AI Generator Remover

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SEMAT

SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) is an initiative to reshape software engineering such that software engineering qualifies as a rigorous discipline. The initiative was launched in December 2009 by Ivar Jacobson, Bertrand Meyer, and Richard Soley with a call for action statement and a vision statement. The initiative was envisioned as a multi-year effort for bridging the gap between the developer community and the academic community and for creating a community giving value to the whole software community. The work is now structured in four different but strongly related areas: Practice, Education, Theory, and Community. The Practice area primarily addresses practices. The Education area is concerned with all issues related to training for both the developers and the academics including students. The Theory area is primarily addressing the search for a General Theory in Software Engineering. Finally, the Community area works with setting up legal entities, creating websites and community growth. It was expected that the Practice area, the Education area and the Theory area would at some point in time integrate in a way of value to all of them: the Practice area would be a "customer" of the Theory area, and direct the research to useful results for the developer community. The Theory area would give a solid and practical platform for the Practice area. And, the Education area would communicate the results in proper ways. == Practice area == The first step was here to develop a common ground or a kernel including the essence of software engineering – things we always have, always do, always produce when developing software. The second step was envisioned to add value on top of this kernel in the form of a library of practices to be composed to become specific methods, specific for all kinds of reasons such as the preferences of the team using it, kind of software being built, etc. The first step is as of this writing just about to be concluded. The results are a kernel including universal elements for software development – called the Essence Kernel, and a language – called the Essence Language - to describe these elements (and elements built on top of the kernel (practices, methods, and more). Essence, including both the kernel and language, has been published as an OMG standard in beta status in July 2013 and is expected to become a formally adopted standard in early 2014. The second step has just started, and the Practice area will be divided into a number of separate but interconnected tracks: the practice (library track), the tool track are so far identified and work has started or is about to get started. The practice track is currently working on a Users Guide. == Education area == The area focuses on leveraging the work of SEMAT in software engineering education, both within academia and industry. It promotes global education based on a common ground called Essence. The area's target groups are instructors such as university professors and industrial coaches as well as their students and learning practitioners. The goal of the area is to create educational courses and course materials that are internationally viable, identify pedagogical approaches that are appropriate and effective for specific target groups and disseminate experience and lessons learned. The area includes members from a number of universities and institutes worldwide. Most members have already been involved in leveraging aspects of SEMAT in the context of their software engineering courses. They are gathering their resources and starting a common venture towards defining a new generation of SEMAT-powered software engineering curricula. As of 2018, some studies of utilizing Essence in educational settings exist. One example of the use of Essence in university education was a software engineering course carried out in Norwegian University of Science and Technology. A study was conducted by introducing Essence into a project-based software engineering course, with the aim of understanding what difficulties the students faced in using Essence, and whether they considered it to have been useful. The results indicated that Essence could also be useful for novice software engineers by (1) encouraging them to look up and study new practices and methods in order to create their own, (2) encouraging them to adjust their way-of-working reflectively and in a situation-specific manner, (3) helping them structure their way of working. The findings of another study introducing students to Essence through a digital game supported these findings: the students felt that Essence will be useful to them in future, real-world projects, and that they wish to utilize it in them. == Theory area == An important part of SEMAT is that a general theory of software engineering is planned to emerge with significant benefits. A series of workshops held under the title SEMAT Workshop on a General Theory of Software Engineering (GTSE) are a key component in awareness building around general theories. In addition to community awareness building, SEMAT also aims to contribute with a specific general theory of software engineering. This theory should be solidly based on the SEMAT Essence language and kernel, and should support software engineering practitioners' goal-oriented decision making. As argued elsewhere, such support is predicated on the predictive capabilities of the theory. Thus, the SEMAT Essence should be augmented to allow the prediction of critical software engineering phenomena. The GTSE workshop series assists in the development of the SEMAT general software engineering theory by engaging a larger community in the search for, development of, and evaluation of promising theories, which may be used as a base for the SEMAT theory. == Organizational structure == === Main organization === SEMAT is chaired by Sumeet S. Malhotra of Tata Consultancy Services. The CEO of the organization is Ste Nadin of Fujitsu. The Executive Management Committee of SEMAT are Ivar Jacobson, Ste Nadin, Sumeet S. Malhotra, Paul E. McMahon, Michael Goedicke and Cecile Peraire. === Japan Chapter === Japan Chapter was established in April 2013, and it has more than 250 members as of November 2013. Member activities include carrying out seminars about SEMAT, considering utilization of SEMAT Essence for integrating different requirements engineering techniques and body of knowledges (BoKs), and translating articles into Japanese. === Korea Chapter === The chapter was inaugurated with about 50 members in October 2013. Member activities include: 2e Consulting started rewriting their IT service engagement methods using the Essence kernel, and uEngine Solutions started developing a tool to orchestrate Essence-kernel based practices into a project method. Korean government supported KAIST to conduct research in Essence. === Latin American Chapter === Semat Latin American Chapter was created in August 2011 in Medellin (Colombia) by Ivar Jacobson during the Latin American Software Engineering Symposium. This Chapter has 9 Executive Committee members from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, chaired by Dr. Carlos Zapata from Colombia. More than 80 people signed the initial declaration of the Chapter and nowadays the Chapter members are in charge of disseminating the Semat ideas in all Latin America. Chapter members have participated in various Latin American conferences, including the Latin American Conference on Informatics (CLEI), the Ibero American Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Journeys (JIISIC), the Colombian Computing Conference (CCC), and the Chilean Computing Meeting (ECC). The Chapter contributed in the submission sent in response to the OMG call for proposals and currently studies didactic strategies for teaching the Semat kernel by games, theoretical studies about some kernel elements, and practical representations of several software development and quality methods by using the Semat kernel. Some of the members also translated the Essence book and some other Semat materials and papers into Spanish. === Russia Chapter === Russian Chapter has about 20 members. A few universities have incorporated SEMAT in their training courses , including Moscow State University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics, and Informatics. The chapter and some commercial companies are carrying out seminars about SEMAT. INCOSE Russian Chapter is working on an extension of SEMAT to systems engineering. EC-leasing is working on an extension of the Kernel for Software Life Cycle. Russian Chapter attended in two conferences: Actual Problems of System and Software Engineering and SECR with SEMAT section and articles. Translation of the Essence book into Russian is in progress. == Practical Applications of SEMAT == Ideas developed by the SEMAT community have been applied by both industry and ac
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How to Choose an AI Humanizer

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

Dissociated press is a parody generator (a computer program that generates nonsensical text). The generated text is based on another text using the Markov chain technique. The name is a play on "Associated Press" and the psychological term dissociation (although word salad is more typical of conditions like aphasia and schizophrenia – which is, however, frequently confused with dissociative identity disorder by laypeople). An implementation of the algorithm is available in Emacs. Another implementation is available as a Perl module in CPAN, Games::Dissociate. == The algorithm == The algorithm starts by printing a number of consecutive words (or letters) from the source text. Then it searches the source text for an occurrence of the few last words or letters printed out so far. If multiple occurrences are found, it picks a random one, and proceeds with printing the text following the chosen occurrence. After a predetermined length of text is printed out, the search procedure is repeated for the newly printed ending. Considering that words and phrases tend to appear in specific grammatical contexts, the resulting text usually seems correct grammatically, and if the source text is uniform in style, the result appears to be of similar style and subject, and takes some effort on the reader's side to recognize as not genuine. Still, the randomness of the assembly process deprives it of any logical flow - the loosely related parts are connected in a nonsensical way, creating a humorously abstract, random result. == Examples == Here is a short example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to the Jargon File: wart: n. A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to be not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to the same source: window sysIWYG: n. A bit was named aften /bee´t@/ prefer to use the other guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speech makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem! == History == The dissociated press algorithm is described in HAKMEM (1972) Item #176. The name "dissociated press" is first known to have been associated with the Emacs implementation. Brian Hayes discussed a Travesty algorithm in Scientific American in November 1983. The article provided a garbled William Faulkner passage: When he got on the table, he come in. He never come out of my own pocket as a measure of protecting the company against riot and bloodshed. And when he said. "You tell me a bus ticket, let alone write out no case histories. Then the law come back with a knife!" Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke of Johns Hopkins University discussed their frequency table-based Travesty generator for microcomputers in BYTE in November 1984. The article included the Turbo Pascal source for two versions of the generator, one using Hayes' algorithm and another using Claude Shannon's Hellbat algorithm. Murray Lesser offered a compiled BASIC version in the magazine in July 1985, in September 1985 Peter Wayner offered a version that used tree data structures instead of frequency tables, and in December 1985 Neil J. Rubenking offered a version written in Turbo Pascal that stored frequency information in a B-tree.
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Indic OCR

Indic OCR refers to the process of converting text images written in Indic scripts into e-text using Optical character recognition (OCR) techniques. Broadly, it can also refer to the OCR systems of Brahmic scripts for languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia, not just the scripts of the Indian subcontinent, which are all written in an abugida-based writing system. OCR for Latin characters is still not 100% accurate but a relatively high degree of accuracy in conversion has been able to be achieved. Such accuracy has not yet been able to be achieved for Indic scripts using OCR. This is due in part to the writing systems of Indic languages as well as a lack of standard representation, encoding, and support among operating systems and keyboards. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Technology Development for Indian Languages, the premier R&D organisation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (also known as MeitY) of India have carried out many projects relating to OCR. Their projects include OCR for Malayalam, Odia, Punjabi, Telugu and Devanagari script. == Properties of Indian writing systems == There are 22 officially recognised languages in India. Of these, Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi are the most widely spoken Indo-Aryan languages and are also the fourth, seventh and tenth most widely spoken languages in the world respectively. Two or more languages can be written with same script. For example, Devanagari is used to write Hindi, Marathi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Bhojpuri and others, while Eastern Nagari is used to write Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri and others. Apart from basic characters as consonants and vowels, most Indic languages combine 2 or more basic characters to form compound characters. The shape of a compound character is more complex than the constituent basic characters. Some Indo-Aryan languages (including Hindi and Punjabi) have a horizontal line over the characters, while other languages (including Gujarati) and Dravidian languages (Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu) do not. These are some of the main challenges for creating a single OCR for all Indic languages. Indic OCR also generally includes support for recently invented scripts in India like Ol Chiki, Warang Citi, Mundari Bani, etc. which are mainly created for writing Munda languages of Austroasiatic family. The concept of upper/lower case is absent in Indic scripts. Apart from Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Thaana, all other Indic languages are written from left to right. == Examples == SanskritOCR - OCR software for Sanskrit, Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages based on the Devanagari script. Sanskrit OCR is developed by a Sanskrit scholar from Germany - Dr. Oliver Hellwig of Department for Languages and Cultures of Southern Asia, Freie Universität Berlin. The official website is in German. The interface of earlier versions of the software was also in German, but later versions have an English interface too. E-aksharayan - Optical character recognition engine for Indian languages Chitrankan - This technology was developed by ISI, Kolkata, and transferred to C-DAC. It processes printed Hindi text from a scanner or from an image. Indic OCR models for Tesseract (software) == OCR in use == OCR has been used for Wikisource and other projects.
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ConEmu

ConEmu (short for Console emulator) is a free and open-source tabbed terminal emulator for Windows. ConEmu presents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications as one customizable GUI window with tabs and a status bar. It also provides emulation for ANSI escape codes for color, bypassing the capabilities of the standard Windows Console Host to provide 256 and 24-bit color in Windows. The program has a large range of customization, including custom color palettes for the standard 16 colors, hotkeys, transparency, an auto-hideable mode (similar to the way Quake originally displayed its developer console). Initially, the program was created as a companion to Far Manager, bringing some features common for graphical file managers to this console application (thumbnails and tiles, drag and drop with other windows, true color interface, and others). As of 2012, ConEmu could be used with any other Win32 console application or simple GUI tool (such as Notepad, PuTTY or DOSBox). ConEmu doesn't provide any shell itself, but rather allows using any other shell. It does provide a limited macro language, to control the hosted applications startup.
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Julia Hirschberg

Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She received her first PhD in history from the University of Michigan and the second from the University of Pennsylvania in computer science doing research in Natural Language Processing. She worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Labs from 1985 to 2002 and from 2002 at Columbia University where she is currently the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science. == Biography == Julia Linn Bell Hirschberg received her first Ph.D. degree in history (16th-century Mexico) from University of Michigan in 1976. She served on the History faculty of Smith College from 1974 to 1982. She subsequently shifted to Computer Science studies, receiving her M.S. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1985. Upon graduation from University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Hirschberg joined AT&T Bell Labs as a Member of Technical staff in the Linguistics Research Department, where she worked on improving prosody assignment for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) in the Bell Labs TTS system. She was promoted to Department Head in 1994 when she created a new Human Computer Interface Research Lab. She and her department remained at Bell Labs until 1996 when they moved to AT&T Labs Research as part of a corporate reorganization. In 2002, she joined the Columbia University faculty as a professor in the Department of Computer Science. She served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012 to 2018. She still leads classes at Columbia in speech and natural language research and supervises PhD students and a large number of research project students. == Research == Hirschberg's research has included prosody, discourse structure, conversational implicature, text-to-speech synthesis, speech summarization, spoken dialogue systems, emotional speech, deceptive speech, charismatic speech, entrainment, empathetic speech and code-switching. Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research. She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in TTS systems. With Janet Pierrehumbert, she developed a theoretical model of intonational meaning. She was a leader in the development of the ToBI conventions for intonational description, which have been extended to numerous languages and which today are the most widely used standard for intonational annotation. Hirschberg has been a pioneer together with Gregory Ward in much experimental work on intonational sources of language meaning and how these interact with pragmatic phenomena, particularly on the meaning of accent (intonational prominent) items and the meaning of intonational contours. She also has innovated in numerous other areas involving prosody and meaning, including the role of grammatical function and surface position in pitch accent location, the use of prosody in disambiguating cue phrases (discourse markers) with Diane Litman, the role of prosody in disambiguation in English, Italian, and Spanish with Cinzia Avesani and Pilar Prieto, and the automatic identification of speech recognition errors using prosodic information, At AT&T Labs she worked with Fernando Pereira, Steve Whittaker, and others on speech search and developing new interfaces for speech navigation. At Columbia, she and her students have continued and extended research on spoken dialogue systems (automatically detecting speech recognition errors and inappropriate system queries, modeling turn-taking behavior, dialogue entrainment, modeling and generating clarification dialogues); on the automatic classification of trust, charisma, deception and emotion from speech; on speech summarization; prosody translation, hedging behavior in text and speech, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech search in low resource languages. She also holds several patents in TTS and in speech search. Corpora she and collaborators have collected include the Boston Directions Corpus, the Columbia SRI Colorado Deception Corpus, and the Columbia Games Corpus. She has served on numerous technical boards and editorial committees. She has served as a member of the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Board of Directors and as co-chair of CRA-W. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. == Awards == Hirschberg's notable honors and awards include: Elected as a member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence Academy of Sciences and recipient of the NAAI Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award, 2025 Elected as a Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2024. 2020 ISCA Special Service Medal Honorary Doctorate (eredoctoraat) from Tilburg University, Netherlands, 2018. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. IEEE Fellow, 2017 National Academy of Engineering, 2017 ACM Fellow in 2015 Elected member, American Philosophical Society, 2014. Honorary member, Association for Laboratory Phonology, 2014. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Founding) Fellow, 2011. International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement, 2011. IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, 2011. Honorary Doctorate (Hedersdoktorer), KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, 2007. AAAI Fellow, 1994. == Publications == A social history of Puebla de Los Ángeles, 1531-60, 1976 Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases, 1991 Prosody and conversation, 1998 Most recent publications and other information, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/speech/.
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Diane Litman

Diane Litman is an American professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. She also jointly holds the positions of senior scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center and faculty with the Intelligent Systems department. Litman is noted for her work in the areas of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and user modeling. == Education == Litman did her undergraduate studies at the College of William and Mary and her master's and PhD degrees at the University of Rochester. == Career == Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was an assistant professor at Columbia University. She additionally held the position of a research scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department Laboratory at AT&T Labs. Litman has held the position of Chair of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics two times, elected twice for the position, whose tenure lasts four years. She is also a distinguished member of the executive committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and a member of the editorial boards of Computational Linguistics and User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. She has also held the position of Leverhulme Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Litman was the keynote speaker at the Speech and Language Technology in Education 2013 symposium, the 2006 SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, and at the 2008 Symposium of the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. She also sits on the board of the several interest groups, including the International Speech Communication Association's Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology in Education. Litman has served as chair, organizer, and a senior member of numerous committees of peer-reviewed scientific journals. == Awards and recognition == She has also co-authored numerous award-winning papers and was awarded senior member status by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2011, an award designed to honor those who have "achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence."
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Lex (software)

Lex is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers ("scanners" or "lexers"). It is commonly used with the yacc parser generator and is the standard lexical analyzer generator on many Unix and Unix-like systems. An equivalent tool is specified as part of the POSIX standard. Lex reads an input stream specifying the lexical analyzer and writes source code which implements the lexical analyzer in the C programming language. In addition to C, some old versions of Lex could generate a lexer in Ratfor. == History == Lex was originally written by Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt and described in 1975. In the following years, Lex became the standard lexical analyzer generator on many Unix and Unix-like systems. In 1983, Lex was one of several UNIX tools available for Charles River Data Systems' UNOS operating system under the Bell Laboratories license. Although originally distributed as proprietary software, some versions of Lex are now open-source. Open-source versions of Lex, based on the original proprietary code, are now distributed with open-source operating systems such as OpenSolaris and Plan 9 from Bell Labs. One popular open-source version of Lex, called flex, or the "fast lexical analyzer", is not derived from proprietary coding. == Structure of a Lex file == The structure of a Lex file is intentionally similar to that of a yacc file: files are divided into three sections, separated by lines that contain only two percent signs, as follows: The definitions section defines macros and imports header files written in C. It is also possible to write any C code here, which will be copied verbatim into the generated source file. The rules section associates regular expression patterns with C statements. When the lexer sees text in the input matching a given pattern, it will execute the associated C code. The C code section contains C statements and functions that are copied verbatim to the generated source file. These statements presumably contain code called by the rules in the rules section. In large programs it is more convenient to place this code in a separate file linked in at compile time. == Example of a Lex file == The following is an example Lex file for the flex version of Lex. It recognizes strings of numbers (positive integers) in the input, and simply prints them out. If this input is given to flex, it will be converted into a C file, lex.yy.c. This can be compiled into an executable which matches and outputs strings of integers. For example, given the input: abc123z.!&2gj6 the program will print: Saw an integer: 123 Saw an integer: 2 Saw an integer: 6 == Using Lex with other programming tools == === Using Lex with parser generators === Lex, as with other lexical analyzers, limits rules to those which can be described by regular expressions. Due to this, Lex can be implemented by a finite-state automata as shown by the Chomsky hierarchy of languages. To recognize more complex languages, Lex is often used with parser generators such as Yacc or Bison. Parser generators use a formal grammar to parse an input stream. It is typically preferable to have a parser, one generated by Yacc for instance, accept a stream of tokens (a "token-stream") as input, rather than having to process a stream of characters (a "character-stream") directly. Lex is often used to produce such a token-stream. Scannerless parsing refers to parsing the input character-stream directly, without a distinct lexer. === Lex and make === make is a utility that can be used to maintain programs involving Lex. Make assumes that a file that has an extension of .l is a Lex source file. The make internal macro LFLAGS can be used to specify Lex options to be invoked automatically by make.
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SIP (software)

SIP is an open source software tool used to connect computer programs or libraries written in C or C++ with the scripting language Python. It is an alternative to SWIG. SIP was originally developed in 1998 for PyQt — the Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit — but is suitable for generating bindings for any C or C++ library. == Concept == SIP takes a set of specification (.sip) files describing the API and generates the required C++ code. This is then compiled to produce the Python extension modules. A .sip file is essentially the class header file with some things removed (because SIP does not include a full C++ parser) and some things added (because C++ does not always provide enough information about how the API works). For PyQt v4 I use an internal tool (written using PyQt of course) called metasip. This is sort of an IDE for SIP. It uses GCC-XML to parse the latest header files and saves the relevant data, as XML, in a metasip project. metasip then does the equivalent of a diff against the previous version of the API and flags up any changes that need to be looked at. Those changes are then made through the GUI and ticked off the TODO list. Generating the .sip files is just a button click. In my subversion repository, PyQt v4 is basically just a 20M XML file. Updating PyQt v4 for a minor release of Qt v4 is about half an hours work. In terms of how the generated code works then I don't think it's very different from how any other bindings generator works. Python has a very good C API for writing extension modules - it's one of the reasons why so many 3rd party tools have Python bindings. For every C++ class, the SIP generated code creates a corresponding Python class implemented in C. == Notable applications that use SIP == PyQt, a python port of the application framework and widget toolkit Qt QGIS, a free and open-source cross-platform desktop geographic information system (GIS) QtiPlot, a computer program to analyze and visualize scientific data calibre (software), a free and open-source cross-platform e-book manager Veusz, a free and open-source cross-platform program to visualize scientific data
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Barney Pell

Barney Pell (born March 18, 1968) is an American entrepreneur, angel investor and computer scientist. He was co-founder and CEO of Powerset, a pioneering natural language search startup, search strategist and architect for Microsoft's Bing search engine, a pioneer in the field of general game playing in artificial intelligence, and the architect of the first intelligent agent to fly onboard and control a spacecraft. He was co-founder, Vice Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Moon Express; co-founder and chairman of LocoMobi; and Associate Founder of Singularity University. == Career == === Education === Pell received his Bachelor of Science degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University in 1989, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a National Merit Scholar. Pell earned a PhD in computer science from Cambridge University in 1993, supervised by Stephen Pulman, where he was a Marshall Scholar. === Research === Pell's research is focused on basic problems in the study of intelligence, computer game playing, machine learning, natural language processing, autonomous robotics, and web search. Barney Pell has published over 30 technical papers on topics related to information retrieval, knowledge management, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and scheduling systems. In computer game playing and machine learning, he was a pioneer in the field of General Game Playing, and created programs to generate the rules of chess-like games and programs to play individual games directly from the rules without human assistance. He also did early work on machine learning in the game of Go and on an architecture for pragmatic reasoning for bidding in the game of Bridge. In natural language processing, he was a scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, where he worked on the Core Language Engine. Barney Pell was the Technical Area Manager of the Collaborative and Assistant Systems area within the Computational Sciences Division (now the Intelligent Systems Division) at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw a staff of 80 scientists working on information retrieval, search, knowledge management, machine learning, semantic technology, human centered systems, collaboration technology, adaptive user interfaces, human robot interaction, and other areas of artificial intelligence. From 1993 to 1998, Barney Pell worked as a Principal Investigator and Senior Computer Scientist at NASA Ames, where he conducted advanced research and development of autonomous control software for NASA's deep space missions. He was the Architect for the Deep Space One Remote Agent Experiment and the Project Lead for the Executive component of the Remote Agent Experiment, the first intelligent agent to fly onboard and control a spacecraft. === Business === Pell is an entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded several business ventures, including Powerset, Moon Express, and LocoMobi. He was the founder and CEO of Powerset, a San Francisco startup company that built a search engine based on natural language processing technology originally developed at XEROX PARC. On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords. On July 1, 2008, Microsoft signed an agreement to acquire Powerset for an estimated $100 million. Powerset became a part of Microsoft's search engine, Bing. From 2008 until August 2011, Pell served as Partner, Search Strategist, and Evangelist for Microsoft's search engine, Bing and as Head of Bing's Local and Mobile Search teams. Prior to joining Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Pell is also a founder of Moon Express, Inc., a U.S. company awarded a $10M commercial lunar contract by NASA and a competitor in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. Pell was also co-founder and chairman of LocoMobi, Inc., a U.S. company developing mobile, software and hardware technology solutions for the parking industry. LocoMobi was winner of the Tie50 Award in 2014. Pell is also an associate founder of Singularity University and a Machine Learning Fellow at the Creative Destruction Lab at the Rotman School of Management From 1998 to 2000, Pell served as chief strategist and vice president of business development at StockMaster.com (acquired by Red Herring in March, 2000). From 2000 to 2002, Pell was Chief Strategist and Vice President of Business Development for Whizbang Labs. Pell has been an angel investor and advisor to numerous startup companies, including Pulse.io (acquired by Google), Aardvark (acquired by Google), Appjet (acquired by Google), Jibe Mobile (acquired by Google), Movity (acquired by Trulia), QuestBridge, BrandYourself, CrowdFlower (acquired by Appen), and LinkedIn. === Views and predictions === Pell has expressed views and predictions regarding technological advancements in coming years. He believes that humans will soon have "brain-machine interfaces that will let people interact with each other as if they had 'hangouts' in their mind." Pell predicts these interfaces to become available within 20 to 30 years. Pell also predicts advancements in bodily augmentation, such as "even-better-than-human prosthetics and high-quality tissue engineering within 10 years." Pell believes that with advancements in space exploration technology the moon will soon be a commercially viable resource for material such as platinum and water. == Awards and recognition == In 1986, Pell was awarded a National Merit Scholarship. In 1989, Pell was awarded a Marshall Scholarship. In 1989, Pell was elected Phi Beta Kappa. In 1997, Pell was part of the team award a NASA Software of the Year Award for the Deep Space 1 Remote Agent.
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Best AI Voice Assistants in 2026

Trying to pick the best AI voice assistant? An AI voice assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI voice assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.
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Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri

Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri (B. B. Chauduri) is a senior computer scientist and an emeritus professor of Techno India University in West Bengal, India. He is also adjuncted to Indian Statistical Institute, where he was a professor for about three decades. He was the founding Head of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit (which was established in 1994) of ISI. Moreover, he was a J.C. Bose Fellow and Indian National Academy of Engineering Distinguished Professor at ISI. He was the vice-president of the Society for Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR). His primary research contributes to the fields of computer vision, image processing and pattern recognition. He is a pioneer of "Indian language script OCR". == Education == Chaudhuri received his BSc (Hons.), BTech and MTech degrees from University of Calcutta, India in 1969, 1972 and 1974, respectively and PhD Degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1980. He did his post-doc work during 1981-1982 from Queen's University, U.K, through Leverhulme Overseas Fellowship. He also worked as a visiting faculty at Tech University, Hannover during 1986-87 as well as at GSF Institute of Radiation Protection (now Leibnitz Institute), Munich in 1990 and 1992. == Awards and recognition == Chaudhuri has been elected as a Life Fellow of IEEE "for contributions to pattern recognition, especially Indian language script OCR, document processing and natural language processing". He has become a Fellow of International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) "for contributions to character recognition and speech synthesis in Indian language". He is also Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), National Academy of Sciences (NASI), and Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering (IETE). In 2011, Chaudhuri received the Om Prakash Bhasin Award for his contribution in the field of electronics and information technology. Chaudhuri's interview on some of his works has been reported in Indian newspaper as well. He is within world's top 2% scientists and top-10 Indian AI scientists according to a study conducted by Stanford University. He has also been featured as top-10 machine learning researcher from India.
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Game Jolt

Game Jolt is a social community platform for video games, gamers and content creators. Founded by Yaprak and David DeCarmine, it is available on iOS, Android, and on the web and as a desktop app for Windows and Linux. Users share interactive content through a variety of formats including images, videos, live streams, chat rooms, and virtual events. == Features == === Crowd streaming === In 2021 Game Jolt revealed their own live streaming feature called Firesides. Firesides allowed multiple users to simultaneously livestream together with nearly no delay. The feature launched with a virtual concert showcasing its ability to accommodate multiple streamers. On October 16, 2023, Firesides were removed from Game Jolt. === Mobile app === Game Jolt Social by Game Jolt Inc. launched on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in March 2022. "It's clear to us that Gen Z is tired of generic social media and they want a place specifically for gaming that supports all types of content they're creating–art, videos, thoughts, and livestreams all in one place." said Game Jolt founder and CEO Yaprak DeCarmine, in a statement to VentureBeat. === Game API === The Game Jolt Application Programming Interface (usually known as the Game Jolt Game API) allows any developer using a game development platform that supports HTTP operations and MD5 or SHA-1. Game Jolt advertises that the API can: Create multiple "scoreboards" which collect high scores from players made publicly available on the game's profile and give user accounts EXP Award player's trophies which give user accounts EXP Store game data on Game Jolt's data servers Log whether a user is currently playing a game they're logged into via the GJAPI == Game jams and competitions == Game Jolt regularly hosts game jams where participants are encouraged to develop games for a chance to win prizes. They hosted their first game jam in 2009, Shocking Contest. In November 2014, Game Jolt announced the "Indies vs PewDiePie" game jam, partnering with the popular YouTuber Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg. Developers were given a weekend (21–24 November) to create a game with the theme of "fun to play, fun to watch" to suit the Let's Plays entertainment style. Users could rate entries afterwards until December 1 when the scores were counted up. The prize to the top 10 rated games was Felix playing the games on his channel as a means of promotion for the developers, although later he played other entries. One of the participants of the jam, now known as Outerminds Inc. was discovered and hired by PewDiePie to develop his mobile game, Legend of the Brofist. Game Jolt partnered with Felix, Sean "Jacksepticeye" McLoughlin and Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach to host "Indies vs Gamers" in July 2015. The requirements for entries were arcade games using the Game Jolt Game API highscore tables, to be made between the July 17–20 and the top 5 games were played on the partner's YouTube channels. Following the "Indies vs PewDiePie" game jam in 2014, Game Jolt released their internal jam hosting tools public for all users to use as a service, to create their own game jams that integrated with the main site. Today, Game Jolt focuses on hosting and co-hosting game competitions with established brands in order to bring monetary and educational opportunities to their users. On April 15, 2024, an announcement was made about a collaboration with Pocket Worlds for the "HighRise Game Jam". Pocket Worlds had sold NFTs up until roughly 2022, causing a community outburst. The situation was addressed, and the situation started to disperse. == Contests == == Events == Game Jolt hosts both physical and virtual events to entertain and prank its users, which consists of the following: == History == Game Jolt has supported independent creators with a central platform to manage their content and communities since its start in 2003. David DeCarmine began development of Game Jolt at the age of 14 for a group of hobbyists, making games and sharing on forums in an early iteration known as Holo World. The original intention was to create a platform for gamers where new games could be discoverable and quickly playable, and where feedback could be provided directly to the creators, allowing them to continue improving their games. In 2008, Game Jolt was registered as an LLC, then incorporated as Game Jolt Inc. in September 2020. A new site launched in 2015 featuring a responsive design, automated curation for both games and game news articles which weighs how recent a game was uploaded and how popular it is ("hot") and filtering options on game listings for platform, maturity rating and development status. In March 2022, Game Jolt launched a mobile application simultaneously on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store targeted at Gen Z gamers and creators. While in beta, the mobile app had 100,000 installs pre-launch. === Game store === Game Jolt continues to host a large library of independent games. Game developers can upload their games directly to the site to share or sell. They would allow distribution for downloadable games, later adding support for Adobe Flash, Unity and Java games which allowed support for browser based games. In February 2013, Game Jolt built support for browser-based HTML5 games as well. A user levelling system was released into public beta in April 2013, incorporating the GJAPI trophies and highscores, as well as site activity, to generate 'EXP' (experience points). Game Jolt Jams released in early 2014 as a service to allow users to create their own game jams that integrated with the main site. In April 2016, an online marketplace was announced and released the following month with an exclusive set of game titles, including Bendy and the Ink Machine, allowing developers to sell their games on the site. In January 2016, Game Jolt released source code of the client and site's front end on GitHub under MIT license. In January 2022, Game Jolt banned adult games from appearing on the site, stating in an email to developers that the site had become a "social media platform" and they "had to make decisions around the direction and future of the brand which has now included the removal of hosted games with explicitly adult content." In response to a tweet by Itch.io saying the site is not for prudes, they wrote in their own tweet: "Game Jolt is a platform with a large audience of 13-16 year olds. Our users asked us to clean up, so here we are." == Investments == After bootstrapping Game Jolt with revenue earned from ads on the website for years, the DeCarmines secured venture capital in 2020 from SoftBank, doing so again in 2021 from founders of Twitch, Rec Room, Modio and more.
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Dan Jurafsky

Daniel Jurafsky is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University, and also an author. With Daniel Gildea, he is known for developing the first automatic system for semantic role labeling (SRL). He is the author of The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (2014) and a textbook on speech and language processing (2000). For the former, Jurafsky was named a finalist for the James Beard Award. Jurafsky was given a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. == Education == Jurafsky received his B.A in linguistics (1983) and Ph.D. in computer science (1992), both at University of California, Berkeley; and then a postdoc at International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley (1992–1995). == Academic life == He is the author of The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). With James H. Martin, he wrote the textbook Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition (Prentice Hall, 2000). The first automatic system for semantic role labeling (SRL, sometimes also referred to as "shallow semantic parsing") was developed by Daniel Gildea and Daniel Jurafsky to automate the FrameNet annotation process in 2002; SRL has since become one of the standard tasks in natural language processing. == Personal life == Jurafsky is Jewish. He is married. They reside in San Francisco, California. == Selected works == 2009. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, 2nd Edition. (with James H. Martin) Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0131873216 2014. The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393240832 2026. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, 3rd Edition draft. (with James H. Martin) == Honors and awards == 1998. NSF Career Award 2002. MacArthur Fellowship 2019. LSA Fellow 2022. Atkinson Prizes in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
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Markov chain central limit theorem

In the mathematical theory of random processes, the Markov chain central limit theorem has a conclusion somewhat similar in form to that of the classic central limit theorem (CLT) of probability theory, but the quantity in the role taken by the variance in the classic CLT has a more complicated definition. See also the general form of Bienaymé's identity. == Statement == Suppose that: the sequence X 1 , X 2 , X 3 , … {\textstyle X_{1},X_{2},X_{3},\ldots } of random elements of some set is a Markov chain that has a stationary probability distribution; and the initial distribution of the process, i.e. the distribution of X 1 {\textstyle X_{1}} , is the stationary distribution, so that X 1 , X 2 , X 3 , … {\textstyle X_{1},X_{2},X_{3},\ldots } are identically distributed. In the classic central limit theorem these random variables would be assumed to be independent, but here we have only the weaker assumption that the process has the Markov property; and g {\textstyle g} is some (measurable) real-valued function for which var ⁡ ( g ( X 1 ) ) < + ∞ . {\textstyle \operatorname {var} (g(X_{1}))<+\infty .} Now let μ = E ⁡ ( g ( X 1 ) ) , μ ^ n = 1 n ∑ k = 1 n g ( X k ) σ 2 := lim n → ∞ var ⁡ ( n μ ^ n ) = lim n → ∞ n var ⁡ ( μ ^ n ) = var ⁡ ( g ( X 1 ) ) + 2 ∑ k = 1 ∞ cov ⁡ ( g ( X 1 ) , g ( X 1 + k ) ) . {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}\mu &=\operatorname {E} (g(X_{1})),\\{\widehat {\mu }}_{n}&={\frac {1}{n}}\sum _{k=1}^{n}g(X_{k})\\\sigma ^{2}&:=\lim _{n\to \infty }\operatorname {var} ({\sqrt {n}}{\widehat {\mu }}_{n})=\lim _{n\to \infty }n\operatorname {var} ({\widehat {\mu }}_{n})=\operatorname {var} (g(X_{1}))+2\sum _{k=1}^{\infty }\operatorname {cov} (g(X_{1}),g(X_{1+k})).\end{aligned}}} Then as n → ∞ , {\textstyle n\to \infty ,} we have n ( μ ^ n − μ ) → D Normal ( 0 , σ 2 ) , {\displaystyle {\sqrt {n}}({\hat {\mu }}_{n}-\mu )\ {\xrightarrow {\mathcal {D}}}\ {\text{Normal}}(0,\sigma ^{2}),} where the decorated arrow indicates convergence in distribution. == Monte Carlo Setting == The Markov chain central limit theorem can be guaranteed for functionals of general state space Markov chains under certain conditions. In particular, this can be done with a focus on Monte Carlo settings. An example of the application in a MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) setting is the following: Consider a simple hard spheres model on a grid. Suppose X = { 1 , … , n 1 } × { 1 , … , n 2 } ⊆ Z 2 {\displaystyle X=\{1,\ldots ,n_{1}\}\times \{1,\ldots ,n_{2}\}\subseteq Z^{2}} . A proper configuration on X {\displaystyle X} consists of coloring each point either black or white in such a way that no two adjacent points are white. Let χ {\displaystyle \chi } denote the set of all proper configurations on X {\displaystyle X} , N χ ( n 1 , n 2 ) {\displaystyle N_{\chi }(n_{1},n_{2})} be the total number of proper configurations and π be the uniform distribution on χ {\displaystyle \chi } so that each proper configuration is equally likely. Suppose our goal is to calculate the typical number of white points in a proper configuration; that is, if W ( x ) {\displaystyle W(x)} is the number of white points in x ∈ χ {\displaystyle x\in \chi } then we want the value of E π W = ∑ x ∈ χ W ( x ) N χ ( n 1 , n 2 ) {\displaystyle E_{\pi }W=\sum _{x\in \chi }{\frac {W(x)}{N_{\chi }{\bigl (}n_{1},n_{2}{\bigr )}}}} If n 1 {\displaystyle n_{1}} and n 2 {\displaystyle n_{2}} are even moderately large then we will have to resort to an approximation to E π W {\displaystyle E_{\pi }W} . Consider the following Markov chain on χ {\displaystyle \chi } . Fix p ∈ ( 0 , 1 ) {\displaystyle p\in (0,1)} and set X 1 = x 1 {\displaystyle X_{1}=x_{1}} where x 1 ∈ χ {\displaystyle x_{1}\in \chi } is an arbitrary proper configuration. Randomly choose a point ( x , y ) ∈ X {\displaystyle (x,y)\in X} and independently draw U ∼ U n i f o r m ( 0 , 1 ) {\displaystyle U\sim \mathrm {Uniform} (0,1)} . If u ≤ p {\displaystyle u\leq p} and all of the adjacent points are black then color ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} white leaving all other points alone. Otherwise, color ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} black and leave all other points alone. Call the resulting configuration X 1 {\displaystyle X_{1}} . Continuing in this fashion yields a Harris ergodic Markov chain { X 1 , X 2 , X 3 , … } {\displaystyle \{X_{1},X_{2},X_{3},\ldots \}} having π {\displaystyle \pi } as its invariant distribution. It is now a simple matter to estimate E π W {\displaystyle E_{\pi }W} with w n ¯ = ∑ i = 1 n W ( X i ) / n {\displaystyle {\overline {w_{n}}}=\sum _{i=1}^{n}W(X_{i})/n} . Also, since χ {\displaystyle \chi } is finite (albeit potentially large) it is well known that X {\displaystyle X} will converge exponentially fast to π {\displaystyle \pi } which implies that a CLT holds for w n ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {w_{n}}}} . == Implications == Not taking into account the additional terms in the variance which stem from correlations (e.g. serial correlations in markov chain monte carlo simulations) can result in the problem of pseudoreplication when computing e.g. the confidence intervals for the sample mean.
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