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  • ROCm

    ROCm

    ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains, including general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), and heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP (GPU-kernel-based programming), OpenMP (directive-based programming), and OpenCL. ROCm is free, libre and open-source software (except the GPU firmware blobs), and it is distributed under various licenses. The name initially stood for Radeon Open Compute platform; however, due to Open Compute being a registered trademark, the name no longer functions as an acronym. == Background == The first GPGPU software stack from ATI/AMD was Close to Metal, which became Stream. ROCm was launched around 2016 with the Boltzmann Initiative. ROCm stack builds upon previous AMD GPU stacks; some tools trace back to GPUOpen and others to the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). === Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language === HSAIL was aimed at producing a middle-level, hardware-agnostic intermediate representation that could be JIT-compiled to the eventual hardware (GPU, FPGA...) using the appropriate finalizer. This approach was dropped for ROCm: now it builds only GPU code, using LLVM, and its AMDGPU backend that was upstreamed, although there is still research on such enhanced modularity with LLVM MLIR. == Programming abilities == ROCm as a stack ranges from the kernel driver to the end-user applications. AMD has introductory videos about AMD GCN hardware, and ROCm programming via its learning portal. One of the best technical introductions about the stack and ROCm/HIP programming, remains, to date, to be found on Reddit. == Hardware support == ROCm is primarily targeted at discrete professional GPUs, but consumer GPUs and APUs of the same architecture as a supported professional GPU are known to work with ROCm. For example, all professional GPUs of the RDNA 2 architecture are officially supported by ROCm 5.x; users report that Consumer RDNA2 units such as the Radeon 6800M APU and the Radeon 6700XT GPU also work. === Professional-grade GPUs === === Consumer-grade GPUs === == Software ecosystem == === Machine learning === Various deep learning frameworks have a ROCm backend: PyTorch TensorFlow ONNX MXNet CuPy MIOpen Caffe Iree (which uses LLVM Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR)) llama.cpp === Supercomputing === ROCm is gaining significant traction in the top 500. ROCm is used with the Exascale supercomputers El Capitan and Frontier. Some related software is to be found at AMD Infinity hub. === Other acceleration & graphics interoperation === As of version 3.0, Blender can now use HIP compute kernels for its renderer cycles. === Other languages === ==== Julia ==== Julia has the AMDGPU.jl package, which integrates with LLVM and selects components of the ROCm stack. Instead of compiling code through HIP, AMDGPU.jl uses Julia's compiler to generate LLVM IR directly, which is later consumed by LLVM to generate native device code. AMDGPU.jl uses ROCr's HSA implementation to upload native code onto the device and execute it, similar to how HIP loads its own generated device code. AMDGPU.jl also supports integration with ROCm's rocBLAS (for BLAS), rocRAND (for random number generation), and rocFFT (for FFTs). Future integration with rocALUTION, rocSOLVER, MIOpen, and certain other ROCm libraries is planned. === Software distribution === ==== Official ==== Installation instructions are provided for Linux and Windows in the official AMD ROCm documentation. ROCm software is currently spread across several public GitHub repositories. Within the main public meta-repository, there is an XML manifest for each official release: using git-repo, a version control tool built on top of Git, is the recommended way to synchronize with the stack locally. AMD starts distributing containerized applications for ROCm, notably scientific research applications gathered under AMD Infinity Hub. AMD distributes itself packages tailored to various Linux distributions. ==== Third-party ==== There is a growing third-party ecosystem packaging ROCm. Linux distributions are officially packaging (natively) ROCm, with various degrees of advancement: Arch Linux, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora , GNU Guix, and NixOS. There are Spack packages. == Components == There is one kernel-space component, ROCk, and the rest - there is roughly a hundred components in the stack - is made of user-space modules. The unofficial typographic policy is to use: uppercase ROC lowercase following for low-level libraries, i.e. ROCt, and the contrary for user-facing libraries, i.e. rocBLAS. AMD is active developing with the LLVM community, but upstreaming is not instantaneous, and as of January 2022, is still lagging. AMD still officially packages various LLVM forks for parts that are not yet upstreamed – compiler optimizations destined to remain proprietary, debug support, OpenMP offloading, etc. === Low-level === ==== ROCk – Kernel driver ==== ==== ROCm – Device libraries ==== Support libraries implemented as LLVM bitcode. These provide various utilities and functions for math operations, atomics, queries for launch parameters, on-device kernel launch, etc. ==== ROCt – Thunk ==== The thunk is responsible for all the thinking and queuing that goes into the stack. ==== ROCr – Runtime ==== The ROC runtime is a set of APIs/libraries that allows the launch of compute kernels by host applications. It is AMD's implementation of the HSA runtime API. It is different from the ROC Common Language Runtime. ==== ROCm – CompilerSupport ==== ROCm code object manager is in charge of interacting with LLVM intermediate representation. === Mid-level === ==== ROCclr Common Language Runtime ==== The common language runtime is an indirection layer adapting calls to ROCr on Linux and PAL on windows. It used to be able to route between different compilers, like the HSAIL-compiler. It is now being absorbed by the upper indirection layers (HIP and OpenCL). ==== OpenCL ==== ROCm ships its installable client driver (ICD) loader and an OpenCL implementation bundled together. As of January 2022, ROCm 4.5.2 ships OpenCL 2.2, and is lagging behind competition. ==== HIP – Heterogeneous Interface for Portability ==== The AMD implementation for its GPUs is called HIPAMD. There is also a CPU implementation mostly for demonstration purposes. ==== HIPCC ==== HIP builds a `HIPCC` compiler that either wraps Clang and compiles with LLVM open AMDGPU backend, or redirects to the NVIDIA compiler. ==== HIPIFY ==== HIPIFY is a source-to-source compiling tool. It translates CUDA to HIP and reverse, either using a Clang-based tool, or a sed-like Perl script. ==== GPUFORT ==== Like HIPIFY, GPUFORT is a tool compiling source code into other third-generation-language sources, allowing users to migrate from CUDA Fortran to HIP Fortran. It is also in the repertoire of research projects, even more so. === High-level === ROCm high-level libraries are usually consumed directly by application software, such as machine learning frameworks. Most of the following libraries are in the General Matrix Multiply (GEMM) category, which GPU architecture excels at. The majority of these user-facing libraries comes in dual-form: hip for the indirection layer that can route to Nvidia hardware, and roc for the AMD implementation. ==== rocBLAS / hipBLAS ==== rocBLAS and hipBLAS are central in high-level libraries, it is the AMD implementation for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms. It uses the library Tensile privately. ==== rocSOLVER / hipSOLVER ==== This pair of libraries constitutes the LAPACK implementation for ROCm and is strongly coupled to rocBLAS. === Utilities === ROCm developer tools: Debug, tracer, profiler, System Management Interface, Validation suite, Cluster management. GPUOpen tools: GPU analyzer, memory visualizer... External tools: radeontop (TUI overview) == Comparison with competitors == ROCm competes with other GPU computing stacks: Nvidia CUDA and Intel OneAPI. === Nvidia CUDA === Nvidia's CUDA is closed-source, whereas AMD ROCm is open source. There is open-source software built on top of the closed-source CUDA, for instance RAPIDS. CUDA is able to run on consumer GPUs, whereas ROCm support is mostly offered for professional hardware such as AMD Instinct and AMD Radeon Pro. Nvidia provides a C/C++-centered frontend and its Parallel Thread Execution (PTX) LLVM GPU backend as the Nvidia CUDA Compiler (NVCC). === Intel OneAPI === All the oneAPI corresponding libraries are published on its GitHub Page. ==== Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL) ==== Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL) is a new technology consortium that are working on the continuation of the OneAPI initiative, with the goal to create a new open standard accelerator software ecosystem, related open standards and specification projects through Working Groups and Specia

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  • Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

    Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

    Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, originally the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium and widely seen by the acronym MCC, was the first, and at one time one of the largest, computer industry research and development consortia in the United States. MCC ceased operations in 2000 and was formally dissolved in 2004. == Divisions == MCC did research and development in the following areas: [1] System Architecture and Design (optimise hardware and software design, provide for scalability and interoperability, allow rapid prototyping for improved time-to-market, and support the re-engineering of existing systems for open systems). Advanced Microelectronics Packaging and Interconnection (smaller, faster, more powerful, and cost-competitive). Hardware Systems Engineering (tools and methodologies for cost-efficient, up-front design of advanced electronic systems, including modelling and design-for-test techniques to improve cost, yield, quality, and time-to-market). Environmentally Conscious Technologies (process control and optimisation tools, information management and analysis capabilities, and non-hazardous material alternatives supporting cost-efficient production, waste minimisation, and reduced environmental impact). Distributed Information Technology (managing and maintaining physically distributed corporate information resources on different platforms, building blocks for the national information infrastructure, networking tools and services for integration within and between companies, and electronic commerce). Intelligent Systems (systems that "intelligently" support business processes and enhance performance, including decision support, data management, forecasting and prediction). == History == The MCC was a response to the announcement of Japan's Fifth Generation Project, a large Japanese research project launched in 1982 aimed at producing a new kind of computer by 1991. The Japanese had formed similar industrial research consortia as early as 1956.[2] Many European and American computer companies saw this new Japanese initiative as an attempt to take full control of the world's high-end computer market, and MCC was created, in part, as a defensive move against that threat. In late 1982, several major computer and semiconductor manufacturers in the United States banded together and founded MCC under the leadership of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, whose previous positions had been Director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such formations were illegal in the United States until the 1984 Congressional passage of the "National Cooperative Research Act". Several sites with relevant universities were considered, including Atlanta, Georgia (Georgia Tech), the Research Triangle, N.C. (UNC), the Washington, D.C. area (George Mason), Stanford University and Austin, Texas (UT) which was the final selection. The University of Texas offered land upon which they would construct a new building specifically designed for the MCC within their Austin campus. Ross Perot also offered the use of his private plane for 2 years for staff recruitment. Austin was selected as the site for MCC in 1983. Despite this purpose and the background of Inman and his senior staff, MCC accepted no government funding for many years and was a refuge for some avoiding work on Strategic Defense Initiative projects. MCC was part of the Artificial Intelligence boom of the 1980s, reportedly the single largest customer of both Symbolics and Lisp Machines, Inc. (and like Symbolics, was one of the first companies to register a .com domain). In the 1980s its major programs were packaging, software engineering, CAD, and advanced computer architectures. The latter comprised artificial intelligence, human interface, database, and parallel processing, the latter two merging in the late 1980s. Many of the early shareholder companies were mainframe computer companies under stress in the 1980s. Over the years, MCC's membership diversified to include a broad range of high-profile corporations involved in information technology products, as well as government research and development agencies and leading universities. In June, 2000 the MCC Board of Directors voted to dissolve the consortium, and the few remaining employees held a wake at Scholz's Beer Garden in Austin on October 25. Formal dissolution papers were reportedly not filed until 2004. == Spinoffs == While multiple technologies were transferred to member companies and government agencies in the final years, fourteen companies were spun out of MCC. Those spinoffs include: TeraVicta Technologies, Austin's first MEMS company; its focus was to develop microscopic switch technology for fiber optic switching and radiofrequency switching in mobile phones specifically to dynamically switch between the future 3G-4GLTE-future5G wireless communication frequencies and ensure mobile phones were communicating over the strongest wireless signal to reduce dropped calls. Robert Miracky was the founding CEO who spun out the first commercial metal micromachining technology developed by MCC researchers Brent Lunceford, Jason Reed, Richard Nelson, K.Hu, and C. Hilbert in a collaborative development program with IBM in a novel implementation and operational paradigm for solid-state integrated circuit coolers integrated with conductive MEMS switches. TeraVicta was liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings in 2015. The Austin region subsequently built up a MEMS & Sensors value chain in the billions of dollars comprising companies such as 3M, Cypress Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductor, Cirrus Logic, Silicon Labs, and the Austin division of the now-defunct Silicon Valley Technology Center. Portelligent, a company that provides reverse engineering teardown services. At the time, Portelligent was the first company to commercialize such services; they had been provided by MCC to its member companies. Today, there are at least twelve companies worldwide that sell reports known as "reverse engineering teardown reports." Modern day teardown reports provide detailed information about technology products such as the bill of materials, microchip, and printed circuit board design specifics, manufacturing details including manufacturing location details for the entire value chain responsible for making electronics, including the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy smartphones. Portelligent was acquired by CMP Technology in 2007. Evolutionary Technologies International, a company focused on developing database tools and data warehousing. It was spun off from MCC in 1990.

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  • Otterly.ai

    Otterly.ai

    Otterly.ai is an Austrian software company, founded in 2024, that provides tools for generative engine optimization, the practice of monitoring and optimizing results in large language models. == History == Otterly.ai was co-founded in 2024 by Thomas Peham, Klaus-M. Schremser and Josef Trauner. The concept for OtterlyAI was developed in response to the increasing use of generative AI tools in digital search and content discovery. The company announced a technology partnership with SEO platform Semrush in January 2025.

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  • Emospark

    Emospark

    EmoSpark is an artificial intelligence console created in London, United Kingdom by Patrick Levy-Rosenthal. The device uses facial recognition and language analysis to evaluate human emotion and convey responsive content according to the emotion. The console measures 90 mm x 90 mm x 90 mm and is cube shaped. It operates on an "Emotional Processing Unit", an emotion chip developed by Emoshape Inc. that enables the system to create emotional profile graphs of its surroundings. The emotional processing unit is a patent pending technology that is said to create synthesised emotional responses in machines. EmoSpark was funded through an Indiegogo campaign which aimed to raise $200,000. == Product overview == EmoSpark was created by French inventor Patrick Levy-Rosenthal, as an emotionally intelligent artificial life unit for the home that can interact with people. It is powered by Android and can communicate with users through typed input from a computer, tablet, smartphone or TV as well as through spoken commands. The EmoSpark's features are categorized into two types: functional and emotional. EmoSpark is said to have the ability to perform practical software-based tasks. Through the smartphone interface, it is able to gauge a person’s emotions and is reported to have a conversational library of over 2 million sentences. The face-tracking technology identifies users likes and dislikes to categorize their emotional responses to stimuli such as videos and music. The device has an emotional spectrum that is composed of eight emotions which are surprise, sadness, joy, trust, fear, disgust, anger and anticipation. EmoSpark monitors a person's facial expressions and emotions through images from an external camera, which are then processed through an emotion text analysis and content analysis. The New Scientist reported that EmoSpark had the ability to work on the best way to cheer up its users, emotionally. === Connectivity === EmoSpark is able to connect to Facebook and YouTube to present users with content designed to improve their mood, or to Wikipedia for collaborative knowledge that can be shared when users ask questions of it. Through Android OS, EmoSpark is able to be customized with Google Play store apps. The cube is expected to develop its own personality based on the communications it has had with the people using it. == EmoShape == The Emotion Chip (EPU) used in the cube is created by the US company Emoshape Inc, founded by Levy-Rosenthal. EmoShape Ltd (UK) was the company that developed EmoSpark cube. Patrick Levy-Rosenthal also received the IST Prize in 2005 from the European Council for Applied Science, Technology and Engineering.

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  • Lexalytics

    Lexalytics

    Lexalytics, Inc. provides sentiment and intent analysis to an array of companies using SaaS and cloud based technology. Salience 6, the engine behind Lexalytics, was built as an on-premises, multi-lingual text analysis engine. It is leased to other companies who use it to power filtering and reputation management programs. In July, 2015 Lexalytics acquired Semantria to be used as a cloud option for its technology. In September, 2021 Lexalytics was acquired by CX company InMoment. == History == Lexalytics spun into existence in January 2003 out of a content management startup called Lightspeed. Lightspeed consolidated on America's West Coast. Jeff Catlin, a Lightspeed General Manager, and Mike Marshall, a Lighstpeed Principal Engineer, convinced investors to give them the East Coast company so as to avoid shutdown costs. Catlin and Marshall renamed the operation Lexalytics. Catlin took on the role of chief executive officer with Marshall working as Chief Technology Officer. Lexalytics opted to not accept venture cash. Instead, the company initially shared sales and marketing expenses with U.K. based document management company Infonic. The partner companies soon formed a joint venture in July 2008, which was later dissolved. Since then, Lexalytics has worked with many other companies, like Bottlenose, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, Oracle and DataSift. Relationships with social media monitoring companies like Datasift tend to find Lexalytics’ Salience engine baked into the product itself. Lexalytics is used similarly to monitor sentiment as it relates to stock trading. In December 2014, Lexalytics announced the latest iteration to its sentiment analysis engine, Salience 6. Earlier that year Lexalytics acquired Semantria in a bid to appeal to a wider variety of business models. Created by former Lexalytics Marketing Director Oleg Rogynskyy, Semantria is a SaaS text mining service offered as an API and Excel based plugin that measures sentiment. The goal of the acquisition, which cost Lexalytics less than US$10 million, was to expand the customer base both within the United States and abroad with multilingual support. The engine that powers Semantria, Salience, is grounded in its deep learning ability. An example of this is its concept matrix, which allows Salience an understanding of concepts and relationship between concepts based on a detailed reading of the entire repository of Wikipedia. This matrix allows Salience to use Wikipedia for automatic categorization. Along with features like the concept matrix, Salience supports 16 international languages. The engine has earned Lexalytics a spot on EContent's “Top 100 Companies in the Digital Content Industry” List for 2014–2015. In September 2018, Lexalytics launched document data extraction market using natural language processing (NLP).

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  • Artificial intelligence safety institute

    Artificial intelligence safety institute

    An artificial intelligence safety institute is a type of state-backed organization aiming to evaluate and ensure the safety of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models, also called frontier AI models. AI safety gained prominence in 2023, notably with public declarations about potential existential risks from AI. During the AI Safety Summit in November 2023, the United Kingdom and the United States both created their own AISI. During the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, international leaders agreed to form a network of AI Safety Institutes, comprising institutes from the UK, the US, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, Canada and the European Union. In 2025, the UK's AI Safety Institute was renamed the "AI Security Institute", and its US counterpart became the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). == Timeline == In 2023, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, expressed his intention to "make the UK not just the intellectual home but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation" and unveiled plans for an AI Safety Summit. He emphasized the need for independent safety evaluations, stating that AI companies cannot "mark their own homework". During the summit in November 2023, the UK AISI was officially established as an evolution of the Frontier AI Taskforce, and the US AISI as part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Japan followed by launching an AI safety institute in February 2024. Politico reported in April 2024 that many AI companies had not shared pre-deployment access to their most advanced AI models for evaluation. Meta's president of global affairs Nick Clegg said that many AI companies were waiting for the UK and the US AI Safety Institutes to work out common evaluation rules and procedures. An agreement was indeed concluded between the UK and the US in April 2024 to collaborate on at least one joint safety test. Initially established in London, the UK AI Safety Institute announced in May 2024 that it would open an office in San Francisco, where many AI companies are located. This is part of a plan to "set new, international standards on AI safety", according to UK's technology minister Michele Donelan. == International network == At the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, the European Union and other countries agreed to create their own AI safety institutes, forming an international network. In July 2025, the international network held an exercise to explore issues with evaluating AI agents, especially when it came to leaking sensitive information or cybersecurity. Network members also met at NeurIPS 2025 in the city of San Diego. == Specific institutes == === Australia === The Albanese government announced the creation of the Australian AI Safety Institute on 25 November 2025. === Canada === Canada announced in April 2024 that it would create an AI safety institute, and such an institute was officially founded in November 2024. The institute is housed under Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, though it also partners with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). It is supported by a budget of CA$50,000,000 for a five-year timespan. === European Union === The EU AI office, founded in May 2024, is a member of the international network of AI safety institutes. === France === On 31 January 2025, the government of France created the Institut national pour l'évaluation et la sécurité de l'intelligence artificielle (INESIA), or the National Institute for AI Evaluation and Security. === India === The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology held consultations with Meta Platforms, Google, Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, NASSCOM, Broadband India Forum, Software Alliance, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), The Quantum Hub, Digital Empowerment Foundation, and Access Now on October 7, 2024, in relation to the establishment of the AI Safety Institute. The decision was made to shift focus from regulation to standards-setting, risk identification, and damage detection—all of which require interoperable technologies. The AISI may spend the ₹20 crore allotted to the Safe and Trusted Pillar of the IndiaAI Mission for the initial budget. Future funding may come from other components of the IndiaAI Mission. UNESCO and MeitY began consulting on AI Readiness Assessment Methodology under Safety and Ethics in Artificial Intelligence from 2024. It is to encourage the ethical and responsible use of AI in industries. The study will find areas where government can become involved, especially in attempts to strengthen institutional and regulatory capabilities. Minister for Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw announced the creation of an IndiaAI Safety Institute on January 30, 2025, to ensure the ethical and safe application of AI models. The institute will promote domestic R&D that is grounded in India's social, economic, cultural, and linguistic diversity and is based on Indian datasets. With the help of academic and research institutions, as well as private sector partners, the institute will follow the hub-and-spoke approach to carry out projects within Safe and Trusted Pillar of the IndiaAI Mission. It operates under a "hub-and-spoke" model with collaboration from academic institutions (e.g., IITs), tech firms, and international organizations like UNESCO. === Japan === The Japan AISI (or J-AISI) was founded in February 2024. Part of the Information Technology Promotion Agency, it employs about 23 people. The institute consists of the Council of AISI, the AISI Steering Committee, and a secretariat with six teams. Akiko Murakami (previously of IBM Japan and Sompo Japan) serves as the institute's executive director, and Kenji Hiramoto and Suguru Nishimura serve as the institute's two deputy executive directors. === Kenya === Kenya agreed to join the international network of AI safety institutes, but the country has not announced any details yet. It is the only African state in the network. === Singapore === The Digital Trust Centre was initially founded in June 2022. In May 2024, it was renamed to the Singapore AISI. Part of Nanyang Technological University, the institute partners with Infocomm Media Development Authority and is supported by an investment of S$10,000,000 per year. === South Korea === South Korea announced in May 2024 that it would create an AI safety institute under the umbrella of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. It will be supported by a tentative investment of somewhere between 10 and 20 million South Korean won per year, and employ at least 30 people. The institute was founded in November 2024 and is based in Bundang District within the city of Seongnam. === United Kingdom === The United Kingdom founded in April 2023 a safety organisation called Frontier AI Taskforce, with an initial budget of £100 million. In November 2023, it evolved into the AI Safety Institute, and continued to be led by Ian Hogarth. The AISI is part of the United Kingdom's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The United Kingdom's AI strategy aims to balance safety and innovation. Unlike the European Union which adopted the AI Act, the UK is reluctant to legislate early, considering that it may lower the sector's growth, and that laws might be rendered obsolete by technological progress. In May 2024, the institute open-sourced an AI safety tool called "Inspect", which evaluates AI model capabilities such as reasoning and their degree of autonomy. In February 2025, the UK body was renamed the AI Security Institute. Observers saw the name change as a signal that the institute will not focus on ethical issues such as algorithmic bias or freedom of speech in AI applications. === United States === The US AISI was founded in November 2023 as part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This happened the day after the signature of the Executive Order 14110. In February 2024, Joe Biden's former economic policy adviser Elizabeth Kelly was appointed to lead it. In February 2024, the US government created the US AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), regrouping more than 200 organizations such as Google, Anthropic or Microsoft. In March 2024, a budget of $10 million was allocated. Observers noted that this investment is relatively small, especially considering the presence of many big AI companies in the US. The NIST itself, which hosts the AISI, is also known for its chronic lack of funding. Biden administration's request for additional funding was met with further budget cuts from congressional appropriators. Under President Trump, plans for members of the agency to attend the February 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris were scrapped. The US and the UK refused to sign the summit's final communique. US Vice President JD Vance said "pro-growth AI policies" should be prioritised over safety. The name of the agency was changed in June 2025 to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation

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  • Sriram Krishnan

    Sriram Krishnan

    Sriram Krishnan (born 1984) is a tech executive and White House official, currently serving as the Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence. Krishnan was named a Time Person of the Year in 2025 as an "Architect of Artificial Intelligence." He was described in Time as providing the "wake-up call that we needed" to the other AI builders, leading to "a multiyear, $500 billion initiative dubbed Stargate" to push American-made AI, as well as numerous other AI initiatives. Also in December 2025, President Trump said of Krishnan, "without him, things on AI would not function well" and cited Krishnan as the leading figure behind the American executive order on AI. As the leader of the United States' policy team regarding artificial intelligence, Krishnan plays "a significant role in shaping the administration’s approach to AI and driving measures to advance federal adoption of AI." The role calls for removing barriers to AI adoption within the government, driving vendors toward solutions suitable for federal needs, designing sensible regulation of private-sector AI, and conducting "AI diplomacy". He has stated a policy goal of "reinvigorating US dominance in emerging technologies," including AI. He also represents the United States' interests in AI abroad, such as at the Paris AI Summit. He is one of the authors of the American "AI Action Plan" released in July, 2025, which he contends is necessary to win the "existential race with China" for AI supremacy. Krishnan, a U.S. citizen born in India, is also a venture capitalist, podcaster, product manager and author. Early in his career, he led product teams at Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Snap. In addition to his work as an investor and technologist, he and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, rose to additional prominence in 2021 as podcast hosts. He served as a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and led its London office. In 2022, Krishnan announced that he was working with Elon Musk on the rebuilding of Twitter following Musk's acquisition of the company. On December 22, 2024, US president-elect Donald Trump announced that Krishnan would be Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in his incoming administration; in 2026 he joined the National Economic Council. == Early life and education == Krishnan was born in Chennai, India. He earned his Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology from SRM University (2001–2005), moved to the United States in 2007 to join Microsoft, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2016. == Career == === Early career === In 2007, he began working at Microsoft where he served as a program manager for Visual Studio. At Facebook, Krishnan built the Facebook Audience Network, a competitive platform to Google's ad technologies. At Twitter, he led product and core user experience, driving a 20% annual user growth rate and launching a redesigned home page and events experience. === Andreessen Horowitz === Krishnan was appointed a general partner of American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ("a16z") in February 2021. He was anticipated to serve consumer and social markets, however he has also theorized on the impact of "deep tech" on society. In 2023 he was appointed to lead the firm's London office, its first non-US location. The office is expected to serve Web3 investments as well as AI and other fields. Krishnan announced that he would leave the firm at the end of 2024. === Social media and AI === In 2022, various news media reported that Krishnan was assisting Elon Musk in the revamp of Twitter following Musk's takeover of the company. Additional reports named Krishnan as the leading candidate for the role of CEO of the newly private company. Krishnan penned a 2023 New York Times opinion column regarding social media, AI, and related fields. He predicted a rise in the number and diversity of online spaces due to decentralization and platforms like Farcaster, Bluesky and Mastodon. === Public office === In 2024, the Financial Times reported that Krishnan was active in international affairs, reintroducing Boris Johnson to Elon Musk, following Musk's nomination to the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. Krishnan was also reported as potentially leaving a16z at the end of the year to "be jumping into something I've wanted to spend [his] energy on," which was widely reported as being related to Musk's and Vivek Ramaswamy's work at DOGE. Others reported to be involved include Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreesen, Bill Ackman, and Travis Kalanick. On December 22, 2024, US president-elect Donald Trump announced that he would be Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in his incoming administration. On February 6, 2025, Reuters reported that Krishnan would be accompanying Vice President Vance to the Paris AI Summit, a "major artificial intelligence" event later that month. Other members of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy would also be joining the event with around 100 other countries to "focus on AI's potential." Krishnan joined a U.S. technology policy delegation to the Middle East in advance of President Trump's visit in May 2025. Conducting "AI diplomacy," Krishnan negotiated the spread of U.S. AI technologies with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, as well as other means to strengthen bilateral trade in artificial intelligence technologies. He explained that the goal of the diplomatic mission was that "we want American A.I. to spread." Krishnan, along with David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, were credited as authors of the American AI Action Plan released in July 2025. The plan is "the administration’s most significant policy directive" regarding artificial intelligence; it calls for financing to support the global spread of American AI models and a policy to enforce neutrality in models. The Washington Post referred to the plan as a "bold action to ensure that American AI remains at the cutting edge." The AI Action Plan is a continuation of prior efforts to reduce barriers to U.S. production of AI systems and the removal of rules that were considered to hinder such growth. Later in 2025, at the POLITICO AI & Tech Summit, Krishnan called national AI development "an existential race with China." He suggested that private companies are best positioned to create new models, quipping "let them cook." He further suggested that state-by-state regulation of AI technologies may hinder national AI competitiveness. Also in 2025, at the Axios AI+ Summit, Krishnan stated that the United States and China are in a race for AI supremacy, in which the winner will be judged by market share. Winning the race is a "business strategy" to Krishnan. Krishnan was named in the 2025 Time Person of the Year article as an "AI Architect". === The Aarthi and Sriram Show and other media === In early 2021, Krishnan and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, launched a Clubhouse talk show that "focuses on organic conversations on anything from startups to venture capitalism and cryptocurrencies." An early appearance by Elon Musk on the Good Time Show was described as the first show that "broke Clubhouse" by rapidly exceeding the limit of 5,000 simultaneous users. The desire to interact with a larger community led to a variety of later innovations to allow streaming and replaying of Clubhouse chats. On that episode, Elon Musk grilled Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev regarding the GameStop trading controversy. As of December 2021, the show had over 187,000 subscribers, plus 735,000 subscribers between Krishnan and Ramamurthy's personal Clubhouse accounts. Other guests have included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Diane von Fürstenberg, Tony Hawk, MrBeast, and A.R. Rahman. In 2022, the Good Time Show moved to YouTube. It then evolved to a podcasting format under the name The Aarthi and Sriram Show, with both audio and video content. The Hollywood Reporter reported that the podcast had received more than 1 million downloads by early 2023. == Personal life == Krishnan is married to Aarthi Ramamurthy, co-host of The Aarthi and Sriram Show (formerly the Good Time Show) and a serial entrepreneur. They met in college in 2003 through a Yahoo! chat room related to a coding project and began dating in 2006 and eloped in 2010. == Awards == Time Person of the Year - 2025

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  • Blockhead (thought experiment)

    Blockhead (thought experiment)

    Blockhead is a theoretical computer system invented as part of a thought experiment by philosopher Ned Block, which appeared in a paper titled "Psychologism and Behaviorism". Block did not personally name the computer in the paper. == Overview == In "Psychologism and Behaviorism", Block argues that the internal mechanism of a system is important in determining whether that system is intelligent and claims to show that a non-intelligent system could pass the Turing test. Block asks the reader to imagine a conversation lasting any given amount of time. He states that given the nature of language, there are a finite number of syntactically and grammatically correct sentences that can be used to start a conversation. Consequently, there is a limit to how many "sensible" responses can be made to the first sentence, then to the second sentence, and so on until the conversation ends. Block then asks the reader to imagine a computer which had been programmed with all the sentences in theory, if not in practice. Block argues that such a machine could continue a conversation with a person on any topic because the computer would be programmed with every sentence that it was possible to use so the computer would be able to pass the Turing test despite the fact that—according to Block—it was not intelligent. Block says that this does not show that there is only one correct internal structure for generating intelligence but simply that some internal structures do not generate intelligence. The argument is related to John Searle's Chinese room.

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  • Thai QR Payment

    Thai QR Payment

    Thai QR Payment or PromptPay (พร้อมเพย์) is a real-time payment system in Thailand that allows money transfers through digital channels using identifiers linked to a bank account, including a mobile phone number, citizen identification number, tax identification number or bank account number. The system was introduced in 2016 as part of Thailand's national e-payment infrastructure and was developed under the National e-Payment Master Plan, a government programme intended to expand digital payment infrastructure and reduce the use of cash in everyday transactions. It is owned by National ITMX ltd and Bank of Thailand and developed by Vocalink, a group by Mastercard == History == PromptPay (originally AnyID) is one of the National e-Payment projects and policies by Thailand, to regulate and standardize electronic payments to follow the technologies with internet and smartphones that is expanding and bringing technology into Finance and Commerce. By 22 December 2015, The First Prayut cabinet have approved the project as a national infastructure PromptPay has also been used in cross-border payment linkages with other real-time payment systems in Southeast Asia. In April 2021, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand launched a linkage between Singapore's PayNow and Thailand's PromptPay, allowing customers of participating banks to send money between the two countries using a mobile phone number. In June 2021, the central banks of Thailand and Malaysia launched a cross-border QR payment linkage between PromptPay and Malaysia's DuitNow system. == Services == PromptPay's Services have included Encrypted Transactions and Payment between Two Individuals (C2C) Government Infrastructure Payment Tax Returns Individual PromptPay e-Wallet Thai QR Payment Pay Alert e-Donation Cross Border QR Payment

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  • International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools

    International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools

    The International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools was founded in 1992 and is published by World Scientific. It covers research on artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including new architectures, languages and algorithms. Topics include AI in Bioinformatics, Cognitive Informatics, Knowledge-Based/Expert Systems and Object-Oriented Programming for AI. == Abstracting and indexing == The journal is abstracted and indexed in: Inspec Science Citation Index Expanded ISI Alerting Services CompuMath Citation Index Current Contents/Engineering, Computing, and Technology

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  • Open Mind Common Sense

    Open Mind Common Sense

    Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web. It has been active from 1999 to 2016. Since its founding, it has accumulated more than a million English facts from over 15,000 contributors in addition to knowledge bases in other languages. Much of OMCS's software is built on three interconnected representations: the natural language corpus that people interact with directly, a semantic network built from this corpus called ConceptNet, and a matrix-based representation of ConceptNet called AnalogySpace that can infer new knowledge using dimensionality reduction. The knowledge collected by Open Mind Common Sense has enabled research projects at MIT and elsewhere. == History == The project was the brainchild of Marvin Minsky, Push Singh, Catherine Havasi, and others. Development work began in September 1999, and the project opened to the Internet a year later. Havasi described it in her dissertation as "an attempt to ... harness some of the distributed human computing power of the Internet, an idea which was then only in its early stages." The original OMCS was influenced by the website Everything2 and its predecessor, and presents a minimalist interface that is inspired by Google. Push Singh would have become a professor at the MIT Media Lab and lead the Common Sense Computing group in 2007, but committed suicide on February 28, 2006. The project is currently run by the Digital Intuition Group at the MIT Media Lab under Catherine Havasi. == Database and website == There are many different types of knowledge in OMCS. Some statements convey relationships between objects or events, expressed as simple phrases of natural language: some examples include "A coat is used for keeping warm", "The sun is very hot", and "The last thing you do when you cook dinner is wash your dishes". The database also contains information on the emotional content of situations, in such statements as "Spending time with friends causes happiness" and "Getting into a car wreck makes one angry". OMCS contains information on people's desires and goals, both large and small, such as "People want to be respected" and "People want good coffee". Originally, these statements could be entered into the Web site as unconstrained sentences of text, which had to be parsed later. The current version of the Web site collects knowledge only using more structured fill-in-the-blank templates. OMCS also makes use of data collected by the Game With a Purpose "Verbosity". In its native form, the OMCS database is simply a collection of these short sentences that convey some common knowledge. In order to use this knowledge computationally, it has to be transformed into a more structured representation. == ConceptNet == ConceptNet is a semantic network based on the information in the OMCS database. ConceptNet is expressed as a directed graph whose nodes are concepts, and whose edges are assertions of common sense about these concepts. Concepts represent sets of closely related natural language phrases, which could be noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, or clauses. ConceptNet is created from the natural-language assertions in OMCS by matching them against patterns using a shallow parser. Assertions are expressed as relations between two concepts, selected from a limited set of possible relations. The various relations represent common sentence patterns found in the OMCS corpus, and in particular, every "fill-in-the-blanks" template used on the knowledge-collection Web site is associated with a particular relation. The data structures that make up ConceptNet were significantly reorganized in 2007, and published as ConceptNet 3. The Software Agents group currently distributes a database and API for the new version 4.0. In 2010, OMCS co-founder and director Catherine Havasi, with Robyn Speer, Dennis Clark and Jason Alonso, created Luminoso, a text analytics software company that builds on ConceptNet. It uses ConceptNet as its primary lexical resource in order to help businesses make sense of and derive insight from vast amounts of qualitative data, including surveys, product reviews and social media. == Machine learning tools == The information in ConceptNet can be used as a basis for machine learning algorithms. One representation, called AnalogySpace, uses singular value decomposition to generalize and represent patterns in the knowledge in ConceptNet, in a way that can be used in AI applications. Its creators distribute a Python machine learning toolkit called Divisi for performing machine learning based on text corpora, structured knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, and combinations of the two. == Comparison to other projects == Other similar projects include Never-Ending Language Learning, Mindpixel (discontinued), Cyc, Learner, SenticNet, Freebase, YAGO, DBpedia, and Open Mind 1001 Questions, which have explored alternative approaches to collecting knowledge and providing incentive for participation. The Open Mind Common Sense project differs from Cyc because it has focused on representing the common sense knowledge it collected as English sentences, rather than using a formal logical structure. ConceptNet is described by one of its creators, Hugo Liu, as being structured more like WordNet than Cyc, due to its "emphasis on informal conceptual-connectedness over formal linguistic-rigor".

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  • Harvey (software)

    Harvey (software)

    Harvey is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) product developed by the Counsel AI Corporation for the legal industry. The product has been described as a provider of customised large language models (LLMs) for law firms and in-house legal teams. It is named after the lead character of the legal drama Suits, Harvey Specter. == History == Harvey was founded in the summer of 2022 by Winston Weinberg, who was a securities and antitrust litigator at O'Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, who was a research scientist at Google DeepMind and Meta. Pereyra and Weinberg were roommates in Los Angeles. Pereyra was brainstorming startup ideas with his research colleagues. He showed Weinberg OpenAI's GPT-3 text-generating system, and Weinberg realized that it could be used to improve legal workflows. They developed an early chain-of-thought prompt based on GPT-3, focused on California tenant law. They ran the model on 100 legal questions from a public forum and hired three attorneys to evaluate the answers and determine whether they could be sent to clients unchanged. Out of those 100 questions, 86 were approved. After that, Pereyra and Weinberg contacted Sam Altman and Jason Kwon, General Counsel at OpenAI, about their results. Shortly after, on July 4, 2022, they met with OpenAI's C-suite, and OpenAI became their seed investor. OpenAI also gave Pereyra and Weinberg early access to GPT-4. Gordon Moodie, a corporate partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, also joined Harvey in July 2023 as the company's chief product officer. In March 2024, Harvey had 82 employees and stated that it intended to double that figure by the end of 2024. The company has reportedly hired a large number of lawyers, including from White & Case, Latham & Watkins, Skadden, Gunderson Dettmer, Katten Muchin Rosenman, and Paul Weiss. Harvey CEO Weinberg explained that many members of the company's sales team were formerly attorneys at 'Big Law', i.e. large US law firms, and that the sales team's experience was useful in convincing attorneys to trial the company's software. The integration of former 'Big Law' attorneys into product and sales teams has been attributed as a major factor in Harvey's success. In February 2026, Harvey announced its first brand partnership with actor Gabriel Macht, who portrayed the character Harvey Specter in Suits, to launch the company's Instagram page. In May 2026, it was announced the company is sponsoring the Golden State Valkyries and the New York Liberty. == Funding == In November 2022, it was reported that Harvey raised US$5 million in funding led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, together with other investors such as Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, Elad Gil, the founder of Mixer Labs, Sarah Guo, the founder of Conviction, and other angel investors. Harvey raised another $23 million in April 2023 in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Harvey announced in December 2023 that it had raised $80 million in a Series B funding round led by Elad Gil and Kleiner Perkins which valued the company at $715 million. Other investors in the round included Sequoia Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund. In July 2024, Harvey announced that it had raised $100 million in a Series C funding round that valued the company at $1.5 billion. The round was led by venture capital firm GV, and other participants included OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, and SV Angel. In February 2025, Harvey announced it had raised $300 million in a Series D funding round that valued the company at $3 billion. Just months later, in June 2025, Harvey closed a $300 million Series E co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, again with participation from Conviction, Elad Gil, OpenAI, and Sequoia, boosting its valuation to about $5 billion and supporting international growth and expanded legal product offerings. In December 2025, Harvey secured a $160 million Series F round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with continued participation from investors including EQT, WndrCo, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction, and Elad Gil, valuing the legal AI company at roughly $8 billion. In March 2026, Harvey raised $200 million at a valuation of $11 billion, in a round co-led by GIC and Sequoia Capital. == Features == In May 2024, Harvey launched its products on Microsoft Azure and stated that it would offer a Harvey on Azure version of its product going forward. It was also reported that Harvey would begin offering general commercial access to some of its products, such as its case law models, as well as product bundles that included its AI assistant, specialised models, and its Vault feature for running prompts on large document collections. == Applications == Various law firms around the world are customers of Harvey. US law firm Paul Weiss began testing Harvey within the firm in January 2023, and became a client of the company later that year. Gina Lynch, the firm's chief knowledge and innovation officer, explained that the firm was not using hard metrics, such as time saved, to assess productivity gains because the time and effort needed to carefully review the output made efficiency gains difficult to measure. In February 2023, the UK law firm, Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman), announced that it had been trialing Harvey since November 2022 within its Markets Innovation Group. This was reported to be the first known use of a generative AI product within the UK magic circle law firms. According to Allen & Overy, during the trial, 3,500 lawyers had used Harvey for around 40,000 queries in the course of their day to day work. The firm's press release stated that "Whilst the output needs careful review by an A&O lawyer, Harvey can help generate insights, recommendations and predictions based on large volumes of data". David Wakeling, head of the Markets Innovation Group, also cautioned that "You must validate everything coming out of the system. You have to check everything". The Irish law firm, A&L Goodbody, announced in February 2024 that it would be working with Harvey to enhance its services in relation to document analysis, due diligence, litigation, and regulatory compliance. In June 2024, UK law firm Ashurst announced that it would partner with Harvey and roll out its services to its branches worldwide. In September 2024, PwC announced that it would be adopting Harvey to empower its lawyers in Singapore. Singapore law firm WongPartnership also announced that month that it had become the first Southeast Asian law firm to test Harvey's generative AI solutions.

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  • Split screen (computing)

    Split screen (computing)

    Split screen is a display technique in computer graphics that consists of dividing graphics and/or text into non-overlapping adjacent parts, typically as two or four rectangular areas. This allows for the simultaneous presentation of (usually) related graphical and textual information on a computer display. TV sports adopted this presentation methodology in the 1960s for instant replay. Non-dynamic split screens differ from windowing systems in that the latter allowed overlapping and freely movable parts of the screen (the "windows") to present both related and unrelated application data to the user. In contrast, split-screen views are strictly limited to fixed positions. The split screen technique can also be used to run two instances of an application, potentially allowing another user to interact with the second instance. == In operating systems == Split screen modes are used by mobile operating systems to enable computer multitasking similar to the window interface present in desktop operating systems. Android supports split screen view of two apps natively on all devices, while certain devices, such as Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold, support three sumultaneous views. Split screen functionality is not supported on iOS, but a similar feature called Split View is present in iPadOS, first introduced in 2015 with the first generation of iPad Pro. == In video games == The split screen feature is commonly used in non-networked, also known as couch co-op, video games with multiplayer options. In its most easily understood form, a split screen for a multiplayer video game is an audiovisual output device (usually a standard television for video game consoles) where the display has been divided into 2-4 equally sized areas (depending on number of players) so that the players can explore different areas simultaneously without being close to each other. This has historically been remarkably popular on consoles, which until the 2000s did not have access to the Internet or any other network and is less common today with modern support for networked console-to-console multiplayer. In competitive split-screen games, it is customarily considered cheating to look at another player's screen section to gain an advantage. === History === Split screen gaming dates back to at least the 1970s, with games such Drag Race (1977) from Kee Games in the arcades being presented in this format. It has always been a common feature of two or more player home console and computer games too, with notable titles being Kikstart II for 8-bit systems, a number of 16-bit racing games (such as Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge and Road Rash II), and action/strategy games (such as Toejam & Earl and Lemmings), all employing a vertical or horizontal screen split for two player games. Xenophobe is notable as a three-way split screen arcade title, although on home platforms it was reduced to one or two screens. The addition of four controller ports on home consoles also ushered in more four-way split screen games, with Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007 on the Nintendo 64 being two well known examples. In arcades, machines tended to move towards having a whole screen for each player, or multiple connected machines, for multiplayer. On home machines, especially in the first and third person shooter genres, multiplayer is now more common over a network or the internet rather than locally with split screen. Starting from the late 2000s, the presence of split screen multiplayer has largely been declining due to the increasing prevalence of online multiplayer, though TechRadar reported a resurgence of split screen due to support from independent studios and increased interest from the players.

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  • Transaction logic

    Transaction logic

    Transaction Logic is an extension of predicate logic that accounts in a clean and declarative way for the phenomenon of state changes in logic programs and databases. This extension adds connectives specifically designed for combining simple actions into complex transactions and for providing control over their execution. The logic has a natural model theory and a sound and complete proof theory. Transaction Logic has a Horn clause subset, which has a procedural as well as a declarative semantics. The important features of the logic include hypothetical and committed updates, dynamic constraints on transaction execution, non-determinism, and bulk updates. In this way, Transaction Logic is able to declaratively capture a number of non-logical phenomena, including procedural knowledge in artificial intelligence, active databases, and methods with side effects in object databases. Transaction Logic was originally proposed in 1993 by Anthony Bonner and Michael Kifer and later described in more detail in An Overview of Transaction Logic and Logic Programming for Database Transactions. The most comprehensive description appears in Bonner & Kifer's technical report from 1995. In later years, Transaction Logic was extended in various ways, including concurrency, defeasible reasoning, partially defined actions, and other features. In 2013, the original paper on Transaction Logic has won the 20-year Test of Time Award of the Association for Logic Programming as the most influential paper from the proceedings of ICLP 1993 conference in the preceding 20 years. == Examples == === Graph coloring === Here tinsert denotes the elementary update operation of transactional insert. The connective ⊗ is called serial conjunction. === Pyramid stacking === The elementary update tdelete represents the transactional delete operation. === Hypothetical execution === Here <> is the modal operator of possibility: If both action1 and action2 are possible, execute action1. Otherwise, if only action2 is possible, then execute it. === Dining philosophers === Here | is the logical connective of parallel conjunction of Concurrent Transaction Logic. == Implementations == A number of implementations of Transaction Logic exist: The original implementation. An implementation of Concurrent Transaction Logic. Transaction Logic enhanced with tabling. An implementation of Transaction Logic has also been incorporated as part of the Flora-2 knowledge representation and reasoning system. All these implementations are open source.

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  • Minimum information standard

    Minimum information standard

    Minimum information standards are sets of guidelines and formats for reporting data derived by specific high-throughput methods. Their purpose is to ensure the data generated by these methods can be easily verified, analysed and interpreted by the wider scientific community. Ultimately, they facilitate the transfer of data from journal articles (unstructured data) into databases (structured data) in a form that enables data to be mined across multiple data sets. Minimal information standards are available for a vast variety of experiment types including microarray (MIAME), RNAseq (MINSEQE), metabolomics (MSI) and proteomics (MIAPE). Minimum information standards typically have two parts. Firstly, there is a set of reporting requirements – typically presented as a table or a checklist. Secondly, there is a data format. Information about an experiment needs to be converted into the appropriate data format for it to be submitted to the relevant database. In the case of MIAME, the data format is provided in spreadsheet format (MAGE-TAB). Some of the communities that maintain minimum information standards also provide tools to help experimental researchers to annotate their data. == MI Standards == The individual minimum information standards are brought by the communities of cross-disciplinary specialists focused on the problematic of the specific method used in experimental biology. The standards then provide specifications what information about the experiments (metadata) is crucial and important to be reported together with the resultant data to make it comprehensive. The need for this standardization is largely driven by the development of high-throughput experimental methods that provide tremendous amounts of data. The development of minimum information standards of different methods is since 2008 being harmonized by "Minimum Information about a Biomedical or Biological Investigation" (MIBBI) project. === MIAPPE, Minimum Information About a Plant Phenotyping Experiment === MIAPPE is an open, community driven project to harmonize data from plant phenotyping experiments. MIAPPE comprises both a conceptual checklist of metadata required to adequately describe a plant phenotyping experiment. === MIQE, Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments === Published in 2009 these guidelines for the basis of requirements by many journals when submitting QPCR data, sadly they are not adhered to enough. === MIAME, gene expression microarray === Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) describes the Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment that is needed to enable the interpretation of the results of the experiment unambiguously and potentially to reproduce the experiment and is aimed at facilitating the dissemination of data from microarray experiments. It was published by the FGED Society in 2001 and was the first published minimum information standard for high-throughput experiments in the life sciences. MIAME contains a number of extensions to cover specific biological domains, including MIAME-env, MIAME-nut and MIAME-tox, covering environmental genomics, nutritional genomics and toxogenomics, respectively. === MINI: Minimum Information about a Neuroscience Investigation === ==== MINI: Electrophysiology ==== Electrophysiology is a technology used to study the electrical properties of biological cells and tissues. Electrophysiology typically involves the measurements of voltage change or electric current flow on a wide variety of scales from single ion channel proteins to whole tissues. This document is a single module, as part of the Minimum Information about a Neuroscience investigation (MINI) family of reporting guideline documents, produced by community consultation and continually available for public comment. A MINI module represents the minimum information that should be reported about a dataset to facilitate computational access and analysis to allow a reader to interpret and critically evaluate the processes performed and the conclusions reached, and to support their experimental corroboration. In practice a MINI module comprises a checklist of information that should be provided (for example about the protocols employed) when a data set is described for publication. The full specification of the MINI module can be found here. === MIARE, RNAi experiment === Minimum Information About an RNAi Experiment (MIARE) is a data reporting guideline which describes the minimum information that should be reported about an RNAi experiment to enable the unambiguous interpretation and reproduction of the results. === MIACA, cell based assay === Advances in genomics and functional genomics have enabled large-scale analyses of gene and protein function by means of high-throughput cell biological analyses. Thereby, cells in culture can be perturbed in vitro and the induced effects recorded and analyzed. Perturbations can be triggered in several ways, for instance with molecules (siRNAs, expression constructs, small chemical compounds, ligands for receptors, etc.), through environmental stresses (such as temperature shift, serum starvation, oxygen deprivation, etc.), or combinations thereof. The cellular responses to such perturbations are analyzed in order to identify molecular events in the biological processes addressed and understand biological principles. We propose the Minimum Information About a Cellular Assay (MIACA) for reporting a cellular assay, and CA-OM, the modular cellular assay object model, to facilitate exchange of data and accompanying information, and to compare and integrate data that originate from different, albeit complementary approaches, and to elucidate higher order principles. Documents describing MIACA are available and provide further information as well as the checklist of terms that should be reported. === MIAPE, proteomic experiments === The Minimum Information About a Proteomic Experiment documents describe information which should be given along with a proteomic experiment. The parent document describes the processes and principles underpinning the development of a series of domain specific documents which now cover all aspects of a MS-based proteomics workflow. === MIMIx, molecular interactions === This document has been developed and maintained by the Molecular Interaction worktrack of the HUPO-PSI (www.psidev.info) and describes the Minimum Information about a Molecular Interaction experiment. === MIAPAR, protein affinity reagents === The Minimum Information About a Protein Affinity Reagent has been developed and maintained by the Molecular Interaction worktrack of the HUPO-PSI (www.psidev.info)in conjunction with the HUPO Antibody Initiative and a European consortium of binder producers and seeks to encourage users to improve their description of binding reagents, such as antibodies, used in the process of protein identification. === MIABE, bioactive entities === The Minimum Information About a Bioactive Entity was produced by representatives from both large pharma and academia who are looking to improve the description of usually small molecules which bind to, and potentially modulate the activity of, specific targets in a living organism. This document encompasses drug-like molecules as well as herbicides, pesticides and food additives. It is primarily maintained through the EMBL-EBI Industry program (www.ebi.ac.uk/industry). === MIGS/MIMS, genome/metagenome sequences === This specification is being developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium === MIFlowCyt, flow cytometry === === Minimum Information about a Flow Cytometry Experiment === The Minimum Information about a Flow Cytometry Experiment (MIFlowCyt) is a standard related to flow cytometry which establishes criteria to record information on experimental overview, samples, instrumentation and data analysis. It promotes consistent annotation of clinical, biological and technical issues surrounding a flow cytometry experiment. === MINDR, dual gene expression reporters === Requires (1) reporting absolute values of reporter readouts, (2) list of positive and negative controls, and (3) sequences of all reporter constructs. === MISFISHIE, In Situ Hybridization and Immunohistochemistry Experiments === === MIAPA, Phylogenetic Analysis === Criteria for Minimum Information About a Phylogenetic Analysis were described in 2006. === MIRAGE, Glycomics === The MIRAGE project is supported and coordinated by the Beilstein-Institut to establish guidelines for data handling and processing in glycomics research [1] === MIAO, ORF === === MIAMET, METabolomics experiment === === MIAFGE, Functional Genomics Experiment === === MIRIAM, Minimum Information Required in the Annotation of Models === The Minimal Information Required In the Annotation of Models (MIRIAM), is a set of rules for the curation and annotation of quantitative models of biological systems. === MIASE, Minimum Information About a Simulation Experiment =

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