AI Face Paint

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  • YNAB

    YNAB

    You Need a Budget (YNAB) (pronounced ) is an online personal budgeting program based on the envelope system developed by a privately owned American company of the same name. It is available via any web browser or a mobile app. == History == The program was initially developed as standalone software in 2004 by Jesse Mecham, while he was in college pursuing his master's degree in accounting, after he and his wife faced financial difficulty and decided to improve their budgeting. It evolved from a spreadsheet that he created for the budgeting process. The acronym stands for "you need a budget." In 2015 they changed their licensing model to software as a service. In 2020, YNAB had 115 employees, all working remotely. == Overview == The service encourages users to follow four principles or "rules": Give every dollar a job: Each dollar in a budget is allocated to a specific purpose. This concept is also called zero-based budgeting. Embrace true expenses: All expenses are planned for, so that there are no surprises. Roll with the punches: Being flexible when there is overspending. Age your money: Keeping money in your budget without immediately spending it. Users can either import transactions automatically from their financial institutions or input them manually. The software also displays financial reports to keep users informed about their finances at a glance. == Awards and recognition == YNAB has been named one of the best budgeting apps by U.S. News & World Report, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, CNN, HuffPost, CNBC, and hundreds of other financial reporting outlets. The Wall Street Journal – Best budgeting app for hands-on budgeters. Forbes – Best Budgeting Apps Money – Best budgeting app for college students. Lifehacker – Most popular personal finance software. Wirecutter – "Great pick for hard-core budgeters". Investopedia – Best overall budgeting app.

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  • MRF optimization via dual decomposition

    MRF optimization via dual decomposition

    In dual decomposition a problem is broken into smaller subproblems and a solution to the relaxed problem is found. This method can be employed for MRF optimization. Dual decomposition is applied to markov logic programs as an inference technique. == Background == Discrete MRF Optimization (inference) is very important in Machine Learning and Computer vision, which is realized on CUDA graphical processing units. Consider a graph G = ( V , E ) {\displaystyle G=(V,E)} with nodes V {\displaystyle V} and Edges E {\displaystyle E} . The goal is to assign a label l p {\displaystyle l_{p}} to each p ∈ V {\displaystyle p\in V} so that the MRF Energy is minimized: (1) min Σ p ∈ V θ p ( l p ) + Σ p q ∈ ε θ p q ( l p ) ( l q ) {\displaystyle \min \Sigma _{p\in V}\theta _{p}(l_{p})+\Sigma _{pq\in \varepsilon }\theta _{pq}(l_{p})(l_{q})} Major MRF Optimization methods are based on Graph cuts or Message passing. They rely on the following integer linear programming formulation (2) min x E ( θ , x ) = θ . x = ∑ p ∈ V θ p . x p + ∑ p q ∈ ε θ p q . x p q {\displaystyle \min _{x}E(\theta ,x)=\theta .x=\sum _{p\in V}\theta _{p}.x_{p}+\sum _{pq\in \varepsilon }\theta _{pq}.x_{pq}} In many applications, the MRF-variables are {0,1}-variables that satisfy: x p ( l ) = 1 {\displaystyle x_{p}(l)=1} ⇔ {\displaystyle \Leftrightarrow } label l {\displaystyle l} is assigned to p {\displaystyle p} , while x p q ( l , l ′ ) = 1 {\displaystyle x_{pq}(l,l^{\prime })=1} , labels l , l ′ {\displaystyle l,l^{\prime }} are assigned to p , q {\displaystyle p,q} . == Dual Decomposition == The main idea behind decomposition is surprisingly simple: decompose your original complex problem into smaller solvable subproblems, extract a solution by cleverly combining the solutions from these subproblems. A sample problem to decompose: min x Σ i f i ( x ) {\displaystyle \min _{x}\Sigma _{i}f^{i}(x)} where x ∈ C {\displaystyle x\in C} In this problem, separately minimizing every single f i ( x ) {\displaystyle f^{i}(x)} over x {\displaystyle x} is easy; but minimizing their sum is a complex problem. So the problem needs to get decomposed using auxiliary variables { x i } {\displaystyle \{x^{i}\}} and the problem will be as follows: min { x i } , x Σ i f i ( x i ) {\displaystyle \min _{\{x^{i}\},x}\Sigma _{i}f^{i}(x^{i})} where x i ∈ C , x i = x {\displaystyle x^{i}\in C,x^{i}=x} Now we can relax the constraints by multipliers { λ i } {\displaystyle \{\lambda ^{i}\}} which gives us the following Lagrangian dual function: g ( { λ i } ) = min { x i ∈ C } , x Σ i f i ( x i ) + Σ i λ i . ( x i − x ) = min { x i ∈ C } , x Σ i [ f i ( x i ) + λ i . x i ] − ( Σ i λ i ) x {\displaystyle g(\{\lambda ^{i}\})=\min _{\{x^{i}\in C\},x}\Sigma _{i}f^{i}(x^{i})+\Sigma _{i}\lambda ^{i}.(x^{i}-x)=\min _{\{x^{i}\in C\},x}\Sigma _{i}[f^{i}(x^{i})+\lambda ^{i}.x^{i}]-(\Sigma _{i}\lambda ^{i})x} Now we eliminate x {\displaystyle x} from the dual function by minimizing over x {\displaystyle x} and dual function becomes: g ( { λ i } ) = min { x i ∈ C } Σ i [ f i ( x i ) + λ i . x i ] {\displaystyle g(\{\lambda ^{i}\})=\min _{\{x^{i}\in C\}}\Sigma _{i}[f^{i}(x^{i})+\lambda ^{i}.x^{i}]} We can set up a Lagrangian dual problem: (3) max { λ i } ∈ Λ g ( λ i ) = Σ i g i ( x i ) , {\displaystyle \max _{\{\lambda ^{i}\}\in \Lambda }g({\lambda ^{i}})=\Sigma _{i}g^{i}(x^{i}),} The Master problem (4) g i ( x i ) = m i n x i f i ( x i ) + λ i . x i {\displaystyle g^{i}(x^{i})=min_{x^{i}}f^{i}(x^{i})+\lambda ^{i}.x^{i}} where x i ∈ C {\displaystyle x^{i}\in C} The Slave problems == MRF optimization via Dual Decomposition == The original MRF optimization problem is NP-hard and we need to transform it into something easier. τ {\displaystyle \tau } is a set of sub-trees of graph G {\displaystyle G} where its trees cover all nodes and edges of the main graph. And MRFs defined for every tree T {\displaystyle T} in τ {\displaystyle \tau } will be smaller. The vector of MRF parameters is θ T {\displaystyle \theta ^{T}} and the vector of MRF variables is x T {\displaystyle x^{T}} , these two are just smaller in comparison with original MRF vectors θ , x {\displaystyle \theta ,x} . For all vectors θ T {\displaystyle \theta ^{T}} we'll have the following: (5) ∑ T ∈ τ ( p ) θ p T = θ p , ∑ T ∈ τ ( p q ) θ p q T = θ p q . {\displaystyle \sum _{T\in \tau (p)}\theta _{p}^{T}=\theta _{p},\sum _{T\in \tau (pq)}\theta _{pq}^{T}=\theta _{pq}.} Where τ ( p ) {\displaystyle \tau (p)} and τ ( p q ) {\displaystyle \tau (pq)} denote all trees of τ {\displaystyle \tau } than contain node p {\displaystyle p} and edge p q {\displaystyle pq} respectively. We simply can write: (6) E ( θ , x ) = ∑ T ∈ τ E ( θ T , x T ) {\displaystyle E(\theta ,x)=\sum _{T\in \tau }E(\theta ^{T},x^{T})} And our constraints will be: (7) x T ∈ χ T , x T = x | T , ∀ T ∈ τ {\displaystyle x^{T}\in \chi ^{T},x^{T}=x_{|T},\forall T\in \tau } Our original MRF problem will become: (8) min { x T } , x Σ T ∈ τ E ( θ T , x T ) {\displaystyle \min _{\{x^{T}\},x}\Sigma _{T\in \tau }E(\theta ^{T},x^{T})} where x T ∈ χ T , ∀ T ∈ τ {\displaystyle x^{T}\in \chi ^{T},\forall T\in \tau } and x T ∈ x | T , ∀ T ∈ τ {\displaystyle x^{T}\in x_{|T},\forall T\in \tau } And we'll have the dual problem we were seeking: (9) max { λ T } ∈ Λ g ( { λ T } ) = ∑ T ∈ τ g T ( λ T ) , {\displaystyle \max _{\{\lambda ^{T}\}\in \Lambda }g(\{\lambda ^{T}\})=\sum _{T\in \tau }g^{T}(\lambda ^{T}),} The Master problem where each function g T ( . ) {\displaystyle g^{T}(.)} is defined as: (10) g T ( λ T ) = min x T E ( θ T + λ T , x T ) {\displaystyle g^{T}(\lambda ^{T})=\min _{x^{T}}E(\theta ^{T}+\lambda ^{T},x^{T})} where x T ∈ χ T {\displaystyle x^{T}\in \chi ^{T}} The Slave problems == Theoretical Properties == Theorem 1. Lagrangian relaxation (9) is equivalent to the LP relaxation of (2). min { x T } , x { E ( x , θ ) | x p T = s p , x T ∈ CONVEXHULL ( χ T ) } {\displaystyle \min _{\{x^{T}\},x}\{E(x,\theta )|x_{p}^{T}=s_{p},x^{T}\in {\text{CONVEXHULL}}(\chi ^{T})\}} Theorem 2. If the sequence of multipliers { α t } {\displaystyle \{\alpha _{t}\}} satisfies α t ≥ 0 , lim t → ∞ α t = 0 , ∑ t = 0 ∞ α t = ∞ {\displaystyle \alpha _{t}\geq 0,\lim _{t\to \infty }\alpha _{t}=0,\sum _{t=0}^{\infty }\alpha _{t}=\infty } then the algorithm converges to the optimal solution of (9). Theorem 3. The distance of the current solution { θ T } {\displaystyle \{\theta ^{T}\}} to the optimal solution { θ ¯ T } {\displaystyle \{{\bar {\theta }}^{T}\}} , which decreases at every iteration. Theorem 4. Any solution obtained by the method satisfies the WTA (weak tree agreement) condition. Theorem 5. For binary MRFs with sub-modular energies, the method computes a globally optimal solution.

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  • Conversational AI Platforms Reviews: What Actually Works in 2026

    Conversational AI Platforms Reviews: What Actually Works in 2026

    Shopping for the best conversational AI platform? An conversational AI platform 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 conversational AI platform 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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  • ROUGE (metric)

    ROUGE (metric)

    ROUGE, or Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation, is a set of metrics and a software package used for evaluating automatic summarization and machine translation software in natural language processing. The metrics compare an automatically produced summary or translation against a reference or a set of references (human-produced) summary or translation. ROUGE metrics range between 0 and 1, with higher scores indicating higher similarity between the automatically produced summary and the reference. == Metrics == The following five evaluation metrics are available. ROUGE-N: Overlap of n-grams between the system and reference summaries. ROUGE-1 refers to the overlap of unigrams (each word) between the system and reference summaries. ROUGE-2 refers to the overlap of bigrams between the system and reference summaries. ROUGE-L: Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) based statistics. Longest common subsequence problem takes into account sentence-level structure similarity naturally and identifies longest co-occurring in sequence n-grams automatically. ROUGE-W: Weighted LCS-based statistics that favors consecutive LCSes. ROUGE-S: Skip-bigram based co-occurrence statistics. Skip-bigram is any pair of words in their sentence order. ROUGE-SU: Skip-bigram plus unigram-based co-occurrence statistics.

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  • Visual analytics

    Visual analytics

    Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary science and technology field that emerged from information visualization and scientific visualization. It focuses on how analytical reasoning can be facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. == Overview == Visual analytics is "the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces." It can address problems whose size, complexity, and need for closely coupled human and machine analysis may make them otherwise intractable. Visual analytics advances scientific and technological development across multiple domains, including analytical reasoning, human–computer interaction, data transformations, visual representation for computation and analysis, analytic reporting, and the transition of new technologies into practice. As a research agenda, visual analytics brings together several scientific and technical communities from computer science, information visualization, cognitive and perceptual sciences, interactive design, graphic design, and social sciences. Visual analytics integrates new computational and theory-based tools with innovative interactive techniques and visual representations to enable human-information discourse. The design of the tools and techniques is based on cognitive, design, and perceptual principles. This science of analytical reasoning provides the reasoning framework upon which one can build both strategic and tactical visual analytics technologies for threat analysis, prevention, and response. Analytical reasoning is central to the analyst's task of applying human judgments to reach conclusions from a combination of evidence and assumptions. Visual analytics has some overlapping goals and techniques with information visualization and scientific visualization. There is currently no clear consensus on the boundaries between these fields, but broadly speaking the three areas can be distinguished as follows: Scientific visualization deals with data that has a natural geometric structure (e.g., MRI data, wind flows). Information visualization handles abstract data structures such as trees or graphs. Visual analytics is especially concerned with coupling interactive visual representations with underlying analytical processes (e.g., statistical procedures, data mining techniques) such that high-level, complex activities can be effectively performed (e.g., sense making, reasoning, decision making). Visual analytics seeks to marry techniques from information visualization with techniques from computational transformation and analysis of data. Information visualization forms part of the direct interface between user and machine, amplifying human cognitive capabilities in six basic ways: by increasing cognitive resources, such as by using a visual resource to expand human working memory, by reducing search, such as by representing a large amount of data in a small space, by enhancing the recognition of patterns, such as when information is organized in space by its time relationships, by supporting the easy perceptual inference of relationships that are otherwise more difficult to induce, by perceptual monitoring of a large number of potential events, and by providing a manipulable medium that, unlike static diagrams, enables the exploration of a space of parameter values These capabilities of information visualization, combined with computational data analysis, can be applied to analytic reasoning to support the sense-making process. == History == As an interdisciplinary approach, visual analytics has its roots in information visualization, cognitive sciences, and computer science. The term and scope of the field was defined in the early 2000s through researchers such as Jim Thomas, Kristin A. Cook, John Stasko, Pak Chung Wong, Daniel A. Keim and David S. Ebert. As a reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks the United States Department of Homeland Security was established in late 2002, combining dozens of previously separated government agencies. Building upon earlier work on visual data mining by Daniel A. Keim starting in the late 1990s, this simultaneously lead to the development of a research agenda for visual analytics. As part of these efforts the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was established in 2004, whose charter was to develop system to mitigate information overload after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the intelligence community. Their research work determined core challenges, posed open research questions, and positioned visual analytics as a new research domain, in particular through the 2005 research agenda Illuminating the Path. In 2006, the IEEE VIS community led by Pak Chung Wong and Daniel A. Keim launched the annual IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), providing a dedicated venue for research into visual analytics, which in 2020 merged to form the IEEE Visualization conference. In 2008, scope and challenges of visual analytics were conceptually defined by Daniel A. Keim and Jim Thomas in their influential book about visual data mining. The domain was further refined as part of the European Commissions FP7 VisMaster program in the late 2000s. == Topics == === Scope === Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary field that includes the following focus areas: Analytical reasoning techniques that enable users to obtain deep insights that directly support assessment, planning, and decision making Data representations and transformations that convert all types of conflicting and dynamic data in ways that support visualization and analysis Techniques to support production, presentation, and dissemination of the results of an analysis to communicate information in the appropriate context to a variety of audiences. Visual representations and interaction techniques that take advantage of the human eye's broad bandwidth pathway into the mind to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once. === Analytical reasoning techniques === Analytical reasoning techniques are the method by which users obtain deep insights that directly support situation assessment, planning, and decision making. Visual analytics must facilitate high-quality human judgment with a limited investment of the analysts’ time. Visual analytics tools must enable diverse analytical tasks such as: Understanding past and present situations quickly, as well as the trends and events that have produced current conditions Identifying possible alternative futures and their warning signs Monitoring current events for emergence of warning signs as well as unexpected events Determining indicators of the intent of an action or an individual Supporting the decision maker in times of crisis. These tasks will be conducted through a combination of individual and collaborative analysis, often under extreme time pressure. Visual analytics must enable hypothesis-based and scenario-based analytical techniques, providing support for the analyst to reason based on the available evidence. === Data representations === Data representations are structured forms suitable for computer-based transformations. These structures must exist in the original data or be derivable from the data themselves. They must retain the information and knowledge content and the related context within the original data to the greatest degree possible. The structures of underlying data representations are generally neither accessible nor intuitive to the user of the visual analytics tool. They are frequently more complex in nature than the original data and are not necessarily smaller in size than the original data. The structures of the data representations may contain hundreds or thousands of dimensions and be unintelligible to a person, but they must be transformable into lower-dimensional representations for visualization and analysis. === Theories of visualization === Theories of visualization include: Jacques Bertin's Semiology of Graphics (1967) Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1977) Jock D. Mackinlay's Automated design of optimal visualization (APT) (1986) Leland Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics (1998) Hadley Wickham's Layered Grammar of Graphics (2010) === Visual representations === Visual representations translate data into a visible form that highlights important features, including commonalities and anomalies. These visual representations make it easy for users to perceive salient aspects of their data quickly. Augmenting the cognitive reasoning process with perceptual reasoning through visual representations permits the analytical reasoning process to become faster and more focused. == Process == The input for the data sets used in the visual analytics process are heterogeneous data sources (i.e., the internet, newspapers, books, scientific experiments, expert systems). From these rich sources, the data sets S = S1, ..., Sm are chosen, whereas each Si , i ∈ (1, ..., m) consists of attrib

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  • Ben Goertzel

    Ben Goertzel

    Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and businessman. He helped popularize the term artificial general intelligence (AGI). == Early life and education == Three of Goertzel's Jewish great-grandparents immigrated to New York from Lithuania and Poland (in the Russian Empire). Goertzel's father is Ted Goertzel, a former professor of sociology at Rutgers University. Goertzel left high school after the tenth grade to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Quantitative Studies. Goertzel graduated with a PhD in mathematics from Temple University under the supervision of Avi Lin in 1990, at age 23. == Career == Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains. He is a leading developer of the OpenCog framework for artificial general intelligence. Goertzel was an associate and grant recipient of Jeffrey Epstein. He received a $100,000 grant from the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation for artificial general intelligence research in 2001. When interviewed by The New York Times about Epstein in 2019, Goertzel said, "I have no desire to talk about Epstein right now... The stuff I'm reading about him in the papers is pretty disturbing and goes way beyond what I thought his misdoings and kinks were. Yecch." === Sophia the Robot === Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while computer scientist Yann LeCun, then Meta's chief AI scientist, made several unflattering remarks including calling the project "complete bullshit". === Views on AI === In May 2007, Goertzel spoke at a Google tech talk about his approach to creating artificial general intelligence. He defines intelligence as the ability to detect patterns in the world and in the agent itself, measurable in terms of emergent behavior of "achieving complex goals in complex environments". A "baby-like" artificial intelligence is initialized, then trained as an agent in a simulated or virtual world such as Second Life to produce a more powerful intelligence. Knowledge is represented in a network whose nodes and links carry probabilistic truth values as well as "attention values", with the attention values resembling the weights in a neural network. Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilistic inference engine and a custom version of evolutionary programming. The 2012 documentary The Singularity by independent filmmaker Doug Wolens discussed Goertzel's views on AGI. In 2023 Goertzel postulated that artificial intelligence could replace up to 80 percent of human jobs in the coming years "without having an AGI, by my guess. Not with ChatGPT exactly as a product. But with systems of that nature". At the Web Summit 2023 in Rio de Janeiro, Goertzel spoke out against efforts to curb AI research and that AGI is only a few years away. Goertzel's belief is that AGI will be a net positive for humanity by assisting with societal problems such as, but not limited to, climate change.

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  • David Horn (Israeli physicist)

    David Horn (Israeli physicist)

    David Horn (Hebrew: דוד הורן; born 10 September 1937) is a Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University (TAU), Israel. He has served as Vice-Rector of TAU, Chairman of the School of Physics and Astronomy and as Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences in TAU. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, nominated for "contributions to theoretical particle physics, including the seminal work on finite energy sum rules, research of the phenomenology of hadronic processes, and investigation of Hamiltonian lattice theories". == Early life and education == David Horn was born and educated in Haifa. He graduated from the Reali School in 1955. He began his academic studies in Physics at the Technion in Haifa in 1957, and received his B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) in 1961, and M.Sc. in 1962. He continued his Ph.D. studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until 1965. His thesis on "Some Aspects of the Structure of Weak Interactions" was supervised by Prof. Yuval Ne'eman. == Career == Horn joined the newly founded Tel Aviv University as an assistant in 1962. He became a lecturer in 1965, a senior lecturer in 1967 and an associate professor in 1968. He was promoted to full professor of Physics in 1972. In 1974 he became the incumbent of the Edouard and Francoise Jaupart Chair of Theoretical Physics of Particles and Fields, a position he held until 2007. Horn has supervised 43 graduate students at TAU and authored over 240 scientific publications. He retired as a professor emeritus in 2005, and continues to be an active researcher. Horn spent a significant part of his career holding visiting academic positions at other universities and research institutes, including: Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne National Lab, ILL, Research Fellow and three times Visiting Associate at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, Visitor at CERN in Geneva, Visiting Professor at Cornell University, NY, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, Visiting Professor at SLAC in Stanford University, CA, and Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, Japan. Beginning from 1980, Horn held official positions at Tel Aviv University, starting with tenure as Vice-Rector (1980-1983), a position he left for research at SLAC. After returning he was nominated Chairman of the Department of High Energy Physics (1984-1986), followed by tenures as Chairman of the School of Physics and Astronomy (1986-9), Dean of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences (1990-1995), and first Director of the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies (1993-2000). Horn has also held national and international professional positions. He was Chairman of the Israel Commission for High Energy Physics (1983-2003), and, in this capacity, served as an Israeli observer of the council of CERN (1991-2003). He served as member of the Israel Council for Higher Education (1987-1991), member of the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society (1989-1992) and member of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (2005-2017). He chaired the Israeli Committee of Research Infrastructures (2012-2016), issuing roadmaps for scientific RI in 2013 and 2016. == Research == Horn's research work focused on theory and phenomenology of High Energy Physics until 1990. He then shifted his interests to Neural Computation and Machine Learning and, since 2005, he has also published in Bioinformatics. Together with Richard Dolen and Christoph Schmid he discovered the Finite Energy Sum Rules in 1967. It was a realization of the bootstrap approach to hadronic structure, and became known as the Dolen-Horn-Schmid Duality. Together with Richard Silver he investigated a model of coherent production of pions at high energy hadron collisions in 1971, and together with Jeffrey Mandula he undertook the investigation of mesons with constituent gluons in 1978. Moving to lattice gauge theories in 1979, he discovered, together with Shimon Yankielowic and Marvin Weinstein, a non-confining phase in Z(N) theories for large N. In 1981 he demonstrated the existence of finite matrix models with link gauge fields, nowadays known as quantum link models. In 1984 Horn and Weinstein developed the t-expansion methodology. Horn's contributions to neural modeling include a novel mechanism for memory maintenance via neuronal regulation in 1998, developed with Nir Levy and Eytan Ruppin and unsupervised learning of natural languages in 2005, a joint work with Zach Solan, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman, introducing novel algorithms for motif and grammar extraction from text. Horn has contributed to algorithms of clustering, an important topic in Machine Learning, by developing Support Vector Clustering (SVC) in 2001, together with Asa Ben Hur, Hava Siegelmann and Vladimir Vapnik. This was followed shortly thereafter by a joint work with Assaf Gottlieb on Quantum Clustering (QC). His contributions to Bioinformatics include motif descriptions of function and structure of proteins, as well as motif studies of genomic structures. Together with Erez Persi he studied compositional order of proteomes, and repeat instability of genomes, as evolution markers of organisms and of cancer (a joint work with Persi and others). == Honors == Horn is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1985) and a Fellow of the Israel Physical Society (2018). == Publications == === Selected articles === R. Dolen, D. Horn and C. Schmid; Prediction of Regge-parameters of rho poles from low-energy pi-N scattering data Phys. Rev. Lett. 19 (1967) 402–407. Finite-Energy Sum Rules and Their Application to pi-N Charge Exchange Phys. Rev. 166 (1968) 1768–1781. D. Horn and R. Silver: Coherent production of pions, Annals Phys. 66 (1971) 509-541 T. Banks, D. Horn and H. Neuberger: Bosonization of the SU(N) Thirring Models, Nucl. Phys. B108, 119 (1976). D. Horn and J. Mandula: Model of Mesons with Constituent Gluons, Phys. Rev. D17, 898 (1978). D. Horn, M. Weinstein and S. Yankielowicz: Hamiltonian Approach to Z(N) Lattice Gauge Theories, Phys. Rev. D19, 3715 (1979). D. Horn: Finite Matrix Models with Continuous Local Gauge Invariance, Phys. Lett. 100B, 149-151 (1981). T. Banks, Y. Dothan and D. Horn: Geometric Fermions, Phys. Lett. 117B, 413 (1982). D. Horn and M. Weinstein: The t expansion: A nonperturbative analytic tool for Hamiltonian systems. Phys. Rev. D 30, 1256-1270 (1984). Ury Naftaly, Nathan Intrator and David Horn: Optimal Ensemble Averaging of Neural Networks. Network, Computation in Neural Systems, 8, 283-296 (1997). David Horn, Nir Levy, Eytan Ruppin: Memory Maintenance via Neuronal Regulation, Neural Computation, 10, 1-18 (1998). Asa Ben-Hur, David Horn, Hava Siegelmann and Vladimir Vapnik: Support Vector Clustering. Journal of Machine Learning Research 2, 125-137 (2001). David Horn and Assaf Gottlieb: Algorithm for data clustering in pattern recognition problems based on quantum mechanics, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 18702 Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman: Unsupervised learning of natural languages, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sc. 102 (2005) 11629–11634. Vered Kunik, Yasmine Meroz, Zach Solan, Ben Sandbank, Uri Weingart, Eytan Ruppin and David Horn: Functional representation of enzymes by specific peptides. PLOS Computational Biology 2007, 3(8):e167. Benny Chor, David Horn, Yaron Levy, Nick Goldman and Tim Massingham: Genomic DNA k-mer spectra: models and modalities. Genome Biology 2009, 10(10):R108 Erez Persi and David Horn. Systematic Analysis of Compositional Order of Proteins Reveals New Characteristics of Biological Functions and a Universal Correlate of Macroevolution. PLoS Comput Biol 9 (2013): e1003346. David Horn. Taxa counting using Specific Peptides of Aminoacyl tRNA Synthetases Encyclopedia of Metagenomics, Springer, 2013. Sagi Shporer, Benny Chor, Saharon Rosset, David Horn. Inversion symmetry of DNA k-mer counts: validity and deviations. BMC Genomics 2016, 17:696 Erez Persi, Davide Prandi, Yuri I. Wolf, Yair Pozniak, Christopher Barbieri, Paola Gasperini, Himisha Beltran, Bishoy M. Faltas, Mark A. Rubin, Tamar Geiger, Eugene V. Koonin, Francesca Demichelis, David Horn. Proteomic and Genomic Signatures of Repeat Instability in Cancer and Adjacent Normal Tissues. PNAS 116, 34, 2019 - 08790 === Book === David Horn and Fredrick Zachariasen: Hadron Physics at Very High Energies. Benjamin 1973. === Patents === Method and Apparatus for Quantum Clustering. USA Patent No. 7,653,646 B2. Method for discovering relationships in data by dynamic quantum clustering USA Patent No 8874412 and USA Patent No. 9,646,074. == Personal life == Horn was married to Nira Fuss since 1963 until her death in 2019. He is a father of three, Yuval, Tamar, and Oded, and grandfather of nine. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

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  • Factored language model

    Factored language model

    The factored language model (FLM) is an extension of a conventional language model introduced by Jeff Bilmes and Katrin Kirchoff in 2003. In an FLM, each word is viewed as a vector of k factors: w i = { f i 1 , . . . , f i k } . {\displaystyle w_{i}=\{f_{i}^{1},...,f_{i}^{k}\}.} An FLM provides the probabilistic model P ( f | f 1 , . . . , f N ) {\displaystyle P(f|f_{1},...,f_{N})} where the prediction of a factor f {\displaystyle f} is based on N {\displaystyle N} parents { f 1 , . . . , f N } {\displaystyle \{f_{1},...,f_{N}\}} . For example, if w {\displaystyle w} represents a word token and t {\displaystyle t} represents a Part of speech tag for English, the expression P ( w i | w i − 2 , w i − 1 , t i − 1 ) {\displaystyle P(w_{i}|w_{i-2},w_{i-1},t_{i-1})} gives a model for predicting current word token based on a traditional Ngram model as well as the Part of speech tag of the previous word. A major advantage of factored language models is that they allow users to specify linguistic knowledge such as the relationship between word tokens and Part of speech in English, or morphological information (stems, root, etc.) in Arabic. Like N-gram models, smoothing techniques are necessary in parameter estimation. In particular, generalized back-off is used in training an FLM.

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  • Cloudflare

    Cloudflare

    Cloudflare, Inc., is an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides a range of internet services, including content delivery network (CDN) services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration. The company's services act primarily as a reverse proxy between website visitors and a customer's hosting provider, improving performance and protecting against malicious traffic. Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 under the ticker symbol NET. Cloudflare has since expanded its offerings to include edge computing through its Workers platform, a public DNS resolver (1.1.1.1), and a VPN-like service known as WARP. In recent years, the company has integrated artificial intelligence into its infrastructure, acquiring companies such as Replicate and launching tools to manage AI bots and scrapers. According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by approximately 21.3% of all websites on the Internet as of January 2026. The company has been the subject of controversy regarding its policy of content neutrality. While Cloudflare executives have historically advocated for remaining a neutral infrastructure provider, the company has terminated services for specific high-profile websites associated with hate speech and violence, including The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms, following significant public pressure. Cloudflare has also faced criticism and litigation regarding copyright infringement by websites using its services, notably losing a lawsuit against Japanese publishers in 2025. The company experienced significant global outages in late 2025 which disrupted services for major platforms internationally. == History == Cloudflare was founded on July 26, 2009, by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. Prince and Holloway had previously collaborated on Project Honey Pot, a product of Unspam Technologies that partly inspired the basis of Cloudflare. In 2009, the company was venture-capital funded. On August 15, 2019, Cloudflare submitted its S-1 filing for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker NET. It opened for public trading on September 13, 2019, at $15 per share. According to the company, the name 'Cloudflare' was chosen, over the initial 'WebWall', because it best described what they were trying to do: build a "firewall in the cloud." In 2020, Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn was named president. Cloudflare has acquired web-services and security companies, including StopTheHacker (February 2014), CryptoSeal (June 2014), Eager Platform Co. (December 2016), Neumob (November 2017), S2 Systems (January 2020), Linc (December 2020), Zaraz (December 2021), Vectrix (February 2022), Area 1 Security (February 2022), Nefeli Networks (March 2024), BastionZero (May 2024), and Kivera (October 2024). Replicate (November 2025), and Human Native (January 2026). Since at least 2017, Cloudflare has used a wall of lava lamps at its San Francisco headquarters as a source of randomness for encryption keys, alongside double pendulums at its London offices and a Geiger counter at its Singapore offices. The lava lamp installation implements the Lavarand method, where a camera transforms the unpredictable shapes of the "lava" blobs into a digital image. In Q4 2022, Cloudflare provided paid services to 162,086 customers. In October 2024, Cloudflare won a lawsuit against patent troll Sable Networks. Sable paid Cloudflare $225,000, granted it a royalty-free license to its patent portfolio, and dedicated its patents to the public by abandoning its patent rights. In November 2025, it was announced Cloudflare had agreed to acquire Replicate, a San Francisco–based platform that enables software developers to run, fine-tune, and deploy open-source machine-learning models via an API without managing infrastructure. In January 2026, Cloudflare released an analysis regarding BGP routing leaks observed from the Venezuelan state-owned ISP CANTV (AS8048), which occurred on January 2 coincides with the arrest of Nicolás Maduro. While some security researchers had speculated that the outages were linked to U.S. cyber operations, Cloudflare's data indicated that the anomalies were consistent with a pattern of "insufficient routing export and import policies" by the ISP rather than malicious external interference. In January 2026, Cloudflare acquired Human Native, an AI data marketplace that brokers transactions between developers and content creators, for an undisclosed amount. On January 16, 2026, Cloudflare acquired The Astro Technology Company, the developers behind the open-source web framework Astro. In May 2026, Cloudflare announced the elimination of approximately 1,100 positions, around 20 percent of its workforce, in a restructuring the company attributed to the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence tools. The announcement coincided with the company's first-quarter 2026 earnings, which reported a record $639.8 million in quarterly revenue, a 34 percent year-over-year increase. CEO Matthew Prince stated the cuts were not driven by performance concerns but reflected roles made obsolete by AI, and that Cloudflare expected to employ more people by the end of 2027 than at any point during 2026. == Products == Cloudflare provides network and security products for consumers and businesses, utilizing edge computing, reverse proxies for web traffic, data center interconnects, and a content distribution network to serve content across its network of servers. It supports transport layer protocols TCP, UDP, QUIC, and many application layer protocols such as DNS over HTTPS, SMTP, and HTTP/2 with support for HTTP/2 Server Push. As of 2023, Cloudflare handles an average of 45 million HTTP requests per second. As of 2024, Cloudflare servers are powered by AMD EPYC 9684X processors. Cloudflare also provides analysis and reports on large-scale outages, including Verizon's October 2024 outage. === Artificial intelligence === In 2023, Cloudflare launched "Workers AI", a framework allowing for use of Nvidia GPU's within Cloudflare's network. In 2024, Cloudflare launched a tool that prevents bots from scraping websites. To build automatic bot detector models, the company analyzed "AI" bots and crawler traffic. The company also launched an "AI" assistant to generate charts based on queries by leveraging "Workers AI". Cloudflare announced plans in September 2024 to launch a marketplace where website owners can sell "AI" model providers access to scrape their site's content. In March 2025, Cloudflare announced a new feature called "AI Labyrinth", which combats unauthorized "AI" data scraping by serving fake "AI"-generated content to LLM bots. In July, the company rolled out a permission-based setting to allow websites to automatically block online bots from scraping data and content. Cloudflare released AutoRAG into beta in 2025. AutoRAG (retrieval augmented generation) creates a vector database of a website's unstructured content to identify relationships between concepts. It is part of an initiative with Microsoft, alongside their NLWeb standard, to make websites easier for people and automated systems to query. Cloudflare and GoDaddy partnered in April 2026 to enable AI Crawl Control features on GoDaddy hosted websites. This would allow site owners to decide how AI bot crawlers interact with their content. === DDoS mitigation === Cloudflare provides free and paid DDoS mitigation services that protect customers from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Cloudflare received media attention in June 2011 for providing DDoS mitigation for the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group. In March 2013, The Spamhaus Project was targeted by a DDoS attack that Cloudflare reported exceeded 300 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). Patrick Gilmore, of Akamai, stated that at the time it was "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet". While trying to defend Spamhaus against the DDoS attacks, Cloudflare ended up being attacked as well; Google and other companies eventually came to Spamhaus' defense and helped it to absorb the unprecedented amount of attack traffic. In 2014, Cloudflare began providing free DDoS mitigation for artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups under the name "Project Galileo". In 2017, it extended the service to electoral infrastructure and political campaigns under the name "Athenian Project". By 2025, more than 2,900 users and organizations were participating in Project Galileo, including 31 US states. In February 2014, Cloudflare claimed to have mitigated an NTP reflection attack against an unnamed European customer, which it stated peaked at 400 Gbit/s. In November 2014, it reported a 500 Gbit/s DDoS attack in Hong Kong. In July 2021, the company claimed to have absorbed a DDoS atta

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  • Is an AI Website Builder Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Website Builder Worth It in 2026?

    Comparing the best AI website builder? An AI website builder is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it lowers the barrier so anyone can produce professional output. Privacy matters too: check whether your data trains the model and whether a no-log or enterprise tier is available. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI website builder 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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  • Selmer Bringsjord

    Selmer Bringsjord

    Selmer Bringsjord (born November 24, 1958) is a professor of computer science and cognitive science and a former chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also holds an appointment in the Lally School of Management & Technology and teaches artificial Intelligence (AI), formal logic, human and machine reasoning, and philosophy of AI. == Biography == Bringsjord's education includes a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University, where he studied under Roderick Chisholm. He conducts research in AI as the director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning (RAIR) Laboratory. He specializes in the logico-mathematical and philosophical foundations of AI and cognitive science, and in collaboratively building AI systems on the basis of computational logic. Bringsjord believes that "the human mind will forever be superior to AI", and that "much of what many humans do for a living will be better done by indefatigable machines who require not a cent in pay". Bringsjord has stated that the "ultimate growth industry will be building smarter and smarter such machines on the one hand, and philosophizing about whether they are truly conscious and free on the other". Bringsjord has an argument for P = NP using digital physics. Other research includes developing a new computational-logic framework allowing the formalization of deliberative multi-agent "mindreading" as applied to the realm of nuclear strategy, with the goal of creating a model and simulation to enable reliable prediction. He has published an opinion piece advocating for counter-terrorism security ensured by pervasive, all-seeing sensors; automated reasoners; and autonomous, lethal robots. Bringsjord received a National Science Foundation award to research Social Robotics and the Covey Award for the advancement of philosophy of computing awarded by the International Association for Computing And Philosophy, among several others prizes. == Books authored == with Yang, Y. Mental Metalogic: A New, Unifying Theory of Human and Machine Reasoning (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).(2007) with Zenzen, M. Superminds: People Harness Hypercomputation, and More (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer). (2003) ISBN 978-1402010958 with Ferrucci, D. Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).(2000) Abortion: A Dialogue (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett).(1997) What Robots Can and Can’t Be (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer).(1992) Soft Wars (New York, NY: Penguin USA). A novel.(1991)

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  • Radford M. Neal

    Radford M. Neal

    Radford M. Neal (born September 12, 1956) is a professor emeritus at the Department of Statistics and Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he held a Canada research chair in statistics and machine learning. == Education and career == Neal studied computer science at the University of Calgary, where he received his B.Sc. in 1977 and M.Sc. in 1980, with thesis work supervised by David Hill. He worked for several years as a sessional instructor at the University of Calgary and as a statistical consultant in the industry before coming back to the academia. Neal continued his study at the University of Toronto, where he received his Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton. Neal became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in 1995, an associated professor in 1999 and a full professor since 2001. He was the Canada Research Chair in Statistics and Machine Learning from 2003 to 2016 and retired in 2017. Neal has made great contributions in the area of machine learning and statistics, where he is particularly well known for his work on Markov chain Monte Carlo, error correcting codes and Bayesian learning for neural networks. He is also known for his blog and as the developer of pqR: a new version of the R interpreter.

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  • Zero-shot learning

    Zero-shot learning

    Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a problem setup in deep learning where, at test time, a learner observes samples from classes which were not observed during training, and needs to predict the class that they belong to. The name is a play on words based on the earlier concept of one-shot learning, in which classification can be learned from only one, or a few, examples. Zero-shot methods generally work by associating observed and non-observed classes through some form of auxiliary information, which encodes observable distinguishing properties of objects. For example, given a set of images of animals to be classified, along with auxiliary textual descriptions of what animals look like, an artificial intelligence model which has been trained to recognize horses, but has never been given a zebra, can still recognize a zebra when it also knows that zebras look like striped horses. This problem is widely studied in computer vision, natural language processing, and machine perception. == Background and history == The first paper on zero-shot learning in natural language processing appeared in a 2008 paper by Chang, Ratinov, Roth, and Srikumar, at the AAAI'08, but the name given to the learning paradigm there was dataless classification. The first paper on zero-shot learning in computer vision appeared at the same conference, under the name zero-data learning. The term zero-shot learning itself first appeared in the literature in a 2009 paper from Palatucci, Hinton, Pomerleau, and Mitchell at NIPS'09. This terminology was repeated later in another computer vision paper and the term zero-shot learning caught on, as a take-off on one-shot learning that was introduced in computer vision years earlier. In computer vision, zero-shot learning models learned parameters for seen classes along with their class representations and rely on representational similarity among class labels so that, during inference, instances can be classified into new classes. In natural language processing, the key technical direction developed builds on the ability to "understand the labels"—represent the labels in the same semantic space as that of the documents to be classified. This supports the classification of a single example without observing any annotated data, the purest form of zero-shot classification. The original paper made use of the Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) representation but later papers made use of other representations, including dense representations. This approach was also extended to multilingual domains, fine entity typing and other problems. Moreover, beyond relying solely on representations, the computational approach has been extended to depend on transfer from other tasks, such as textual entailment and question answering. The original paper also points out that, beyond the ability to classify a single example, when a collection of examples is given, with the assumption that they come from the same distribution, it is possible to bootstrap the performance in a semi-supervised like manner (or transductive learning). Unlike standard generalization in machine learning, where classifiers are expected to correctly classify new samples to classes they have already observed during training, in ZSL, no samples from the classes have been given during training the classifier. It can therefore be viewed as an extreme case of domain adaptation. == Prerequisite information for zero-shot classes == Naturally, some form of auxiliary information has to be given about these zero-shot classes, and this type of information can be of several types. Learning with attributes: classes are accompanied by pre-defined structured description. For example, for bird descriptions, this could include "red head", "long beak". These attributes are often organized in a structured compositional way, and taking that structure into account improves learning. While this approach was used mostly in computer vision, there are some examples for it also in natural language processing. Learning from textual description. As pointed out above, this has been the key direction pursued in natural language processing. Here class labels are taken to have a meaning and are often augmented with definitions or free-text natural-language description. This could include for example a wikipedia description of the class. Class-class similarity. Here, classes are embedded in a continuous space. A zero-shot classifier can predict that a sample corresponds to some position in that space, and the nearest embedded class is used as a predicted class, even if no such samples were observed during training. == Generalized zero-shot learning == The above ZSL setup assumes that at test time, only zero-shot samples are given, namely, samples from new unseen classes. In generalized zero-shot learning, samples from both new and known classes, may appear at test time. This poses new challenges for classifiers at test time, because it is very challenging to estimate if a given sample is new or known. Some approaches to handle this include: a gating module, which is first trained to decide if a given sample comes from a new class or from an old one, and then, at inference time, outputs either a hard decision, or a soft probabilistic decision a generative module, which is trained to generate feature representation of the unseen classes—a standard classifier can then be trained on samples from all classes, seen and unseen. == Domains of application == Zero shot learning has been applied to the following fields: image classification semantic segmentation image generation object detection natural language processing computational biology abstract reasoning

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  • Emma Brunskill

    Emma Brunskill

    Emma Patricia Brunskill is an American computer scientist. Her research combines machine learning with human–computer interaction by studying the effects of AI systems in human-centered applications including educational software and healthcare, and the theory of reinforcement learning in situations where mistakes impose high risks or costs. She is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and is an affiliate of the King Center on Global Development. == Education and career == Brunskill grew up in Seattle and Edmonds, Washington, and entered the University of Washington at age 15. She graduated magna cum laude in 2000, with a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and physics. A Rhodes Scholarship took her to Magdalen College, Oxford in England, where she received a master's degree in neuroscience in 2002. After a summer working in Rwanda, she became a graduate student of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2009. Her doctoral dissertation, Compact parametric models for efficient sequential decision making in high-dimensional, uncertain domains, was supervised by Nicholas Roy. After working as an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2011 as an assistant professor of computer science. She moved from CMU to Stanford University in 2017. == Recognition == Brunskill was a 2014 recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a 2015 recipient of the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. She was one of two alumni of the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering to be honored in 2020 by the school's Alumni Impact Awards. She was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2025, "for significant contributions to the field of reinforcement learning, and applications for societal benefit, in particular AI for education".

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  • Arthur Zimek

    Arthur Zimek

    Arthur Zimek is a professor in data mining, data science and machine learning at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark. He graduated from LMU Munich in Germany, where he worked with Prof. Hans-Peter Kriegel. His dissertation on "Correlation Clustering" was awarded the "SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award 2009 Runner-up" by the Association for Computing Machinery. He is well known for his work on outlier detection, density-based clustering, correlation clustering, and the curse of dimensionality. He is one of the founders and core developers of the open-source ELKI data mining framework.

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