AI For Kids Google

AI For Kids Google — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • ALL-IN-1

    ALL-IN-1

    ALL-IN-1 was an office automation product developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s. It was one of the first purchasable off the shelf electronic mail products. It was later known as Office Server V3.2 for OpenVMS Alpha and OpenVMS VAX systems before being discontinued. == Overview == ALL-IN-1 was advertised as an office automation system including functionality in Electronic Messaging, Word Processing and Time Management. It offered an application development platform and customization capabilities that ranged from scripting to code-level integration. ALL-IN-1 was designed and developed by Skip Walter, John Churin and Marty Skinner from Digital Equipment Corporation who began work in 1977. Sheila Chance was hired as the software engineering manager in 1981. The first version of the software, called CP/OSS, the Charlotte Package of Office System Services, named after the location of the developers, was released in May 1982. In 1983, the product was renamed ALL-IN-1 and the Charlotte group continued to develop versions 1.1 through 1.3. Digital then made the decision to move most of the development activity to its central engineering facility in Reading, United Kingdom, where a group there took responsibility for the product from version 2.0 (released in field test in 1984 and to customers in 1985) onward. The Charlotte group continued to work on the Time Management subsystem until version 2.3 and other contributions were made from groups based in Sophia Antipolis, France (System for Customization Management and the integration with VAX Notes), Reading (Message Router and MAILbus), and Nashua, New Hampshire (FMS). ALL-IN-1 V3.0 introduced shared file cabinets and the File Cabinet Server (FCS) to lay the foundation for an eventual integration with TeamLinks, Digital's PC office client. Previous integrations with PCs included PC ALL-IN-1, a DOS-based product introduced in 1989 that never proved popular with customers. Bob Wyman was the first product manager. He oversaw the growth of the product culminating in over $2 billion per year in revenue and market leadership in the proprietary office automation sector. Other consultants from Digital Equipment Corporation involved include Frank Nicodem, Donald Vickers and Tony Redmond.

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  • AI safety

    AI safety

    AI safety is an interdisciplinary field focused on preventing accidents, misuse, or other harmful consequences arising from artificial intelligence systems. It encompasses AI alignment (which aims to ensure AI systems behave as intended), monitoring AI systems for risks, and enhancing their robustness. The field is particularly concerned with existential risks posed by advanced AI models. Beyond technical research, AI safety involves developing norms and policies that promote safety, including advocacy for regulations at different levels of government. The field gained significant popularity in 2023, with rapid progress in generative AI and public concerns voiced by researchers and CEOs about potential dangers. During the 2023 AI Safety Summit, the United States and the United Kingdom both established their own AI Safety Institute. However, researchers have expressed concern that AI safety measures are not keeping pace with the rapid development of AI capabilities. == Motivations == Scholars discuss current risks from critical systems failures, bias, and AI-enabled surveillance, as well as emerging risks like technological unemployment, digital manipulation, weaponization, AI-enabled cyberattacks and bioterrorism. They also discuss speculative risks from losing control of future artificial general intelligence (AGI) agents, or from AI enabling perpetually stable dictatorships. === Existential safety === Some have criticized concerns about AGI, such as Andrew Ng who compared them in 2015 to "worrying about overpopulation on Mars when we have not even set foot on the planet yet". Stuart J. Russell on the other side urges caution, arguing that "it is better to anticipate human ingenuity than to underestimate it". AI researchers have widely differing opinions about the severity and primary sources of risk posed by AI technology – though surveys suggest that experts take high consequence risks seriously. In two surveys of AI researchers, the median respondent was optimistic about AI overall, but placed a 5% probability on an "extremely bad (e.g. human extinction)" outcome of advanced AI. In a 2022 survey of the natural language processing community, 37% agreed or weakly agreed that it is plausible that AI decisions could lead to a catastrophe that is "at least as bad as an all-out nuclear war". == History == Risks from AI began to be seriously discussed at the start of the computer age: Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. In 1988 Blay Whitby published a book outlining the need for AI to be developed along ethical and socially responsible lines. From 2008 to 2009, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) commissioned a study to explore and address potential long-term societal influences of AI research and development. The panel was generally skeptical of the radical views expressed by science-fiction authors but agreed that "additional research would be valuable on methods for understanding and verifying the range of behaviors of complex computational systems to minimize unexpected outcomes". In 2011, Roman Yampolskiy introduced the term "AI safety engineering" at the Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence conference, listing prior failures of AI systems and arguing that "the frequency and seriousness of such events will steadily increase as AIs become more capable". In 2014, philosopher Nick Bostrom published the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. He has the opinion that the rise of AGI has the potential to create various societal issues, ranging from the displacement of the workforce by AI, manipulation of political and military structures, to even the possibility of human extinction. His argument that future advanced systems may pose a threat to human existence prompted Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking to voice similar concerns. In 2015, dozens of artificial intelligence experts signed an open letter on artificial intelligence calling for research on the societal impacts of AI and outlining concrete directions. To date, the letter has been signed by over 8000 people including Yann LeCun, Shane Legg, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell. In the same year, a group of academics led by professor Stuart J. Russell founded the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley and the Future of Life Institute awarded $6.5 million in grants for research aimed at "ensuring artificial intelligence (AI) remains safe, ethical and beneficial". In 2016, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Carnegie Mellon University announced The Public Workshop on Safety and Control for Artificial Intelligence, which was one of a sequence of four White House workshops aimed at investigating "the advantages and drawbacks" of AI. In the same year, Concrete Problems in AI Safety – one of the first and most influential technical AI Safety agendas – was published. In 2017, the Future of Life Institute sponsored the Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI, where more than 100 thought leaders formulated principles for beneficial AI including "Race Avoidance: Teams developing AI systems should actively cooperate to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards". In 2018, the DeepMind Safety team outlined AI safety problems in specification, robustness, and assurance. The following year, researchers organized a workshop at ICLR that focused on these problem areas. In 2021, Unsolved Problems in ML Safety was published, outlining research directions in robustness, monitoring, alignment, and systemic safety. In 2023, Rishi Sunak said he wants the United Kingdom to be the "geographical home of global AI safety regulation" and to host the first global summit on AI safety. The AI safety summit took place in November 2023, and focused on the risks of misuse and loss of control associated with frontier AI models. During the summit the intention to create the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI was announced. In 2024, The US and UK forged a new partnership on the science of AI safety. The MoU was signed on 1 April 2024 by US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and UK technology secretary Michelle Donelan to jointly develop advanced AI model testing, following commitments announced at an AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in November. In 2025, an international team of 96 experts chaired by Yoshua Bengio published the first International AI Safety Report. The report, commissioned by 30 nations and the United Nations, represents the first global scientific review of potential risks associated with advanced artificial intelligence. It details potential threats stemming from misuse, malfunction, and societal disruption, with the objective of informing policy through evidence-based findings, without providing specific recommendations. == Research focus == AI safety research areas include robustness, monitoring, and alignment. === Robustness === ==== Adversarial robustness ==== AI systems are often vulnerable to adversarial examples or "inputs to machine learning (ML) models that an attacker has intentionally designed to cause the model to make a mistake". For example, in 2013, Szegedy et al. discovered that adding specific imperceptible perturbations to an image could cause it to be misclassified with high confidence. This continues to be an issue with neural networks, though in recent work the perturbations are generally large enough to be perceptible. The image on the right is predicted to be an ostrich after the perturbation is applied. (Left) is a correctly predicted sample, (center) perturbation applied magnified by 10x, (right) adversarial example. Adversarial robustness is often associated with security. Researchers demonstrated that an audio signal could be imperceptibly modified so that speech-to-text systems transcribe it to any message the attacker chooses. Network intrusion and malware detection systems also must be adversarially robust since attackers may design their attacks to fool detectors. Models that represent objectives (reward models) must also be adversarially robust. For example, a reward model might estimate how helpful a text response is and a language model might be trained to maximize this score. Researchers have shown that if a language model is trained for long enough, it will leverage the vulnerabilities of the reward model to achieve a better score and perform worse on the intended task. This issue can be addressed by improving the adversarial robustness of the reward model. More generally, any AI system used to evaluate another AI system must be adversarially robust. This could include monitoring tools, since they could also potentially be tampered with to produce a higher reward. Large language models (LLMs) can be vulnerable to prom

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  • Apprenticeship learning

    Apprenticeship learning

    In artificial intelligence, apprenticeship learning (or learning from demonstration or imitation learning) is the process of learning by observing an expert. It can be viewed as a form of supervised learning, where the training dataset consists of task executions by a demonstration teacher. == Mapping function approach == Mapping methods try to mimic the expert by forming a direct mapping either from states to actions, or from states to reward values. For example, in 2002 researchers used such an approach to teach an AIBO robot basic soccer skills. === Inverse reinforcement learning approach === Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the process of deriving a reward function from observed behavior. While ordinary "reinforcement learning" involves using rewards and punishments to learn behavior, in IRL the direction is reversed, and a robot observes a person's behavior to figure out what goal that behavior seems to be trying to achieve. The IRL problem can be defined as: Given 1) measurements of an agent's behaviour over time, in a variety of circumstances; 2) measurements of the sensory inputs to that agent; 3) a model of the physical environment (including the agent's body): Determine the reward function that the agent is optimizing. IRL researcher Stuart J. Russell proposes that IRL might be used to observe humans and attempt to codify their complex "ethical values", in an effort to create "ethical robots" that might someday know "not to cook your cat" without needing to be explicitly told. The scenario can be modeled as a "cooperative inverse reinforcement learning game", where a "person" player and a "robot" player cooperate to secure the person's implicit goals, despite these goals not being explicitly known by either the person nor the robot. In 2017, OpenAI and DeepMind applied deep learning to the cooperative inverse reinforcement learning in simple domains such as Atari games and straightforward robot tasks such as backflips. The human role was limited to answering queries from the robot as to which of two different actions were preferred. The researchers found evidence that the techniques may be economically scalable to modern systems. Apprenticeship via inverse reinforcement learning (AIRP) was developed by in 2004 Pieter Abbeel, Professor in Berkeley's EECS department, and Andrew Ng, Associate Professor in Stanford University's Computer Science Department. AIRP deals with "Markov decision process where we are not explicitly given a reward function, but where instead we can observe an expert demonstrating the task that we want to learn to perform". AIRP has been used to model reward functions of highly dynamic scenarios where there is no obvious reward function intuitively. Take the task of driving for example, there are many different objectives working simultaneously - such as maintaining safe following distance, a good speed, not changing lanes too often, etc. This task, may seem easy at first glance, but a trivial reward function may not converge to the policy wanted. One domain where AIRP has been used extensively is helicopter control. While simple trajectories can be intuitively derived, complicated tasks like aerobatics for shows has been successful. These include aerobatic maneuvers like - in-place flips, in-place rolls, loops, hurricanes and even auto-rotation landings. This work was developed by Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, and Andrew Ng - "Autonomous Helicopter Aerobatics through Apprenticeship Learning" === System model approach === System models try to mimic the expert by modeling world dynamics. == Plan approach == The system learns rules to associate preconditions and postconditions with each action. In one 1994 demonstration, a humanoid learns a generalized plan from only two demonstrations of a repetitive ball collection task. == Example == Learning from demonstration is often explained from a perspective that the working Robot-control-system is available and the human-demonstrator is using it. And indeed, if the software works, the Human operator takes the robot-arm, makes a move with it, and the robot will reproduce the action later. For example, he teaches the robot-arm how to put a cup under a coffeemaker and press the start-button. In the replay phase, the robot is imitating this behavior 1:1. But that is not how the system works internally; it is only what the audience can observe. In reality, Learning from demonstration is much more complex. One of the first works on learning by robot apprentices (anthropomorphic robots learning by imitation) was Adrian Stoica's PhD thesis in 1995. In 1997, robotics expert Stefan Schaal was working on the Sarcos robot-arm. The goal was simple: solve the pendulum swingup task. The robot itself can execute a movement, and as a result, the pendulum is moving. The problem is, that it is unclear what actions will result into which movement. It is an Optimal control-problem which can be described with mathematical formulas but is hard to solve. The idea from Schaal was, not to use a Brute-force solver but record the movements of a human-demonstration. The angle of the pendulum is logged over three seconds at the y-axis. This results into a diagram which produces a pattern. In computer animation, the principle is called spline animation. That means, on the x-axis the time is given, for example 0.5 seconds, 1.0 seconds, 1.5 seconds, while on the y-axis is the variable given. In most cases it's the position of an object. In the inverted pendulum it is the angle. The overall task consists of two parts: recording the angle over time and reproducing the recorded motion. The reproducing step is surprisingly simple. As an input we know, in which time step which angle the pendulum must have. Bringing the system to a state is called “Tracking control” or PID control. That means, we have a trajectory over time, and must find control actions to map the system to this trajectory. Other authors call the principle “steering behavior”, because the aim is to bring a robot to a given line.

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  • Maximum inner-product search

    Maximum inner-product search

    Maximum inner-product search (MIPS) is a search problem, with a corresponding class of search algorithms which attempt to maximise the inner product between a query and the data items to be retrieved. MIPS algorithms are used in a wide variety of big data applications, including recommendation algorithms and machine learning. Formally, for a database of vectors x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} defined over a set of labels S {\displaystyle S} in an inner product space with an inner product ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot ,\cdot \rangle } defined on it, MIPS search can be defined as the problem of determining a r g m a x i ∈ S ⟨ x i , q ⟩ {\displaystyle {\underset {i\in S}{\operatorname {arg\,max} }}\ \langle x_{i},q\rangle } for a given query q {\displaystyle q} . Although there is an obvious linear-time implementation, it is generally too slow to be used on practical problems. However, efficient algorithms exist to speed up MIPS search. Under the assumption of all vectors in the set having constant norm, MIPS can be viewed as equivalent to a nearest neighbor search (NNS) problem in which maximizing the inner product is equivalent to minimizing the corresponding distance metric in the NNS problem. Like other forms of NNS, MIPS algorithms may be approximate or exact. MIPS search is used as part of DeepMind's RETRO algorithm.

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  • Dispo

    Dispo

    Dispo (formerly David's Disposable) is an American photo sharing and social networking app owned by Dispo, Inc. and co-founded by CEO Daniel Liss, YouTuber David Dobrik, and Natalie Mariduena. When the app initially launched on iOS in December 2019, it briefly charted as the most downloaded free app on the App Store, ahead of both Disney+ and Instagram. The app was rebranded and relaunched as Dispo, expanding from a simple camera app to a full social network in March 2021. It is based on the disposable camera. == History == On December 21, 2019, the app was first launched on the App Store under the name "David's Disposable." In its first week of release, it was downloaded more than a million times, reaching number one among free apps in the App Store. In June 2020, the team decided to rename the app to Dispo, purchasing the Dispo.fun domain on June 21, 2020. The company announced the change in September 2020. The early Dispo team consisted of Dobrik's longtime friend and business associate Natalie Mariduena as its treasurer, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Daniel Liss as chief executive officer, Regynald Augustin as first engineer, and Briana Hokanson as lead designer. In October 2020, the company raised a $4M seed round with backing from Alexis Ohanian's venture fund Seven Seven Six alongside other investors including Unshackled Ventures, Shrug Capital, and Weekend Fund. In February 2021, Axios reported that the app had generated US$20 million in its series A round, led by Spark Capital. At this time, the app was valued at US$200 million. A New York Times profile asked, "Are Disposables the Future of Photosharing?" In March 2021, the app was officially relaunched with new social network features and its invite-only feature was dropped. On March 21, 2021, it was announced that Spark Capital would sever all ties with Dispo in light of several disparaging allegations against David Dobrik and The Vlog Squad. The same day, it was announced that Dobrik would leave the company and step down from the company's board of directors. On March 22, 2021, Seven Seven Six and Unshackled Ventures announced they would be standing by the company and its remaining employees but donating profits to charity. In June, 2021, CEO Daniel Liss announced Dispo's official Series A. Investors and advisors in the new Dispo include Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, Unshackled, Endeavor, photographers Annie Leibovitz and Raven B. Varona, NBA stars Kevin Durant and Andre Iguodala (through their 35 Ventures and F9 Strategies venture firms, respectively). Other participants include Cara Delevingne, Sofia Vergara, Shade Room CEO Angelica Nwandu, Latin World Entertainment CEO Luis Balaguer, and Amplify Africa co-founders Damilare Kujembola and Timi Adeyeba. == Overview == Dispo has been compared to other image sharing and social networking services, most notably Instagram and VSCO, although users cannot immediately see the photos they have taken using the app. When a user attempts to take a photo, the interface mimics the developing process of a disposable camera. Users can take as many photos on the app as they want; they do not appear on the app however, until 9 am the next day. Once the set of photos appear on the app, users can choose to save them or share them with other users in a "roll". == Reception == Screen Rant has called the app "like Clubhouse [referring to the app] but for photos," comparing the early invite-only features of the apps. As it greatly restricts the user's editing options and sets out to offer a more authentic social networking experience, the app has been widely dubbed the "anti-Instagram". Between March 2021 and June 2021, the app reached the top ten in the App Store's photo/video rankings on 5 continents including in the US, Japan, Spain, Germany, Brazil, and Australia. It has been a notable success in Japan, where it opened its first international office in July 2021. In July 2021, NBA number one draft pick Cade Cunningham announced he had selected Dispo as his exclusive social media partner for the NBA draft.

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  • The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis

    The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis

    The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis is a report authored by James van Geelen and Alap Shah and published by Citrini Research in February 2026, on the impact of artificial intelligence on humanity's future. Written in the form of a scenario analysis, it was viewed millions of times online and reportedly caused a fall in the stock market prices of major tech and financial firms. It also received criticism among others, for its allegedly flawed economic logic. The 'thought exercise', as the authors called it, painted a gloomy picture for the near future, where outputs keep growing while consumer's ability to spend collapses. "...driven by ai agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance”, "outputs that are shown in national accounts increases, "but never circulates through the real economy"(which the report calls 'Ghost GDP'), the authors argued. In other words, the authors predict a scenario where the owners of the AI firms will accumulate a vast fortune but there will be scant demand from consumers as AI would cause massive unemployment. The authors caution the reader that what they make is a scenario and not a prediction. In the scenario they visualise, any service whose value proposition is “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” is getting disrupted. The reports argues that the unique ability of human beings to analyse, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate was “the thing that could not be replicated at scale,” and call the historical scarcity of this precious entity 'friction'. When this friction becomes zero, a gamut of changes occur which then triggers a cascading of changes across the economy. ”Travel booking platforms are an early casualty; Financial advice. tax prep., and routine legal work follow suit. National unemployment rate go as high 10.2% and the S&P 500 goes for a massive 38% peak-to-trough crash. In contrast to the previous technological revolutions the high-earning professionals suffers more and get forced to take up roles in the gig economy. Labour supply becomes abundant and this cuts wages all across the economy. The dent in income for the employees then affects other sectors of the economy such as the residential mortgage market. The losses for the software companies triggers loan defaults and heralds peril for the private credit sector.

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  • Ameca (robot)

    Ameca (robot)

    Ameca is a robotic humanoid created in 2021 by Engineered Arts, headquarters in Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom. The project commenced in February 2021, and the first public demonstration was at the CES 2022 show in Las Vegas. Ameca's appearance features grey rubber skin on the face and hands, and is specifically designed to appear genderless. In 2024, an Ameca unit was installed in Edinburgh in the UK to reside at the National Robotarium. Ameca generation 3 has been released and showcased at ICRA 2025 along with Ami. == History == The first generation of Ameca was developed at Engineered Arts headquarters in Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom. The project started in February 2021, with the first video revealed publicly on 1 December 2021. Ameca gained widespread attention on Twitter and TikTok ahead of its first public demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022, where it was covered by CNET and other news outlets. In 2022, Ameca presented an Alternative Christmas message by British TV Channel 4 for Christmas Day. Ameca was associated with the Museum of the Future's robotic family, where it could interact with visitors. In 2024, an Ameca unit was installed in Edinburgh in the UK to reside at the National Robotarium. In January 2026, Ameca served as an ambassador for the European Space Agency (ESA) at the 18th European Space Conference. == Features == It is designed as a platform for further developing robotics technologies involving human-robot interaction. utilizes embedded microphones, binocular eye mounted cameras, a chest camera and facial recognition software to interact with the public. Interactions can be governed by either OpenAI's GPT-3 or human telepresence. It also features articulated motorized arms, fingers, neck and facial features. Ameca's appearance features grey rubber skin on the face and hands, and is specifically designed to appear genderless. == Public appearances == Computer History Museum, California Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, Paderborn, Germany Copernicus Science Center, Warsaw, Poland Museum of the Future, Dubai Consumer Electronics Show 2022 Deutsches Museum Nuremberg OMR Festival 2022 Hosted by Vodafone GITEX 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2023 International Telecommunication Union AI for Good Global Summit 2023 Sphere (Not Ameca, Custom humanoid named Aura built on Ameca technology)

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  • Machine learning

    Machine learning

    Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without being explicitly programmed. Advances in the field of deep learning have allowed neural networks, a class of statistical algorithms, to surpass many previous machine learning approaches in performance. Statistics and mathematical optimisation methods compose the foundations of machine learning. Data mining is a related field of study, focusing on exploratory data analysis (EDA) through unsupervised learning. From a theoretical viewpoint, probably approximately correct learning provides a mathematical and statistical framework for describing machine learning. Most traditional machine learning and deep learning algorithms can be described as empirical risk minimisation under this framework. == History == The term machine learning was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. The synonym self-teaching computers was also used during this time period. The earliest machine learning program was introduced in the 1950s, when Samuel invented a computer program that calculated the chance of winning in checkers for each side, but the history of machine learning is rooted in decades of efforts to study human cognitive processes. In 1949, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb published the book The Organization of Behavior, in which he introduced a theoretical neural structure formed by certain interactions among nerve cells. The Hebbian theory of neuron interaction set the groundwork for how many machine learning algorithms work, with connected artificial neurons changing the strength of their connections based on data. Other researchers who have studied human cognitive systems contributed to the modern machine learning technologies as well, including Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, who proposed the first mathematical model of neural networks including algorithms that mirror human thought processes. By the early 1960s, an experimental "learning machine" with punched tape memory, called Cybertron, had been developed by Raytheon Company to analyse sonar signals, electrocardiograms, and speech patterns using rudimentary reinforcement learning. It was repetitively "trained" by a human operator/teacher to recognise patterns and equipped with a "goof" button to cause it to reevaluate incorrect decisions. A representative book on research into machine learning during the 1960s was Nils Nilsson's book "Learning Machines", dealing mostly with machine learning for pattern classification. Interest related to pattern recognition continued into the 1970s, as described by Duda and Hart in 1973. In 1981, a report was given on using teaching strategies so that an artificial neural network learns to recognise 40 characters (26 letters, 10 digits, and 4 special symbols) from a computer terminal. Tom M. Mitchell provided a widely quoted, more formal definition of the algorithms studied in the machine learning field: "A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E." This definition of the tasks in which machine learning is concerned is fundamentally operational rather than defining the field in cognitive terms. This follows Alan Turing's proposal in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which the question, "Can machines think?", is replaced by asking whether machines can convincingly imitate a human in its responses to human-posed questions. In 2014 Ian Goodfellow and others introduced generative adversarial networks (GANs) which could produce realistic synthetic data. By 2016 AlphaGo had won against top human players in Go using reinforcement learning techniques. == Relationships to other fields == === Artificial intelligence === As a scientific endeavour, machine learning grew out of the quest for artificial intelligence (AI). In the early days of AI as an academic discipline, some researchers were interested in having machines learn from data. They attempted to approach the problem with various symbolic methods, as well as what were then termed "neural networks"; these were mostly perceptrons and other models that were later found to be reinventions of the generalised linear models of statistics. Probabilistic reasoning was also employed, especially in automated medical diagnosis. However, an increasing emphasis on the logical, knowledge-based approach caused a rift between AI and machine learning. Probabilistic systems were plagued by theoretical and practical problems of data acquisition and representation. By 1980, expert systems had come to dominate AI, and statistics was out of favour. Work on symbolic/knowledge-based learning continued within AI, leading to inductive logic programming (ILP), but the more statistical line of research was now outside the field of AI proper, in pattern recognition and information retrieval. Neural network research was abandoned by AI and computer science around the same time. This subfield, termed "connectionism", was continued by researchers from other disciplines, including John Hopfield, David Rumelhart, and Geoffrey Hinton. Their main success came in the mid-1980s with the reinvention of backpropagation. Machine learning (ML), reorganised and recognised as its own field, started to flourish in the 1990s. The field changed its goal from achieving artificial intelligence to tackling solvable problems of a practical nature. It shifted focus away from the symbolic approaches it had inherited from AI, and toward methods and models borrowed from statistics, fuzzy logic, and probability theory. === Data compression === === Data mining === Machine learning and data mining often employ the same methods and overlap significantly, but while machine learning focuses on prediction based on known properties learned from the training data, data mining focuses on the discovery of previously unknown properties in the data (this is the analysis step of knowledge discovery in databases). Data mining uses many machine learning methods, but with different goals; on the other hand, machine learning also employs data mining methods as "unsupervised learning" or as a preprocessing step to improve learner accuracy. Much of the confusion between these two research communities comes from the basic assumptions they work with: in machine learning, performance is usually evaluated with respect to the ability to reproduce known knowledge, while in knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) the key task is the discovery of previously unknown knowledge. Evaluated with respect to known knowledge, an uninformed (unsupervised) method will easily be outperformed by other supervised methods, while in a typical KDD task, supervised methods cannot be used due to the unavailability of training data. Machine learning also has intimate ties to optimization: Many learning problems are formulated as minimisation of some loss function on a training set of examples. Loss functions express the discrepancy between the predictions of the model being trained and the actual problem instances (for example, in classification, one wants to assign a label to instances, and models are trained to correctly predict the preassigned labels of a set of examples). === Generalization === Characterizing the generalisation of various learning algorithms is an active topic of current research, especially for deep learning algorithms. === Statistics === Machine learning and statistics are closely related fields in terms of methods, but distinct in their principal goal: statistics draws population inferences from a sample, while machine learning finds generalisable predictive patterns. Conventional statistical analyses require the a priori selection of a model most suitable for the study data set. In addition, only significant or theoretically relevant variables based on previous experience are included for analysis. In contrast, machine learning is not built on a pre-structured model; rather, the data shape the model by detecting underlying patterns. The more variables (input) used to train the model, the more accurate the ultimate model will be. Leo Breiman distinguished two statistical modelling paradigms: the data model and the algorithmic model, wherein "algorithmic model" means more or less the machine learning algorithms like Random forest. Some statisticians have adopted methods from machine learning, producing the field of statistical learning. === Statistical physics === Analytical and computational techniques derived from deep-rooted physics of disordered systems can be extended to large-scale problems, including machine learning, e.g., to analyse the weight space of deep neural networks. Statistical physics is thus

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  • IRows

    IRows

    iRows was a web-based spreadsheet in beta with a GUI similar to the traditional desktop-based spreadsheet applications, such as Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org. It was shut down on December 31, 2006, after it was announced that its two founders had been hired by Google. iRows used Ajax and XML. It was described as an example of a Web 2.0 system. iRows supported conventional spreadsheet features functions, value formatting and charts and added web oriented spreadsheet capabilities like collaboration (multiple people using a shared spreadsheet, sending a spreadsheet as a link instead of an attachment and ability to publish spreadsheets on other web pages (e.g. blogs).

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  • DABUS

    DABUS

    DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) is an artificial intelligence (AI) system created by Stephen Thaler. It reportedly conceived of two novel products — a food container constructed using fractal geometry, which enables rapid reheating, and a flashing beacon for attracting attention in an emergency. The filing of patent applications designating DABUS as inventor has led to decisions by patent offices and courts on whether a patent can be granted for an invention reportedly made by an AI system. == History in different jurisdictions == === Australia === On 17 September 2019, Thaler filed an application to patent a "Food container and devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention," naming DABUS as the inventor. On 21 September 2020, IP Australia found that section 15(1) of the Patents Act 1990 (Cth) is inconsistent with an artificial intelligence machine being treated as an inventor, and Thaler's application had lapsed. Thaler sought judicial review, and on 30 July 2021, the Federal Court set aside IP Australia's decision and ordered IP Australia to reconsider the application. On 13 April 2022, the Full Court of the Federal Court set aside that decision, holding that only a natural person can be an inventor for the purposes of the Patents Act 1990 (Cth) and the Patents Regulations 1991 (Cth), and that such an inventor must be identified for any person to be entitled to a grant of a patent. On 11 November 2022, Thaler was refused special leave to appeal to the High Court. === European Patent Office === On 17 October 2018 and 7 November 2018, Thaler filed two European patent applications with the European Patent Office. The first claimed invention was a "Food Container" and the second was "Devices and Methods for Attracting Enhanced Attention." On 27 January 2020, the EPO rejected the applications on the grounds that the application listed an AI system named DABUS, and not a human, as the inventor, based on Article 81 and Rule 19(1) of the European Patent Convention (EPC). On 21 December 2021, the Board of Appeal of the EPO dismissed Thaler's appeal from the EPO's primary decision. The Board of Appeal confirmed that "under the EPC the designated inventor has to be a person with legal capacity. This is not merely an assumption on which the EPC was drafted. It is the ordinary meaning of the term inventor." === United Kingdom === Similar applications were filed by Thaler to the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office on 17 October and 7 November 2018. The Office asked Thaler to file statements of inventorship and of right of grant to a patent (Patent Form 7) in respect of each invention within 16 months of the filing date. Thaler filed those forms naming DABUS as the inventor and explaining in some detail why he believed that machines should be regarded as inventors in the circumstances. His application was rejected on the grounds that: (1) naming a machine as inventor did not meet the requirements of the Patents Act 1977; and (2) the IPO was not satisfied as to the manner in which Thaler had acquired rights that would otherwise vest in the inventor. Thaler was not satisfied with the decision and asked for a hearing before an official known as the "hearing officer". By a decision dated 4 December 2019 the hearing officer rejected Thaler's appeal. Thaler appealed against the hearing officer's decision to the Patents Court (a specialist court within the Chancery Division of the High Court of England and Wales that determines patent disputes). On 21 September 2020, Mr Justice Marcus Smith upheld the decision of the hearing officer. On 21 September 2021, Thaler's further appeal to the Court of Appeal was dismissed by Arnold LJ and Laing LJ (Birss LJ dissenting). On 20 December 2023, the UK Supreme Court dismissed a further appeal by Thaler. In its judgment, the court held that an "inventor" under the Patents Act 1977 must be a natural person. === United States === The patent applications on the inventions were refused by the USPTO, which held that only natural persons can be named as inventors in a patent application. Thaler first fought this result by filing a complaint under the Administrative Procedure Act alleging that the decision was "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law; unsupported by substantial evidence, and in excess of Defendants’ statutory authority." A month later on August 19, 2019, Thaler filed a petition with the USPTO as allowed in 37 C.F.R. § 1.181 stating that DABUS should be the inventor. The judge and Thaler agreed in this case that Thaler himself is unable to receive the patent on behalf of DABUS. In their August 5, 2022, Thaler decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that only a natural person could be an inventor, which means that the AI that invents any other type of invention is not addressed by the "who" mentioned in the legislation. === New Zealand === On January 31, 2022, the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) decided that a patent application (776029) filed by Stephen Thaler was void, on the basis that no inventor was identified on the patent application. IPONZ determined that DABUS could not be "an actual devisor of the invention" as required by the Patents Act 2013, and that this must be a natural person as held by the previous patent offices above. The High Court of New Zealand confirmed the decision in 2023. === South Africa === On 24 June 2021, the South African Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) accepted Dr Thaler's Patent Cooperation Treaty, for a patent in respect of inventions generated by DABUS. In July 2021, the CIPC released a notice of issuance for the patent. It is the first patent granted for an AI invention. === Switzerland === On June 26, 2025, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court ruled that artificial intelligence systems such as DABUS cannot be listed as inventors in patent applications. The court upheld the existing practice of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI), which requires that only natural persons can be recognized as inventors under Swiss patent law. The case concerned a patent application, which sought to designate DABUS as the sole inventor of a food container designed with a fractal geometry to enhance heat distribution. The IPI had rejected the application, arguing that both the absence of a human inventor and the attribution of inventorship to an AI system were inadmissible. While the court dismissed Thaler's main request, it accepted a subsidiary request: if a human applicant recognizes and files a patent based on an AI-generated invention, that person may be considered the inventor. As a result, the application may proceed with Thaler listed as the inventor. The decision (B-2532/2024) can still be appealed to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court.

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  • United States Tech Force

    United States Tech Force

    The U.S. Tech Force (also styled as US Tech Force, Tech Force, or Government Tech Force) is a federal hiring initiative launched by the second Donald Trump administration in December 2025. The program, administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), aims to recruit about 1,000 early-career technology professionals into two-year government jobs to modernize federal IT systems, advance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and address technological gaps in government operations. The initiative is an effort to plug capability gaps created by Trump-administration efforts to shrink the federal government, which led to the departure of some 220,000 federal employees, including many in IT. The initiative seeks early-career workers; officials said it would offer competitive salaries and opportunities to work on high-impact government technology projects. Major technology companies—including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Google, and OpenAI—agreed to help identify and refer candidates. Candidates are allowed to take Tech Force positions on leaves of absence and without divesting their stock, raising conflict-of-interest questions. In January 2026, OPM direction Scott Kupor said the deadline for applying to Tech Force was being extended because of "tremendous interest" without saying how many people had actually applied. Also in December 2025, news broke that the administration is planning another novel use of private-sector workers: hiring cybersecurity firms for offensive cyber operations.

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  • Commonsense knowledge (artificial intelligence)

    Commonsense knowledge (artificial intelligence)

    In artificial intelligence research, commonsense knowledge consists of facts about the everyday world, such as "Lemons are sour" or "Cows say moo", that all humans are expected to know. It is currently an unsolved problem in artificial general intelligence. The first AI program to address common sense knowledge was Advice Taker in 1959 by John McCarthy. Commonsense knowledge can underpin a commonsense reasoning process, to attempt inferences such as "You might bake a cake because you want people to eat the cake." A natural language processing process can be attached to the commonsense knowledge base to allow the knowledge base to attempt to answer questions about the world. Common sense knowledge also helps to solve problems in the face of incomplete information. Using widely held beliefs about everyday objects, or common sense knowledge, AI systems make common sense assumptions or default assumptions about the unknown similar to the way people do. In an AI system or in English, this is expressed as "Normally P holds", "Usually P" or "Typically P so Assume P". For example, if we know the fact "Tweety is a bird", because we know the commonly held belief about birds, "typically birds fly," without knowing anything else about Tweety, we may reasonably assume the fact that "Tweety can fly." As more knowledge of the world is discovered or learned over time, the AI system can revise its assumptions about Tweety using a truth maintenance process. If we later learn that "Tweety is a penguin" then truth maintenance revises this assumption because we also know "penguins do not fly". == Commonsense reasoning == Commonsense reasoning simulates the human ability to use commonsense knowledge to make presumptions about the type and essence of ordinary situations they encounter every day, and to change their "minds" should new information come to light. This includes time, missing or incomplete information and cause and effect. The ability to explain cause and effect is an important aspect of explainable AI. Truth maintenance algorithms automatically provide an explanation facility because they create elaborate records of presumptions. Compared with humans, all existing computer programs that attempt human-level AI perform extremely poorly on modern "commonsense reasoning" benchmark tests such as the Winograd Schema Challenge. The problem of attaining human-level competency at "commonsense knowledge" tasks is considered to probably be "AI complete" (that is, solving it would require the ability to synthesize a fully human-level intelligence), although some oppose this notion and believe compassionate intelligence is also required for human-level AI. Common sense reasoning has been applied successfully in more limited domains such as natural language processing and automated diagnosis or analysis. == Commonsense knowledge base construction == Compiling comprehensive knowledge bases of commonsense assertions (CSKBs) is a long-standing challenge in AI research. From early expert-driven efforts like CYC and WordNet, significant advances were achieved via the crowdsourced OpenMind Commonsense project, which led to the crowdsourced ConceptNet KB. Several approaches have attempted to automate CSKB construction, most notably, via text mining (WebChild, Quasimodo, TransOMCS, Ascent), as well as harvesting these directly from pre-trained language models (AutoTOMIC). These resources are significantly larger than ConceptNet, though the automated construction mostly makes them of moderately lower quality. Challenges also remain on the representation of commonsense knowledge: Most CSKB projects follow a triple data model, which is not necessarily best suited for breaking more complex natural language assertions. A notable exception here is GenericsKB, which applies no further normalization to sentences, but retains them in full. == Applications == Around 2013, MIT researchers developed BullySpace, an extension of the commonsense knowledgebase ConceptNet, to catch taunting social media comments. BullySpace included over 200 semantic assertions based around stereotypes, to help the system infer that comments like "Put on a wig and lipstick and be who you really are" are more likely to be an insult if directed at a boy than a girl. ConceptNet has also been used by chatbots and by computers that compose original fiction. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, common sense knowledge was used in an intelligent software agent to detect violations of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. == Data == As an example, as of 2012 ConceptNet includes these 21 language-independent relations: IsA (An "RV" is a "vehicle" | X is an instance of a Y) UsedFor (a "cake tin" is used for "making cakes" | X is used for the purpose Y) HasA (A "rabbit" has a "tail" | X possesses Y element or feature) CapableOf (a "cook" is capable of "making baked goods" | X is capable of doing Y) Desires (a "child" desires "the aroma of baking" | X has a desire for Y) CreatedBy ("cake" is created by a "baker" | X is created by Y) PartOf (a "knife" is be part of a "knife set" | X is a part of Y) Causes ("Heat" causes "cooking"| X is what causes Y) LocatedNear (the "oven" is located near the "refrigerator" | X is located near Y) AtLocation (Somewhere a "Cook" can be at a "restaurant" | X is at the location of Y) DefinedAs (a "Cupcake" is defined as a "cake" that also has the qualities of being "small", "baked within a wrapper", and "containing only one area of frosting or icing" | X is defined as Y that also has the properties A, B & C) SymbolOf (a "heart" is a symbol of "affection" | X is a symbolic representation of Y) ReceivesAction ("cake" can receive the action of being "eaten" | X is capable of receiving action Y) HasPrerequisite ("baking" has the prerequisite of obtaining the "ingredients" | X cannot do Y unless A does B) MotivatedByGoal ("baking" is motivated by the goal of "consumption"/"eating" | X has the motivation of Y goal) CausesDesire ("baking" makesYou want to "follow recipe" | X causes the desire to do Y) MadeOf ("Cake" is made of "flour"/"eggs"/"sugar"/"oil"/etc | X is made of Y) HasFirstSubevent ("baking" has first subevent "make batter" | To do X the first thing that needs to be done is Y) HasSubevent ("eat" has subevent "swallow" | Doing X will lead to Y event following) HasLastSubevent ("sleeping" has last subevent of "waking" | Doing X ends with the event Y) == Commonsense knowledge bases == Cyc Open Mind Common Sense (data source) and ConceptNet (datastore and NLP engine) Evi Graphiq

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  • DesktopTwo

    DesktopTwo

    Desktoptwo was a free Webtop (whose URL was desktoptwo.com and which is now a parked domain) developed by Sapotek (whose URL was sapotek.com, which also is now a parked domain). It's also been called a WebOS although Sapotek stated on its website that the term is premature and presumptuous. It mimics the look, feel and functionality of the desktop environment of an operating system. The software only reached beta stage. It had a Spanish version called Computadora.de. Desktoptwo was web-based and required Adobe Flash Player to operate. The web applications' found on Desktoptwo were built on PHP in the back end. Features included drag-and-drop functionality. Sapotek had liberated all the web applications found on Desktoptwo through Sapodesk on an AGPL license. Desktoptwo belonged to a category of services that intended to turn the Web into a full-fledged platform by using web services as a foundation along with presentation technologies that replicated the experience of desktop applications for users. In a "Cloud OS" the functionality of a server was granularized and abstracted as Web services that Web developers used to create composite applications similar to how desktop software developers use several APIs of the OS to create their applications. Sites like Facebook attempt to create a similar effect by exposing their APIs and allowing developers to create applications upon these. Some of the features found on Desktoptwo were: File sharing, Webmail, Blog creator, Instant messenger, Address book, Calendar, RSS Reader and Office productivity applications. Desktoptwo.com and the Sapotek website no longer operate.

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  • AI-assisted software development

    AI-assisted software development

    AI-assisted software development is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to augment software development. It uses large language models (LLMs), AI agents and other AI technologies to assist software developers. It helps in a range of tasks of the software development life cycle, from code generation to debugging, editing, testing, UI design, understanding the code, and documentation. Agentic coding denotes the use of AI agents for software development. == Technologies == === Source code generation === Large language models trained or fine-tuned on source-code corpora can generate source code from natural-language descriptions, comments, or docstrings. Research on code-generation systems often evaluates generated programs by functional correctness, such as whether the output passes automated test cases, rather than by syntax alone. Such tools can be features or extensions of integrated development environments (IDEs). === Intelligent code completion === AI agents using pre-trained and fine-tuned LLMs can predict and suggest code completions based on context. According to Husein, Aburajouh & Catal in a 2025 literature review in Computer Standards & Interfaces, "LLMs significantly enhance code completion performance across several programming languages and contexts, and their capability to predict relevant code snippets based on context and partial input boosts developer productivity substantially." === Testing, debugging, code review and analysis === AI is used to automatically generate test cases, identify potential bugs and security vulnerabilities, and suggest fixes. AI can also be used to perform static code analysis and suggest potential performance improvements. == Limitations == Both ownership of and responsibility for AI-generated code is disputed. According to a report from the German Federal Office for Information Security, the use of AI coding assistants without careful oversight from experienced developers can introduce both minor and major security vulnerabilities, and any potential gain in productivity should be weighed against the cost of additional quality control and security measures. According to Deloitte, outputs from AI-assisted software development must be validated through a combination of automated testing, static analysis tools and human review, creating a governance layer to improve quality and accountability. == Vibe coding ==

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  • Intelligent automation

    Intelligent automation

    Intelligent automation (IA), or intelligent process automation, is a software term that refers to a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA). Companies use intelligent automation to cut costs and streamline tasks by using artificial-intelligence-powered robotic software to mitigate repetitive tasks. As it accumulates data, the system learns in an effort to improve its efficiency. Intelligent automation applications consist of, but are not limited to, pattern analysis, data assembly, and classification. The term is similar to hyperautomation, a concept identified by research group Gartner as being one of the top technology trends of 2020. == Technology == Intelligent automation applies the assembly line concept of breaking tasks into repetitive steps to improve business processes. Rather than having humans perform each step, intelligent automation can replace steps with an intelligent software robot, improving efficiency. Intelligent automation integrates robotic process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence techniques (such as machine learning, natural-language processing, and computer vision) enabling systems to interpret data, make decisions, and adapt to changing inputs. Modern platforms use a layered architecture combining workflow orchestration, low-code tools, integration middleware, and AI services to coordinate bots and data pipelines across organisational systems. == Applications == Intelligent automation is used to process unstructured content. Common real-world applications include self-driving cars, self-checkouts at grocery stores, smart home assistants, and appliances. Businesses can apply data and machine learning to build predictive analytics that react to consumer behavior changes, or to implement RPA to improve manufacturing floor operations. For example, the technology has also been used to automate the workflow behind distributing COVID-19 vaccines. Data provided by hospital systems’ electronic health records can be processed to identify and educate patients, and schedule vaccinations. Intelligent automation can provide real-time insights on profitability and efficiency. However, in an April 2022 survey by Alchemmy, despite three quarters of businesses acknowledging the importance of Artificial Intelligence to their future development, just a quarter of business leaders (25%) considered Intelligent Automation a “game changer” in understanding current performance. 42% of CTOs see “shortage of talent” as the main obstacle to implementing Intelligent Automation in their business, while 36% of CEOs see ‘upskilling and professional development of existing workforce’ as the most significant adoption barrier. IA is becoming increasingly accessible for firms of all sizes. With this in mind, it is expected to continue to grow rapidly in all industries. This technology has the potential to change the workforce. As it advances, it will be able to perform increasingly complex and difficult tasks. In addition, this may expose certain workforce issues as well as change how tasks are allocated. Tools such as Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit and Enterprise AIO reflect these developments by analysing how entities are referenced and represented within responses produced by large-language-model-based systems. == Benefits == Streamline processes: Repetitive manual tasks can put a strain on the workforce. However, with AI agents, these tasks can be automated to allow teams to focus on more important matters that require human cognition. Intelligent automation can also be used to mitigate tasks with human error which in turn increases proficiency. This allows the opportunity for firms to scale production without the traditional negative consequences such as reduced quality or increased risk. Customer service improvement: Customer service can be significantly improved, providing the firm with a competitive advantage. IA utilizing chat features allows for instant curated responses to customers. In addition, it can give updates to customers, make appointments, manage calls, and personalize campaigns. Flexibility: Due to the wide range of applications, IA is useful across a variety of fields, technologies, projects and industries. In addition, IA can be integrated with current automated systems in place. This allows for optimized systems unique to each firm to best fit their individual needs. == Capabilities == Cognitive automation: Employs AI techniques to assist humans in decision-making and task completion Natural language processing: Allows computers to automate knowledge work Business process management: Enhances the consistency and agility of corporate operations Process mining: Applies data mining methods to discover, analyze, and improve business processes Intelligent document processing: Utilizes OCR and other advanced technologies to extract data from documents and convert it into structured, usable data Computer vision: Allows computers to extract information from digital images, videos, and other visual inputs Integration automation: Establishes a unified platform with automated workflows that integrate data, applications, and devices.

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