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  Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics

  The Grammar of Graphics (GoG) is a grammar-based system for representing graphics to provide grammatical constraints on the composition of data and information visualizations. A graphical grammar differs from a graphics pipeline as it focuses on semantic components such as scales and guides, statistical functions, coordinate systems, marks and aesthetic attributes. For example, a bar chart can be converted into a pie chart by specifying a polar coordinate system without any other change in graphical specification. The grammar of graphics concept was launched by Leland Wilkinson in 2001 (Wilkinson et al., 2001; Wilkinson, 2005) and graphical grammars have since been written in a variety of languages with various parameterisations and extensions. The major implementations of graphical grammars are nViZn created by a team at SPSS/IBM, followed by Polaris focusing on multidimensional relational databases which is commercialised as Tableau, a revised Layered Grammar of Graphics by Hadley Wickham in Ggplot2, and Vega-Lite which is a visualisation grammar with added interactivity. The grammar of graphics continues to evolve with alternate parameterisations, extensions, or new specifications. == Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics == === Theory === Wilkinson conceived the seven elements of a graphics to be Variables: mapping of objects to values represented in a graphic Algebra: operations to combine variables and specify dimensions of graphs Geometry: creation of geometric graphs from variables Aesthetics: sensory attributes Statistics: functions to change the appearance and representation of graphs Scales: represent variables on measured dimensions Coordinates: mapping to coordinate systems With these, Wilkinson hypothesised that These seven constructs are orthogonal and virtually all known statistical charts can be generated relatively parsimoniously This computational system is not a taxonomy of charts and rather it describes the meaning of what we do when we construct statistical graphics. === Implementations === Wilkinson wrote SYSTAT, a statistical software package, in the early 1980s. This program was noted for its comprehensive graphics, including the first software implementation of the heatmap display now widely used among biologists. After his company grew to 50 employees, he sold it to SPSS in 1995. At SPSS, he assembled a team of graphics programmers who developed the nViZn platform that produces the visualizations in SPSS, Clementine, and other analytics products. While at Stanford, Tableau founders Hanrahan and Stolte, as well as Diane Tang, created the predecessor to Tableau, named Polaris. Polaris was a data visualization software tool, built with the support of a United States Department of Energy defense program, the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). The main differences between Wilkinson's system and Polaris are the use of SQL relational algebra for database services and using shelves instead of cross and nest operators. == Wickham's Layered Grammar of Graphics == === Theory === Hadley Wickham conceived an alternate parameterisation of the syntax Wilkinson had derived, creating a layered grammar of graphics which he implemented as ggplot2 for R (programming language) users. This added a hierarchy of defaults based around the idea of building up a graphic from multiple layers. Wickham conceived these elements to be: Defaults: consists of data and mapping Data: dataset Mapping: aesthetic mappings Layer: consists of data, mapping, geom, stat, and position Data: dataset, or inherit from defaults Mapping: aesthetic mappings, or inherit from defaults Geom: geometric object Stat: statistical transformation Position: position adjustment Scale: mapping of data to aesthetic attributes Coord: mapping of data to the plane of the plot Facet: split up the data === Reception === Wilkinson is generally positive on Wickham's parameterisation and implementation of ggplot2, praising its elegance and expressivity whilst claiming that his original Grammar of Graphics is capable of representing a wider range of statistical graphics. === Implementations === ggplot2 is the first implementation of a layered grammar of graphics in R and implementations in other programming languages have ensued. These include direct ports plotnine for Python, gramm for MATLAB, Lets-Plot for Kotlin and gadfly for Julia. Projects inspired by elements of Wickham's grammar include Vega-Lite which specifies plots in JSON and uses a JavaScript engine. Implementations for Python include Vega-Altair (built on top of Vega-Lite). == Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics == === Theory === Vega-Lite combines ideas from Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics and Wickham's Layered Grammar of Graphics with a composition algebra for layered and multi-view displays with a grammar of interaction. The Vega-Lite specification is instantiated in JSON and rendered by the lower-level Vega. The graphical grammar implemented by Vega-Lite is composed of the following: Unit: consists of data, transforms, mark-type and encoding Data: relational table consisting of records (rows) and named attributes (columns) Transforms: data transformations Mark-type: geometric object for visual encoding Encodings: mapping of data attributes to visual marks properties where each encoding consists of: Channel: e.g. colour, shape, size, or text Field: data attribute Data-type: e.g. nominal, ordinal, quantitative, or temporal Value: use a literal instead of a data-type Functions: e.g. binning, aggregation, and sorting Scale: maps from data domain to visual range Guide: axis or legend for visualising scale Composite Views: compose views from multiple unit specifications with operators: Layer: charts plotted on top of each other Hconcat/Vconcat: place views side-by-side Facet: subset data to produce a trellis plot Repeat: multiple plots similar to facet but with full data replication in each cell Interaction: selections identify the set of points a user is interested in manipulating, with components: Selection: get the minimal number of backing points Name: reference Type: how many backing values are stored Predicate: determine the set of selected points e.g. single, list, interval Domain|Range: store data domain or visual range Event: e.g. mouseover, mousedown, mouseup, Init: initialise with specific backing points Transforms: e.g. project, toggle, translate, zoom, and nearest Resolve: resolve selections to union or intersect ==== Implementations ==== Whilst Vega-Lite is the sole implementation of this graphics grammar specification with compilation to Vega, other implementations do create JSON files which can be interpreted by Vega-Lite. == Related projects == Ggplot2 is an R package for plotting Tableau Software (originally known as Polaris) is a commercial software built using the Grammar of Graphics nViZn built by Wilkinson. SYSTAT (statistics package) built by Wilkinson ggpy, ggplot for Python, but has not been updated since 20 November 2016 plotnine started as an effort to improve the scalability of ggplot for Python and is largely compatible with ggplot2 syntax. Plotly - Interactive, online ggplot2 graphs gramm, a plotting class for MATLAB inspired by ggplot2 gadfly, a system for plotting and visualization written in Julia, based largely on ggplot2 Chart::GGPlot - ggplot2 port in Perl, but has not been updated since 16 March 2023 The Lets-Plot for Python library includes a native backend and a Python API, which was mostly based on the ggplot2 package. Lets-Plot Kotlin API is an open-source plotting library for statistical data implemented using the Kotlin programming language, and is built on the principles of layered graphics first described in the Leland Wilkinson's work The Grammar of Graphics. ggplotnim, plotting library using the Nim programming language inspired by ggplot2. Vega and Vega-Lite are plotting libraries that use JSON to specify plots. Vega-Altair, a Python library built on top of Vega-Lite chart-parts - React-friendly Grammar of Graphics, but has not been updated since 10 Dec 2021 g2 - a JavaScript library

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  OpenAI Operator

  OpenAI Operator was an AI agent developed by OpenAI, capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions, including filling forms, placing online orders, scheduling appointments, and other repetitive browser-based tasks. It uses OpenAI's advanced models to expand practical automation capabilities for users in daily activities. Operator was launched on January 23, 2025. It was released as a limited-access research preview to ChatGPT Pro-tier subscribers in the United States on February 1, 2025, with future plans to broaden availability. Operator was deprecated after the release of ChatGPT agent, and shut down on August 31, 2025. == Performance and limitations == In benchmark assessments, Operator achieved notable success, scoring 38.1% on OSWorld benchmarks (OS-level tasks) and 58.1% on WebArena benchmarks (web interactions). However, it did not reach human-level accuracy and faced limitations with intricate user interfaces and extended workflows. == Safety and privacy == OpenAI emphasized privacy and safety measures within Operator, including stringent data protection protocols and built-in safety checks designed to prevent unauthorized sensitive actions or information misuse. == Availability == Initially, Operator was only available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the U.S., with plans for broader availability to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users in the future.

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  BabelNet

  BabelNet is a multilingual lexical-semantic knowledge graph, ontology and encyclopedic dictionary developed at the NLP group of the Sapienza University of Rome under the supervision of Roberto Navigli. BabelNet was automatically created by linking Wikipedia to the most popular computational lexicon of the English language, WordNet. The integration is done using an automatic mapping and by filling in lexical gaps in resource-poor languages by using statistical machine translation. The result is an encyclopedic dictionary that provides concepts and named entities lexicalized in many languages and connected with large amounts of semantic relations. Additional lexicalizations and definitions are added by linking to free-license wordnets, OmegaWiki, the English Wiktionary, Wikidata, FrameNet, VerbNet and others. Similarly to WordNet, BabelNet groups words in different languages into sets of synonyms, called Babel synsets. For each Babel synset, BabelNet provides short definitions (called glosses) in many languages harvested from both WordNet and Wikipedia. == Statistics of BabelNet == As of December 2023, BabelNet (version 5.3) covers 600 languages. It contains almost 23 million synsets and around 1.7 billion word senses (regardless of their language). Each Babel synset contains 2 synonyms per language, i.e., word senses, on average. The semantic network includes all the lexico-semantic relations from WordNet (hypernymy and hyponymy, meronymy and holonymy, antonymy and synonymy, etc., totaling around 364,000 relation edges) as well as an underspecified relatedness relation from Wikipedia (totaling around 1.9 billion edges). Version 5.3 also associates around 61 million images with Babel synsets and provides a Lemon RDF encoding of the resource, available via a SPARQL endpoint. 2.67 million synsets are assigned domain labels. == Applications == BabelNet has been shown to enable multilingual natural language processing applications. The lexicalized knowledge available in BabelNet has been shown to obtain state-of-the-art results in: Semantic relatedness, Multilingual word-sense disambiguation and entity linking, with the Babelfy system, Video games with a purpose. == Prizes and acknowledgments == BabelNet received the META prize 2015 for "groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers through a multilingual lexicalised semantic network and ontology making use of heterogeneous data sources". The Artificial Intelligence Journal paper that describes BabelNet won the Prominent Paper Award in 2017. BabelNet featured prominently in a Time magazine article about the new age of innovative and up-to-date lexical knowledge resources available on the Web.

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  Thomas Bolander

  Thomas Bolander is a Danish professor at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, where he studies logic and artificial intelligence. Most of his studies focus on the social aspect of artificial intelligence, and how we can make future AI able to navigate in social interactions. Thomas Bolander also sits in different commissions, expert panels and boards, among these he is a member of the Siri Commission, the TeckDK Commission, a member of the editorial board of the journal Studia Logica and co-organizer of Science and Cocktails. Bolander is known for his dissemination of science. In 2019 he was awarded the H. C. Ørsted Medal. Which he was the first to achieve after a break of three years.

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  Charge-coupled device

  A charge-coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to a neighboring capacitor. CCD sensors are a major technology used in digital imaging. In a CCD image sensor, pixels are represented by p-doped metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) capacitors. These MOS capacitors, the basic building blocks of a CCD, are biased above the threshold for inversion when image acquisition begins, allowing the conversion of incoming photons into electron charges at the semiconductor-oxide interface; the CCD is then used to read out these charges. Although CCDs are not the only technology to allow for light detection, CCD image sensors are widely used in professional, medical, and scientific applications where high-quality image data are required. In applications with less exacting quality demands, such as consumer and professional digital cameras, active pixel sensors, also known as CMOS sensors (complementary MOS sensors), are generally used. However, the large quality advantage CCDs enjoyed early on has narrowed over time and since the late 2010s CMOS sensors are the dominant technology, having largely if not completely replaced CCD image sensors. == History == The basis for the CCD is the metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) structure, with MOS capacitors being the basic building blocks of a CCD, and a depleted MOS structure used as the photodetector in early CCD devices. In the late 1960s, Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs were researching MOS technology while working on semiconductor bubble memory. They realized that an electric charge was the analog of the magnetic bubble and that it could be stored on a tiny MOS capacitor. As it was fairly straightforward to fabricate a series of MOS capacitors in a row, they connected a suitable voltage to them so that the charge could be stepped along from one to the next. This led to the invention of the charge-coupled device by Boyle and Smith in 1969. They conceived of the design of what they termed, in their notebook, "Charge 'Bubble' Devices". The initial paper describing the concept in April 1970 listed possible uses as memory, a delay line, and an imaging device. The device could also be used as a shift register. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor from one storage capacitor to the next. The first experimental device demonstrating the principle was a row of closely spaced metal squares on an oxidized silicon surface electrically accessed by wire bonds. It was demonstrated by Gil Amelio, Michael Francis Tompsett and George Smith in April 1970. This was the first experimental application of the CCD in image sensor technology, and used a depleted MOS structure as the photodetector. The first patent (U.S. patent 4,085,456) on the application of CCDs to imaging was assigned to Tompsett, who filed the application in 1971. The first working CCD made with integrated circuit technology was a simple 8-bit shift register, reported by Tompsett, Amelio and Smith in August 1970. This device had input and output circuits and was used to demonstrate its use as a shift register and as a crude eight pixel linear imaging device. Development of the device progressed at a rapid rate. By 1971, Bell researchers led by Michael Tompsett were able to capture images with simple linear devices. Several companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, RCA and Texas Instruments, picked up on the invention and began development programs. Fairchild's effort, led by ex-Bell researcher Gil Amelio, was the first with commercial devices, and by 1974 had a linear 500-element device and a 2D 100 × 100 pixel device. Peter L. P. Dillon, a scientist at Kodak Research Labs, invented the first color CCD image sensor by overlaying a color filter array on this Fairchild 100 x 100 pixel Interline CCD starting in 1974. Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer working for the Kodak Apparatus Division, invented a digital still camera using this same Fairchild 100 × 100 CCD in 1975. The interline transfer (ILT) CCD device was proposed by L. Walsh and R. Dyck at Fairchild in 1973 to reduce smear and eliminate a mechanical shutter. To further reduce smear from bright light sources, the frame-interline-transfer (FIT) CCD architecture was developed by K. Horii, T. Kuroda and T. Kunii at Matsushita (now Panasonic) in 1981. The first KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellite equipped with charge-coupled device array (800 × 800 pixels) technology for imaging was launched in December 1976. Under the leadership of Kazuo Iwama, Sony started a large development effort on CCDs involving a significant investment. Eventually, Sony managed to mass-produce CCDs for their camcorders. Before this happened, Iwama died in August 1982. Subsequently, a CCD chip was placed on his tombstone to acknowledge his contribution. The first mass-produced consumer CCD video camera, the CCD-G5, was released by Sony in 1983, based on a prototype developed by Yoshiaki Hagiwara in 1981. Early CCD sensors suffered from shutter lag. This was largely resolved with the invention of the pinned photodiode (PPD). It was invented by Nobukazu Teranishi, Hiromitsu Shiraki and Yasuo Ishihara at NEC in 1980. They recognized that lag can be eliminated if the signal carriers could be transferred from the photodiode to the CCD. This led to their invention of the pinned photodiode, a photodetector structure with low lag, low noise, high quantum efficiency and low dark current. It was first publicly reported by Teranishi and Ishihara with A. Kohono, E. Oda and K. Arai in 1982, with the addition of an anti-blooming structure. The new photodetector structure invented at NEC was given the name "pinned photodiode" (PPD) by B.C. Burkey at Kodak in 1984. In 1987, the PPD began to be incorporated into most CCD devices, becoming a fixture in consumer electronic video cameras and then digital still cameras. Since then, the PPD has been used in nearly all CCD sensors and then CMOS sensors. In January 2006, Boyle and Smith were awarded the National Academy of Engineering Charles Stark Draper Prize, and in 2009 they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their invention of the CCD concept. Michael Tompsett was awarded the 2010 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, for pioneering work and electronic technologies including the design and development of the first CCD imagers. He was also awarded the 2012 IEEE Edison Medal for "pioneering contributions to imaging devices including CCD Imagers, cameras and thermal imagers". == Basics of operation == In a CCD for capturing images, there is a photoactive region (an epitaxial layer of silicon), and a transmission region made out of a shift register (the CCD, properly speaking). An image is projected through a lens onto the capacitor array (the photoactive region), causing each capacitor to accumulate an electric charge proportional to the light intensity at that location. A one-dimensional array, used in line-scan cameras, captures a single slice of the image, whereas a two-dimensional array, used in video and still cameras, captures a two-dimensional picture corresponding to the scene projected onto the focal plane of the sensor. Once the array has been exposed to the image, a control circuit causes each capacitor to transfer its contents to its neighbor (operating as a shift register). The last capacitor in the array dumps its charge into a charge amplifier, which converts the charge into a voltage. By repeating this process, the controlling circuit converts the entire contents of the array in the semiconductor to a sequence of voltages. In a digital device, these voltages are then sampled, digitized, and usually stored in memory; in an analog device (such as an analog video camera), they are processed into a continuous analog signal (e.g. by feeding the output of the charge amplifier into a low-pass filter), which is then processed and fed out to other circuits for transmission, recording, or other processing. == Detailed physics of operation == === Charge generation === Before the MOS capacitors are exposed to light, they are biased into the depletion region; in n-channel CCDs, the silicon under the bias gate is slightly p-doped or intrinsic. The gate is then biased at a positive potential, above the threshold for strong inversion, which will eventually result in the creation of an n channel below the gate as in a MOSFET. However, it takes time to reach this thermal equilibrium: up to hours in high-end scientific cameras cooled at low temperature. Initially after biasing, the holes are pushed far into the substrate, and no mobile electrons are at or near the surface; the CCD thus operates in a non-equilibrium state called deep depletion. Then, when electron–hole pairs are generated in the depletion region, they are separated by the electric field, the elec

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  Anthropic–United States Department of Defense dispute

  Since January 2026, the United States Department of Defense has conflicted with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic over the use of its products for military purposes and mass domestic surveillance. == Background == === Artificial intelligence in the U.S. military === The United States Department of Defense began developing lethal autonomous weapons as early as the Reagan administration. The Department of Defense established a policy on the use of artificial intelligence in 2012, Directive 3000.09. Efforts to utilize artificial intelligence intensified under the term of secretary Ash Carter. The Department of Defense's use of artificial intelligence for Project Maven prompted concerns within Google in 2018, leading to protests and mass resignations. === Anthropic in the second Trump administration === In Donald Trump's second presidency, Anthropic publicly disagreed with the administration's policies and initiatives. In January 2025, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei criticized the artificial intelligence investment project Stargate as "chaotic" and opposed Trump's rescission of president Joe Biden's Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence, but noted that Anthropic had held discussions with Trump officials about artificial intelligence policy. Amid discussions over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Anthropic privately lobbied for Congress to vote against a bill preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence and expressed opposition to an artificial intelligence agreement signed among Gulf states in Trump's visit to the Middle East in May. According to Semafor, Trump officials chastised Anthropic's hiring of several officials involved in the Biden administration, including Elizabeth Kelly, the former director of the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute; Tarun Chhabra, the coordinator for technology and national security in the National Security Council; and Ben Buchanan, Biden's advisor for artificial intelligence. The following month, Amodei wrote an op-ed in The New York Times describing the artificial intelligence regulation bill, then tied to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as "far too blunt an instrument". Prior to the dispute, the Trump administration had integrated Anthropic's services. By November 2024, Anthropic had already partnered with Palantir and Amazon Web Services, companies that offered services with FedRAMP authorization. In the Biden administration, Anthropic had reached an agreement with the AI Safety Institute and had participated in a nuclear information safety evaluation. The Department of Homeland Security authorized its workers to use commercial artificial intelligence systems, including Anthropic's Claude, until May 2025. Through its interoperability with Palantir, a company heavily involved in data analysis and analytics at the Department of Defense, Anthropic's technology achieved relatively widespread usage in the U.S. military. The following month, Anthropic announced that it would allow national security customers to use Claude Gov. Anthropic's orthogonal usage policy to the surveillance systems implemented at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement led to a conflict between Anthropic and the Trump administration by September. That month, Amodei criticized Trump's approach to export restrictions on semiconductors. Anthropic's strategy has mirrored Amodei's views towards Trump; in a Facebook post ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Amodei urged his associates to vote for vice president Kamala Harris over Trump, describing him as a "feudal warlord". As the Trump administration targeted law firms, Amodei cut ties with the firms Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Latham & Watkins, which reached agreements with the Trump administration to avoid punishment. David Sacks, Trump's advisor for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, said on All-In (2020–present) that Anthropic was among several "AI doomers" that support regulation he saw as overly restrictive. According to The Wall Street Journal, officials close to Sacks examined whether Anthropic's Claude was a "woke AI"; in July, Trump signed an executive order "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government ". Sacks viewed Amodei's decision to attend the World Economic Forum over Trump's second inauguration; his hiring of Biden officials; and Anthropic's association with the philanthropic initiative Open Philanthropy as evidence that Anthropic would not support Trump's agenda. In October 2025, Sacks stated that Anthropic was "running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering." That month, Amodei published a blog post rebuffing "inaccurate claims" from the Trump administration on Anthropic's policies, intensifying the dispute. Amodei's statement included views explicitly espoused by vice president JD Vance. In December, Amodei met with Trump officials and several senators in an effort to improve Anthropic's relationship with the Trump administration. == Dispute == In December 2025, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth announced GenAI.mil, an artificial intelligence platform for the Department of Defense. The department initially contracted Google Gemini for the platform, then OpenAI's ChatGPT. The following month, Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense would additionally contract xAI's Grok for use in the military, decrying "woke AI." In January 2026, Semafor reported that the Department of Defense had conflicted with Anthropic over its policies on lethal military force and that Hegseth's comment on woke AI was a reference to Anthropic. According to Reuters, Anthropic representatives opposed the use of the company's products for surveillance or to develop lethal autonomous weapons. The dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense resulted in the termination of a contract worth an estimated US$200 million. In February 2026, Emil Michael, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, stated that the Department of Defense would expand access to commercial artificial intelligence systems, including Anthropic's Claude, to unclassified and classified domains. That month, Axios reported that the Department of Defense had used Claude in the United States intervention in Venezuela. Anthropic told Axios that it would reassess its partnership with the Department of Defense after the revelations. After Anthropic refused to agree to allow the Department of Defense to use Claude for "all lawful purposes," the department threatened to cancel its contracts with the company. Hegseth additionally moved to label Anthropic a "supply chain risk," which would have forced military contractors to cut ties with Anthropic. A federal judge blocked this designation, describing it as punitive. Michael told reporters that Anthropic should "cross the Rubicon" and allow the Department of Defense to dictate the terms of how its technology is used. The position of the Department of Defense, and its tactics during the dispute, were widely criticized on grounds including violating the principles of rule-of-law, market independence and national security. == Impact == The dispute caused 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm associated with Donald Trump Jr., to abandon an investment in Anthropic worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Following the government's actions against Anthropic, OpenAI "rushed", hours before the US started the 2026 Iran war, to get a deal without the constraints that Anthropic had sought. == Lawsuits == In March 2026, Judge Rita F. Lin granted a preliminary injunction against the government. Lin wrote: The Department of War’s records show that it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because of its “hostile manner through the press.” Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government’s contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation. (...) At bottom, Anthropic has shown that these broad punitive measures were likely unlawful and that it is suffering irreparable harm from them. Numerous amici have also described wide-ranging harm to the public interest, including the chilling of open discussion about important topics in AI safety. In April 2026, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in a per curiam order denied Anthropic's motion to lift the designation. The April order is not final. The court's order said lifting the designation "would force the United States military to prolong its dealings with an unwanted vendor of critical AI services in the middle of a significant ongoing military conflict". According to Wired, "Several experts in government contracting and corporate rights" said "Anthropic has a strong case against the government, but the courts sometimes refuse to overrule the White House on matters related to national security."

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  Copyright and artificial intelligence in the United Kingdom

  The interaction of artificial intelligence and copyright law has become one of the most contentious tech policy debates in the United Kingdom, centering on whether AI developers should be permitted to train their models on copyrighted material without explicit consent or remuneration. This debate has exposed a deep fracture between the creative industries, which seek to protect their intellectual property from unauthorised commercial exploitation, and tech companies. The academic and library sectors are also impacted, and argue that overly restrictive copyright laws hinder scientific research and the UK's sovereign AI capabilities. In 2024, the UK government proposed a broad text and data mining (TDM) exception to copyright that would have allowed AI companies to use publicly available copyrighted material for training, offering creators only an "opt-out" mechanism, similar to the exception introduced in Europe. This proposal faced intense opposition from across the creative sector. Trade unions representing writers, musicians, performers, and journalists argued that such an exception would effectively expropriate their members' work for the commercial benefit of tech giants. A report from the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, warned that generative AI posed a "clear and present danger" to the £124 billion creative economy. The government abandoned the opt-out model in March 2026, opting instead to build a stronger evidence base before pursuing any copyright reform. Conversely, the academic and library sectors have raised significant concerns that the UK's current TDM exception, which is strictly limited to non-commercial research, is too narrow. Universities and research libraries occupy a dual role as both creators of vast datasets and beneficiaries of TDM exceptions. They argue that the current legal framework restricts their ability to computationally analyse the very research they produce, thereby hobbling the UK's "AI for Science" strategy. Advocacy groups have highlighted a "triple payment" problem, wherein publicly funded research is handed over to publishers, who then charge universities substantial subscription fees and demand additional payments for specific TDM licences. This tension is further complicated by the commercial practices of major academic publishers. While publishers often restrict universities from using subscribed databases for AI training, they have simultaneously entered into lucrative, multi-million-dollar licensing agreements to sell access to this academic content to commercial AI developers. Furthermore, academics have accused publishers of actively steering authors away from permissive open-access licences towards more restrictive variants. By doing so, publishers retain the exclusive commercial rights necessary to strike these AI training deals, often without consulting the original authors or offering them any additional remuneration. This dynamic has not only reopened debates within the Open Access movement but has also created complex legal scenarios where publishers, rather than authors, control the terms of copyright litigation against major tech companies. == Training on copyrighted material == The question of whether AI developers should be permitted to train their models on copyrighted material without payment or consent has been one of the most contentious policy debates in the UK AI landscape. In 2024, the then-Conservative government proposed a broad text and data mining (TDM) exception that would have allowed AI companies to use any publicly available copyrighted material for training purposes, with creators able only to "opt out" of having their work used. This proposal provoked intense opposition from writers, musicians, visual artists, publishers, and broadcasters, who argued it would effectively expropriate their intellectual property for the commercial benefit of AI companies. The debate over text and data mining exceptions extends significantly beyond generative AI and the creative industries, implicating a wide range of scientific, industrial, and academic research applications. TDM is a foundational process for analysing large datasets to identify patterns, trends, and correlations, which is heavily utilised in fields such as medical research, climate modelling, and financial services. In the scientific and academic sectors, researchers rely on TDM to process vast amounts of published literature. For example, in biomedical research, TDM is used to accelerate drug discovery, identify new uses for existing medicines, and extract insights from clinical notes and genomic datasets. However, the application of traditional copyright frameworks to scientific literature has been criticised by academics. Researchers argue that scientific writing is intended to convey factual, verifiable information rather than creative originality, and that copyright restrictions on TDM hinder reproducibility, validation, and the advancement of science. The current UK copyright exception for TDM (Section 29A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) is limited strictly to non-commercial research, which creates barriers for public-private research partnerships and commercial scientific development. Beyond academia, non-generative AI and TDM are critical to various industrial and commercial operations. In the financial services sector, TDM is employed to monitor transactions, detect fraud, and analyse market feeds. Other non-generative applications include search engine indexing, plagiarism detection software, and media monitoring. A 2026 report by Public First estimated that 19% of UK businesses use specialised TDM tools, and that a restrictive copyright regime requiring licenses for all copyrighted content could cost the UK economy £220 billion in lost AI-driven GDP growth by 2035 compared to a broad commercial TDM exemption. Industry advocates argue that the lack of a commercial TDM exception in the UK creates legal uncertainty that stifles innovation across these broader, non-generative applications of data analysis. === Tech and AI industry positions === The technology and artificial intelligence industries lobbied for a broad text and data mining (TDM) exception to UK copyright law, arguing that such an exception is essential for the UK to remain globally competitive in AI development. Industry bodies such as techUK have argued that without a TDM exception, the UK risks becoming an "AI taker rather than an AI maker," as developers will relocate training operations to jurisdictions with more permissive copyright regimes, such as the United States, Japan, Singapore, and the European Union. During the UK government's 2024–2025 consultation on copyright and AI, major AI developers and trade associations strongly supported "Option 2" (a broad TDM exception) or "Option 3" (a TDM exception with an opt-out mechanism). OpenAI stated in its consultation response that a broad TDM exception is "necessary to drive AI innovation and investment in the UK," arguing that developers should be permitted to train models on lawfully accessed copies without further distribution. The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) similarly argued that restricting TDM to non-commercial development would undermine the government's ambitions for the UK tech sector and frustrate partnerships between commercial entities and research institutions. Tech industry advocates have also highlighted the economic implications of copyright policy. According to analysis by the think tank UK Day One, adopting an overly restrictive licensing-only approach could result in the UK economy losing up to £182 billion over 20 years, whereas a broad TDM exception could generate a positive impact of £131.61 billion over the same period. Following the government's March 2026 decision to drop plans for a TDM exception in favour of a market-led licensing approach, techUK's Deputy CEO Antony Walker criticised the move, stating that "copyright material cannot be used for AI development and training without permission" under the current framework, which he argued would push AI model training to the US. === Creative sector and political opposition to text and data mining === In March 2026, the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee published a report, AI, Copyright and the Creative Industries, which concluded that the creative industries face "a clear and present danger from generative AI" and that it would be "a very poor bet" for the government to weaken copyright protections to attract AI investment. The Committee noted that the creative industries contributed £124 billion to the UK economy in 2023 and employed 2.4 million people, compared to the AI sector's £12 billion GVA and 86,000 employees in 2024. The Committee called on the government to develop a "licensing-first" regime underpinned by mandatory transparency requirements, and to rule out any new commercial TDM exception with an opt-out model. Tra

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  Leabra

  Leabra stands for local, error-driven and associative, biologically realistic algorithm. It is a model of learning which is a balance between Hebbian and error-driven learning with other network-derived characteristics. This model is used to mathematically predict outcomes based on inputs and previous learning influences. Leabra is heavily influenced by and contributes to neural network designs and models, including emergent. == Background == It is the default algorithm in emergent (successor of PDP++) when making a new project, and is extensively used in various simulations. Hebbian learning is performed using conditional principal components analysis (CPCA) algorithm with correction factor for sparse expected activity levels. Error-driven learning is performed using GeneRec, which is a generalization of the recirculation algorithm, and approximates Almeida–Pineda recurrent backpropagation. The symmetric, midpoint version of GeneRec is used, which is equivalent to the contrastive Hebbian learning algorithm (CHL). See O'Reilly (1996; Neural Computation) for more details. The activation function is a point-neuron approximation with both discrete spiking and continuous rate-code output. Layer or unit-group level inhibition can be computed directly using a k-winners-take-all (KWTA) function, producing sparse distributed representations. A feedforward and feedback (FFFB) form of inhibition has now replaced the KWTA form of inhibition. FFFB inhibition can be efficiently implemented by using the average excitatory input and activity levels in a given layer. The net input is computed as an average, not a sum, over connections, based on normalized, sigmoidally transformed weight values, which are subject to scaling on a connection-group level to alter relative contributions. Automatic scaling is performed to compensate for differences in expected activity level in the different projections. Documentation about this algorithm can be found in the book "Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain" published by MIT press. and in the Emergent Documentation Archived 2009-04-16 at the Wayback Machine == Overview of the leabra algorithm == The pseudocode for Leabra is given here, showing exactly how the pieces of the algorithm described in more detail in the subsequent sections fit together. Iterate over minus and plus phases of settling for each event. o At start of settling, for all units: - Initialize all state variables (activation, v_m, etc.). - Apply external patterns (clamp input in minus, input & output in plus). - Compute net input scaling terms (constants, computed here so network can be dynamically altered). - Optimization: compute net input once from all static activations (e.g., hard-clamped external inputs). o During each cycle of settling, for all non-clamped units: - Compute excitatory netinput (g_e(t), aka eta_j or net) -- sender-based optimization by ignoring inactives. - Compute kWTA inhibition for each layer, based on g_i^Q: Sort units into two groups based on g_i^Q: top k and remaining k+1 -> n. If basic, find k and k+1th highest If avg-based, compute avg of 1 -> k & k+1 -> n. Set inhibitory conductance g_i from g^Q_k and g^Q_k+1 - Compute point-neuron activation combining excitatory input and inhibition o After settling, for all units, record final settling activations as either minus or plus phase (y^-_j or y^+_j). After both phases update the weights (based on linear current weight values), for all connections: o Compute error-driven weight changes with CHL with soft weight bounding o Compute Hebbian weight changes with CPCA from plus-phase activations o Compute net weight change as weighted sum of error-driven and Hebbian o Increment the weights according to net weight change. == Implementations == Emergent Archived 2015-10-03 at the Wayback Machine is the original implementation of Leabra; its most recent implementation is written in Go. It was written chiefly by Dr. O'Reilly, but professional software engineers were recently hired to improve the existing codebase. This is the fastest implementation, suitable for constructing large networks. Although emergent has a graphical user interface, it is very complex and has a steep learning curve. If you want to understand the algorithm in detail, it will be easier to read non-optimized code. For this purpose, check out the MATLAB version. There is also an R version available, that can be easily installed via install.packages("leabRa") in R and has a short introduction to how the package is used. The MATLAB and R versions are not suited for constructing very large networks, but they can be installed quickly and (with some programming background) are easy to use. Furthermore, they can also be adapted easily. == Special algorithms == Temporal differences and general dopamine modulation. Temporal differences (TD) is widely used as a model of midbrain dopaminergic firing. Primary value learned value (PVLV). PVLV simulates behavioral and neural data on Pavlovian conditioning and the midbrain dopaminergic neurons that fire in proportion to unexpected rewards (an alternative to TD). Prefrontal cortex basal ganglia working memory (PBWM). PBWM uses PVLV to train prefrontal cortex working memory updating system, based on the biology of the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia.

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  MovieRide FX

  MovieRide FX is a patented automated special visual effects video compositing engine used in the MovieRide FX mobile application for Android (requires Android 2.3 or later) and iOS (compatible with iPhone 4 and up, iPad, and iPod Touch (new generation), requires iOS 7 or later). MovieRide FX allows the user to personalize a "Hollywood-style" movie clip by inserting themself into the clip as the "actor". == Features == The MovieRide FX app uses the relevant mobile device's camera to record a video of the user and insert it into a pre-packaged "Hollywood style" movie clip. The "actor" is extracted from their recorded video clip through various known effects such as masking, keying, and motion tracking. The "actor" is then inserted into one of the pre-packaged movie clips created by the MovieRide FX visual effects artists. This is done through an automated process requiring little or no artistic or technical skill from the user. The custom movie clips pre-packaged with MovieRide FX offer the user a variety of movie scenarios. Additional clips based on popular television and movie themes are continually being developed and are available on a freemium basis. == Sharing == Once the user's footage has automatically been composited into a movie clip and rendered as an .mp4 file, it can be shared via social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and by e-mail. == History == === 2012 === MovieRide FX was created by Grant Waterston and Johann Mynhardt, who started development in 2012. === 2013 === The beta version was released on Google Play in July 2013. In August 2013 MovieRide FX was a New Media Award winner in the "New Media" category of the Accolade International Awards in Los Angeles. In October 2013 MovieRide FX was awarded exhibitor space in the ‘start-up village’ at the Apps-World Expo in London. === 2014 === MovieRide FX reached the 100 000 – 500 000 downloads category on the Google Play Store in June 2014. The official Android version was launched in July 2014. iOS version released in August 2014. MovieRide FX was selected as one of the "Top 150" startups at the Pioneer Festival in Vienna in September 2014. In November 2014 MovieRide FX was shortlisted for the Appster Awards in the "Best Entertainment App" and "Most Innovative App" categories and was awarded exhibitor space at the ‘start-up village’ at the Apps-World Expo in London. Patent applications were filed in South Africa, the EU and USA in April 2014. === 2015 === In September 2015 MovieRide FX was shortlisted for "Best Software innovation" at The Technology Expo Awards in London. === 2016 === In April 2016 MovieRide FX was nominated for a National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF) award for 'Research leading to Innovation by a corporate organization' In August 2016 Movie Ride FX won two Gold Awards at the 2016 Mobile Marketing Awards (MMA Smarties SA). These two Gold awards were for the 'Innovation' and 'Best in Show’ categories. In December 2016 FlicJam Inc. was formed in the US to access the larger global market. EU patent application was published in March 2016. === 2017 === South African patent was granted in February 2017. === 2018 === US patent was granted in March 2018.

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  International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence

  The International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence was founded in 1987 and is published by World Scientific. The journal covers developments in artificial intelligence, and its sub-field, pattern recognition. This includes articles on image and language processing, robotics and neural networks. == Abstracting and indexing == The journal is abstracted and indexed in: SciSearch ISI Alerting Services CompuMath Citation Index Current Contents/Engineering, Computing & Technology Inspec io-port.net Compendex Computer Abstracts

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  Mustafa Suleyman

  Mustafa Suleyman (born in August 1984) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Microsoft AI, and the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an AI company which was acquired by Google. After leaving DeepMind, he co-founded Inflection AI, a machine learning and generative AI company, in 2022. == Early life and education == Suleyman's Syrian father worked as a taxi driver and his English mother was a nurse. He grew up off Caledonian Road, London, where he lived with his parents and his two younger brothers. Suleyman went to Thornhill Primary School, a state school in Islington, followed by Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, a boys' grammar school. Around that time, he met his DeepMind co-founder, Demis Hassabis, through his best friend, who was Demis's younger brother. Suleyman shared that he and Hassabis often discussed how they could make a positive impact on the world. Suleyman enrolled to study philosophy and theology at the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate student at Mansfield College, Oxford, before dropping out at 19. == Career == In August 2001, while still a teenager and a "strong atheist", Suleyman helped Mohammed Mamdani establish a telephone counselling service called the Muslim Youth Helpline. The organization would later become one of the largest mental health support services. Suleyman subsequently worked as a policy officer on human rights for Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, before going on to start Reos Partners, a "systemic change" consultancy that uses methods from conflict resolution to navigate social problems. As a negotiator and facilitator, Mustafa worked for a wide range of clients such as the United Nations, the Dutch government, and the World Wide Fund for Nature. === DeepMind and Google === In 2010 Suleyman co-founded DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning company, and became its chief product officer. The company quickly established itself as one of the leaders in the AI sector. In 2014 DeepMind was acquired by Google for a reported £400 million, the company's largest acquisition in Europe at that time. Following the acquisition, Suleyman became head of applied AI at DeepMind, taking on responsibility for integrating the company's technology across a wide range of Google products. In February 2016 Suleyman launched DeepMind Health at the Royal Society of Medicine. DeepMind Health builds clinician-led technology for the National Health Service (NHS) and other partners to improve frontline healthcare services. Under Suleyman, DeepMind also developed research collaborations with healthcare organizations in the United Kingdom, including Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS foundation trust. In 2016, Suleyman led an effort to apply DeepMind's machine learning algorithms to help reduce the energy required to cool Google's data centres. The system evaluated the billions of possible combinations of actions that the data centre operators could take, and came up with recommendations based on the predicted power usage. The system discovered novel methods of cooling, leading to a reduction of up to 40% of the amount of energy used for cooling, and a 15% improvement in the buildings' overall energy efficiency. Since June 2019, Suleyman has served on the board of The Economist Group, which publishes The Economist newspaper. In August 2019, Suleyman was placed on administrative leave following allegations of bullying employees. The company hired an external lawyer to investigate, and shortly thereafter Suleyman left to take a VP role at parent company Google. An email circulated by DeepMind's leadership to staff after the story broke, as well as additional details published by Business Insider, said Suleyman's "management style fell short" of expected standards. In December 2019, Suleyman announced he would be leaving DeepMind to join Google, working in a policy role. === Inflection AI === Suleyman left Google in January 2022 and joined Greylock Partners as a venture partner and in March 2022, Suleyman co-founded Inflection AI, a new AI lab venture with Greylock's Reid Hoffman. The company was founded with the goal of leveraging "AI to help humans 'talk' to computers," recruited former staff from companies such as Google and Meta and raised $225 million in its first funding round. In 2023, Inflection AI launched a chatbot named “Pi” for Personal Intelligence. The bot “remembers” past conversations and seems to get to know its users over time. According to Suleyman, the long-term goal for Pi is to be a digital “Chief of Staff”, with the initial design focused on maintaining conversational dialogue with users, asking questions, and offering emotional support. === Microsoft AI === In March 2024, Microsoft appointed Suleyman as Executive Vice President (EVP) and CEO of its newly created consumer AI unit, Microsoft AI. Several members of Inflection AI's team were also appointed to the division, including co-founder Karen Simonyan. === Awards and honours === Suleyman was appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours. Suleyman was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence in 2023 and in 2024. === Views on AI ethics === Suleyman is prominent in the debate over the ethics of AI and has spoken widely about the need for companies, governments and civil society to join in holding technologists accountable for the impacts of their work. He has advocated redesigning incentives in the technology industry to steer business leaders toward prioritising social responsibility alongside their fiduciary duties. Within DeepMind he set up a research unit called DeepMind Ethics & Society to study the real-world impacts of AI and help technologists put ethics into practice. Suleyman is also a founding co-chair of the Partnership on AI – an organisation that includes representatives from companies such as Amazon, Apple, DeepMind, Meta, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. The organisation studies and formulates best practices for AI technologies, advances the public's understanding of AI, and serves as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and how it affects people and society. Its board of directors has equal representation from non-profit and for profit entities. In September 2023, Suleyman, in collaboration with researcher Michael Bhaskar, published The Coming Wave, Technology, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma, a book that examines the transformative and potentially perilous impact of advanced technologies, particularly AI and synthetic biology. According to Suleyman, AI notably has the potential to bring "radical abundance", address climate change and empower people with its cheap problem-solving capabilities. But it may also improve its own design and manufacturing processes, leading to a period of dangerously rapid AI progress. And it could enable catastrophic misuse, from bioengineered pathogens to autonomous weapons, making global oversight and containment essential to avoid unintended consequences. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. In June 2024, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Suleyman expressed the view that unless a website explicitly specifies otherwise, for "content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding." The statement sparked controversy over the use of Internet data for training AI models. == Personal life == A Business Insider profile in 2017 described Suleyman as being liberal.

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  AI Dungeon

  AI Dungeon is a single-player/multiplayer text adventure game which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate content and allows players to create and share adventures and custom prompts. The game's first version was made available in May 2019, and its second version (initially called AI Dungeon 2) was released on Google Colaboratory in December 2019. It was later ported that same month to its current cross-platform web application. The AI model was then reformed in July 2020. == Gameplay == AI Dungeon is a text adventure game that uses artificial intelligence to generate random storylines in response to player-submitted stimuli. In the game, players are prompted to choose a setting for their adventure (e.g. fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, zombies), followed by other options relevant to the setting (such as character class for fantasy settings). After beginning an adventure, four main interaction methods can be chosen for the player's text input: Do: Must be followed by a verb, allowing the player to perform an action. Say: Must be followed by dialogue sentences, allowing players to communicate with other characters. Story: Can be followed by sentences describing something that happens to progress the story, or that players want the AI to know for future events. See: Must be followed by a description, allowing the player to perceive events, objects, or characters. Using this command creates an AI generated image, and does not affect gameplay. The game adapts and responds to most actions the player enters. Providing blank inputs can be used to prompt the AI to generate further content, and the game also provides players with options to undo or redo or modify recent events to improve the game's narrative. Players can also tell the AI what elements to "remember" for reference in future parts of their playthrough. === User-generated content === In addition to AI Dungeon's pre-configured settings, players can create custom "adventures" from scratch by describing the setting in text format, which the AI will then generate a setting from. These custom adventures can be published for others to play, with an interface for browsing published adventures and leaving comments under them. === Multiplayer === AI Dungeon includes a multiplayer mode in which different players each have their own character and take turns interacting with the AI within the same game session. Multiplayer supports both online play across multiple devices or local play using a shared device. The game's hosts are able to supervise the AI and modify its output. Unlike the single-player game, in which actions and stories use second person narration, multiplayer game stories are presented using third-person narration. === Worlds === AI Dungeon allows players to set their adventures within specific "Worlds" that give context to the broader environment where the adventure takes place. This feature was first released with two different worlds available for selection: Xaxas, a "world of peace and prosperity"; and Kedar, a "world of dragons, demons, and monsters". == Development == === AI Dungeon Classic (Early GPT-2) === The first version of AI Dungeon (sometimes referred to as AI Dungeon Classic) was designed and created by Nick Walton of Brigham Young University's "Perception, Control, and Cognition" deep learning laboratory in March 2019 during a hackathon. Before this, Walton had been working as an intern for several companies in the field of autonomous vehicles. This creation used an early version of the GPT-2 natural-language-generating neural network, created by OpenAI, allowing it to generate its original adventure narratives. During his first interactions with GPT-2, Walton was partly inspired by the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), which he had played for the first time with his family a few months earlier: I realized that there were no games available that gave you the same freedom to do anything that I found in [Dungeons & Dragons] ... You can be so creative compared to other games. This led him to wonder if an AI could function as a dungeon master. Unlike later versions of AI Dungeon, the original did not allow players to specify any action they wanted. Instead, it generated a finite list of possible actions to choose from. This first version of the game was released to the public in May 2019. It is not to be confused with another GPT-2-based adventure game, GPT Adventure, created by Northwestern University neuroscience postgraduate student Nathan Whitmore, also released on Google Colab several months after the public release of AI Dungeon. === AI Dungeon 2 (Full GPT-2) === In November 2019, a new, "full" version of GPT-2 was released by OpenAI. This new model included support for 1.5 billion parameters (which determine the accuracy with which a machine learning model can perform a task), compared with the 126 million parameter version used in the earliest stages of AI Dungeon's development. The game was recreated by Walton, leveraging this new version of the model, and temporarily rebranded as AI Dungeon 2. AI Dungeon 2's AI was given more focused training compared to its predecessor, using genre-specific text. This training material included approximately 30 megabytes of content web-scraped from chooseyourstory.com (an online community website of content inspired by interactive gamebooks, written by contributors of multiple skill levels, using logic of differing complexity) and multiple D&D rulebooks and adventures. The new version was released in December 2019 as open-source software available on GitHub. It was accessible via Google Colab, an online tool for data scientists and AI researchers that allows for free execution of code on Google-hosted machines. It could also be run locally on a PC, but in both cases, it required players to download the full model, around 5 gigabytes of data. Within days of the initial release, this mandatory download resulted in bandwidth charges of over $20,000, forcing the temporary shut-down of the game until a peer-to-peer alternative solution was established. Due to the game's sudden and explosive growth that same month, however, it became closed-source, proprietary software and was relaunched by Walton's start-up development team, Latitude (with Walton taking on the role of CTO). This relaunch constituted mobile apps for iOS and Android (built by app developer Braydon Batungbacal) on December 17. Other members of this team included Thorsten Kreutz for the game's long-term strategy and the creator's brother, Alan Walton, for hosting infrastructure. At this time, Nick Walton also established a Patreon campaign to support the game's further growth (such as the addition of multiplayer and voice support, along with longer-term plans to include music and image content) and turn the game into a commercial endeavor, which Walton felt was necessary to cover the costs of delivering a higher-quality version of the game. AI Dungeon was one of the only known commercial applications to be based upon GPT-2. Following its first announcement in December 2019, a multiplayer mode was added to the game in April 2020. Hosting a game in this mode was originally restricted to premium subscribers, although any players could join a hosted game. === Dragon model release (GPT-3) === In July 2020, the developers introduced a premium-exclusive version of the AI model, named Dragon, which uses OpenAI's API for leveraging the GPT-3 model without maintaining a local copy (released on June 11, 2020). GPT-3 was trained with 570 gigabytes of text content (approximately one trillion words, with a $12 million development cost) and can support 175 billion parameters, compared to the 40 gigabytes of training content and 1.5 billion parameters of GPT-2. The free model was also upgraded to a less-advanced version of GPT-3 and was named Griffin. Speaking shortly after this release, on the differences between GPT-2 and GPT-3, Walton stated: [GPT-3 is] one of the most powerful AI models in the world... It's just much more coherent in terms of understanding who the characters are, what they're saying, what's going on in the story and just being able to write an interesting and believable story. In the latter half of 2020, the "Worlds" feature was added to AI Dungeon, providing players with a selection of overarching worlds in which their adventures can take place. In February 2021, it was announced that AI Dungeon's developers, Latitude, had raised $3.3 million in seed funding (led by NFX, with participation from Album VC and Griffin Gaming Partners) to "build games with 'infinite' story possibilities." This funding intended to move AI content creation beyond the purely text-based nature of AI Dungeon as it existed at the time. After its announcement on August 20, a new "See" interaction mode was made available for all players and added to the game on August 30, 2022. AI Dungeon was retired from Steam on March 12, 2024. == Reception == Approximate

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  Common Image Generator Interface

  The Common Image Generator Interface (CIGI) (pronounced sig-ee), is an on-the-wire data protocol that allows communication between an Image Generator and its host simulation. The interface is designed to promote a standard way for a host device to communicate with an image generator (IG) within the industry. CIGI enables plug-and-play by standard-compliant image generator vendors and reduces integration costs when upgrading visual systems. == Background == Most high-end simulators do not have everything running on a single machine the way popular home software flight simulators are currently implemented. The airplane model is run on one machine, normally referred to as the host, and the out the window visuals or scene graph program is run on another, usually referred to as an Image Generator (IG). Frequently there are multiple IGs required to display the surrounding environment created by a host. CIGI is the interface between the 'host' and the IGs. The main goal of CIGI is to capitalize on previous investments through the use of a common interface. CIGI is designed to assist suppliers and integrators of IG systems with ease of integration, code reuse, and overall cost reduction. In the past most image generators provided their own proprietary interface; every host had to implement that interface making changing image generators a costly ordeal. CIGI was created to standardize the interface between the host and the image generator so that little modification would be needed to switch image generators. The CIGI initiative was largely spearheaded by The Boeing Company during the early 21st century. The latest version of CIGI (CIGI 4.0) was developed by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) in the form of SISO-STD-013-2014, Standard for Common Image Generator Interface (CIGI), Version 4.0, dated 22 August 2014. SISO-STD-013-2014 is freely available from SISO. == Definitions == Image generator – In this context an image generator consists of one or more rendering channels that produce an image that can be used to visualize an “Out-The-Window” scene, or images produced by various sensor simulations such as Infra-red, Day TV, electro-optical, and night vision. Host simulation – In this context a “Host” is the computational system that provides information about the device being simulated so that the image generator can portray the correct scenery to the user. This information is passed via CIGI to the image generator. == Maturation == CIGI 4 is the latest version of the standard as was approved by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization on August 22, 2014. CIGI became an international SISO standard known as SISO-STD-013-2014; which contains the CIGI version 4.0 Interface Control Document (ICD). CIGI 4.0 is the official standard, published by SISO. Previous versions of CIGI were spearheaded by Boeing include CIGI v3.3, in November 2008, v3.2 April 2006, v3.1 June 2004, v3 November 2003, v2 in March 2002, and the original (v1) in March 2001 == Protocol dependencies == Typically, CIGI uses UDP as its transport protocol, but CIGI does not require a specific transport mechanism, only packet definition conformance. CIGI traffic does not have a well known port; however, the use of ports 8004-8005 has been widely adopted by commercial image generator vendors implementations. == Development tools == === Host Emulator === The Host Emulator can be used as a surrogate to manipulate the interface when a simulation Host is not available. It is a Windows-based image generator Host application used to develop, integrate and test image generators that use the CIGI protocol. It provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for the creation, modification and deletion of entities; manipulation of views; control of environmental attributes and phenomena; and other host functions. The Host Emulator has several features that are useful for integration and testing. A free-flight mode allows for fixed-wing and rotorcraft flight, movement along entity axes and free rotation using a joystick or a joystick-like widget. Scripting and record/playback features support regression testing, demonstrations and other tasks needing exact reproduction of certain sequences of events. A packet-level snoop feature allows the user to examine the contents of CIGI messages, image generator response times and latencies. A Heartbeat Monitor Window shows a graphical timing history of the Image Generator's data frame rate. Other features include explicit packet creation, animation control, missile flyouts and a situation display window (Host Emulator 3.x only). === Multi-Purpose Viewer === The Multi-Purpose Viewer (MPV) provides the basic functionality expected of an Image Generator, such as loading and displaying a terrain database, displaying entities and so forth. The Multi-Purpose Viewer can be used as a surrogate to manipulate the interface when a real Image Generator is not available. The MPV is capable of operating with both the Windows and Linux operating systems. === CIGI Class Library === The CCL is an object-oriented software interface that automatically handles message composition and decomposition (i.e. packing, unpacking and byte swapping to the ICD specification) on both the Host and Image Generator sides of the interface. The CCL interprets Host or Image Generator messages based on compile time parameters. It also performs error handling and translation between different versions of CIGI. Each packet type has its own class. The individual packet members are accessed through packet class accessors. Outgoing messages are constructed by placing each packet into the outgoing buffer using a streaming operator. Incoming messages are parsed using callback or event-based mechanisms that supply the using program with fully populated packet objects. === Current tool suite === A set of CIGI development tools are managed and maintained by the SISO CIGI Product Support Group. The latest packages are available on SourceForge. Comments/Suggestions to the package can be directed to the SISO discussion board at: https://discussions.sisostds.org/index.htm?A0=SAC-PSG-CIGI Archived 2017-09-13 at the Wayback Machine === Wireshark === Wireshark is a free and open source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Wireshark provides a dissector for CIGI packets. As of October 2016, “The CIGI dissector is fully functional for CIGI version 2 and 3. Version 1 is not yet implemented.” === Older versions of CIGI === A CIGI Interface Control Document (ICD) and development suite is available in open source format. The tools, ICD, and accompanying user documentation can be found and downloaded from the CIGI sourceforge web site. The SourceForge version of the MPV is limited in its support of CIGI data packets and is intended to grow as needs arise. The MPV uses CIGI 3 as its interface, but the MPV is backward-compatible with earlier CIGI versions through the use of the CCL. The MPV uses the Open Scene Graph library to render a scene. The scene graph is manipulated according to the CIGI commands received from the Host via the CCL. The MPV itself is an application layer that consists of a small kernel leveraging heavily on a plug-in architecture for ease of maintainability and flexibility. An implementer can implement the interface from scratch, however a full suite of integration tools is available. These tools consist of three elements. The Host Emulator (HE), the Multi-Purpose Viewer (MPV), and the CIGI Class Library (CCL).

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  AlphaGo Zero

  AlphaGo Zero is a version of DeepMind's Go software AlphaGo. AlphaGo's team published an article in Nature in October 2017 introducing AlphaGo Zero, a version created without using data from human games, and stronger than any previous version. By playing games against itself, AlphaGo Zero: surpassed the strength of AlphaGo Lee in three days by winning 100 games to 0; reached the level of AlphaGo Master in 21 days; and exceeded all previous versions in 40 days. Training artificial intelligence (AI) without datasets derived from human experts has significant implications for the development of AI with superhuman skills, as expert data is "often expensive, unreliable, or simply unavailable." Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, said that AlphaGo Zero was so powerful because it was "no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge". Furthermore, AlphaGo Zero performed better than standard deep reinforcement learning models (such as Deep Q-Network implementations) due to its integration of Monte Carlo tree search. David Silver, one of the first authors of DeepMind's papers published in Nature on AlphaGo, said that it is possible to have generalized AI algorithms by removing the need to learn from humans. Google later developed AlphaZero, a generalized version of AlphaGo Zero that could play chess and shōgi in addition to Go. In December 2017, AlphaZero beat the 3-day version of AlphaGo Zero by winning 60 games to 40, and with 8 hours of training it outperformed AlphaGo Lee on an Elo scale. AlphaZero also defeated a top chess program (Stockfish) and a top Shōgi program (Elmo). == Architecture == The network in AlphaGo Zero is a ResNet with two heads. The stem of the network takes as input a 17x19x19 tensor representation of the Go board. 8 channels are the positions of the current player's stones from the last eight time steps. (1 if there is a stone, 0 otherwise. If the time step go before the beginning of the game, then 0 in all positions.) 8 channels are the positions of the other player's stones from the last eight time steps. 1 channel is all 1 if black is to move, and 0 otherwise. The body is a ResNet with either 20 or 40 residual blocks and 256 channels. There are two heads, a policy head and a value head. Policy head outputs a logit array of size 19 × 19 + 1 {\displaystyle 19\times 19+1} , representing the logit of making a move in one of the points, plus the logit of passing. Value head outputs a number in the range ( − 1 , + 1 ) {\displaystyle (-1,+1)} , representing the expected score for the current player. -1 represents current player losing, and +1 winning. == Training == AlphaGo Zero's neural network was trained using TensorFlow, with 64 GPU workers and 19 CPU parameter servers. Only four TPUs were used for inference. The neural network initially knew nothing about Go beyond the rules. Unlike earlier versions of AlphaGo, Zero only perceived the board's stones, rather than having some rare human-programmed edge cases to help recognize unusual Go board positions. The AI engaged in reinforcement learning, playing against itself until it could anticipate its own moves and how those moves would affect the game's outcome. In the first three days AlphaGo Zero played 4.9 million games against itself in quick succession. It appeared to develop the skills required to beat top humans within just a few days, whereas the earlier AlphaGo took months of training to achieve the same level. According to Epoch.ai, training cost 3e23 FLOPs. For comparison, the researchers also trained a version of AlphaGo Zero using human games, AlphaGo Master, and found that it learned more quickly, but actually performed more poorly in the long run. DeepMind submitted its initial findings in a paper to Nature in April 2017, which was then published in October 2017. == Hardware cost == The hardware cost for a single AlphaGo Zero system in 2017, including the four TPUs, has been quoted as around $25 million. == Applications == According to Hassabis, AlphaGo's algorithms are likely to be of the most benefit to domains that require an intelligent search through an enormous space of possibilities, such as protein folding (see AlphaFold) or accurately simulating chemical reactions. AlphaGo's techniques are probably less useful in domains that are difficult to simulate, such as learning how to drive a car. DeepMind stated in October 2017 that it had already started active work on attempting to use AlphaGo Zero technology for protein folding, and stated it would soon publish new findings. == Reception == AlphaGo Zero was widely regarded as a significant advance, even when compared with its groundbreaking predecessor, AlphaGo. Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence called AlphaGo Zero "a very impressive technical result" in "both their ability to do it—and their ability to train the system in 40 days, on four TPUs". The Guardian called it a "major breakthrough for artificial intelligence", citing Eleni Vasilaki of Sheffield University and Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon University, who called it an impressive feat and an “outstanding engineering accomplishment" respectively. Mark Pesce of the University of Sydney called AlphaGo Zero "a big technological advance" taking us into "undiscovered territory". Gary Marcus, a psychologist at New York University, has cautioned that for all we know, AlphaGo may contain "implicit knowledge that the programmers have about how to construct machines to play problems like Go" and will need to be tested in other domains before being sure that its base architecture is effective at much more than playing Go. In contrast, DeepMind is "confident that this approach is generalisable to a large number of domains". In response to the reports, South Korean Go professional Lee Sedol said, "The previous version of AlphaGo wasn’t perfect, and I believe that’s why AlphaGo Zero was made." On the potential for AlphaGo's development, Lee said he will have to wait and see but also said it will affect young Go players. Mok Jin-seok, who directs the South Korean national Go team, said the Go world has already been imitating the playing styles of previous versions of AlphaGo and creating new ideas from them, and he is hopeful that new ideas will come out from AlphaGo Zero. Mok also added that general trends in the Go world are now being influenced by AlphaGo's playing style. "At first, it was hard to understand and I almost felt like I was playing against an alien. However, having had a great amount of experience, I’ve become used to it," Mok said. "We are now past the point where we debate the gap between the capability of AlphaGo and humans. It’s now between computers." Mok has reportedly already begun analyzing the playing style of AlphaGo Zero along with players from the national team. "Though having watched only a few matches, we received the impression that AlphaGo Zero plays more like a human than its predecessors," Mok said. Chinese Go professional Ke Jie commented on the remarkable accomplishments of the new program: "A pure self-learning AlphaGo is the strongest. Humans seem redundant in front of its self-improvement." == Comparison with predecessors == == AlphaZero == On 5 December 2017, DeepMind team released a preprint on arXiv, introducing AlphaZero, a program using generalized AlphaGo Zero's approach, which achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in chess, shogi, and Go, defeating world-champion programs, Stockfish, Elmo, and 3-day version of AlphaGo Zero in each case. AlphaZero (AZ) is a more generalized variant of the AlphaGo Zero (AGZ) algorithm, and is able to play shogi and chess as well as Go. Differences between AZ and AGZ include: AZ has hard-coded rules for setting search hyperparameters. The neural network is now updated continually. Chess (unlike Go) can end in a tie; therefore AZ can take into account the possibility of a tie game. An open source program, Leela Zero, based on the ideas from the AlphaGo papers is available. It uses a GPU instead of the TPUs recent versions of AlphaGo rely on.

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  Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence

  The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI, pronounced "gee-pay") is an international initiative established to guide the responsible development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a manner that respects human rights and the shared democratic values of its members. The partnership was first proposed by Canada and France at the 2018 44th G7 summit, and officially launched in June 2020. GPAI is hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). GPAI seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice by supporting research and applied activities in areas that are directly relevant to policymakers in the realm of AI. It brings together experts from industry, civil society, governments, and academia to collaborate on the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence. == History == The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence was announced on the margins of the 2018 G7 Summit by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron. It officially launched on June 15, 2020 with fifteen founding members: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) hosts a dedicated secretariat to support GPAI's governing bodies and activities. UNESCO joined the partnership in December 2020 as an observer. On November 11, 2021, Czechia, Israel and few more EU countries also joined the GPAI, bringing the total membership to 25 countries. Since the November 2022 summit, the list of members stands at 29. Austria, Chile, Finland, Malaysia, Norway, Slovakia and Switzerland were invited. The seven, however, are pending membership approval. == Membership == The following 29 members of the GPAI are: Argentina Australia Belgium Brazil Canada Czech Republic Denmark France Germany India Ireland Israel Italy Japan Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Poland Republic of Korea Senegal Serbia Singapore Slovenia Spain Sweden Turkey United Kingdom United States European Union Invited members: Austria (pending membership approval) Chile (pending membership approval) Finland (pending membership approval) Malaysia (pending membership approval) Norway (pending membership approval) Slovakia (pending membership approval) Switzerland (pending membership approval) == Organization == GPAI's experts collaborate across several Working Groups themes: Responsible AI (including an ad-hoc subgroup on AI and Pandemic Response), Data Governance, Future of Work, and Innovation & Commercialization. GPAI's Working Groups are supported by two Centres of Expertise: one in Montreal that supports the first two Working Groups, and one in Paris that supports the latter two. It also has a Steering Committee, the elected chair of which has also been to date elected chair of the Multi Stakeholder Group (MEG). These chairs have been: Jordan Zed and Baroness Joanna Shields (Shields, MEG chair; 2020-2021), Joanna Shields and Renaud Vedel (Shields, MEG chair; 2021-2022), Yoichi Iida and Inma Martinez (Martinez, MEG chair; 2023-2024) GPAI has a rotating presidency and host (much like the G7). The presidencies to date have been: Canada (2020) France (2021) Japan (2022) India (2023)

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