Zendesk in June 2011 in collaboration with eight other founding member organizations including Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Tracker, ServiceNow and SugarCRM. The first integration, between Zendesk and Atlassian's issue tracking product, Jira, was announced at the 2011 Atlassian Summit. By August 2011, 34 member companies had joined the initiative. A year after launching, over 50 organizations had joined. Within Zendesk instances this feature is branded as ticket sharing. == Basis == Support tools are generally built around a common paradigm that begins with a customer making a request or an incident report, these create a ticket. Each ticket has a progress status and is updated with annotations and attachments. These annotations and attachments may be visible to the customer (public), or only visible to analysts (private). Customers are notified of progress made on their ticket until it is complete. If the people necessary to complete a ticket are using separate support tools, additional overhead is introduced in maintaining the relevant information in the ticket in each tool while notifying the customer of progress made by each group in completing their ticket. For example, if a customer support issue is caused by a software bug and reported to a help desk using one system, and then the fix is documented by the developers in another, and analyzed in a customer relationship management tool, keeping the records in each system up-to-date and notifying the customer manually using a swivel chair approach is unnecessarily time-consuming and error-prone. If information is not transferred correctly, a customer may have to re-explain their problem each time their ticket is transferred. For systems with the Networked Help Desk API implemented, it is possible for several different applications related to a customer's support experience to synchronize data in one uniquely identified shared ticket. While many applications in these domains have implemented APIs that allow data to be imported, exported and modified, Network Help Desk provide a common standard for customer support information to automatically synchronize between several systems. Once implemented, two systems can quickly share tickets with just a configuration change as they both understand the same interface. Communication between two instances on a specific ticket occurs in three steps, an invitation agreement, sharing of ticket data and continued synchronization of tickets. The standard allows for "full delegation" (analysts in both systems each make public and private comments and synchronize status) as well as "partial delegation" where the instance receiving the ticket can only make private comments and status changes are not synchronized. Tickets may be shared with multiple instances. == Implementation list ==

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  OCR Systems

  OCR Systems, Inc., was an American computer hardware manufacturer and software publisher dedicated to optical character recognition technologies. The company's first product, the System 1000 in 1970, was used by numerous large corporations for bill processing and mail sorting. Following a series of pitfalls in the 1970s and early 1980s, founder Theodor Herzl Levine put the company in the hands of Gregory Boleslavsky and Vadim Brikman, the company's vice presidents and recent immigrants from the Soviet Ukraine, who were able to turn OCR System's fortunes around and expand its employee base. The company released the software-based OCR application ReadRight for DOS, later ported to Windows, in the late 1980s. Adobe Inc. bought the company in 1992. == History == OCR Systems was co-founded by Theodor Herzl Levine (c. 1923 – May 30, 2005). Levine served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II in the Solomon Islands, where he helped develop a sonar to find ejected pilots in the ocean. After the war, Levine spent 22 years at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his bachelor's degree in 1951, his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1957, and his doctorate in 1968. Alongside his studies, Levine taught statistics and calculus at Temple University, Rutgers University, La Salle University and Penn State Abington. Sometime in the 1960s, Levine was hired at Philco. He and two of his co-workers decided to form their own company dedicated to optical character recognition, founding OCR Systems in 1969 in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. OCR Systems's first product, the System 1000, was announced in 1970. OCR Systems entered a partnership with 3M to resell the System 1000 throughout the United States in March 1973. This was 3M's entry into the data entry field, managed by the company's Microfilm Products Division and accompanying 3M's suite of data retrieval systems. It soon found use among Texas Instruments, AT&T, Ricoh, Panasonic and Canon for bill processing and mail sorting. Later in the mid-1970s an unspecified Fortune 500 company reneged on a contract to distribute the System 1000; later still a Canadian company distributing the System 1000 in Canada went defunct. Both incidents led OCR Systems to go nearly bankrupt, although it eventually recovered. By the early 1980s, however, the company was almost insolvent. In 1983 Levine had only $8,000 in his savings and became bedridden with an illness. He left the company in the hands of Gregory Boleslavsky and Vadim Brikman, two Soviet Ukraine expats whom Levine had hired earlier in the 1980s. Boleslavsky was hired as a wire wrapper for the System 1000 and as a programmer and beta tester for ReadRight—a software package developed by Levine implementing patents from Nonlinear Technology, another OCR-centric company from Greenbelt, Maryland. Boleslavsky in turn recommended Brikman to Levine. The two soon became vice presidents of the company while Levine was bedridden; in Boleslavsky's case, he worked 14-hour work days for over half a year in pursuit of the title. The two presented OCR Systems' products to the National Computer Conference in Chicago, where they were massively popular. The company soon gained such clients as Allegheny Energy in Pennsylvania and the postal service of Belgium and received an influx of employees—mostly expats from Russia but also Poland and South Korea, as well as American-born workers. To accommodate the company's employee base, which had grown to over 30 in 1988, Levine moved OCR System's headquarters from Bensalem to the Masons Mill Business Park in Bryn Athyn. Chinon Industries of Japan signed an agreement with OCR Systems in 1987 to distribute OCR's ReadRight 1.0 software with Chinon's scanners, starting with their N-205 overhead scanner. In 1988, OCR opened their agreement to distribute ReadRight to other scanner manufacturers, including Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Skyworld, Taxan, Diamond Flower and Abaton. That year, the company posted a revenue of $3 million. OCR Systems extended their agreement with Chinon in 1989 and introduced version 2.0 of ReadRight. OCR Systems faced stiff competition in the software OCR market in the turn of the 1990s. The Toronto-based software firm Delrina signed a letter of intent to purchase the company in November 1991, expecting the deal to close in December and have OCR software available by Christmas. OCR was to receive $3 million worth of Delrina shares in a stock swap, but the deal collapsed in January 1992. Delrine later marketed its own Extended Character Recognition, or XCR, software package to compete with ReadRight. In July 1992, OCR Systems was purchased by Adobe Inc. for an undisclosed sum. == Products == === System 1000 === The System 1000 was based on the 16-bit Varian Data 620/i minicomputer with 4 KB of core memory. The system used the 620/i for controlling the paper feed, interpreting the format of the documents, the optical character recognition process itself, error detection, sequencing and output. The System was initially programmed to recognize 1428 OCR (used by Selectrics); IBM 407 print; and the full character sets of OCR-A, OCR-B and Farrington 7B; as well as optical marks and handwritten numbers. OCR Systems promised added compatibility with more fonts available down the line—per request—in 1970. The number of fonts supported was limited by the amount of core memory, which was expandable in 4 KB increments up to 32 KB. The System 1000 later supported generalized typewriter and photocopier fonts. The rest of the System 1000 comprised the document transport, one or more scanner elements, a CRT display and a Teletype Model 33 or 35. Pages are fed via friction with a rubber belt. Up to three lines could be scanned per document, while the rest of the scanned document could be laid out in any manner granted there was enough space around the fields to be read. The reader initially supported pages as small as 3.25 in by 3.5 in dimension (later supporting 2.6 in by 3.5 in utility cash stubs) all the way to the standard ANSI letter size (8.5 in by 11 in; later 8.5 in by 12 in as used in stock certificates). The initial System 1000 had a maximum throughput of 420 documents per minute per transport (later 500 documents per minute), contingent on document size and content. A feature unique to the System 1000 over other optical character recognition systems of the time was its ability to alert the operator when a field was unreadable or otherwise invalid. This feature, called Document Referral, placed the document in front of the operator and displayed a blank field on the screen of the included CRT monitor for manual re-entry via keyboard. Once input, data could be output to 7- or 9-track tape, paper tape, punched cards and other mass storage media or to System/360 mainframes for further processing. The complete System 1000 could be purchased for US$69,000. Options for renting were $1,800 per month on a three-year lease or $1,600 per month for five years. Computerworld wrote that it was less than half the cost of its competitors while more capable and user-friendly. Competing systems included the Recognition Equipment Retina, the Scan-Optics IC/20 and the Scan-Data 250/350. === ReadRight === ReadRight processes individual letters topographically: it breaks down the scanned letter into parts—strokes, curves, angles, ascenders and descenders—and follows a tree structure of letters broken down into these parts to determine the corresponding character code. ReadRight was entirely software-based, requiring no expansion card to work. Version 2.01, the last version released for DOS, runs in real mode in under 640 KB of RAM. OCR Systems released the Windows-only version 3.0 in 1991 while offering version 2.01 alongside it. The company unveiled a sister product, ReadRight Personal, dedicated to handheld scanners and for Windows only in October 1991. This version adds real-time scanning—each word is updated to the screen while lines are being scanned. ReadRight proper was later made a Windows-only product with version 3.1 in 1992. The inclusion of ReadRight 2.0 with Canon's IX-12F flatbed scanner led PC Magazine to award it an Editor's Choice rating in 1989. Despite this, reviewer Robert Kendall found qualification with ReadRight's ability to parse proportional typefaces such as Helvetica and Times New Roman. Mitt Jones of the same publication found version 2.01 to have improved its ability to read such typefaces and praised its ease of use and low resource intensiveness. Jones disliked the inability to handle uneven page paragraph column widths and graphics, noting that the manual recommended the user block out graphics with a Post-it Note. Version 3.1 for Windows received mixed reviews. Mike Heck of InfoWorld wrote that its "low cost and rich collection of features are hard to ignore" but rated its speed and accuracy average. Barry Simon of PC Magazine called it economical but inaccurate, unable to correct errors it did

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  Lin-Shan Lee

  Lin-Shan Lee (Chinese: 李琳山; born 23 September 1952) is a Taiwanese computer scientist. == Education and career == Lee earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1974, and pursued a doctorate in the same subject at Stanford University, graduating in 1977. He subsequently returned to Taiwan and joined the NTU faculty in 1982. Lee is a 1993 fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, recognized "[f]or contributions to computer voice input/output techniques for Mandarin Chinese and to engineering education." The International Speech Communication Association elevated him to fellow status in 2010 "[f]or his contributions to Chinese spoken language processing and speech information retrieval, and his service to the speech language community." In 2016, Lee was elected a member of Academia Sinica.

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