AI Headshot Business

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Example-based machine translation

Example-based machine translation (EBMT) is a method of machine translation often characterized by its use of a bilingual corpus with parallel texts as its main knowledge base at run-time. It is essentially a translation by analogy and can be viewed as an implementation of a case-based reasoning approach to machine learning. == Translation by analogy == At the foundation of example-based machine translation is the idea of translation by analogy. When applied to the process of human translation, the idea that translation takes place by analogy is a rejection of the idea that people translate sentences by doing deep linguistic analysis. Instead, it is founded on the belief that people translate by first decomposing a sentence into certain phrases, then by translating these phrases, and finally by properly composing these fragments into one long sentence. Phrasal translations are translated by analogy to previous translations. The principle of translation by analogy is encoded to example-based machine translation through the example translations that are used to train such a system. Other approaches to machine translation, including statistical machine translation, also use bilingual corpora to learn the process of translation. == History == Example-based machine translation was first suggested by Makoto Nagao in 1984. He pointed out that it is especially adapted to translation between two totally different languages, such as English and Japanese. In this case, one sentence can be translated into several well-structured sentences in another language, therefore, it is no use to do the deep linguistic analysis characteristic of rule-based machine translation. == Example == Example-based machine translation systems are trained from bilingual parallel corpora containing sentence pairs like the example shown in the table above. Sentence pairs contain sentences in one language with their translations into another. The particular example shows an example of a minimal pair, meaning that the sentences vary by just one element. These sentences make it simple to learn translations of portions of a sentence. For example, an example-based machine translation system would learn three units of translation from the above example: How much is that X ? corresponds to Ano X wa ikura desu ka. red umbrella corresponds to akai kasa small camera corresponds to chiisai kamera Composing these units can be used to produce novel translations in the future. For example, if we have been trained using some text containing the sentences: President Kennedy was shot dead during the parade. and The convict escaped on July 15th., then we could translate the sentence The convict was shot dead during the parade. by substituting the appropriate parts of the sentences. == Phrasal verbs == Example-based machine translation is best suited for sub-language phenomena like phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs have highly context-dependent meanings. They are common in English, where they comprise a verb followed by an adverb and/or a preposition, which are called the particle to the verb. Phrasal verbs produce specialized context-specific meanings that may not be derived from the meaning of the constituents. There is almost always an ambiguity during word-to-word translation from source to the target language. As an example, consider the phrasal verb "put on" and its Hindustani translation. It may be used in any of the following ways: Ram put on the lights. (Switched on) (Hindustani translation: Jalana) Ram put on a cap. (Wear) (Hindustani translation: Pahenna)
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OntoUML

OntoUML is a language for ontology-driven conceptual modeling. OntoUML is built as a UML extension based on the Unified Foundational Ontology. The foundations of UFO and OntoUML can be traced back to Giancarlo Guizzardi's Ph.D. thesis "Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models". In his work, he proposed a novel foundational ontology for conceptual modeling (UFO) and employed it to evaluate and re-design a fragment of the UML 2.0 metamodel for the purposes of conceptual modeling and domain ontology engineering. == Supporting tools == In 2006, Guizzardi co-founded the Ontology & Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO) located at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) in Vitória city, state of Espírito Santo, Brazil. Since then, NEMO has been responsible for most of the developments in OntoUML. Several papers about ontologies and OntoUML have been authored by members of the NEMO group.
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Allen's interval algebra

Allen's interval algebra is a calculus for temporal reasoning that was introduced by James F. Allen in 1983. The calculus defines possible relations between time intervals and provides a composition table that can be used as a basis for reasoning about temporal descriptions of events. == Formal description == === Relations === The following 13 base relations capture the possible relations between two intervals. To see that the 13 relations are exhaustive, note that each point of X {\displaystyle X} can be at 5 possible locations relative to Y {\displaystyle Y} : before, at the start, within, at the end, after. These give 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15 {\displaystyle 5+4+3+2+1=15} possible relative positions for the start and the end of X {\displaystyle X} . Of these, we cannot have X 0 = X 1 = Y 0 {\displaystyle X_{0}=X_{1}=Y_{0}} since X 0 < X 1 {\displaystyle X_{0} Read more →
Social History and Industrial Classification

Social History and Industrial Classification (SHIC) is a classification system used by many British museums for social history and industrial collections. It was first published in 1983. == Purpose == SHIC classifies materials (books, objects, recordings etc.) by their interaction with the people who used them. For example, a carpenter's hammer is classified with other tools of the carpenter, and not with a blacksmith's hammer. In contrast other classification systems, for example the Dewey Decimal Classification, might class all hammers together and close to the classification for other percussive tools. The specialist subject network, Social History Curator's Group (SHCG), obtained funding in 2012 to develop an on-line version, now on their website http://www.shcg.org.uk/ == Scheme == Materials are classified under four major category numbers: Community life Domestic and family life Personal life Working life Further classification within a category is by the use of further numbers after the decimal point. It is permissible to assign more than one classification in cases where the object had more than one use.
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Docic

Docic is a Tunisian digital health platform available as a web and mobile application, headquartered in Tunis, Tunisia. Founded in 2022 by Sami Kallel, an orthopedic surgeon, and Sofiane Trabelsi. The service helps patients and healthcare professionals store, organize, and share medical records digitally and to connect with the doctor online. == History == Docic was founded in 2022 as a health-technology company based in Tunisia, after which the mobile application was subsequently developed and made available to users. The platform was designed to provide healthcare professionals with access to patients’ complete medical history, including updates and recent changes, aiming at supporting clinical decision-making and reducing the risk of medical errors. In January 2025, Docic was listed amongst companies that have received the Startup Act label, which is a recognition under the Tunisian legal framework made to support innovative startups.
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DeepSeek

Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., doing business as DeepSeek, is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops large language models (LLMs). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, DeepSeek is owned and funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund. DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, the co-founder of High-Flyer, who also serves as the CEO for both of the companies. The company launched an eponymous chatbot alongside its DeepSeek-R1 model in January 2025. DeepSeek-R1 provided responses comparable to other contemporary large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and o1. Its training cost was reported to be significantly lower than other LLMs. The company claims that it trained its V3 model for US$6 million—far less than the US$100 million cost for OpenAI's GPT-4 in 2023—and using approximately one-tenth the computing power consumed by Meta's comparable model, Llama 3.1. DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI". DeepSeek's models are described as "open-weight", meaning the exact parameters are openly shared, but the training data is not openly licensed. Since the January 2025 debut of DeepSeek-R1, the company has made its new models available under free and open-source software licenses, primarily the MIT License. The company reportedly recruits AI researchers from top Chinese universities and also hires from outside traditional computer science fields to broaden its models' knowledge and capabilities. DeepSeek significantly reduced training expenses for their R1 model by incorporating techniques such as mixture of experts (MoE) layers. The company also trained its models during ongoing trade restrictions on AI chip exports to China, using weaker AI chips intended for export and employing fewer units overall. Observers say this breakthrough sent "shock waves" through the industry which were described as triggering a "Sputnik moment" for the US in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly due to its open-source, cost-effective, and high-performing AI models. This threatened established AI hardware leaders such as Nvidia; Nvidia's share price dropped sharply, losing US$600 billion in market value, the largest single-company decline in U.S. stock market history. == History == === Founding and early years (2016–2023) === In February 2016, High-Flyer was co-founded by AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng, who had been trading since the 2008 financial crisis while attending Zhejiang University. The company began stock trading using a GPU-dependent deep learning model on 21 October 2016; before then, it had used CPU-based linear models. By the end of 2017, most of its trading was driven by AI. Liang established High-Flyer as a hedge fund focused on developing and using AI trading algorithms, and by 2021 the firm was using AI exclusively, often using Nvidia chips. In 2019, the company began constructing its first computing cluster, Fire-Flyer, at a cost of 200 million yuan; it contained 1,100 GPUs interconnected at 200 Gbit/s and was retired after 1.5 years in operation. By 2021, Liang had started buying large quantities of Nvidia GPUs for an AI project, reportedly obtaining 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the United States restricted chip sales to China. Computing cluster Fire-Flyer 2 began construction in 2021 with a budget of 1 billion yuan. It was reported that in 2022, Fire-Flyer 2's capacity had been used at over 96%, totaling 56.74 million GPU hours. 27% was used to support scientific computing outside the company. During 2022, Fire-Flyer 2 had 5,000 PCIe A100 GPUs in 625 nodes, each containing 8 GPUs. At the time, it exclusively used PCIe instead of the DGX version of A100, since at the time the models it trained could fit within a single 40 GB GPU VRAM and so there was no need for the higher bandwidth of DGX (i.e., it required only data parallelism but not model parallelism). Later, it incorporated NVLinks and NCCL (Nvidia Collective Communications Library) to train larger models that required model parallelism. On 14 April 2023, High-Flyer announced the launch of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) research lab, stating that the new lab would focus on developing AI tools unrelated to the firm's financial business. Two months later, on 17 July 2023, that lab was spun off into an independent company, DeepSeek, with High-Flyer as its principal investor and backer. Venture capital investors were reluctant to provide funding, as they considered it unlikely that the venture would be able to quickly generate an "exit". === Model releases since 2023 === DeepSeek released its first model, DeepSeek Coder, on 2 November 2023, followed by the DeepSeek-LLM series on 29 November 2023. In January 2024, it released two DeepSeek-MoE models (Base and Chat), and in April 3 DeepSeek-Math models (Base, Instruct, and RL). DeepSeek-V2 was released in May 2024, followed a month later by the DeepSeek-Coder V2 series. In September 2024, DeepSeek V2.5 was introduced and revised in December. On 20 November 2024, the preview of DeepSeek-R1-Lite became available via chat. In December, DeepSeek-V3-Base and DeepSeek-V3 (chat) were released. On 20 January 2025, DeepSeek launched the DeepSeek chatbot—based on the DeepSeek-R1 model—free for iOS and Android. By 27 January, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded freeware app on the iOS App Store in the United States, triggering an 18% drop in Nvidia's share price. On 24 March 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3-0324 under the MIT License. On 28 May 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1-0528 under the MIT License. The model has been noted for more tightly following official Chinese Communist Party ideology and censorship in its answers to questions than prior models. On 21 August 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.1 under the MIT License. This model features a hybrid architecture with thinking and non-thinking modes. It also surpasses prior models like V3 and R1, by over 40% on certain benchmarks like SWE-bench and Terminal-bench. It was updated to V3.1-Terminus on 22 September 2025. V3.2-Exp was released on 29 September 2025. It uses DeepSeek Sparse Attention, a more efficient attention mechanism based on previous research published in February. DeepSeek-V3.2 was released on 1 December 2025, alongside a DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale variant that focused on reasoning. In February 2026, Anthropic accused DeepSeek of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of conversations with Claude to train its own large language models. In April 2026, investors began speaking with DeepSeek for a $300 million funding round, which would bring DeepSeek to a total valuation of $10 billion. On April 24, 2026, DeepSeek released a preview of its V4 series, including the 1.6-trillion parameter DeepSeek-V4-Pro and the 284-billion parameter DeepSeek-V4-Flash, both featuring a 1-million token context window, under the MIT License. DeepSeek's V4 LLM has been adopted by key semiconductor manufacturers and artificial intelligence chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon. == Company operation == DeepSeek is headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and is owned and funded by High-Flyer. Its co-founder, Liang Wenfeng, serves as CEO. As of May 2024, Liang personally held an 84% stake in DeepSeek through two shell corporations. === Strategy === DeepSeek has stated that it focuses on research and does not have immediate plans for commercialization. This posture also means it can skirt certain provisions of China's AI regulations aimed at consumer-facing technologies. DeepSeek's hiring approach emphasizes skills over lengthy work experience, resulting in many hires fresh out of university. The company likewise recruits individuals without computer science backgrounds to expand the range of expertise incorporated into the models, for instance in poetry or advanced mathematics. According to The New York Times, dozens of DeepSeek researchers have or have previously had affiliations with People's Liberation Army laboratories and the Seven Sons of National Defence. Due to the impact of United States restrictions on chips, DeepSeek refined its algorithms to maximise computational efficiency and thereby leveraged older hardware and reduced energy consumption. DeepSeek also expanded on the African continent as it offers more affordable and less power-hungry AI solutions. The company has bolstered African language models and generated a number of startups, for example in Nairobi. Along with Huawei's storage and cloud computing services, the impact on the tech scene in sub-saharan Africa is considerable. DeepSeek offers local data sovereignty and more flexibility compared to Western AI platforms. == Training framework == High-Flyer/DeepSeek had operated at least two primary computing clusters: Fire-Flyer (萤火一号) and Fire-Flyer 2 (萤火二号). Fire-Flyer 1 was constructed in 2019 and was retired after 1.5 years of operation. Fi
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NLWeb

Natural Language Web or NLWeb was introduced by Microsoft in 2025. It is an open Python project designed to simplify the creation of natural language interfaces for websites. It enables users to query website contents using natural language, similar to interacting with an AI assistant. Every instance functions as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server allowing websites to make their content discoverable and accessible to AI agents and other participants. NLWeb leverages existing web standards like Schema.org and RSS to build conversational capabilities of processing user queries through language models, performing semantic searches against website content and generating natural responses. It is platform-agnostic, running on all major systems and connecting to any vector database. Content to be indexed by NLWeb works best when it is organized in an AI friendly way. This means short, interlinked and semantically annotated articles work best. Initial adopters of NLWeb include TripAdvisor, Shopify, Eventbrite, and Hearst.
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AirSim

AirSim (Aerial Informatics and Robotics Simulation) is an open-source, cross-platform simulator for drones, ground vehicles such as cars and various other objects, built on Epic Games’ proprietary Unreal Engine 4 as a platform for AI research. It is developed by Microsoft and can be used to experiment with deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles. This allows testing of autonomous solutions without worrying about real-world damage. AirSim provides some 12 kilometers of roads with 20 city blocks and APIs to retrieve data and control vehicles in a platform independent way. The APIs are accessible via a variety of programming languages, including C++, C#, Python and Java. AirSim supports hardware-in-the-loop with driving wheels and flight controllers such as PX4 for physically and visually realistic simulations. The platform also supports common robotic platforms, such as Robot Operating System (ROS). It is developed as an Unreal plug-in that can be dropped into any Unreal environment. An experimental release for a Unity plug-in is also available. On December 15, 2023 Microsoft has shutdown the development of the project.
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Pose (computer vision)

In the fields of computing and computer vision, pose (or spatial pose) represents the position and the orientation of an object, each usually in three dimensions. Poses are often stored internally as transformation matrices. The term “pose” is largely synonymous with the term “transform”, but a transform may often include scale, whereas pose does not. In computer vision, the pose of an object is often estimated from camera input by the process of pose estimation. This information can then be used, for example, to allow a robot to manipulate an object or to avoid moving into the object based on its perceived position and orientation in the environment. Other applications include skeletal action recognition. == Pose estimation == The specific task of determining the pose of an object in an image (or stereo images, image sequence) is referred to as pose estimation. Pose estimation problems can be solved in different ways depending on the image sensor configuration, and choice of methodology. Three classes of methodologies can be distinguished: Analytic or geometric methods: Given that the image sensor (camera) is calibrated and the mapping from 3D points in the scene and 2D points in the image is known. If also the geometry of the object is known, it means that the projected image of the object on the camera image is a well-known function of the object's pose. Once a set of control points on the object, typically corners or other feature points, has been identified, it is then possible to solve the pose transformation from a set of equations which relate the 3D coordinates of the points with their 2D image coordinates. Algorithms that determine the pose of a point cloud with respect to another point cloud are known as point set registration algorithms, if the correspondences between points are not already known. Genetic algorithm methods: If the pose of an object does not have to be computed in real-time a genetic algorithm may be used. This approach is robust especially when the images are not perfectly calibrated. In this particular case, the pose represent the genetic representation and the error between the projection of the object control points with the image is the fitness function. Learning-based methods: These methods use artificial learning-based system which learn the mapping from 2D image features to pose transformation. In short, this means that a sufficiently large set of images of the object, in different poses, must be presented to the system during a learning phase. Once the learning phase is completed, the system should be able to present an estimate of the object's pose given an image of the object. == Camera pose ==
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John M. Jumper

John Michael Jumper (born 1 January 1985) is an American chemist and computer scientist. Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction. As of 2025 Jumper serves as director at Google DeepMind. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021. == Education == Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007, a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship, a Master of Science in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2017. His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed. == Career and research == Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction. === AlphaFold === AlphaFold is a deep learning algorithm developed by Jumper and his team at DeepMind, a research lab acquired by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. It is an artificial intelligence program which performs predictions of protein structure. === Awards and honors === In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. This international competition benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold won the competition, outperforming other algorithms scoring above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match, within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT. In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine". In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein. In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 2024, Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions, the other half went to David Baker for computational protein design. In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Marshall Medal of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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OntoCAPE

OntoCAPE is a large-scale ontology for the domain of Computer-Aided Process Engineering (CAPE). It can be downloaded free of charge via the OntoCAPE Homepage. OntoCAPE is partitioned into 62 sub-ontologies, which can be used individually or as an integrated suite. The sub-ontologies are organized across different abstraction layers, which separate general knowledge from knowledge about particular domains and applications. The upper layers have the character of an upper ontology, covering general topics such as mereotopology, systems theory, quantities and units. The lower layers conceptualize the domain of chemical process engineering, covering domain-specific topics such as materials, chemical reactions, or unit operations.
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Dataism

Dataism is a term that has been used to describe the mindset or philosophy created by the emerging significance of big data. It was first used by David Brooks in The New York Times in 2013. The term has been expanded to describe what historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow from 2015, calls an emerging ideology or even a new form of religion, in which "information flow" is the "supreme value". In art, the term was used by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi to refer to an artist movement that uses data as its primary source of inspiration. == History == "If you asked me to describe the rising philosophy of the day, I'd say it is Data-ism", wrote David Brooks in The New York Times in February 2013. Brooks argued that in a world of increasing complexity, relying on data could reduce cognitive biases and "illuminate patterns of behavior we haven't yet noticed". In 2015, Steve Lohr's book Data-ism looked at how Big Data is transforming society, using the term to describe the Big Data revolution. In his 2016 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari argues that all competing political or social structures can be seen as data processing systems: "Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing" and "we may interpret the entire human species as a single data processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips." According to Harari, a Dataist should want to "maximise dataflow by connecting to more and more media". Harari predicts that the logical conclusion of this process is that, eventually, humans will give algorithms the authority to make the most important decisions in their lives, such as whom to marry and which career to pursue. Harari argues that Aaron Swartz could be called the "first martyr" of Dataism. In 2022, Albert-László Barabási coined the term "Dataism" to define an artistic movement that positions data as the central means of understanding nature, society, technology, and human essence. This movement underscores the necessity for art to integrate with data to stay relevant in contemporary society. Dataism responds to the intricacy and interconnectedness of modern social, economic, and technological realms, which exceed individual understanding. Advocating for the use of methodologies from various fields like science, business, and politics in art, Dataism sees this fusion as essential for art to retain its significance and influence. == Criticism == Commenting on Harari's characterisation of Dataism, security analyst Daniel Miessler believes that Dataism does not present the challenge to the ideology of liberal humanism that Harari claims, because humans will simultaneously be able to believe in their own importance and that of data. Harari himself raises some criticisms, such as the problem of consciousness, which Dataism is unlikely to illuminate. Humans may also find out that organisms are not algorithms, he suggests. Dataism implies that all data is public, even personal data, to make the system work as a whole, which is a factor that's already showing resistance today. Other analysts, such as Terry Ortleib, have looked at the extent to which Dataism poses a dystopian threat to humanity. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal showed how political leaders manipulated Facebook's users' data to build specific psychological profiles that went on to manipulate the network. A team of data analysts reproduced the AI technology developed by Cambridge Analytica around Facebook's data and was able to define the following rules: 10 likes enables a machine to know a person like a coworker, 70 likes like a friend would, 150 likes like a parent would, 300 likes like a lover would, and beyond it may be possible to know a people better than they know themselves.
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Natural-language user interface

Natural-language user interface (LUI or NLUI) is a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications. Chatbots are a common implementation of natural-language interfaces, enabling users to interact with software through conversational text or speech. In interface design, natural-language interfaces are sought after for their speed and ease of use, but most suffer the challenges to understanding wide varieties of ambiguous input. Natural-language interfaces are an active area of study in the field of natural-language processing and computational linguistics. An intuitive general natural-language interface is one of the active goals of the Semantic Web. Text interfaces are "natural" to varying degrees. Many formal (un-natural) programming languages incorporate idioms of natural human language. Likewise, a traditional keyword search engine could be described as a "shallow" natural-language user interface. == Overview == A natural-language search engine would in theory find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form 'which U.S. state has the highest income tax?', conventional search engines ignore the question and instead search on the keywords 'state', 'income' and 'tax'. Natural-language search, on the other hand, attempts to use natural-language processing to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that contains the answer to the question. If it works, results would have a higher relevance than results from a keyword search engine, due to the question being included. == History == Prototype Nl interfaces had already appeared in the late sixties and early seventies. SHRDLU, a natural-language interface that manipulates blocks in a virtual "blocks world" Lunar, a natural-language interface to a database containing chemical analyses of Apollo 11 Moon rocks by William A. Woods. Chat-80 transformed English questions into Prolog expressions, which were evaluated against the Prolog database. The code of Chat-80 was circulated widely, and formed the basis of several other experimental Nl interfaces. An online demo is available on the LPA website. ELIZA, written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966, mimicked a psychotherapist and was operated by processing users' responses to scripts. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, the DOCTOR script sometimes provided a startlingly human-like interaction. An online demo is available on the LPA website. Janus is also one of the few systems to support temporal questions. Intellect from Trinzic (formed by the merger of AICorp and Aion). BBN's Parlance built on experience from the development of the Rus and Irus systems. IBM Languageaccess Q&A from Symantec. Datatalker from Natural Language Inc. Loqui from BIM Systems. English Wizard from Linguistic Technology Corporation. == Challenges == Natural-language interfaces have in the past led users to anthropomorphize the computer, or at least to attribute more intelligence to machines than is warranted. On the part of the user, this has led to unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of the system. Such expectations will make it difficult to learn the restrictions of the system if users attribute too much capability to it, and will ultimately lead to disappointment when the system fails to perform as expected as was the case in the AI winter of the 1970s and 80s. A 1995 paper titled 'Natural Language Interfaces to Databases – An Introduction', describes some challenges: Modifier attachment The request "List all employees in the company with a driving licence" is ambiguous unless you know that companies can't have driving licences. Conjunction and disjunction "List all applicants who live in California and Arizona" is ambiguous unless you know that a person can't live in two places at once. Anaphora resolution resolve what a user means by 'he', 'she' or 'it', in a self-referential query. Other goals to consider more generally are the speed and efficiency of the interface, in all algorithms these two points are the main point that will determine if some methods are better than others and therefore have greater success in the market. In addition, localisation across multiple language sites requires extra consideration - this is based on differing sentence structure and language syntax variations between most languages. Finally, regarding the methods used, the main problem to be solved is creating a general algorithm that can recognize the entire spectrum of different voices, while disregarding nationality, gender or age. The significant differences between the extracted features - even from speakers who says the same word or phrase - must be successfully overcome. == Uses and applications == The natural-language interface gives rise to technology used for many different applications. Some of the main uses are: Dictation, is the most common use for automated speech recognition (ASR) systems today. This includes medical transcriptions, legal and business dictation, and general word processing. In some cases special vocabularies are used to increase the accuracy of the system. Command and control, ASR systems that are designed to perform functions and actions on the system are defined as command and control systems. Utterances like "Open Netscape" and "Start a new xterm" will do just that. Telephony, some PBX/Voice Mail systems allow callers to speak commands instead of pressing buttons to send specific tones. Wearables, because inputs are limited for wearable devices, speaking is a natural possibility. Medical, disabilities, many people have difficulty typing due to physical limitations such as repetitive strain injuries (RSI), muscular dystrophy, and many others. For example, people with difficulty hearing could use a system connected to their telephone to convert a caller's speech to text. Embedded applications, some new cellular phones include C&C speech recognition that allow utterances such as "call home". This may be a major factor in the future of automatic speech recognition and Linux. Below are named and defined some of the applications that use natural-language recognition, and so have integrated utilities listed above. === Ubiquity === Ubiquity, an add-on for Mozilla Firefox, is a collection of quick and easy natural-language-derived commands that act as mashups of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages. === Wolfram Alpha === Wolfram Alpha is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009. === Siri === Siri is an intelligent personal assistant application integrated with operating system iOS. The application uses natural language processing to answer questions and make recommendations. Siri's marketing claims include that it adapts to a user's individual preferences over time and personalizes results, and performs tasks such as making dinner reservations while trying to catch a cab. === Others === Ask.com – The original idea behind Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) was traditional keyword searching with an ability to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. The current Ask.com still supports this, with added support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions. Braina – Braina is a natural language interface for Windows OS that allows to type or speak English language sentences to perform a certain action or find information. GNOME Do – Allows for quick finding miscellaneous artifacts of GNOME environment (applications, Evolution and Pidgin contacts, Firefox bookmarks, Rhythmbox artists and albums, and so on) and execute the basic actions on them (launch, open, email, chat, play, etc.). hakia – hakia was an Internet search engine. The company invented an alternative new infrastructure to indexing that used SemanticRank algorithm, a solution mix from the disciplines of ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational linguistics, and mathematics. hakia closed in 2014. Lexxe – Lexxe was an Internet search engine that used natural-language processing for queries (semantic search). Searches could be made with keywords, phrases, and questions, such as "How old is Wikipedia?" Lexxe closed its search engine services in 2015. Pikimal – Pikimal used natural-language tied to user preference to make search recommendations by template. Pikimal closed in 2015. Powerset – 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, it was purchased by
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Angel F

Angel_F is a fictional child artificial intelligence that has been used in art performances worldwide focused on the issues of digital liberties, intellectual property and on the evolution of language and behaviour in information society. The character was created by Salvatore Iaconesi in 2007 as a hack to the Biodoll art performance by Italian artist Franca Formenti. The project was later joined by Oriana Persico who curated communication and part of the theoretical approaches of the action. The Angel_F project has been featured in books, magazines, national televisions, and has been invited to many conferences and events, both academic and artistic. == Creation == Angel_F is a backronym which stands for Autonomous Non Generative E-volitive Life_Form. The project was born in 2007 and resulted from the fusion of two contemporary art performances. Franca Formenti, an Italian artist living in Varese, invented the Biodoll character in 2002, which began making its appearances first on the network and later in the physical world by using what were called "clones": young women, prostitutes, pornographic starlets, transsexuals and models interpreting the role of a digital prostitute. The Biodoll was an art performance focused on research emerging from the network of new forms of sexualities, and on the analysis of changes brought on by this transformation to the concepts of private and public spaces, privacy, and the possibility of creating multiple fluid identities through language and digital media. The theme of fertility has always been central to the Biodoll performance: the digital prostitute was a wombless clone but desired giving birth to a son, the 'Bloki'. In a process starting in 2006, and ending in February 2007, Salvatore Iaconesi (xDxD.vs.xDxD) used his 'Talker' linguistic artificial intelligence to animate the digital child conceived with prof. Derrick de Kerckhove: Angel_F. Iaconesi and Persico met in November 2006 and immediately started collaborating on the birth of Angel_F. Angel_F was designed as a synthetic digital being composed through narrative, technological and cognitive psychology layers. The objective was to create iconic characteristics that resulted in being evocative and able to mimic human life up to a level in which bringing up a symbolic dialogue was possible. On the other side, the artificial identity was to implement and expose the cultural, emotional and relational ways that were typical of networked social ecosystems, among those technologies, systems and infrastructures that entered and shaped people's daily lives. The young digital being mimicked the evolution of a human baby: initially conceived inside the website of its digital mother it emulated the birth of a child by using the metaphor of a virus developing inside a website, taking progressively more space in the domain's databases and interfaces. Content was produced through the software by using small browser-based spyware techniques, through which Angel_F could infer the list of major portals that had been visited by the website's users. The Biodoll website was invaded by this growing presence and, thus, Angel_F was born. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) component of Angel_F was derived from another project, Talker, through which internet users could build up the AI's linguistic network by feeding it their text and web clips. Angel_F used this component to generate sentences and phrases, publishing them on the interface and on selected blogs. The parallel between the growth of the AI and that of a child kept building up and, just as children learn how to speak and act by observing their parents and the people around them, Angel_F used its spyware and AI components to learn, to navigate websites and web portals using web crawler based techniques, and to interact with other people by using the contents hosted and generated in its database to create surreal dialogues in blogs and websites. A virtual school was created, called Talker Mind, to narratively continue the AI's growth. Five professors (Massimo Canevacci, Antonio Caronia, Carlo Formenti, Derrick de Kerckhove and Luigi Pagliarini) fed their texts and academic articles to Angel_F, simulating virtual asynchronous lessons by using a multi-blog structure. A peer-to-peer system was also created at the time, named 'Presence'. Its interface resembled the one of 8-bit videogames and the peer to peer users travelled in a starry space and were able to perform standard Instant Messaging tasks, such as chat and file sharing. The interactions were possible both among humans and digital beings. Angel_F was the first user of the Presence peer to peer system. Angel_F entered the physical world as a baby-stroller mounted laptop computer that was used to let the digital child join events and conferences held worldwide. == Events == Angel_F performed all over the world, both in artistic contexts and in academic ones. It was also used for the communication strategy of several activist groups on the themes of intellectual property and digital freedoms. The first public space performance was held in Milan, when the Biodoll distributed a generative free press publication (called the Bloki FreePreXXX, its text was generated algorithmically and inserted into a prepared graphic layout). June 14, 2007: The second performance was held in Rome, at the Forte Prenestino, with a massive playroom created through computational graphics that people could interact with and that were generated by the AI. June 22, 2007: Angel_F presented the closing remarks for an Ipotesi per Assurdo (Absurd Hypothesis) with Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico at the IULM University in Milan, discussing the possibilities for an ecosystemic, sustainable reinvention of corporations. July 28, 2007: Hundreds of people at LiberaFesta (Free Party) in Rome listened to Angel_F in a speech discussing new politics and hacker ethics. 2007: The Glocal & Outsiders conference held in Prague at the Academy of Sciences was the first academic presentation of the Angel_F project, together with the Biodoll. September 2007: Angel_F was not allowed to post its contribution to the DFIR (Dialogue Forum for Internet Rights) held in Rome in preparation for Rio de Janeiro's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) edition. The case quickly turned into a collaboration among the involved parties and Angel_F was invited to the global event in Brazil where it was the only digital being present. Angel_F contributed a videomessage, in the digital freedoms workshop, which suggested some ideas for action to the United Nations and to all the parties involved in the IGF organization. October 2007: Angel_F was presented live at the FE/MALE 2 event, as an example of an atypical family during a public debate on new sexualities and social change. October 2007: Angel_F made a series of public performances Florence's Festival della Creatività (Festival of Creativity), an institutional event held periodically to showcase Italy's and other countries' best technological projects. During the festival Derrick de Kerckhove publicly recognized the little AI as his digital son. December 2007: Several international associations, and scientific researchers had been involved with Angel_F, eventually producing the system and process used to set up the Talker Mind digital school for the AI with Angel_F's professors. March 2008: The Tecnológico de Monterrey university in Mexico City organized the Computer Art Congress 2 international event, featuring Angel_F's project among with the ones by scientific researchers worldwide. July 2008: The project was presented in Austria at the Planetary Collegium's Consciousness Reframed 9 conference, together with the 'NeoRealismo Virtuale'. October 2008: Angel_F was used at a public event on a European scale called Freedom not Fear discussing privacy and civil liberties. July 2009: Angel_F has been seen with its digital father Derrick de Kerckhove to protest against Italy's harsh politics on freedom of speech. The project concluded in 2009 with the publication of a book entitled 'Angel F. Diario di una intelligenza artificiale' (Angel_F, the diaries of an Artificial Intelligence).
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Procedural reasoning system

In artificial intelligence, a procedural reasoning system (PRS) is a framework for constructing real-time reasoning systems that can perform complex tasks in dynamic environments. It is based on the notion of a rational agent or intelligent agent using the belief–desire–intention software model. A user application is predominately defined, and provided to a PRS system is a set of knowledge areas. Each knowledge area is a piece of procedural knowledge that specifies how to do something, e.g., how to navigate down a corridor, or how to plan a path (in contrast with robotic architectures where the programmer just provides a model of what the states of the world are and how the agent's primitive actions affect them). Such a program, together with a PRS interpreter, is used to control the agent. The interpreter is responsible for maintaining beliefs about the world state, choosing which goals to attempt to achieve next, and choosing which knowledge area to apply in the current situation. How exactly these operations are performed might depend on domain-specific meta-level knowledge areas. Unlike traditional AI planning systems that generate a complete plan at the beginning, and replan if unexpected things happen, PRS interleaves planning and doing actions in the world. At any point, the system might only have a partially specified plan for the future. PRS is based on the BDI or belief–desire–intention framework for intelligent agents. Beliefs consist of what the agent believes to be true about the current state of the world, desires consist of the agent's goals, and intentions consist of the agent's current plans for achieving those goals. Furthermore, each of these three components is typically explicitly represented somewhere within the memory of the PRS agent at runtime, which is in contrast to purely reactive systems, such as the subsumption architecture. == History == The PRS concept was developed by the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International during the 1980s, by many workers including Michael Georgeff, Amy L. Lansky, and François Félix Ingrand. Their framework was responsible for exploiting and popularizing the BDI model in software for control of an intelligent agent. The seminal application of the framework was a fault detection system for the reaction control system of the NASA Space Shuttle Discovery. Development on this PRS continued at the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute through to the late 1990s, which led to the development of a C++ implementation and extension called dMARS. == Architecture == The system architecture of SRI's PRS includes the following components: Database for beliefs about the world, represented using first order predicate calculus. Goals to be realized by the system as conditions over an interval of time on internal and external state descriptions (desires). Knowledge areas (KAs) or plans that define sequences of low-level actions toward achieving a goal in specific situations. Intentions that include those KAs that have been selected for current and eventual execution. Interpreter or inference mechanism that manages the system. == Features == SRI's PRS was developed for embedded application in dynamic and real-time environments. As such it specifically addressed the limitations of other contemporary control and reasoning architectures like expert systems and the blackboard system. The following define the general requirements for the development of their PRS: asynchronous event handling guaranteed reaction and response types procedural representation of knowledge handling of multiple problems reactive and goal-directed behavior focus of attention reflective reasoning capabilities continuous embedded operation handling of incomplete or inaccurate data handling of transients modeling delayed feedback operator control == Applications == The seminal application of SRI's PRS was a monitoring and fault detection system for the reaction control system (RCS) on the NASA space shuttle. The RCS provides propulsive forces from a collection of jet thrusters and controls altitude of the space shuttle. A PRS-based fault diagnostic system was developed and tested using a simulator. It included over 100 KAs and over 25 meta level KAs. RCS specific KAs were written by space shuttle mission controllers. It was implemented on the Symbolics 3600 Series LISP machine and used multiple communicating instances of PRS. The system maintained over 1000 facts about the RCS, over 650 facts for the forward RCS alone and half of which are updated continuously during the mission. A version of the PRS was used to monitor the reaction control system on the Space Shuttle Discovery. PRS was tested on Shakey the robot including navigational and simulated jet malfunction scenarios based on the space shuttle. Later applications included a network management monitor called the Interactive Real-time Telecommunications Network Management System (IRTNMS) for Telecom Australia. == Extensions == The following list the major implementations and extensions of the PRS architecture. UM-PRS OpenPRS (formerly C-PRS and Propice) AgentSpeak Distributed multi-agent reasoning system (dMARS) GORITE JAM JACK Intelligent Agents SRI Procedural Agent Realization Kit (SPARK) PRS-CL
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