AI Face Fixer

AI Face Fixer — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Voice search

    Voice search

    Voice search, also called voice-enabled search, allows the user to use a voice to search the Internet, a website, or an app. In a broader definition, voice search includes open-domain keyword query on any information on the Internet, for example in Google Voice Search, Cortana, Siri and Amazon Echo. Voice search is often interactive, involving several rounds of interaction that allows a system to ask for clarification. Voice search is a type of dialog system. Voice search is not a replacement for typed search. Rather the search terms, experience and use cases can differ heavily depending on the input type. == Supported language == Language is the most essential factor for a system to understand, and provide the most accurate results of what the user searches. This covers across languages, dialects, and accents, as users want a voice assistant that both understands them and speaks to them understandably. While spoken and written languages differ, voice search should support natural spoken language instead of only transforming voice into text and doing a regular text search with the help speech recognition. For example, in typed search an eCommerce user can easily copy and paste an alphanumeric product code to search field, but when speaking the search terms can be very different, such as "show me the new Bluetooth headphones by Samsung". == How it works == The difference between text and voice search is not only the input type. The mechanism must include an automatic speech recognition (ASR) for input, but it can also include natural language understanding for natural spoken search queries such as "What's the population for the United States" It can include text-to-speech (TTS) or a regular display for output modalities. Users might sometimes be required to activate the search by using a wake word. Then, the search system will detect the language spoken by the user. It will then detect the keywords and context of the sentence. Lastly, the device will return results depending on its output. A device with a screen might display the results, while a device without a screen will speak them back to the searcher.

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  • Jürgen Schmidhuber

    Jürgen Schmidhuber

    Jürgen Schmidhuber (born 17 January 1963) is a German computer scientist noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically artificial neural networks. He has been described by media outlets as a leading pioneer of modern artificial intelligence. He is a scientific director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Switzerland. He is also director of the Artificial Intelligence Initiative and professor of the Computer Science program in the Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) division at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. He is best known for his work on long short-term memory (LSTM), a type of neural network architecture which was the dominant technique for various natural language processing tasks in research and commercial applications in the 2010s. He also introduced principles of dynamic neural networks, meta-learning, generative adversarial networks and linear transformers, all of which are widespread in modern AI. == Career == Schmidhuber completed his undergraduate (1987) and PhD (1991) studies at the Technical University of Munich in Munich, Germany. His PhD advisors were Wilfried Brauer and Klaus Schulten. He taught there from 2004 until 2009. From 2009 to 2021, he was a professor of artificial intelligence at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. He has served as the director of Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA), a Swiss AI lab, since 1995. Since 2021, he has also been the director of the AI Initiative at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). In 2014, Schmidhuber formed a company, NNAISENSE, to work on commercial applications of artificial intelligence in fields such as finance, heavy industry and self-driving cars. Sepp Hochreiter, Jaan Tallinn, and Marcus Hutter are advisers to the company. Sales were under US$11 million in 2016; however, Schmidhuber states that the current emphasis is on research and not revenue. NNAISENSE raised its first round of capital funding in January 2017. Schmidhuber's overall goal is to create an all-purpose AI by training a single AI in sequence on a variety of narrow tasks, but as of 2026 he has said that the focus of NNAISENSE has shifted from artificial general intelligence to asset management. == Research == In the 1980s, backpropagation did not work well for deep learning with long credit assignment paths in artificial neural networks. To overcome this problem, Schmidhuber (1991) proposed a hierarchy of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) pre-trained one level at a time by self-supervised learning. It uses predictive coding to learn internal representations at multiple self-organizing time scales, facilitating downstream deep learning. The RNN hierarchy can be collapsed into a single RNN, by distilling a higher level chunker network into a lower level automatizer network. In 1993, a chunker solved a deep learning task whose depth exceeded 1000. In 1991, Schmidhuber published adversarial neural networks that contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one network's gain is the other network's loss. The first network is a generative model that models a probability distribution over output patterns. The second network learns by gradient descent to predict the reactions of the environment to these patterns. This was called "artificial curiosity". In 2014, this principle was used in the creation of the generative adversarial network, which Schmidhuber describes as a special case of artificial curiosity where the environmental reaction is 1 or 0 depending on whether the first network's output is in a given set. Schmidhuber supervised the 1991 diploma thesis of his student Sepp Hochreiter which he considered "one of the most important documents in the history of machine learning". It studied the neural history compressor and analyzed and overcame the vanishing gradient problem. This led to the creation of long short-term memory (LSTM), a type of recurrent neural network. The name LSTM was introduced in a tech report in 1995, leading to the most cited LSTM publication, published in 1997 and co-authored by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber. The standard LSTM architecture was introduced in 2000 by Felix Gers, Schmidhuber, and Fred Cummins. Today's "vanilla LSTM" using backpropagation through time was published with his student Alex Graves in 2005, and its connectionist temporal classification (CTC) training algorithm in 2006. CTC was applied to end-to-end speech recognition with LSTM. In 2014, the state of the art was training “very deep neural network” with 20 to 30 layers. Stacking too many layers led to a steep reduction in training accuracy, known as the "degradation" problem. In May 2015, Rupesh Kumar Srivastava, Klaus Greff, and Schmidhuber used LSTM principles to create the highway network, a feedforward neural network with hundreds of layers, much deeper than previous networks. In Dec 2015, the residual neural network (ResNet) was published, which is a variant of the highway network. In 1992, Schmidhuber published fast weights programmer, an alternative to recurrent neural networks. It has a slow feedforward neural network that learns by gradient descent to control the fast weights of another neural network through outer products of self-generated activation patterns, and the fast weights network itself operates over inputs. This was later shown to be equivalent to the unnormalized linear transformer. In 2011, Schmidhuber's team at IDSIA with his postdoc Dan Ciresan also achieved dramatic speedups of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using graphics processing units (GPUs), based on CNN designs introduced much earlier by Kunihiko Fukushima. An earlier CNN on GPU by Chellapilla et al. (2006) was 4 times faster than an equivalent implementation on CPU. The deep CNN of Dan Ciresan et al. (2011) at IDSIA was 60 times faster and achieved the first superhuman performance in a computer vision contest in August 2011. Between 15 May 2011 and 10 September 2012, these CNNs won four more image competitions and improved the state of the art on multiple image benchmarks. The approach has become central to the field of computer vision. == Credit disputes == Schmidhuber has controversially argued that he and other researchers have been denied adequate recognition for their contribution to the field of deep learning, in favour of Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, who shared the 2018 Turing Award for their work in deep learning. He wrote a "scathing" 2015 article arguing that Hinton, Bengio and LeCun "heavily cite each other" but "fail to credit the pioneers of the field". In a statement to the New York Times, Yann LeCun wrote that "Jürgen is manically obsessed with recognition and keeps claiming credit he doesn't deserve for many, many things... It causes him to systematically stand up at the end of every talk and claim credit for what was just presented, generally not in a justified manner." Schmidhuber replied that LeCun did this "without any justification, without providing a single example", and published details of numerous priority disputes with Hinton, Bengio and LeCun. The term "schmidhubered" has been jokingly used in the AI community to describe Schmidhuber's habit of publicly challenging the originality of other researchers' work, a practice seen by some in the AI community as a "rite of passage" for young researchers. Some suggest that Schmidhuber's significant accomplishments have been underappreciated due to his confrontational personality. == Recognition == Schmidhuber received the Helmholtz Award of the International Neural Network Society in 2013, and the Neural Networks Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in 2016 for "pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks." He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has been referred to as the "father of modern AI", the "father of generative AI", and the "father of deep learning". Schmidhuber himself, however, has called Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko the "father of deep learning", and gives credit to many even earlier AI pioneers. The New York Times ran a profile under the headline "When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber 'Dad'", highlighting his early work on deep learning and his long‑term vision for self‑improving AI. == Views == Schmidhuber is a proponent of open source AI, and believes that they will become competitive against commercial closed-source AI. Since the 1970s, Schmidhuber wanted to create "intelligent machines that could learn and improve on their own and become smarter than him within his lifetime." He differentiates between two types of AIs: tool AI, such as those for improving healthcare, and autonomous AIs that set their own goals, perform their own research, and explore the universe. He has worked on both types for de

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  • Frederick J. Damerau

    Frederick J. Damerau

    Frederick J. Damerau (December 25, 1931 – January 27, 2009) was a pioneer of research on natural language processing and data mining. After earning his B.A. from Cornell University in 1953, he spent most of his career at IBM, in the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He holds a PhD from Yale University. One of his most influential and ground-breaking papers was "A technique for computer detection and correction of spelling errors" published in 1964. He also developed and patented for IBM the first algorithm for placing hyphens automatically in words. In 1971 he published the book "Markov Models and Linguistic Theory : An Experimental Study of a Model for English." After being active in research for over four decades, Fred Damerau died on January 27, 2009.

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  • Best AI Paragraph Rewriters in 2026

    Best AI Paragraph Rewriters in 2026

    In search of the best AI paragraph rewriter? An AI paragraph rewriter 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 paragraph rewriter 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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  • Biopython

    Biopython

    Biopython is an open-source collection of non-commercial Python modules for computational biology and bioinformatics. It makes robust and well-tested code easily accessible to researchers. Python is an object-oriented programming language and is a suitable choice for automation of common tasks. The availability of reusable libraries saves development time and lets researchers focus on addressing scientific questions. Biopython is constantly updated and maintained by a large team of volunteers across the globe. Biopython contains parsers for diverse bioinformatic sequence, alignment, and structure formats. Sequence formats include FASTA, FASTQ, GenBank, and EMBL. Alignment formats include Clustal, BLAST, PHYLIP, and NEXUS. Structural formats include the PDB, which contains the 3D atomic coordinates of the macromolecules. It has provisions to access information from biological databases like NCBI, Expasy, PBD, and BioSQL. This can be used in scripts or incorporated into their software. Biopython contains a standard sequence class, sequence alignment, and motif analysis tools. It also has clustering algorithms, a module for structural biology, and a module for phylogenetics analysis. == History == The development of Biopython began in 1999, and it was first released in July 2000. First "semi-complete" and "semi-stable" release was done in March 2001 and December 2002 respectively. It was developed during a similar time frame and with analogous goals to other projects that added bioinformatics capabilities to their respective programming languages, including BioPerl, BioRuby and BioJava. Early developers on the project included Jeff Chang, Andrew Dalke and Brad Chapman, though over 100 people have made contributions to date. In 2007, a similar Python project, namely PyCogent, was established. The initial scope of Biopython involved accessing, indexing and processing biological sequence files. The retrieved data from common biological databases will then be parsed into a python data structure. While this is still a major focus, over the following years added modules have extended its functionality to cover additional areas of biology. The key challenge in the design of parsers for bioinformatics file formats is the frequency at which the data formats change. This is due to inadequate curation of the structure of the data, and changes in the database contents. This problem is overcome by the application of a standard event-oriented parser design (see Key features and examples). As of version 1.77, Biopython no longer supports Python 2. The current stable release of Biopython version 1.85 was released on 15 January 2025. It only supports Python 3 and the recent releases of Biopython require NumPy (and not Numeric). == Design == Wherever possible, Biopython follows the conventions used by the Python programming language to make it easier for users familiar with Python. For example, Seq and SeqRecord objects can be manipulated via slicing, in a manner similar to Python's strings and lists. It is also designed to be functionally similar to other Bio projects, such as BioPerl. It is organized into modular sub-packages, e.g., Bio.Seq, Bio.Align, Bio.PDB, Bio.Entrez each of them useful in a different bioinformatics domain. It used principles, like encapsulation and polymorphism, notably in classes Seq, SeqRecord, and Bio.PDB.Structure. It can also interoperate with other Python tools (Pandas, Matplotlib and SciPy). Biopython can read and write most common file formats for each of its functional areas, and its license is permissive and compatible with most other software licenses, which allows Biopython to be used in a variety of software projects. == Requirements == Biopython is currently supported and tested with the following Python implementations: Python 3 or PyPy3 NumPy == Key features and examples == === Input and output === Biopython can read and write to a number of common formats. When reading files, descriptive information in the file is used to populate the members of Biopython classes, such as SeqRecord. This allows records of one file format to be converted into others. Very large sequence files can exceed a computer's memory resources, so Biopython provides various options for accessing records in large files. They can be loaded entirely into memory in Python data structures, such as lists or dictionaries, providing fast access at the cost of memory usage. Alternatively, the files can be read from disk as needed, with slower performance but lower memory requirements. === Sequences === A core concept in Biopython is the biological sequence, and this is represented by the Seq class. A Biopython Seq object is similar to a Python string in many respects: it supports the Python slice notation, can be concatenated with other sequences and is immutable. This object includes both general string-like and biological sequence-specific methods. It is best to store information about the biological type (DNA, RNA, protein) separately from the sequence, rather than using an explicit alphabet argument. === Sequence annotation === The SeqRecord class describes sequences, along with information such as name, description and features in the form of SeqFeature objects. Each SeqFeature object specifies the type of the feature and its location. Feature types can be ‘gene’, ‘CDS’ (coding sequence), ‘repeat_region’, ‘mobile_element’ or others, and the position of features in the sequence can be exact or approximate. === Accessing online databases === Through the Bio.Entrez module, users of Biopython can download biological data from NCBI databases. Each of the functions provided by the Entrez search engine is available through functions in this module, including searching for and downloading records. === Phylogeny === The Bio.Phylo module provides tools for working with and visualising phylogenetic trees. A variety of file formats are supported for reading and writing, including Newick, NEXUS and phyloXML. Common tree manipulations and traversals are supported via the Tree and Clade objects. Examples include converting and collating tree files, extracting subsets from a tree, changing a tree's root, and analysing branch features such as length or score. Rooted trees can be drawn in ASCII or using matplotlib (see Figure 1), and the Graphviz library can be used to create unrooted layouts (see Figure 2). === Genome diagrams === The GenomeDiagram module provides methods of visualising sequences within Biopython. Sequences can be drawn in a linear or circular form (see Figure 3), and many output formats are supported, including PDF and PNG. Diagrams are created by making tracks and then adding sequence features to those tracks. By looping over a sequence's features and using their attributes to decide if and how they are added to the diagram's tracks, one can exercise much control over the appearance of the final diagram. Cross-links can be drawn between different tracks, allowing one to compare multiple sequences in a single diagram. === Macromolecular structure === The Bio.PDB module can load molecular structures from PDB and mmCIF files, and was added to Biopython in 2003. The Structure object is central to this module, and it organises macromolecular structure in a hierarchical fashion: Structure objects contain Model objects which contain Chain objects which contain Residue objects which contain Atom objects. Disordered residues and atoms get their own classes, DisorderedResidue and DisorderedAtom, that describe their uncertain positions. Using Bio.PDB, one can navigate through individual components of a macromolecular structure file, such as examining each atom in a protein. Common analyses can be carried out, such as measuring distances or angles, comparing residues and calculating residue depth. === Population genetics === The Bio.PopGen module adds support to Biopython for Genepop, a software package for statistical analysis of population genetics. This allows for analyses of Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium, linkage disequilibrium and other features of a population's allele frequencies. This module can also carry out population genetic simulations using coalescent theory with the fastsimcoal2 program. === Wrappers for command line tools === Biopython previously included command-line wrappers for tools such as BLAST, Clustal, EMBOSS, and SAMtools. This option allowed users to run external tool commands from within the code using specialized Biopython classes. However, Bio.Application modules and their wrappers have deprecated and will be removed in future Biopython releases. The main reason for this is the high maintenance burden of updating them with the evolving external tools. The recommended approach is to directly construct and execute command-line tool commands using Python’s built-in subprocess module. This method provides flexibility and removes the dependency on the Biopython wrappers. subprocess is a native Python module useful for running ext

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  • Alexander Gammerman

    Alexander Gammerman

    Alexander Gammerman (born 2 November 1944) is a British computer scientist, and professor at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the co-inventor of conformal prediction. He is the founding director of the Centre for Machine Learning at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. == Career == Gammerman's academic career has been pursued in the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. He started working as a Research Fellow in the Agrophysical Research Institute, St. Petersburg. In 1983, he emigrated to the United Kingdom and was appointed as a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Together with Roger Thatcher, Gammerman published several articles on Bayesian inference. In 1993, he was appointed to the established chair in Computer Science at University of London tenable at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, where he served as the Head of Computer Science department from 1995 to 2005. In 1998, the Centre for Reliable Machine Learning was established, and Gammerman became the first director of the centre. Gammerman has written 7 books. == Honours and awards == In 1996, Gammerman received the P.W. Allen Award from the Forensic Science Society. In 2006, he became an Honorary Professor, at University College London. In 2009, he became a Distinguished Professor at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. In 2019, he received a research grant funded by the energy company Centrica about predicting the time to the next failure of equipment. In 2020, he received the Amazon Research Award for the project titled Conformal Martingales for Change-Point Detection == Selected books == Measures of Complexity (2016), Springer, ISBN 3319357786. Algorithmic Learning in a Random World (2005), Springer, ISBN 0387001522. Causal Models and Intelligent Data Management (1999), Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-58648-4. Probabilistic Reasoning and Bayesian Belief Networks (1998), Nelson Thornes Ltd, ISBN 1872474268. Computational Learning and Probabilistic Reasoning (1996), Wiley, ISBN 0471962791.

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  • Yun Sing Koh

    Yun Sing Koh

    Yun Sing Koh (born 1978) is a New Zealand computer science academic, and is a full professor at the University of Auckland, specialising in machine learning and artificial intelligence. She is a co-director of the Centre of Machine Learning for Social Good, and the Advanced Machine Learning and Data Analytics Research (MARS) Lab at Auckland. == Academic career == Koh earned a Bachelor of Science with Honours and a Master of Software Engineering at the University of Malaya. She then completed a PhD titled Generating sporadic association rules at the University of Otago in 2007. Koh joined the faculty of the University of Auckland in 2010, rising to full professor. As of 2024, she is director of the Centre of Machine Learning for Social Good at Auckland, alongside Gillian Dobbie and Daniel Wilson, and is director of the Master of AI course at the university. Koh also co-directs the Advanced Machine Learning and Data Analytics Research (MARS) Lab. Koh's research covers machine learning and artificial intelligence. She is especially interested in designing machine learning algorithms for data streams, and has led research using AI systems to identify individual stoats for pest population research. In 2018 she was awarded a Marsden grant for a research project "An Adaptive Predictive System for Life-long Learning on Data Streams", and has been part of three MBIE projects. In 2025 the stoat identification project Koh co-leads with Daniel Wilson was awarded $1 million per annum by the MBIE Smart Ideas fund. Koh was a finalist in the AI in Climate section of the Women in AI Australia and New Zealand Awards in 2022. She was a 2023 Fellow at the United States National Science Foundation-funded Convergence Research (CORE) Institute. Koh has chaired a number of sessions at international conferences on data mining. In March 2026 it was announced that Koh would be a member of the New Zealand Human Rights Commission's Expert Advisory Group on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Digital Technologies and Human Rights. == Selected works == Philippe Fournier-Viger; Jerry Chun-Wei Lin; Rage Uday Kiran; Yun Sing Koh; Rincy Thomas (2017). "A Survey of Sequential Pattern Mining". Data Science and Pattern Recognition. 1 (1): 54–77. Wikidata Q138719481. Yun Sing Koh; Nathan Rountree; Richard O’Keefe (1 April 2006). "Finding Non-Coincidental Sporadic Rules Using Apriori-Inverse". International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining (in Ndonga). 2 (2): 38–54. doi:10.4018/JDWM.2006040102. ISSN 1548-3924. Wikidata Q125185222. Russel Pears; Sripirakas Sakthithasan; Yun Sing Koh (11 January 2014). "Detecting concept change in dynamic data streams". Machine Learning. 97 (3): 259–293. doi:10.1007/S10994-013-5433-9. ISSN 1573-0565. Zbl 1319.68186. Wikidata Q125185156. David Tse Jung Huang; Yun Sing Koh; Gillian Dobbie; Russel Pears (December 2014), Detecting Volatility Shift in Data Streams, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, doi:10.1109/ICDM.2014.50, Wikidata Q125185151 Sidney Tsang; Yun Sing Koh; Gillian Dobbie (2011). "RP-Tree: Rare Pattern Tree Mining". Lecture Notes in Computer Science: 277–288. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23544-3_21. ISSN 0302-9743. Wikidata Q125185206. Yun Sing Koh; Sri Devi Ravana (24 May 2016). "Unsupervised Rare Pattern Mining". ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. 10 (4): 1–29. doi:10.1145/2898359. ISSN 1556-4681. Wikidata Q125185136. Jack Julian; Yun Sing Koh; Albert Bifet (1 October 2025), Building adaptive knowledge bases for evolving continual learning models (PDF), vol. 1, doi:10.1038/S44387-025-00028-4, Wikidata Q138719496

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  • Tamara Berg

    Tamara Berg

    Tamara Lee Berg is a tenured associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a research scientist manager at Facebook AML/FAIR. == Education == Berg obtained her PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 as a member of the Berkeley Computer Vision Group. She was an assistant professor at Stony Brook University from 2008 to 2013 before joining University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2013. == Research == Berg's research interests are at the boundary of computer vision and natural language processing. In particular, she focuses on understanding the connections between vision and language, for example, to automatically identify people in news photographs, for generating natural language descriptions for images, or for recognising clothing and style. == Selected awards and honours == 2019 Mark Everingham Prize 2013 Marr Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision 2011 National Science Foundation Career Award == Personal life == Berg is married to fellow computer vision researcher Alexander Berg.

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  • Automotive security

    Automotive security

    Automotive security refers to the branch of computer security focused on the cyber risks related to the automotive context. The increasingly high number of ECUs in vehicles and, alongside, the implementation of multiple different means of communication from and towards the vehicle in a remote and wireless manner led to the necessity of a branch of cybersecurity dedicated to the threats associated with vehicles. Not to be confused with automotive safety. == Causes == The implementation of multiple ECUs (Electronic Control Units) inside vehicles began in the early '70s thanks to the development of integrated circuits and microprocessors that made it economically feasible to produce the ECUs on a large scale. Since then the number of ECUs has increased to up to 100 per vehicle. These units nowadays control almost everything in the vehicle, from simple tasks such as activating the wipers to more safety-related ones like brake-by-wire or ABS (Anti-lock Braking System). Autonomous driving is also strongly reliant on the implementation of new, complex ECUs such as the ADAS, alongside sensors (lidars and radars) and their control units. Inside the vehicle, the ECUs are connected with each other through cabled or wireless communication networks, such as CAN bus (controller area network), MOST bus (Media Oriented System Transport), FlexRay (Automotive Network Communications Protocol) or RF (radio frequency) as in many implementations of TPMSs (tire-pressure monitoring systems). Many of these ECUs require data received through these networks that arrive from various sensors to operate and use such data to modify the behavior of the vehicle (e.g., the cruise control modifies the vehicle's speed depending on signals arriving from a button usually located on the steering wheel). Since the development of cheap wireless communication technologies such as Bluetooth, LTE, Wi-Fi, RFID and similar, automotive producers and OEMs have designed ECUs that implement such technologies with the goal of improving the experience of the driver and passengers. Safety-related systems such as the OnStar from General Motors, telematic units, communication between smartphones and the vehicle's speakers through Bluetooth, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. == Threat model == Threat models of the automotive world are based on both real-world and theoretically possible attacks. Most real-world attacks aim at the safety of the people in and around the car, by modifying the cyber-physical capabilities of the vehicle (e.g., steering, braking, accelerating without requiring actions from the driver), while theoretical attacks have been supposed to focus also on privacy-related goals, such as obtaining GPS data on the vehicle, or capturing microphone signals and similar. Regarding the attack surfaces of the vehicle, they are usually divided in long-range, short-range, and local attack surfaces: LTE and DSRC can be considered long-range ones, while Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are usually considered short-range although still wireless. Finally, USB, OBD-II and all the attack surfaces that require physical access to the car are defined as local. An attacker that is able to implement the attack through a long-range surface is considered stronger and more dangerous than the one that requires physical access to the vehicle. In 2015 the possibility of attacks on vehicles already on the market has been proven possible by Miller and Valasek, that managed to disrupt the driving of a Jeep Cherokee while remotely connecting to it through remote wireless communication. === Controller area network attacks === The most common network used in vehicles and the one that is mainly used for safety-related communication is CAN, due to its real-time properties, simplicity, and cheapness. For this reason the majority of real-world attacks have been implemented against ECUs connected through this type of network. The majority of attacks demonstrated either against actual vehicles or in testbeds fall in one or more of the following categories: ==== Sniffing ==== Sniffing in the computer security field generally refers to the possibility of intercepting and logging packets or more generally data from a network. In the case of CAN, since it is a bus network, every node listens to all communication on the network. It is useful for the attacker to read data to learn the behavior of the other nodes of the network before implementing the actual attack. Usually, the final goal of the attacker is not to simply sniff the data on CAN, since the packets passing on this type of network are not usually valuable just to read. ==== Denial of service ==== Denial of service (DoS) in information security is usually described as an attack that has the objective of making a machine or a network unavailable. DoS attacks against ECUs connected to CAN buses can be done both against the network, by abusing the arbitration protocol used by CAN to always win the arbitration, and targeting the single ECU, by abusing the error handling protocol of CAN. In this second case the attacker flags the messages of the victim as faulty to convince the victim of being broken and therefore shut itself off the network. ==== Spoofing ==== Spoofing attacks comprise all cases in which an attacker, by falsifying data, sends messages pretending to be another node of the network. In automotive security usually spoofing attacks are divided into masquerade and replay attacks. Replay attacks are defined as all those where the attacker pretends to be the victim and sends sniffed data that the victim sent in a previous iteration of authentication. Masquerade attacks are, on the contrary, spoofing attacks where the data payload has been created by the attacker. == Real life automotive threat example == Security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have successfully demonstrated remote access to a wide variety of vehicle controls using a Jeep Cherokee as the target. They were able to control the radio, environmental controls, windshield wipers, and certain engine and brake functions. The method used to hack the system was implementation of pre-programmed chip into the controller area network (CAN) bus. By inserting this chip into the CAN bus, he was able to send arbitrary message to CAN bus. One other thing that Miller has pointed out is the danger of the CAN bus, as it broadcasts the signal which the message can be caught by the hackers throughout the network. The control of the vehicle was all done remotely, manipulating the system without any physical interaction. Miller states that he could control any of some 1.4 million vehicles in the United States regardless of the location or distance, the only thing needed is for someone to turn on the vehicle to gain access. The work by Miller and Valasek replicated earlier work completed and published by academics in 2010 and 2011 on a different vehicle. The earlier work demonstrated the ability to compromise a vehicle remotely, over multiple wireless channels (including cellular), and the ability to remotely control critical components on the vehicle post-compromise, including the telematics unit and the car's brakes. While the earlier academic work was publicly visible, both in peer-reviewed scholarly publications and in the press, the Miller and Valesek work received even greater public visibility. == Security measures == The increasing complexity of devices and networks in the automotive context requires the application of security measures to limit the capabilities of a potential attacker. Since the early 2000 many different countermeasures have been proposed and, in some cases, applied. Following, a list of the most common security measures: Sub-networks: to limit the attacker capabilities even if he/she manages to access the vehicle from remote through a remotely connected ECU, the networks of the vehicle are divided in multiple sub-networks, and the most critical ECUs are not placed in the same sub-networks of the ECUs that can be accessed from remote. Gateways: the sub-networks are divided by secure gateways or firewalls that block messages from crossing from a sub-network to the other if they were not intended to. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS): on each critical sub-network, one of the nodes (ECUs) connected to it has the goal of reading all data passing on the sub-network and detect messages that, given some rules, are considered malicious (made by an attacker). The arbitrary messages can be caught by the passenger by using IDS which will notify the owner regarding with unexpected message. Authentication protocols: in order to implement authentication on networks where it is not already implemented (such as CAN), it is possible to design an authentication protocol that works on the higher layers of the ISO OSI model, by using part of the data payload of a message to authenticate the message itself. Hardware Security Modules: since many ECUs are not powerful enough to keep real-time delays whi

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  • Is an AI Photo Editor Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Photo Editor Worth It in 2026?

    Shopping for the best AI photo editor? An AI photo editor is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI photo editor slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.

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  • Peter Gerstoft

    Peter Gerstoft

    Peter Gerstoft is a Danish-American scientist and engineer specializing in ocean acoustics, seismology, and signal processing. He is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark. He was previously a Distinguished Data Scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego and an adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego. == Education == Gerstoft received his MSc in engineering from the Technical University of Denmark in 1983 and another MSc from the University of Western Ontario in 1984. He completed his PhD in engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in 1986. == Career == Gerstoft began his career in acoustics and vibrations at Odegaard & Danneskiold-Samsøe (1987–1992). He then served as a Senior Scientist at the NATO SACLANT Undersea Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy, from 1992 to 1997. Between 1999 and 2000, Gerstoft worked as a Senior Seismic Acoustic Officer with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. He has been a Data Scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography since 1997. From 2013, he held an adjunct faculty position in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, where he taught courses on seismology, data assimilation, and machine learning for physical systems. Gerstoft retired from UC San Diego in 2025 and accepted an appointment as Professor of Electrical and Photonics Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in 2026 . == Research and contributions == Gerstoft's research focuses on environmental signal processing, with a particular emphasis on inversion methods, including their theoretical development, algorithmic implementation, and practical applications. In the 1990s, he investigated the use of nonlinear optimization and Bayesian approaches in acoustic inverse problems related to source localization and environmental parameter estimation. His work integrated physical propagation models with Bayesian sampling methods and a range of likelihood functions. These techniques have been applied to various data types, including vertical sensor arrays, single-sensor broadband data, and transmission loss measurements, and contributed to a general framework for inversion based on Gaussian assumptions. He has also conducted research in machine learning and sparse signal processing, particularly in the context of sensor array data. This includes applications such as direction of arrival estimation and source localization, including for seismic events such as the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and for ship tracking in ocean environments. His work on sparse Bayesian sequential methods and techniques for estimating Lagrange multipliers in constrained optimization problems has contributed to the development of adaptive and high-resolution signal processing techniques. Gerstoft has applied supervised learning and deep neural networks to problems in physical acoustics, including source localization in ocean waveguides. He has also co-authored several review articles on the use of machine learning in acoustics and seismology. == Honors == Fulbright Scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1989–1990) Fellow, Acoustical Society of America (2003) Member, American Geophysical Union (since 2004) Senior Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2018) Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2023) == Selected publications == === Book === Diachok, O., Caiti, A., Gerstoft, P., & Schmidt, H. (Eds.). Full Field Inversion Methods in Ocean and Seismo-Acoustics. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. === Selected articles === Gerstoft, P. (1994). "Inversion of seismo-acoustic data using genetic algorithms and a posteriori probability distributions". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 95 (2): 770–782. doi:10.1121/1.408467. Gerstoft, P., & Mecklenbrauker, C. F. (1998). "Ocean acoustic inversion with estimation of a posteriori probability distributions". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 104 (2): 808–819. doi:10.1121/1.423287. Sabra, K. G., Gerstoft, P., Roux, P., Kuperman, W. A., & Fehler, M. (2005). "Extracting time-domain Green's function estimates from ambient seismic noise". Geophysical Research Letters. 32, L03310. Xenaki, A., Gerstoft, P., & Mosegaard, K. (2014). "Compressive beamforming". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 136, 260–271. Niu, H., Reeves, D., & Gerstoft, P. (2017). "Source localization in an ocean waveguide using supervised machine learning". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 142, 1176–1188.

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  • Jacek M. Zurada

    Jacek M. Zurada

    Jacek M. Zurada is a Polish-American computer scientist who is a Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are from Politechnika Gdaṅska (Gdansk University of Technology, Poland). He has held visiting appointments at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Princeton, Northeastern, and Auburn, and at overseas universities in Australia, Chile, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Poland, Singapore, Spain, and South Africa. He is a life fellow of IEEE and a fellow of the International Neural Networks Society and Doctor Honoris Causa of Czestochowa Institute of Technology, Poland. == Research == Zurada's research covers neural networks, deep learning, data mining with emphasis on data and feature understanding, rule extraction from semantic and visual information, machine learning, decomposition methods for salient feature extraction, and lambda learning rule for neural networks. == Professional and editorial service == Zurada was the editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (1998–2003), an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Pt. I and Pt. II, Action Editor in Neural Networks (Elsevier) and on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the IEEE. He is an associate editor of Neurocomputing, Schedae Informaticae, the International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, and Editor of the Springer Natural Computing, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing and Studies in Computational Intelligence Book series or volumes. == Awards and honours == In 2003 he was given the title of Professor by the President of Poland. Since 2005 he has been an elected Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He also received five honorary professorships from foreign universities, including Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and Obuda University in Budapest, Hungary.

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  • Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales

    Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales

    Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales, or ADAMS was a $35 million DARPA project designed to identify patterns and anomalies in very large data sets. It is under DARPA's Information Innovation office and began in 2011 and ended in August 2014 The project was intended to detect and prevent insider threats such as "a soldier in good mental health becoming homicidal or suicidal", an "innocent insider becoming malicious", or "a government employee [who] abuses access privileges to share classified information". Specific cases mentioned are Nadal Malik Hasan and WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning. Commercial applications may include finance. The intended recipients of the system output are operators in the counterintelligence agencies. A final report was published on May 11, 2015, detailing a system known as Anomaly Detection Engine for Networks, or ADEN, developed by the University of Maryland, College Park, whose goal was to "identify malicious users within a network." Using multiple datasets from Wikipedia, Slashdot, and others, researchers were able to identify vandals and malicious users on a website using both conventional algorithms and artificial intelligence. The Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning was part of the ADAMS project. The Georgia Tech team includes noted high-performance computing researcher David Bader (computer scientist).

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  • Hapax legomenon

    Hapax legomenon

    In corpus linguistics, a hapax legomenon ( also or ; pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax, plural hapaxes) is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is also sometimes used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works but more than once in that particular work. Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "said once". The related terms dis legomenon, tris legomenon, and tetrakis legomenon respectively (, , ) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used. Hapax legomena are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are hapax legomena, and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena. Thus, in the Brown Corpus of American English, about half of the 50,000 distinct words are hapax legomena within that corpus. Hapax legomenon refers to the appearance of a word or an expression in a body of text, not to either its origin or its prevalence in speech. It thus differs from a nonce word, which may never be recorded, may find currency and may be widely recorded, or may appear several times in the work which coins it, and so on. == Significance == Hapax legomena in ancient texts are usually difficult to decipher, since it is easier to infer meaning from multiple contexts than from just one. For example, many of the remaining undeciphered Mayan glyphs are hapax legomena, and Biblical (particularly Hebrew; see § Hebrew) hapax legomena sometimes pose problems in translation. Hapax legomena also pose challenges in natural language processing. Some scholars consider Hapax legomena useful in determining the authorship of written works. P. N. Harrison, in The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (1921) made hapax legomena popular among Bible scholars, when he argued that there are considerably more of them in the three Pastoral Epistles than in other Pauline Epistles. He argued that the number of hapax legomena in a putative author's corpus indicates his or her vocabulary and is characteristic of the author as an individual. Harrison's theory has faded in significance due to a number of problems raised by other scholars. For example, in 1896, W. P. Workman found the following numbers of hapax legomena in each Pauline Epistle: At first glance, the last three totals (for the Pastoral Epistles) are not out of line with the others. To take account of the varying length of the epistles, Workman also calculated the average number of hapax legomena per page of the Greek text, which ranged from 3.6 to 13, as summarized in the diagram on the right. Although the Pastoral Epistles have more hapax legomena per page, Workman found the differences to be moderate in comparison to the variation among other Epistles. This was reinforced when Workman looked at several plays by Shakespeare, which showed similar variations (from 3.4 to 10.4 per page of Irving's one-volume edition), as summarized in the second diagram on the right. Apart from author identity, there are several other factors that can explain the number of hapax legomena in a work: text length: this directly affects the expected number and percentage of hapax legomena; the brevity of the Pastoral Epistles also makes any statistical analysis problematic. text topic: if the author writes on different subjects, of course many subject-specific words will occur only in limited contexts. text audience: if the author is writing to a peer rather than a student, or their spouse rather than their employer, again quite different vocabulary will appear. time: over the course of years, both the language and an author's knowledge and use of language will change. In the particular case of the Pastoral Epistles, all of these variables are quite different from those in the rest of the Pauline corpus, and hapax legomena are no longer widely accepted as strong indicators of authorship; those who reject Pauline authorship of the Pastorals rely on other arguments. There are also subjective questions over whether two forms amount to "the same word": dog vs. dogs, clue vs. clueless, sign vs. signature; many other gray cases also arise. The Jewish Encyclopedia points out that, although there are 1,500 hapaxes in the Hebrew Bible, only about 400 are not obviously related to other attested word forms. A final difficulty with the use of hapax legomena for authorship determination is that there is considerable variation among works known to be by a single author, and disparate authors often show similar values. In other words, hapax legomena are not a reliable indicator. Authorship studies now usually use a wide range of measures to look for patterns rather than relying upon single measurements. == Computer science == In the fields of computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), esp. corpus linguistics and machine-learned NLP, it is common to disregard hapax legomena (and sometimes other infrequent words), as they are likely to have little value for computational techniques. This disregard has the added benefit of significantly reducing the memory use of an application, since, by Zipf's law, many words are hapax legomena. == Examples == The following are some examples of hapax legomena in languages or corpora. === Arabic === In the Qurʾān: The proper nouns Iram (Q 89:7, Iram of the Pillars), Bābil (Q 2:102, Babylon), Bakka(t) (Q 3:96, Bakkah), Jibt (Q 4:51), Ramaḍān (Q 2:185, Ramadan), ar-Rūm (Q 30:2, Byzantine Empire), Tasnīm (Q 83:27), Qurayš (Q 106:1, Quraysh), Majūs (Q 22:17, Magian/Zoroastrian), Mārūt (Q 2:102, Harut and Marut), Makka(t) (Q 48:24, Mecca), Nasr (Q 71:23), (Ḏū) an-Nūn (Q 21:87) and Hārūt (Q 2:102, Harut and Marut) occur only once. zanjabīl (زَنْجَبِيل – ginger) is a Qurʾānic hapax (Q 76:17). zamharīr (زَمْهَرِيرًۭ) is a Qurʾānic hapax (Q 76:13), usually glossed as referring to extreme cold. The epitheton ornans aṣ-ṣamad (الصَّمَد – the One besought) is a Qurʾānic hapax (Q 112:2). ṭūd (طُودْ - mountain) is a Qurʾānic hapax (Q 26:63). === Chinese and Japanese === Classical Chinese and Japanese literature contains many Chinese characters that feature only once in the corpus, and their meaning and pronunciation has often been lost. Known in Japanese as kogo (孤語), literally "lonely characters", these can be considered a type of hapax legomenon. For example, the Classic of Poetry (c. 1000 BC) uses the character 篪 exactly once in the verse 「伯氏吹塤, 仲氏吹篪」, and it was only through the discovery of a description by Guo Pu (276–324 AD) that the character could be associated with a specific type of ancient flute. === English === It is fairly common for authors to "coin" new words to convey a particular meaning or for the sake of entertainment, without any suggestion that they are "proper" words. For example, P.G. Wodehouse and Lewis Carroll frequently coined novel words. Indexy, below, appears to be an example of this. Flother, as a synonym for snowflake, is a hapax legomenon of written English found in a manuscript entitled The XI Pains of Hell (c. 1275). Honorificabilitudinitatibus is a hapax legomenon of Shakespeare's works, coming from Erasmus' Adagia Indexy, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, used as an adjective to describe a situational state with no other further use in the language: "If that man had been an ordinary lunatic I would have taken my chance of trusting him; but he seems so mixed up with the Count in an indexy kind of way that I am afraid of doing anything wrong by helping his fads." Manticratic, meaning "of the rule by the Prophet's family or clan", was apparently invented by T. E. Lawrence and appears once in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Nortelrye, a word for "education", occurs only once in Chaucer's The Reeve's Tale. Sassigassity, perhaps with the meaning of "audacity", occurs only once in Dickens's short story "A Christmas Tree". Slæpwerigne, "sleep-weary", occurs exactly once in the Old English corpus, in the Exeter Book. There is debate over whether it means "weary with sleep" or "weary for sleep". === German === The name of the 9th-century poem Muspilli is a back-formation from "muspille", Old High German hapax legomenon of unclear meaning only found in this text (see Muspilli § Etymology for discussion). === Ancient Greek === According to classical scholar Clyde Pharr, "the Iliad has 1,097 hapax legomena, while the Odyssey has 868". Others have defined the term differently, however, and count as few as 303 in the Iliad and 191 in the Odyssey. panaōrios (παναώριος), ancient Greek for "very untimely", is one of many words that occur only once in the Iliad. The Greek New Testament contains 686 local hapax legomena, which are sometimes called "New Testament hapaxes". 62 of these occur in 1 Peter and 54 occur in 2 Peter

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  • Models of DNA evolution

    Models of DNA evolution

    A number of different Markov models of DNA sequence evolution have been proposed. These substitution models differ in terms of the parameters used to describe the rates at which one nucleotide replaces another during evolution. These models are frequently used in molecular phylogenetic analyses. In particular, they are used during the calculation of likelihood of a tree (in Bayesian and maximum likelihood approaches to tree estimation) and they are used to estimate the evolutionary distance between sequences from the observed differences between the sequences. == Introduction == These models are phenomenological descriptions of the evolution of DNA as a string of four discrete states. These Markov models do not explicitly depict the mechanism of mutation nor the action of natural selection. Rather they describe the relative rates of different changes. For example, mutational biases and purifying selection favoring conservative changes are probably both responsible for the relatively high rate of transitions compared to transversions in evolving sequences. However, the Kimura (K80) model described below only attempts to capture the effect of both forces in a parameter that reflects the relative rate of transitions to transversions. Evolutionary analyses of sequences are conducted on a wide variety of time scales. Thus, it is convenient to express these models in terms of the instantaneous rates of change between different states (the Q matrices below). If we are given a starting (ancestral) state at one position, the model's Q matrix and a branch length expressing the expected number of changes to have occurred since the ancestor, then we can derive the probability of the descendant sequence having each of the four states. The mathematical details of this transformation from rate-matrix to probability matrix are described in the mathematics of substitution models section of the substitution model page. By expressing models in terms of the instantaneous rates of change we can avoid estimating a large numbers of parameters for each branch on a phylogenetic tree (or each comparison if the analysis involves many pairwise sequence comparisons). The models described on this page describe the evolution of a single site within a set of sequences. They are often used for analyzing the evolution of an entire locus by making the simplifying assumption that different sites evolve independently and are identically distributed. This assumption may be justifiable if the sites can be assumed to be evolving neutrally. If the primary effect of natural selection on the evolution of the sequences is to constrain some sites, then models of among-site rate-heterogeneity can be used. This approach allows one to estimate only one matrix of relative rates of substitution, and another set of parameters describing the variance in the total rate of substitution across sites. == DNA evolution as a continuous-time Markov chain == === Continuous-time Markov chains === Continuous-time Markov chains have the usual transition matrices which are, in addition, parameterized by time, t {\displaystyle t} . Specifically, if E 1 , E 2 , E 3 , E 4 {\displaystyle E_{1},E_{2},E_{3},E_{4}} are the states, then the transition matrix P ( t ) = ( P i j ( t ) ) {\displaystyle P(t)={\big (}P_{ij}(t){\big )}} where each individual entry, P i j ( t ) {\displaystyle P_{ij}(t)} refers to the probability that state E i {\displaystyle E_{i}} will change to state E j {\displaystyle E_{j}} in time t {\displaystyle t} . Example: We would like to model the substitution process in DNA sequences (i.e. Jukes–Cantor, Kimura, etc.) in a continuous-time fashion. The corresponding transition matrices will look like: P ( t ) = ( p A A ( t ) p A G ( t ) p A C ( t ) p A T ( t ) p G A ( t ) p G G ( t ) p G C ( t ) p G T ( t ) p C A ( t ) p C G ( t ) p C C ( t ) p C T ( t ) p T A ( t ) p T G ( t ) p T C ( t ) p T T ( t ) ) {\displaystyle P(t)={\begin{pmatrix}p_{\mathrm {AA} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {AG} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {AC} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {AT} }(t)\\p_{\mathrm {GA} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {GG} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {GC} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {GT} }(t)\\p_{\mathrm {CA} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {CG} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {CC} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {CT} }(t)\\p_{\mathrm {TA} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {TG} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {TC} }(t)&p_{\mathrm {TT} }(t)\end{pmatrix}}} where the top-left and bottom-right 2 × 2 blocks correspond to transition probabilities and the top-right and bottom-left 2 × 2 blocks corresponds to transversion probabilities. Assumption: If at some time t 0 {\displaystyle t_{0}} , the Markov chain is in state E i {\displaystyle E_{i}} , then the probability that at time t 0 + t {\displaystyle t_{0}+t} , it will be in state E j {\displaystyle E_{j}} depends only upon i {\displaystyle i} , j {\displaystyle j} and t {\displaystyle t} . This then allows us to write that probability as p i j ( t ) {\displaystyle p_{ij}(t)} . Theorem: Continuous-time transition matrices satisfy: P ( t + τ ) = P ( t ) P ( τ ) {\displaystyle P(t+\tau )=P(t)P(\tau )} Note: There is here a possible confusion between two meanings of the word transition. (i) In the context of Markov chains, transition is the general term for the change between two states. (ii) In the context of nucleotide changes in DNA sequences, transition is a specific term for the exchange between either the two purines (A ↔ G) or the two pyrimidines (C ↔ T) (for additional details, see the article about transitions in genetics). By contrast, an exchange between one purine and one pyrimidine is called a transversion. === Deriving the dynamics of substitution === Consider a DNA sequence of fixed length m evolving in time by base replacement. Assume that the processes followed by the m sites are Markovian independent, identically distributed and that the process is constant over time. For a particular site, let E = { A , G , C , T } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {E}}=\{A,\,G,\,C,\,T\}} be the set of possible states for the site, and p ( t ) = ( p A ( t ) , p G ( t ) , p C ( t ) , p T ( t ) ) {\displaystyle \mathbf {p} (t)=(p_{A}(t),\,p_{G}(t),\,p_{C}(t),\,p_{T}(t))} their respective probabilities at time t {\displaystyle t} . For two distinct x , y ∈ E {\displaystyle x,y\in {\mathcal {E}}} , let μ x y {\displaystyle \mu _{xy}\ } be the transition rate from state x {\displaystyle x} to state y {\displaystyle y} . Similarly, for any x {\displaystyle x} , let the total rate of change from x {\displaystyle x} be μ x = ∑ y ≠ x μ x y . {\displaystyle \mu _{x}=\sum _{y\neq x}\mu _{xy}\,.} The changes in the probability distribution p A ( t ) {\displaystyle p_{A}(t)} for small increments of time Δ t {\displaystyle \Delta t} are given by p A ( t + Δ t ) = p A ( t ) − p A ( t ) μ A Δ t + ∑ x ≠ A p x ( t ) μ x A Δ t . {\displaystyle p_{A}(t+\Delta t)=p_{A}(t)-p_{A}(t)\mu _{A}\Delta t+\sum _{x\neq A}p_{x}(t)\mu _{xA}\Delta t\,.} In other words, (in frequentist language), the frequency of A {\displaystyle A} 's at time t + Δ t {\displaystyle t+\Delta t} is equal to the frequency at time t {\displaystyle t} minus the frequency of the lost A {\displaystyle A} 's plus the frequency of the newly created A {\displaystyle A} 's. Similarly for the probabilities p G ( t ) {\displaystyle p_{G}(t)} , p C ( t ) {\displaystyle p_{C}(t)} and p T ( t ) {\displaystyle p_{T}(t)} . These equations can be written compactly as p ( t + Δ t ) = p ( t ) + p ( t ) Q Δ t , {\displaystyle \mathbf {p} (t+\Delta t)=\mathbf {p} (t)+\mathbf {p} (t)Q\Delta t\,,} where Q = ( − μ A μ A G μ A C μ A T μ G A − μ G μ G C μ G T μ C A μ C G − μ C μ C T μ T A μ T G μ T C − μ T ) {\displaystyle Q={\begin{pmatrix}-\mu _{A}&\mu _{AG}&\mu _{AC}&\mu _{AT}\\\mu _{GA}&-\mu _{G}&\mu _{GC}&\mu _{GT}\\\mu _{CA}&\mu _{CG}&-\mu _{C}&\mu _{CT}\\\mu _{TA}&\mu _{TG}&\mu _{TC}&-\mu _{T}\end{pmatrix}}} is known as the rate matrix. Note that, by definition, the sum of the entries in each row of Q {\displaystyle Q} is equal to zero. It follows that p ′ ( t ) = p ( t ) Q . {\displaystyle \mathbf {p} '(t)=\mathbf {p} (t)Q\,.} For a stationary process, where Q {\displaystyle Q} does not depend on time t, this differential equation can be solved. First, P ( t ) = exp ⁡ ( t Q ) , {\displaystyle P(t)=\exp(tQ),} where exp ⁡ ( t Q ) {\displaystyle \exp(tQ)} denotes the exponential of the matrix t Q {\displaystyle tQ} . As a result, p ( t ) = p ( 0 ) P ( t ) = p ( 0 ) exp ⁡ ( t Q ) . {\displaystyle \mathbf {p} (t)=\mathbf {p} (0)P(t)=\mathbf {p} (0)\exp(tQ)\,.} === Ergodicity === If the Markov chain is irreducible, i.e. if it is always possible to go from a state x {\displaystyle x} to a state y {\displaystyle y} (possibly in several steps), then it is also ergodic. As a result, it has a unique stationary distribution π = { π x , x ∈ E } {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\pi }}=\{\pi _{x},\,x\in {\mathcal {E}}\}} , where π x {\displaystyle \pi _{x}} corresponds to the proportion of time spent in state x {\displaystyle x} after the Markov chain has run for an infinite amount of time. In DNA evo

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