AI Generator Za Darmo

AI Generator Za Darmo — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

• 

  Information space analysis

  Within the field of information science, information space analysis is a deterministic method, enhanced by machine intelligence, for locating and assessing resources for team-centric efforts. Organizations need to be able to quickly assemble teams backed by the support services, information, and material to do the job. To do so, these teams need to find and assess sources of services that are potential participants in the team effort. To support this initial team and resource development, information needs to be developed via analysis tools that help make sense of sets of data sources in an Intranet or Internet. Part of the process is to characterize them, partition them, and sort and filter them. These tools focus on three key issues in forming a collaborative team: Help individuals responsible for forming the team understand what is available. Assist team members in identifying the structure and categorize the information available to them in a manner specifically suited to the task at hand. Aid team members to understand the mappings of their information between their organization and that used by others who might participate. Information space analysis tools combine multiple methods to assist in this task. This causes the tools to be particularly well-suited to integrating additional technologies in order to create specialized systems.

  Read more →
• 

  Color normalization

  Color normalization is a topic in computer vision concerned with artificial color vision and object recognition. In general, the distribution of color values in an image depends on the illumination, which may vary depending on lighting conditions, cameras, and other factors. Color normalization allows for object recognition techniques based on color to compensate for these variations. == Main concepts == === Color constancy === Color constancy is a feature of the human internal model of perception, which provides humans with the ability to assign a relatively constant color to objects even under different illumination conditions. This is helpful for object recognition as well as identification of light sources in an environment. For example, humans see an object approximately as the same color when the sun is bright or when the sun is dim. === Applications === Color normalization has been used for object recognition on color images in the field of robotics, bioinformatics and general artificial intelligence, when it is important to remove all intensity values from the image while preserving color values. One example is in case of a scene shot by a surveillance camera over the day, where it is important to remove shadows or lighting changes on same color pixels and recognize the people that passed. Another example is automated screening tools used for the detection of diabetic retinopathy as well as molecular diagnosis of cancer states, where it is important to include color information during classification. == Known issues == The main issue about certain applications of color normalization is that the result looks unnatural or too distant from the original colors. In cases where there is a subtle variation between important aspects, this can be problematic. More specifically, the side effect can be that pixels become divergent and not reflect the actual color value of the image. A way of combating this issue is to use color normalization in combination with thresholding to correctly and consistently segment a colored image. == Transformations and algorithms == There is a vast array of different transformations and algorithms for achieving color normalization and a limited list is presented here. The performance of an algorithm is dependent on the task and one algorithm which performs better than another in one task might perform worse in another (no free lunch theorem). Additionally, the choice of the algorithm depends on the preferences of the user for the end-result, e.g. they may want a more natural-looking color image. === Grey world === The grey world normalization makes the assumption that changes in the lighting spectrum can be modelled by three constant factors applied to the red, green and blue channels of color. More specifically, a change in illuminated color can be modelled as a scaling α, β and γ in the R, G and B color channels and as such the grey world algorithm is invariant to illumination color variations. Therefore, a constancy solution can be achieved by dividing each color channel by its average value as shown in the following formula: ( α R , β G , γ B ) → ( α R α n ∑ i R , β G β n ∑ i G , γ B γ n ∑ i B ) {\displaystyle \left(\alpha R,\beta G,\gamma B\right)\rightarrow \left({\frac {\alpha R}{{\frac {\alpha }{n}}\sum _{i}R}},{\frac {\beta G}{{\frac {\beta }{n}}\sum _{i}G}},{\frac {\gamma B}{{\frac {\gamma }{n}}\sum _{i}B}}\right)} As mentioned above, grey world color normalization is invariant to illuminated color variations α, β and γ, however it has one important problem: it does not account for all variations of illumination intensity and it is not dynamic; when new objects appear in the scene it fails. To solve this problem there are several variants of the grey world algorithm. Additionally there is an iterative variation of the grey world normalization, however it was not found to perform significantly better. === Histogram equalization === Histogram equalization is a non-linear transform which maintains pixel rank and is capable of normalizing for any monotonically increasing color transform function. It is considered to be a more powerful normalization transformation than the grey world method. The results of histogram equalization tend to have an exaggerated blue channel and look unnatural, due to the fact that in most images the distribution of the pixel values is usually more similar to a Gaussian distribution, rather than uniform. === Histogram specification === Histogram specification transforms the red, green and blue histograms to match the shapes of three specific histograms, rather than simply equalizing them. It refers to a class of image transforms which aims to obtain images of which the histograms have a desired shape. As specified, firstly it is necessary to convert the image so that it has a particular histogram. Assume an image x. The following formula is the equalization transform of this image: y = f ( x ) = ∫ 0 x p x ( u ) d u {\displaystyle y=f(x)=\int \limits _{0}^{x}p_{x}(u)du} Then assume wanted image z. The equalization transform of this image is: y ′ = g ( z ) = ∫ 0 z p z ( u ) d u {\displaystyle y'=g(z)=\int \limits _{0}^{z}p_{z}(u)du} Of course p z ( u ) {\displaystyle p_{z}(u)} is the histogram of the output image. The formula to find the inverse of the above transform is: z = g − 1 ( y ′ ) {\displaystyle z=g^{-1}(y')} Therefore, since images y and y' have the same equalized histogram they are actually the same image, meaning y = y' and the transform from the given image x to the wanted image z is: z = g − 1 ( y ′ ) = g − 1 ( y ) = g − 1 ( f ( x ) ) {\displaystyle z=g^{-1}(y')=g^{-1}(y)=g^{-1}(f(x))} Histogram specification has the advantage of producing more realistic looking images, as it does not exaggerate the blue channel like histogram equalization. === Comprehensive Color Normalization === The comprehensive color normalization is shown to increase localization and object classification results in combination with color indexing. It is an iterative algorithm which works in two stages. The first stage is to use the red, green and blue color space with the intensity normalized, to normalize each pixel. The second stage is to normalize each color channel separately, so that the sum of the color components is equal to one third of the number of pixels. The iterations continue until convergence, meaning no additional changes. Formally: Normalize the color image f ( t ) = [ f i j ( t ) ] i = 1... N , j = 1... M {\displaystyle f^{(t)}=[f_{ij}^{(t)}]_{i=1...N,j=1...M}} which consists of color vectors f i j ( t ) = ( r i j ( t ) , g i j ( t ) , b i j ( t ) ) T . {\displaystyle f_{ij}^{(t)}=(r_{ij}^{(t)},g_{ij}^{(t)},b_{ij}^{(t)})^{T}.} For the first step explained above, compute: S i j := r i j ( t ) + g i j ( t ) + b i j ( t ) {\displaystyle S_{ij}:=r_{ij}^{(t)}+g_{ij}^{(t)}+b_{ij}^{(t)}} which leads to r i j ( t + 1 ) = r i j ( t ) S i j , g i j ( t + 1 ) = g i j ( t ) S i j {\displaystyle r_{ij}^{(t+1)}={\frac {r_{ij}^{(t)}}{S_{ij}}},g_{ij}^{(t+1)}={\frac {g_{ij}^{(t)}}{S_{ij}}}} and b i j ( t + 1 ) = b i j ( t ) S i j . {\displaystyle b_{ij}^{(t+1)}={\frac {b_{ij}^{(t)}}{S_{ij}}}.} For the second step explained above, compute: r ′ = 3 N M ∑ i = 1 N ∑ j = 1 M r i j ( t + 1 ) {\displaystyle r'={\frac {3}{NM}}\sum _{i=1}^{N}\sum _{j=1}^{M}r_{ij}^{(t+1)}} and normalize r i j ( t + 2 ) = r i j ( t + 1 ) r ′ . {\displaystyle r_{ij}^{(t+2)}={\frac {r_{ij}^{(t+1)}}{r'}}.} Of course the same process is done for b' and g'. Then these two steps are repeated until the changes between iteration t and t+2 are less than some set threshold. Comprehensive color normalization, just like the histogram equalization method previously mentioned, produces results that may look less natural due to the reduction in the number of color values.

  Read more →
• 

  PatchMatch

  PatchMatch is an algorithm used to quickly find correspondences (or matches) between small square regions (or patches) of an image. It has various applications in image editing, such as reshuffling or removing objects from images or altering their aspect ratios without cropping or noticeably stretching them. PatchMatch was first presented in a 2011 paper by researchers at Princeton University. == Algorithm == The goal of the algorithm is to find the patch correspondence by defining a nearest-neighbor field (NNF) as a function f : R 2 → R 2 {\displaystyle f:\mathbb {R} ^{2}\to \mathbb {R} ^{2}} of offsets, which is over all possible matches of patch (location of patch centers) in image A, for some distance function of two patches D {\displaystyle D} . So, for a given patch coordinate a {\displaystyle a} in image A {\displaystyle A} and its corresponding nearest neighbor b {\displaystyle b} in image B {\displaystyle B} , f ( a ) {\displaystyle f(a)} is simply b − a {\displaystyle b-a} . However, if we search for every point in image B {\displaystyle B} , the work will be too hard to complete. So the following algorithm is done in a randomized approach in order to accelerate the calculation speed. The algorithm has three main components. Initially, the nearest-neighbor field is filled with either random offsets or some prior information. Next, an iterative update process is applied to the NNF, in which good patch offsets are propagated to adjacent pixels, followed by random search in the neighborhood of the best offset found so far. Independent of these three components, the algorithm also uses a coarse-to-fine approach by building an image pyramid to obtain the better result. === Initialization === When initializing with random offsets, we use independent uniform samples across the full range of image B {\displaystyle B} . This algorithm avoids using an initial guess from the previous level of the pyramid because in this way the algorithm can avoid being trapped in local minima. === Iteration === After initialization, the algorithm attempted to perform iterative process of improving the N N F {\displaystyle NNF} . The iterations examine the offsets in scan order (from left to right, top to bottom), and each undergoes propagation followed by random search. === Propagation === We attempt to improve f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} using the known offsets of f ( x − 1 , y ) {\displaystyle f(x-1,y)} and f ( x , y − 1 ) {\displaystyle f(x,y-1)} , assuming that the patch offsets are likely to be the same. That is, the algorithm will take new value for f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} to be arg ⁡ min ( x , y ) D ( f ( x , y ) ) , D ( f ( x − 1 , y ) ) , D ( f ( x , y − 1 ) ) {\displaystyle \arg \min \limits _{(x,y)}{D(f(x,y)),D(f(x-1,y)),D(f(x,y-1))}} . So if f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} has a correct mapping and is in a coherent region R {\displaystyle R} , then all of R {\displaystyle R} below and to the right of f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} will be filled with the correct mapping. Alternatively, on even iterations, the algorithm search for different direction, fill the new value to be arg ⁡ min ( x , y ) { D ( f ( x , y ) ) , D ( f ( x + 1 , y ) ) , D ( f ( x , y + 1 ) ) } {\displaystyle \arg \min \limits _{(x,y)}\{D(f(x,y)),D(f(x+1,y)),D(f(x,y+1))\}} . === Random search === Let v 0 = f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle v_{0}=f(x,y)} , we attempt to improve f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} by testing a sequence of candidate offsets at an exponentially decreasing distance from v 0 {\displaystyle v_{0}} u i = v 0 + w α i R i {\displaystyle u_{i}=v_{0}+w\alpha ^{i}R_{i}} where R i {\displaystyle R_{i}} is a uniform random in [ − 1 , 1 ] × [ − 1 , 1 ] {\displaystyle [-1,1]\times [-1,1]} , w {\displaystyle w} is a large window search radius which will be set to maximum picture size, and α {\displaystyle \alpha } is a fixed ratio often assigned as 1/2. This part of the algorithm allows the f ( x , y ) {\displaystyle f(x,y)} to jump out of local minimum through random process. === Halting criterion === The often used halting criterion is set the iteration times to be about 4~5. Even with low iteration, the algorithm works well.

  Read more →
• 

  LTX (text-to-video model)

  LTX is a family of open source artificial intelligence video foundation models developed by Lightricks, and first released in November 2024. The latest models, LTX-2, create videos based on user prompts. They were preceded by LTX Video, which was released in 2024 as the company's first text-to-video model. LTX-2 is part of the LTX family of video generation models, which form the core technology, alongside LTX Studio, of the LTX ecosystem. == History == === Origins: LTX Video (2024–2025) === In November 2024 Lightricks publicly released its first text-to-video model, LTX Video. It was a 2-billion parameter model, available as open source. In May 2025 Lightricks launched LTXV-13b, a version with 13-billion parameters. Two months later, the model broke the 60 second barrier for generated video. === Release of LTX-2 (2025) === In October 2025 Lightricks announced its latest model, and renamed it LTX-2. The model was described as capable of generating synchronized audio and video at native 4K resolution and up to 50 frames per second (fps), using a variety of conditions and prompts, including text-to-video and image-to-video. Google highlighted the fact that LTX-2 was trained on its infrastructure, and saying it was "The first open source AI video generation model, powered by Google Cloud". Upon its release it was ranked in the top-3 models for image-to-video creation by Artificial Analysis, behind Kling 3.5 by Kling AI and Veo 3.1 by Google. Its text-to-image option was ranked 7th. In addition to its open-source release, Lightricks offers API access to LTX-2, allowing developers to generate videos from text and image prompts through a hosted service without running the model locally. === Open Source Release (2026) === In January 2026, Lightricks officially released the full open-source version of LTX-2, making the model’s complete codebase, weights, and associated tooling publicly available. In March 2026 the company released LTX-2.3, which was accompanied by a desktop video editor enabling the entire model to run locally on consumer hardware. == Technical features == === Advancements over LTX Video === LTX-2 builds upon the LTX Video architecture with several major improvements: Unified audio-video generation producing synchronized dialogue, ambience, and motion Native 4K rendering 50-fps output for cinematic motion Three operational modes (Fast, Pro, Ultra) More efficient diffusion pipelines enabling high fidelity on consumer GPUs === Core capabilities === Text-to-video generation Image-to-video generation Multimodal audiovisual synthesis High-resolution spatial and temporal coherence Configurable quality/performance settings Open-source distribution of weights and datasets == Reception == Initial reception to LTX-2 was broadly positive, with several technology and media outlets highlighting its open-source approach and multimodal capabilities. Open Source For You described LTX-2 as “one of the first AI video systems to combine 4K output, synchronized audio, and an open model release,” noting that it positioned Lightricks as a significant competitor to proprietary systems such as OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo. IEA Green said that the model “could rewrite the AI filmmaking game,” emphasizing that its 50-fps rendering and unified audio-video generation made it suitable for professional studios and independent creators alike. AI News characterized LTX-2 as a “major step forward in the democratization of cinematic-quality video generation,” praising its consumer-grade hardware efficiency and multi-tier generation modes, while also noting ongoing challenges in long-form temporal stability. FinancialContent reported strong interest among creative agencies, attributing the attention to Lightricks’ decision to release model weights and datasets, which reviewers said enabled “a level of transparency not typically seen in commercial AI video models.” === Benchmarks and rankings === Upon release, LTX-2 ranked third for image-to-video creation in the Artificial Analysis benchmark, behind Kling 3.5 and Veo 3.1, while its text-to-video option ranked seventh. As of early 2026, it was the highest-ranked open-source model in the benchmark. === Limitations === Some early reviewers also pointed out quality limitations. The Ray3 technical review noted occasional inconsistencies in lip-sync and motion tracking during long scenes, though it stated these were “in line with the challenges faced by all current AI video diffusion models” and expected to improve with continued iteration. Like other diffusion-based video generators, LTX-2 can produce artifacts in complex multi-person scenes and may struggle with precise text rendering within generated video.

  Read more →
• 

  NHS COVID-19

  NHS COVID-19 was a voluntary contact tracing app for monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in England and Wales, in use from 24 September 2020 until 27 April 2023. It was available for Android and iOS smartphones, and could be used by anyone aged 16 or over. Two versions of the app were created. The first was commissioned by NHSX and developed by the Pivotal division of American software company VMware. A pilot deployment began in May 2020, but on 18 June development of the app was abandoned in favour of a second design using the Apple/Google Exposure Notification system. Scotland and Northern Ireland had separate contact tracing apps. A 2023 study estimated that in its first year of use, the app's contact tracing function prevented an estimated 1 million cases, and 9,600 deaths. == Description == The app allowed users to: See the alert level of their local authority area (in Wales) or information about restrictions (in England); to enable this, the user must enter the first half of their postcode "Check in" at places displaying an NHS QR code poster (no longer required by legislation after 26 January 2022, removed from the app the next month) Be notified when they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus Be notified when local health protection teams determine that people with the virus had attended a business or other venue around the same time as the user Check their symptoms, and book a coronavirus test if necessary If asked to self-isolate, receive information and a daily "countdown". At first, "close contact" was defined as being within 2 metres for 15 minutes, or within 4 metres for a longer time. These time durations were reduced from 29 October 2020, to as little as three minutes when the other person is at their most infectious, i.e. soon after they begin showing symptoms. === Implementation === The Android app was coded in Kotlin, and the iOS app in Swift. The backend used Java and is deployed to Amazon Web Services using Terraform. The code of the app and back-end is open-source and available on GitHub. == Context == The app was part of the UK's test and trace programme which was chaired by Dido Harding; from 12 May 2020 Tom Riordan, chief executive of Leeds City Council, led the tracing effort. == First phase and cancellation == === Description === In March 2020, NHSX commissioned a contact tracing app to monitor the spread in the United Kingdom of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the 2020 pandemic, developed by the Pivotal division of American software company VMware. The app used a centralised approach, in contrast to the Google / Apple contact tracing project. NHSX consulted ethicists and GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) about the privacy aspects. The app recorded the make and model of the phone and asked the user for their postcode area. It generated a unique installation identification number and also a daily identification number. It then used Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to record the daily identification number of other users nearby. If a user was unwell, they could tell the app about symptoms which are characteristic of COVID-19, such as a fever and cough. These details were then passed to a central NHS server. This would assess the information and notify other users that have been in contact, giving them appropriate advice such as physical distancing. The NHS would also arrange for a swab test of the unwell user and the outcome would determine further notifications to contacts: if the test confirmed infection with COVID-19, the contacts would be asked to isolate. By June 2020, £11.8 million had been spent on the app; in 2020–21, £35 million was spent on the app. === Deployment === The first public trial of the app began on the Isle of Wight on 5 May 2020 and by 11 May it had been downloaded 55,000 times. When the first national contact tracing schemes were launched – Test, Trace, Protect in Wales on 13 May, then on 28 May NHS Test and Trace in England, and Test and Protect in Scotland – the app was not ready to be included. Replying to a question at the government's daily briefing on 8 June, Hancock was unable to give a date for rollout of the app in England, saying it would be brought in "when it's right to do so". On 17 June, Lord Bethell, junior minister for Innovation at the Department of Health and Social Care, said "we're seeking to get something going before the winter ... it isn't a priority for us at the moment". On 18 June, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced development would switch to the Apple/Google system after admitting that Apple's restrictions on usage of Bluetooth prevented the app from working effectively. At the same press briefing Dido Harding, leader of the UK's test and trace programme, said "What we've done in really rigorously testing both our own Covid-19 app and the Google-Apple version is demonstrate that none of them are working sufficiently well enough to be actually reliable to determine whether any of us should self-isolate for two weeks [and] that's true across the world". === Concerns === The first, ultimately rejected, version of the app was subject to privacy concerns, the government backtracking on initial statements that the data collected from the app would not be shared outside the NHS. Matthew Gould, CEO of NHSX, the government department responsible for the app, said the data would be accessible to other organisations, but did not disclose which. Data collected would not necessarily be anonymised and would be held in a centralised repository. Over 150 of the UK's security and privacy experts warned the app's data could be used by 'a bad actor (state, private sector, or hacker)' to spy on citizens. Fears were discussed by the House of Commons' Human Rights Select Committee about plans for the app to record user location data. Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights said this version of the app should not be released without proper privacy protections. The second version of the app, released nationwide, addressed these concerns by employing a decentralised framework, the Apple/Google Exposure Notification system. Under this system, users remain pseudonymous: a person diagnosed with COVID-19 does not know which people are informed about an encounter, and contacted persons do not receive any information about the person diagnosed with COVID-19. The functionality of the app was also questioned in late April and early May 2020, as the software's use of Bluetooth required the app to be constantly running, meaning users could not use other apps or lock their device if the app was to function properly. The developers of the app were said to have found a way of working around this restriction. === Related contracts === Faculty – a company linked to Cambridge Analytica – provided research and modelling to NHSX in support of the response to the pandemic. Palantir, also linked to Cambridge Analytica, provided their data management platform. These contracts began in February and March respectively. == Second phase == As outlined on cancellation of the first app on 18 June 2020, the Department of Health and Social Care published on 30 July a brief description of the "next phase" app. Users would be able to scan a QR code at venues they visit, and later be notified if they had visited a place which was the source of a number of infections; the app would also assist with identifying symptoms and ordering a test. By using the Exposure Notification system from Apple and Google, personal data would be decentralised. Zuhlke Engineering Ltd, the UK branch of Swiss-based Zühlke Group, used 70 staff to complete the development of the app in 12 weeks. Zuhlke Engineering was awarded "Development Team of the Year" title at UK IT Industry awards in November 2021 for development of NHS COVID-19 application. === Timeline === Testing of the app by NHS volunteer responders, and selected residents of the Isle of Wight and the London Borough of Newham, began around 13 August. The app was made available to the public (aged 16 or over) in England and Wales on 24 September. An updated app released on 29 October, in part from collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute, improved the accuracy of measurements of the distance between the user's phone and other phones. At the same time, the duration threshold for determining exposure was reduced; this was expected to lead to an increase in the number of users told to self-isolate. An update to the app in April 2021, timed to coincide with easing of restrictions on hospitality businesses, was blocked by Apple and Google. It was intended that users who tested positive would be asked to share their history of visited venues, to assist in warning others, but this would have contravened assurances by Apple and Google that location data from devices would not be shared. === Statistics and effectiveness === The app was downloaded six million times on the first day it was generally availa

  Read more →
• 

  Transfer learning

  Transfer learning (TL) is a technique in machine learning (ML) in which knowledge learned from a task is re-used in order to boost performance on a related task. For example, for image classification, knowledge gained while learning to recognize cars could be applied when trying to recognize trucks. This topic is related to the psychological literature on transfer of learning, although practical ties between the two fields are limited. Reusing or transferring information from previously learned tasks to new tasks has the potential to significantly improve learning efficiency. Since transfer learning makes use of training with multiple objective functions it is related to cost-sensitive machine learning and multi-objective optimization. == History == In 1976, Bozinovski and Fulgosi published a paper addressing transfer learning in neural network training. The paper gives a mathematical and geometrical model of the topic. In 1981, a report considered the application of transfer learning to a dataset of images representing letters of computer terminals, experimentally demonstrating positive and negative transfer learning. In 1992, Lorien Pratt formulated the discriminability-based transfer (DBT) algorithm. By 1998, the field had advanced to include multi-task learning, along with more formal theoretical foundations. Influential publications on transfer learning include the book Learning to Learn in 1998, a 2009 survey and a 2019 survey. Ng said in his NIPS 2016 tutorial that TL would become the next driver of machine learning commercial success after supervised learning. In the 2020 paper, "Rethinking Pre-Training and self-training", Zoph et al. reported that pre-training can hurt accuracy, and advocate self-training instead. == Definition == The definition of transfer learning is given in terms of domains and tasks. A domain D {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}} consists of: a feature space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} and a marginal probability distribution P ( X ) {\displaystyle P(X)} , where X = { x 1 , . . . , x n } ∈ X {\displaystyle X=\{x_{1},...,x_{n}\}\in {\mathcal {X}}} . Given a specific domain, D = { X , P ( X ) } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}=\{{\mathcal {X}},P(X)\}} , a task consists of two components: a label space Y {\displaystyle {\mathcal {Y}}} and an objective predictive function f : X → Y {\displaystyle f:{\mathcal {X}}\rightarrow {\mathcal {Y}}} . The function f {\displaystyle f} is used to predict the corresponding label f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} of a new instance x {\displaystyle x} . This task, denoted by T = { Y , f ( x ) } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}=\{{\mathcal {Y}},f(x)\}} , is learned from the training data consisting of pairs { x i , y i } {\displaystyle \{x_{i},y_{i}\}} , where x i ∈ X {\displaystyle x_{i}\in {\mathcal {X}}} and y i ∈ Y {\displaystyle y_{i}\in {\mathcal {Y}}} . Given a source domain D S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{S}} and learning task T S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{S}} , a target domain D T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{T}} and learning task T T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{T}} , where D S ≠ D T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{S}\neq {\mathcal {D}}_{T}} , or T S ≠ T T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{S}\neq {\mathcal {T}}_{T}} , transfer learning aims to help improve the learning of the target predictive function f T ( ⋅ ) {\displaystyle f_{T}(\cdot )} in D T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{T}} using the knowledge in D S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{S}} and T S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{S}} . == Applications == Algorithms for transfer learning are available in Markov logic networks and Bayesian networks. Transfer learning has been applied to cancer subtype discovery, building utilization, general game playing, text classification, digit recognition, medical imaging and spam filtering. In 2020, it was discovered that, due to their similar physical natures, transfer learning is possible between electromyographic (EMG) signals from the muscles and classifying the behaviors of electroencephalographic (EEG) brainwaves, from the gesture recognition domain to the mental state recognition domain. It was noted that this relationship worked in both directions, showing that electroencephalographic can likewise be used to classify EMG. The experiments noted that the accuracy of neural networks and convolutional neural networks were improved through transfer learning both prior to any learning (compared to standard random weight distribution) and at the end of the learning process (asymptote). That is, results are improved by exposure to another domain. Moreover, the end-user of a pre-trained model can change the structure of fully-connected layers to improve performance.

  Read more →
• 

  Local ternary patterns

  Local ternary patterns (LTP) are an extension of local binary patterns (LBP). Unlike LBP, it does not threshold the pixels into 0 and 1, rather it uses a threshold constant to threshold pixels into three values. Considering k as the threshold constant, c as the value of the center pixel, a neighboring pixel p, the result of threshold is: { 1 , if p > c + k 0 , if p > c − k and p < c + k − 1 if p < c − k {\displaystyle {\begin{cases}1,&{\text{if }}p>c+k\\0,&{\text{if }}p>c-k{\text{ and }}p Read more →

• 

  Predictive text

  Predictive text is an input technology used where one key or button represents many letters, such as on the physical numeric keypads of mobile phones and in accessibility technologies. Each key press results in a prediction rather than repeatedly sequencing through the same group of "letters" it represents, in the same, invariable order. Predictive text could allow for an entire word to be input by a single keypress. Predictive text makes efficient use of fewer device keys to input writing into a text message, an e-mail, an address book, a calendar, and the like. The most widely used, general, predictive text systems are T9, iTap, eZiText, and LetterWise/WordWise. There are many ways to build a device that predicts text, but all predictive text systems have initial linguistic settings that offer predictions that are re-prioritized to adapt to each user. This learning adapts, by way of the device memory, to a user's disambiguating feedback that results in corrective key presses, such as pressing a "next" key to get to the intention. Most predictive text systems have a user database to facilitate this process. Theoretically the number of keystrokes required per desired character in the finished writing is, on average, comparable to using a keyboard. This is approximately true provided that all words used are in its database, punctuation is ignored, and no input mistakes are made when typing or spelling. The theoretical keystrokes per character, KSPC, of a keyboard is KSPC=1.00, and of multi-tap is KSPC=2.03. Eatoni's LetterWise is a predictive multi-tap hybrid, which when operating on a standard telephone keypad achieves KSPC=1.15 for English. The choice of which predictive text system is the best to use involves matching the user's preferred interface style, the user's level of learned ability to operate predictive text software, and the user's efficiency goal. There are various levels of risk in predictive text systems, versus multi-tap systems, because the predicted text that is automatically written provides the speed and mechanical efficiency benefit, which, if the user is not careful to review, results in transmitting misinformation. Predictive text systems take time to learn to use well, and so generally, a device's system has user options to set up the choice of multi-tap or any one of several schools of predictive text methods. == Background == Short message service (SMS) permits a mobile phone user to send text messages (also called messages, SMSes, texts, and txts) as a short message. The most common system of SMS text input is referred to as "multi-tap". Using multi-tap, a key is pressed multiple times to access the list of letters on that key. For instance, pressing the "2" key once displays an "a", twice displays a "b" and three times displays a "c". To enter two successive letters that are on the same key, the user must either pause or hit a "next" button. A user can type by pressing an alphanumeric keypad without looking at the electronic equipment display. Thus, multi-tap is easy to understand and can be used without any visual feedback. However, multi-tap is not very efficient, requiring potentially many keystrokes to enter a single letter. In ideal predictive text entry, all words used are in the dictionary, punctuation is ignored, no spelling mistakes are made, and no typing mistakes are made. The ideal dictionary would include all slang, proper nouns, abbreviations, URLs, foreign-language words and other user-unique words. This ideal circumstance gives predictive text software a reduction in the number of key strokes a user is required to enter a word. The user presses the number corresponding to each letter. As long as the word exists in the predictive text dictionary or is correctly disambiguated by non-dictionary systems, it will appear. For instance, pressing "4663" will typically be interpreted as the word good, provided that a linguistic database in English is currently in use, though alternatives such as home, hood and hoof are also valid interpretations of the sequence of key strokes. The most widely used systems of predictive text are Tegic's T9, Motorola's iTap, and the Eatoni Ergonomics' LetterWise and WordWise. T9 and iTap use dictionaries, but Eatoni Ergonomics' products use a disambiguation process, a set of statistical rules to recreate words from keystroke sequences. All predictive text systems require a linguistic database for every supported input language. == Dictionary vs. non-dictionary systems == Traditional disambiguation works by referencing a dictionary of commonly used words, though Eatoni offers a dictionaryless disambiguation system. In dictionary-based systems, as the user presses the number buttons, an algorithm searches the dictionary for a list of possible words that match the keypress combination and offers up the most probable choice. The user can then confirm the selection and move on, or use a key to cycle through the possible combinations. A non-dictionary system constructs words and other sequences of letters from the statistics of word parts. To attempt predictions of the intended result of keystrokes not yet entered, disambiguation may be combined with a word completion facility. Either system (disambiguation or predictive) may include a user database, which can be further classified as a "learning" system when words or phrases are entered into the user database without direct user intervention. The user database is for storing words or phrases that are not well disambiguated by the pre-supplied database. Some disambiguation systems further attempt to correct spelling, format text or perform other automatic rewrites, with the risky effect of either enhancing or frustrating user efforts to enter text. == History == The predictive text and autocomplete technology was invented out of necessities by Chinese scientists and linguists in the 1950s to solve the input inefficiency of the Chinese typewriter, as the typing process involved finding and selecting thousands of logographic characters on a tray, drastically slowing down the word processing speed. The actuating keys of the Chinese typewriter created by Lin Yutang in the 1940s included suggestions for the characters following the one selected. In 1951, the Chinese typesetter Zhang Jiying arranged Chinese characters in associative clusters, a precursor of modern predictive text entry, and broke speed records by doing so. Predictive entry of text from a telephone keypad has been known at least since the 1970s (Smith and Goodwin, 1971). Predictive text was mainly used to look up names in directories over the phone until mobile phone text messaging came into widespread use. == Example == On a typical phone keypad, if users wished to type the in a "multi-tap" keypad entry system, they would need to: Press 8 (tuv) once to select t. Press 4 (ghi) twice to select h. Press 3 (def) twice to select e. Meanwhile, in a phone with predictive text, they need only: Press 8 once to select the (tuv) group for the first character. Press 4 once to select the (ghi) group for the second character. Press 3 once to select the (def) group for the third character. The system updates the display as each keypress is entered, to show the most probable entry. In this example, prediction reduced the number of button presses from five to three. The effect is even greater with longer words and those composed of letters later in each key's sequence. A dictionary-based predictive system is based on the hope that the desired word is in the dictionary. That hope may be misplaced if the word differs in any way from common usage—in particular, if the word is not spelled or typed correctly, is slang, or is a proper noun. In these cases, some other mechanism must be used to enter the word. Furthermore, the simple dictionary approach fails with agglutinative languages, where a single word does not necessarily represent a single semantic entity. == Companies and products == Predictive text is developed and marketed in a variety of competing products, such as Nuance Communications's T9. Other products include Motorola's iTap; Eatoni Ergonomic's LetterWise (character, rather than word-based prediction); WordWise (word-based prediction without a dictionary); EQ3 (a QWERTY-like layout compatible with regular telephone keypads); Prevalent Devices's Phraze-It; Xrgomics' TenGO (a six-key reduced QWERTY keyboard system); Adaptxt (considers language, context, grammar and semantics); Lightkey (a predictive typing software for Windows); Clevertexting (statistical nature of the language, dictionaryless, dynamic key allocation); and Oizea Type (temporal ambiguity); Intelab's Tauto; WordLogic's Intelligent Input Platform™ (patented, layer-based advanced text prediction, includes multi-language dictionary, spell-check, built-in Web search); Google's Gboard. == Textonyms == Words produced by the same combination of keypresses have been called "textonyms"; also "txtonyms"; or "T9o

  Read more →
• 

  Representation collapse

  Representation collapse is a phenomenon in machine learning and representation learning where a model maps different inputs to the same or very similar embeddings, which means it loses important information about how the data is spread out. It is frequently encountered in self-supervised learning, especially within contrastive and non-contrastive frameworks, when training objectives or model architectures do not maintain variance across representations. Collapse results in degenerate solutions characterized by uninformative learned features, significantly impairing downstream task performance. Various techniques have been proposed to mitigate representation collapse, including the use of negative samples, architectural asymmetry, stop-gradient operations, variance regularization, and redundancy reduction objectives, as seen in methods such as SimCLR, BYOL, and VICReg. Comprehending and averting representation collapse is regarded as a fundamental challenge in the advancement of stable and efficient self-supervised learning systems.

  Read more →
• 

  LTX (text-to-video model)

  LTX is a family of open source artificial intelligence video foundation models developed by Lightricks, and first released in November 2024. The latest models, LTX-2, create videos based on user prompts. They were preceded by LTX Video, which was released in 2024 as the company's first text-to-video model. LTX-2 is part of the LTX family of video generation models, which form the core technology, alongside LTX Studio, of the LTX ecosystem. == History == === Origins: LTX Video (2024–2025) === In November 2024 Lightricks publicly released its first text-to-video model, LTX Video. It was a 2-billion parameter model, available as open source. In May 2025 Lightricks launched LTXV-13b, a version with 13-billion parameters. Two months later, the model broke the 60 second barrier for generated video. === Release of LTX-2 (2025) === In October 2025 Lightricks announced its latest model, and renamed it LTX-2. The model was described as capable of generating synchronized audio and video at native 4K resolution and up to 50 frames per second (fps), using a variety of conditions and prompts, including text-to-video and image-to-video. Google highlighted the fact that LTX-2 was trained on its infrastructure, and saying it was "The first open source AI video generation model, powered by Google Cloud". Upon its release it was ranked in the top-3 models for image-to-video creation by Artificial Analysis, behind Kling 3.5 by Kling AI and Veo 3.1 by Google. Its text-to-image option was ranked 7th. In addition to its open-source release, Lightricks offers API access to LTX-2, allowing developers to generate videos from text and image prompts through a hosted service without running the model locally. === Open Source Release (2026) === In January 2026, Lightricks officially released the full open-source version of LTX-2, making the model’s complete codebase, weights, and associated tooling publicly available. In March 2026 the company released LTX-2.3, which was accompanied by a desktop video editor enabling the entire model to run locally on consumer hardware. == Technical features == === Advancements over LTX Video === LTX-2 builds upon the LTX Video architecture with several major improvements: Unified audio-video generation producing synchronized dialogue, ambience, and motion Native 4K rendering 50-fps output for cinematic motion Three operational modes (Fast, Pro, Ultra) More efficient diffusion pipelines enabling high fidelity on consumer GPUs === Core capabilities === Text-to-video generation Image-to-video generation Multimodal audiovisual synthesis High-resolution spatial and temporal coherence Configurable quality/performance settings Open-source distribution of weights and datasets == Reception == Initial reception to LTX-2 was broadly positive, with several technology and media outlets highlighting its open-source approach and multimodal capabilities. Open Source For You described LTX-2 as “one of the first AI video systems to combine 4K output, synchronized audio, and an open model release,” noting that it positioned Lightricks as a significant competitor to proprietary systems such as OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo. IEA Green said that the model “could rewrite the AI filmmaking game,” emphasizing that its 50-fps rendering and unified audio-video generation made it suitable for professional studios and independent creators alike. AI News characterized LTX-2 as a “major step forward in the democratization of cinematic-quality video generation,” praising its consumer-grade hardware efficiency and multi-tier generation modes, while also noting ongoing challenges in long-form temporal stability. FinancialContent reported strong interest among creative agencies, attributing the attention to Lightricks’ decision to release model weights and datasets, which reviewers said enabled “a level of transparency not typically seen in commercial AI video models.” === Benchmarks and rankings === Upon release, LTX-2 ranked third for image-to-video creation in the Artificial Analysis benchmark, behind Kling 3.5 and Veo 3.1, while its text-to-video option ranked seventh. As of early 2026, it was the highest-ranked open-source model in the benchmark. === Limitations === Some early reviewers also pointed out quality limitations. The Ray3 technical review noted occasional inconsistencies in lip-sync and motion tracking during long scenes, though it stated these were “in line with the challenges faced by all current AI video diffusion models” and expected to improve with continued iteration. Like other diffusion-based video generators, LTX-2 can produce artifacts in complex multi-person scenes and may struggle with precise text rendering within generated video.

  Read more →
• 

  FloodAlerts

  FloodAlerts is a software application, developed by software specialists Shoothill, which takes real-time flooding information, and displays the data on an interactive Bing map, updating and warning its users when they, their premises or the routes they need to travel could be at risk of flooding. == History == FloodAlerts was launched in 2012, originally as the world's first Facebook flood warning app. == Operation == FloodAlerts is made available free of charge to individuals. Users are able to set up their own monitored locations and receive alerts via the application or their Facebook wall if the locations they are monitoring are at imminent risk of flooding. Hosted in the Cloud, using the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, the FloodAlerts application processes the data received from the Environment Agency, automatically creates the required map tiles, pins and alerts and displays them on an interactive Bing map, updating the content every 15 minutes. Users are able to see the latest information on the map without having to refresh their browser. FloodAlerts can also be provided as a customised risk management solution to businesses that require infrastructure or asset safety monitoring in areas where water levels are rising or receding. == Awards and recognition == FloodAlerts has received The Guardian and Virgin Media Business's 2012 Innovation Nation Awards and was shortlisted as a finalist for a further two national awards: the UK IT Industry Awards for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and The Institution of Engineering and Technology Innovation Awards for Information Technology. == In the press == The FloodAlerts application was reviewed on the BBC website. It was also reviewed on BBC Click.

  Read more →
• 

  Backend as a service

  Backend as a service (BaaS), sometimes also referred to as mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), is a service for providing web app and mobile app developers with a way to easily build a backend to their frontend applications. Features available include user management, push notifications, and integration with social networking services. These services are provided via the use of custom software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). BaaS is a relatively recent development in cloud computing, with most BaaS startups dating from 2011 or later. Some of the most popular service providers are AWS Amplify and Firebase. == Purpose == Web and mobile apps require a similar set of features on the backend, including notification service, integration with social networks, and cloud storage. Each of these services has its own API that must be individually incorporated into an app, a process that can be time-consuming and complicated for app developers. BaaS providers form a bridge between the frontend of an application and various cloud-based backends via a unified API and SDK. Providing a consistent way to manage backend data means that developers do not need to redevelop their own backend for each of the services that their apps need to access, potentially saving both time and money. Although similar to other cloud-computing business models, such as serverless computing, software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS), BaaS is distinct from these other services in that it specifically addresses the cloud-computing needs of web and mobile app developers by providing a unified means of connecting their apps to cloud services. == Features == BaaS providers offer different set of features and backend tools. Some of the most common features include: Database management. Most BaaS solutions provide SQL and/or NoSQL database management services for applications. Developers can store their app data without deploying and managing databases themselves. BaaS usually provides client SDKs, REST and GraphQL APIs for the frontend to interact with databases. File storage. BaaS providers often offer storage solutions for media files, user uploads, and other binary data. Applications can upload, download, and delete files through provided SDKs and APIs. Authentication and authorization. Some BaaS offer authentication and authorization services that allow developers to easily manage app users. This includes user sign-up, login, password reset, social media login integration through OAuth, user group and permission management etc. Notification service. Some BaaS providers such as Firebase and AWS Amplify have notification services that can send custom emails to users and push native notifications on mobile platforms. This is especially useful for applications that need to send messages, alerts, and reminders. Cloud functions. Some BaaS allow developers to deploy and run serverless functions. The functions are usually stateless and can be triggered by various ways including HTTP requests, SDK invocation, background server events, and cloud scheduled executions. Different providers offer runtime support for different languages, some of the popular languages are JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, Deno), Python, Java/Kotlin. Cloud functions extend the potential and flexibility of BaaS by allowing developers to write custom functionalities for their apps, working in a way similar to a traditional REST API backend framework. Usage analytics. Analytics data about application usage is often included in BaaS. This allows developers to monitor user behaviors and make decisions correspondingly in marketing strategies and performance optimizations. UI design. Some BaaS providers, such as AWS Amplify and Backendless, offer user interface designing tools that help developers design the frontend UI of web and mobile apps. While this may be useful for small teams and individual developers, UI design assistance may not be conventional in BaaS as it goes beyond the scope of backend infrastructure. Real-Time. Real-time features in a BaaS platform ensure that data updates and synchronizations occur instantly across all clients, making changes immediately visible to users. This is crucial for applications like live chat and collaborative tools, using technologies like WebSockets to maintain continuous server-client connections. == Service providers == BaaS providers have a broad focus, providing SDKs and APIs that work for app development on multiple platforms with different technology stacks, such as JavaScript (for Web apps), Flutter, Java/Kotlin (for Android apps), Swift/Objective-C (for iOS/MacOS/WatchOS/TvOS apps), .NET (for Windows) and others. BaaS providers also come in different types, suiting developers of different needs. === Cloud-based BaaS === Most BaaS providers host backend platforms on their cloud servers. They also manage the infrastructure, security, and scalability of the platforms. Developers can access the backend services via a web interface or the provided APIs. Some examples of cloud-based BaaS include Firebase (hosted on Google Cloud Platform), AWS Amplify (hosted on Amazon Web Services), and Microsoft Azure Mobile Apps (hosted on Microsoft Azure). === Self-hosted BaaS === Self-hosted BaaS allow developers to host backend on their own servers, providing more flexibility and potential to customization compared to cloud-based BaaS, which often is more difficult to migrate from. However, developers are also in charge of managing the infrastructure, security, and scalability of their servers. === Mobile BaaS === Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) is a type of BaaS specifically for applications deployed in mobile systems. While some references use MBaaS interchangeably for BaaS, BaaS can have a wider variety of support such as for web apps and desktop apps. == Business model == BaaS providers generate revenue from their services in various ways, often using a freemium model. Under this model, a client receives a certain number of free active users or API calls per month, and pays a fee for each user or call over this limit. Alternatively, clients can pay a set fee for a package which allows for a greater number of calls or active users per month. There are also flat fee plans that make the pricing more predictable. Some of the providers offer the unlimited API calls inside their free plan offerings. Another business model that has been used by a lot of BaaS providers is PAYG (pay as you go), which has a flexible cost based on developers' usage of database, storage, bandwidth, function calls, user numbers etc.

  Read more →
• 

  Visual Turing Test

  The Visual Turing Test is “an operator-assisted device that produces a stochastic sequence of binary questions from a given test image”. The query engine produces a sequence of questions that have unpredictable answers given the history of questions. The test is only about vision and does not require any natural language processing. The job of the human operator is to provide the correct answer to the question or reject it as ambiguous. The query generator produces questions such that they follow a “natural story line”, similar to what humans do when they look at a picture. == History == Research in computer vision dates back to the 1960s when Seymour Papert first attempted to solve the problem. This unsuccessful attempt was referred to as the Summer Vision Project. The reason why it was not successful was because computer vision is more complicated than what people think. The complexity is in alignment with the human visual system. Roughly 50% of the human brain is devoted in processing vision, which indicates that it is a difficult problem. Later there were attempts to solve the problems with models inspired by the human brain. Perceptrons by Frank Rosenblatt, which is a form of the neural networks, was one of the first such approaches. These simple neural networks could not live up to their expectations and had certain limitations due to which they were not considered in future research. Later with the availability of the hardware and some processing power the research shifted to image processing which involves pixel-level operations, like finding edges, de-noising images or applying filters to name a few. There was some great progress in this field but the problem of vision which was to make the machines understand the images was still not being addressed. During this time the neural networks also resurfaced as it was shown that the limitations of the perceptrons can be overcome by Multi-layer perceptrons. Also in the early 1990s convolutional neural networks were born which showed great results on digit recognition but did not scale up well on harder problems. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the birth of modern computer vision. One of the reasons this happened was due to the availability of key, feature extraction and representation algorithms. Features along with the already present machine learning algorithms were used to detect, localise and segment objects in Images. While all these advancements were being made, the community felt the need to have standardised datasets and evaluation metrics so the performances can be compared. This led to the emergence of challenges like the Pascal VOC challenge and the ImageNet challenge. The availability of standard evaluation metrics and the open challenges gave directions to the research. Better algorithms were introduced for specific tasks like object detection and classification. Visual Turing Test aims to give a new direction to the computer vision research which would lead to the introduction of systems that will be one step closer to understanding images the way humans do. == Current evaluation practices == A large number of datasets have been annotated and generalised to benchmark performances of difference classes of algorithms to assess different vision tasks (e.g., object detection/recognition) on some image domain (e.g., scene images). One of the most famous datasets in computer vision is ImageNet which is used to assess the problem of object level Image classification. ImageNet is one of the largest annotated datasets available and has over one million images. The other important vision task is object detection and localisation which refers to detecting the object instance in the image and providing the bounding box coordinates around the object instance or segmenting the object. The most popular dataset for this task is the Pascal dataset. Similarly there are other datasets for specific tasks like the H3D dataset for human pose detection, Core dataset to evaluate the quality of detected object attributes such as colour, orientation, and activity. Having these standard datasets has helped the vision community to come up with well performing algorithms for all these tasks. The next logical step is to create a larger task encompassing of these smaller subtasks. Having such a task would lead to building systems that would understand images, as understanding images would inherently involve detecting objects, localising them and segmenting them. == Details == The Visual Turing Test (VTT) unlike the Turing test has a query engine system which interrogates a computer vision system in the presence of a human co-ordinator. It is a system that generates a random sequence of binary questions specific to the test image, such that the answer to any question k is unpredictable given the true answers to the previous k − 1 questions (also known as history of questions). The test happens in the presence of a human operator who serves two main purposes: removing the ambiguous questions and providing the correct answers to the unambiguous questions. Given an Image infinite possible binary questions can be asked and a lot of them are bound to be ambiguous. These questions if generated by the query engine are removed by the human moderator and instead the query engine generates another question such that the answer to it is unpredictable given the history of the questions. The aim of the Visual Turing Test is to evaluate the Image understanding of a computer system, and an important part of image understanding is the story line of the image. When humans look at an image, they do not think that there is a car at ‘x’ pixels from the left and ‘y’ pixels from the top, but instead they look at it as a story, for e.g. they might think that there is a car parked on the road, a person is exiting the car and heading towards a building. The most important elements of the story line are the objects and so to extract any story line from an image the first and the most important task is to instantiate the objects in it, and that is what the query engine does. === Query engine === The query engine is the core of the Visual Turing Test and it comprises two main parts : Vocabulary and Questions ==== Vocabulary ==== Vocabulary is a set of words that represent the elements of the images. This vocabulary when used with appropriate grammar leads to a set of questions. The grammar is defined in the next section in a way that it leads to a space of binary questions. The vocabulary V {\displaystyle {\mathcal {V}}} consist of three components: Types of Objects T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}} Type-dependent attributes of objects A ( t ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {A}}(t)} Type-dependent relationships between two objects R ( t , t ′ ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {R}}(t,t')} For Images of urban street scenes the types of objects include people, vehicle and buildings. Attributes refer to the properties of these objects, for e.g. female, child, wearing a hat or carrying something, for people and moving, parked, stopped, one tire visible or two tires visible for vehicles. Relationships between each pair of object classes can be either “ordered” or “unordered”. The unordered relationships may include talking, walking together and the ordered relationships include taller, closer to the camera, occluding, being occluded etc. Additionally all of this vocabulary is used in context of rectangular image regions w \in W which allow for the localisation of objects in the image. An extremely large number of such regions are possible and this complicates the problem, so for this test, regions at specific scales are only used which include 1/16 the size of image, 1/4 the size of image, 1/2 the size of image or larger. ==== Questions ==== The question space is composed of four types of questions: Existence questions: The aim of the existence questions is to find new objects in the image that have not been uniquely identified previously. They are of the form : Qexist = 'Is there an instance of an object of type t with attributes A partially visible in region w that was not previously instantiated?' Uniqueness questions: A uniqueness question tries to uniquely identify an object to instantiate it. Quniq = 'Is there a unique instance of an object of type t with attributes A partially visible in region w that was not previously instantiated?' The uniqueness questions along with the existence questions form the instantiation questions. As mentioned earlier instantiating objects leads to other interesting questions and eventually a story line. Uniqueness questions follow the existence questions and a positive answer to it leads to instantiation of an object. Attribute questions: An attribute question tries to find more about the object once it has been instantiated. Such questions can query about a single attribute, conjunction of two attributes or disjunction of two attributes. Qatt(ot) = {'Does object ot have attribute a?' , 'Does object

  Read more →
• 

  Ed (chatbot)

  Ed was a chatbot co-developed by the Los Angeles Unified School District and AllHere Education. Described as a learning acceleration platform, it was the first personal assistant for students in the United States. Part of the district's Individual Acceleration Plan, it was able to interact with students both verbally and visually, offering support in 100 languages. The chatbot was launched on March 20, 2024, as part of the district's plan for academic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and to improve overall academic performance. Utilizing artificial intelligence, Ed organizes data and reports on grades, test scores, and attendance, creating individualized plans for each student. After the company behind it, AllHere, collapsed, the district shuttered operations of the chatbot on June 14, 2024. The firm is under investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. == History == On February 14, 2022, Alberto M. Carvalho became the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, pledging to give the district a full academic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2022, he announced the Individual Acceleration Plan for the district, which aimed to provide each student with a unique progress report and help them determine if they were on track to graduate. The district faced criticism from disability advocates for its management of Individualized Education Programs, and in April 2022, the United States Department of Education announced that the district had failed to provide appropriate educational services to students with disabilities during the pandemic. The district had been grappling with significant absenteeism issues since the pandemic, which led to declining academic performance and disengagement among students. On February 17, 2023, the district issued a request for proposals to develop a fully integrated portal system. Later that year, they signed a $6 million, five-year contract with AllHere Education, a Boston-based company founded in 2016. The introduction of Ed follows the public launch of ChatGPT, which has been utilized by both teachers and students in educational settings. On August 4, 2023, during an annual address at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Carvalho and the Los Angeles Unified School District announced the launch of Ed. The district invested $4 million into the chatbot, with Carvalho noting that this cost would be halved thanks to donor and grant funding. The chatbot was launched on March 20, 2024. Following its launch, a press conference was held to address security and technology concerns. Carvalho stated that the district had collaborated with security companies and incorporated filters to screen for threatening language. Months after its launch, AllHere Education furloughed most of its staff on June 14, citing their “current financial position” on its website as the reason. After learning about the furlough, the district terminated its dealings with AllHere Education. However, it stated its intention to bring the chatbot back in the future once officials determine the best course of action. Carvalho announced that he would appoint an independent task force to review what went wrong with AllHere Education and the chatbot. On February 25, 2026, the FBI served a search warrant on Carvalho’s home and office in connection with AllHere. The FBI also raided the LAUSD's headquarters. == Service == The chatbot was described as a personal assistant and a "one-stop shop for parents and students" who want to see information about a student's attendance and grades, as well as other resources from the district. Additionally, the application can function as an alarm clock, provide daily lunch menus from the school cafeteria, and offer updates on the location of school buses. The chatbot also helps students and parents who do not speak English as their first language by translating displayed information into approximately 100 different languages. The application can also help with submitting applications and give updates on progress and upcoming assignments. The district stated that the primary goal of Ed was to actively motivate students to complete homework and other tasks. == Reception == The chatbot received a mostly positive reception among parents and observers upon its launch. Some parents and teachers expressed caution about the technology, voicing concerns that the district's push for its implementation lacked public accountability. Rob Nelson from the University of Pennsylvania described the district's strategy as risky, saying that the release felt "like the beginning of a Clippy-level disaster". After the chatbot's shutdown, The 74 criticized it for misusing student data. Chris Whiteley, a former software engineer at AllHere Education, alleged that the data collected by the chatbot likely violated the district's data privacy rules.

  Read more →
• 

  Local ternary patterns

  Local ternary patterns (LTP) are an extension of local binary patterns (LBP). Unlike LBP, it does not threshold the pixels into 0 and 1, rather it uses a threshold constant to threshold pixels into three values. Considering k as the threshold constant, c as the value of the center pixel, a neighboring pixel p, the result of threshold is: { 1 , if p > c + k 0 , if p > c − k and p < c + k − 1 if p < c − k {\displaystyle {\begin{cases}1,&{\text{if }}p>c+k\\0,&{\text{if }}p>c-k{\text{ and }}p Read more →