Puck App is a mobile application that allows hockey players to quickly find and rent a hockey goalie. Founded in 2015 in Toronto, the application primarily operates throughout Canada. It is available on Apple's App Store and Google Play. == History == Puck App was founded in 2016 by Niki Sawni. Users can rate the goalies, message with available goalies, and coordinate skill levels. In 2017, Puck App expanded to Western Canada and has over 1,000 goalies registered. In 2018, Puck App charged approximately $40 CDN to rent a goalie with more than 2 hours notice. Previously, Puck App was a competitor to a similar application called GoalieUp. As of 2024, both companies have agreed to a merger deal.
You Only Look Once
You Only Look Once (YOLO) is a series of real-time object detection systems based on convolutional neural networks. First introduced by Joseph Redmon et al. in 2015, YOLO has undergone several iterations and improvements, becoming one of the most popular object detection frameworks. The name "You Only Look Once" refers to the fact that the algorithm requires only one forward propagation pass through the neural network to make predictions, unlike previous region proposal-based techniques like R-CNN that require thousands for a single image. == Overview == Compared to previous methods like R-CNN and OverFeat, instead of applying the model to an image at multiple locations and scales, YOLO applies a single neural network to the full image. This network divides the image into regions and predicts bounding boxes and probabilities for each region. These bounding boxes are weighted by the predicted probabilities. === OverFeat === OverFeat was an early influential model for simultaneous object classification and localization. Its architecture is as follows: Train a neural network for image classification only ("classification-trained network"). This could be one like the AlexNet. The last layer of the trained network is removed, and for every possible object class, initialize a network module at the last layer ("regression network"). The base network has its parameters frozen. The regression network is trained to predict the ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} coordinates of two corners of the object's bounding box. During inference time, the classification-trained network is run over the same image over many different zoom levels and croppings. For each, it outputs a class label and a probability for that class label. Each output is then processed by the regression network of the corresponding class. This results in thousands of bounding boxes with class labels and probability. These boxes are merged until only one single box with a single class label remains. == Versions == There are two parts to the YOLO series. The original part contained YOLOv1, v2, and v3, all released on a website maintained by Joseph Redmon. === YOLOv1 === The original YOLO algorithm, introduced in 2015, divides the image into an S × S {\displaystyle S\times S} grid of cells. If the center of an object's bounding box falls into a grid cell, that cell is said to "contain" that object. Each grid cell predicts B bounding boxes and confidence scores for those boxes. These confidence scores reflect how confident the model is that the box contains an object and how accurate it thinks the box is that it predicts. In more detail, the network performs the same convolutional operation over each of the S 2 {\displaystyle S^{2}} patches. The output of the network on each patch is a tuple as follows: ( p 1 , … , p C , c 1 , x 1 , y 1 , w 1 , h 1 , … , c B , x B , y B , w B , h B ) {\displaystyle (p_{1},\dots ,p_{C},c_{1},x_{1},y_{1},w_{1},h_{1},\dots ,c_{B},x_{B},y_{B},w_{B},h_{B})} where p i {\displaystyle p_{i}} is the conditional probability that the cell contains an object of class i {\displaystyle i} , conditional on the cell containing at least one object. x j , y j , w j , h j {\displaystyle x_{j},y_{j},w_{j},h_{j}} are the center coordinates, width, and height of the j {\displaystyle j} -th predicted bounding box that is centered in the cell. Multiple bounding boxes are predicted to allow each prediction to specialize in one kind of bounding box. For example, slender objects might be predicted by j = 2 {\displaystyle j=2} while stout objects might be predicted by j = 1 {\displaystyle j=1} . c j {\displaystyle c_{j}} is the predicted intersection over union (IoU) of each bounding box with its corresponding ground truth. The network architecture has 24 convolutional layers followed by 2 fully connected layers. During training, for each cell, if it contains a ground truth bounding box, then only the predicted bounding boxes with the highest IoU with the ground truth bounding boxes is used for gradient descent. Concretely, let j {\displaystyle j} be that predicted bounding box, and let i {\displaystyle i} be the ground truth class label, then x j , y j , w j , h j {\displaystyle x_{j},y_{j},w_{j},h_{j}} are trained by gradient descent to approach the ground truth, p i {\displaystyle p_{i}} is trained towards 1 {\displaystyle 1} , other p i ′ {\displaystyle p_{i'}} are trained towards zero. If a cell contains no ground truth, then only c 1 , c 2 , … , c B {\displaystyle c_{1},c_{2},\dots ,c_{B}} are trained by gradient descent to approach zero. === YOLOv2 === Released in 2016, YOLOv2 (also known as YOLO9000) improved upon the original model by incorporating batch normalization, a higher resolution classifier, and using anchor boxes to predict bounding boxes. It could detect over 9000 object categories. It was also released on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. === YOLOv3 === YOLOv3, introduced in 2018, contained only "incremental" improvements, including the use of a more complex backbone network, multiple scales for detection, and a more sophisticated loss function. === YOLOv4 and beyond === Subsequent versions of YOLO (v4, v5, etc.) have been developed by different researchers, further improving performance and introducing new features. These versions are not officially associated with the original YOLO authors but build upon their work. As of 2026, versions up to YOLO26 have been released..
Hartmut Neven
Hartmut Neven (born 1964) is a German American scientist working in quantum computing, computer vision, robotics and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition and his contributions to quantum machine learning. He is currently Vice President of Engineering at Google where he leads the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which he founded in 2012. == Education == Hartmut Neven studied Physics and Economics in Brazil, Köln, Paris, Tübingen and Jerusalem. He wrote his Master thesis on a neuronal model of object recognition at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics under Valentino Braitenberg. In 1996 he received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, for a thesis on "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots" written under the tutelage of Christoph von der Malsburg. He received a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, Germany's most prestigious scholarship foundation. == Work == In 1998 Neven became research professor of computer science at the University of Southern California at the Laboratory for Biological and Computational Vision. In 2003 he returned as the head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at USC's Information Sciences Institute. === Face recognition, avatars and face filters === Neven co-founded two companies, Eyematic for which he served as CTO and Neven Vision which he initially led as CEO. At Eyematic he developed face recognition technology and real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation. Teams led by Neven have repeatedly won top scores in government sponsored tests designed to determine the most accurate face recognition software. Face filters, now ubiquitous on mobile phones, were launched for the first time by Neven Vision on the networks of NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone Japan in 2003. Neven Vision also pioneered mobile visual search for camera phones. Neven Vision was acquired by Google in 2006. === Object recognition and adversarial images === At Google he managed teams responsible for advancing Google's visual search technologies. His team launched Google Goggles now Google Lens. The concept of adversarial patterns originated in his group when he tasked Christian Szegedy with a project to modify the pixel inputs of a deep neural network to lower the activity of select output nodes. The motivation was to use this technique for object localization which did not work out. But the idea gave rise to the fields of adversarial learning and DeepDream art. In 2013 his optical character recognition team won the ICDAR Robust Reading Competition by a wide margin and in 2014 the object recognition team won the ImageNet challenge. === Google Glass === Neven was a co-founder of the Google Glass project. His team completed the first prototype, codenamed Ant, in 2011. === Quantum Artificial Intelligence === In 2006 Neven started to explore the application of quantum computing to hard combinatorial problems arising in machine learning. In collaboration with D-Wave Systems he developed the first image recognition system based on quantum algorithms. It was demonstrated at SuperComputing07. At NIPS 2009 his team demonstrated the first binary classifier trained on a quantum processor. In 2012 together with Pete Worden at NASA Ames he founded the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2014 he invited John M. Martinis and his group at UC Santa Barbara to join the lab to start a fabrication facility for superconducting quantum processors. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence team performed the first experimental demonstration of a scalable simulation of a molecule. In 2016 the team formulated an experiment to demonstrate quantum supremacy. Quantum supremacy was then declared by Google in October 2019. In 2023 Quantum AI researchers demonstrated that quantum error correction works in practice by showing for the first time that the error of a logical qubit decreases when increasing the number of physical qubits it is composed of. Google's quantum processors have been used to study the physics of quantum many body states that otherwise are challenging to prepare in a laboratory such as time crystals, traversable wormholes and non-Abelian anyons. ==== Neven's law ==== Neven's law states that the performance of quantum computers improves at a doubly exponential rate.
AI Clip Makers: Free vs Paid (2026)
Shopping for the best AI clip maker? An AI clip maker is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI clip maker slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.
How to Choose an AI Website Builder
Shopping for the best AI website builder? An AI website builder is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI website builder slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.
Symbolic regression
Symbolic regression (SR) is a type of regression analysis that searches the space of mathematical expressions to find the model that best fits a given dataset, both in terms of accuracy and simplicity. No particular model is provided as a starting point for symbolic regression. Instead, initial expressions are formed by randomly combining mathematical building blocks such as mathematical operators, analytic functions, constants, and state variables. Usually, a subset of these primitives will be specified by the person operating it, but that's not a requirement of the technique. The symbolic regression problem for mathematical functions has been tackled with a variety of methods, including recombining equations most commonly using genetic programming, as well as more recent methods utilizing Bayesian methods and neural networks. Another non-classical alternative method to SR is called Universal Functions Originator (UFO), which has a different mechanism, search-space, and building strategy. Further methods such as Exact Learning attempt to transform the fitting problem into a moments problem in a natural function space, usually built around generalizations of the Meijer-G function. By not requiring a priori specification of a model, symbolic regression isn't affected by human bias, or unknown gaps in domain knowledge. It attempts to uncover the intrinsic relationships of the dataset, by letting the patterns in the data itself reveal the appropriate models, rather than imposing a model structure that is deemed mathematically tractable from a human perspective. The fitness function that drives the evolution of the models takes into account not only error metrics (to ensure the models accurately predict the data), but also special complexity measures, thus ensuring that the resulting models reveal the data's underlying structure in a way that's understandable from a human perspective. This facilitates reasoning and favors the odds of getting insights about the data-generating system, as well as improving generalisability and extrapolation behaviour by preventing overfitting. Accuracy and simplicity may be left as two separate objectives of the regression—in which case the optimum solutions form a Pareto front—or they may be combined into a single objective by means of a model selection principle such as minimum description length. It has been proven that symbolic regression is an NP-hard problem. Nevertheless, if the sought-for equation is not too complex it is possible to solve the symbolic regression problem exactly by generating every possible function (built from some predefined set of operators) and evaluating them on the dataset in question. == Difference from classical regression == While conventional regression techniques seek to optimize the parameters for a pre-specified model structure, symbolic regression avoids imposing prior assumptions, and instead infers the model from the data. In other words, it attempts to discover both model structures and model parameters. This approach has the disadvantage of having a much larger space to search, because not only the search space in symbolic regression is infinite, but there are an infinite number of models which will perfectly fit a finite data set (provided that the model complexity isn't artificially limited). This means that it will possibly take a symbolic regression algorithm longer to find an appropriate model and parametrization, than traditional regression techniques. This can be attenuated by limiting the set of building blocks provided to the algorithm, based on existing knowledge of the system that produced the data; but in the end, using symbolic regression is a decision that has to be balanced with how much is known about the underlying system. Nevertheless, this characteristic of symbolic regression also has advantages: because the evolutionary algorithm requires diversity in order to effectively explore the search space, the result is likely to be a selection of high-scoring models (and their corresponding set of parameters). Examining this collection could provide better insight into the underlying process, and allows the user to identify an approximation that better fits their needs in terms of accuracy and simplicity. == Benchmarking == === SRBench === In 2021, SRBench was proposed as a large benchmark for symbolic regression. In its inception, SRBench featured 14 symbolic regression methods, 7 other ML methods, and 252 datasets from PMLB. The benchmark intends to be a living project: it encourages the submission of improvements, new datasets, and new methods, to keep track of the state of the art in SR. === SRBench Competition 2022 === In 2022, SRBench announced the competition Interpretable Symbolic Regression for Data Science, which was held at the GECCO conference in Boston, MA. The competition pitted nine leading symbolic regression algorithms against each other on a novel set of data problems and considered different evaluation criteria. The competition was organized in two tracks, a synthetic track and a real-world data track. ==== Synthetic Track ==== In the synthetic track, methods were compared according to five properties: re-discovery of exact expressions; feature selection; resistance to local optima; extrapolation; and sensitivity to noise. Rankings of the methods were: QLattice PySR (Python Symbolic Regression) uDSR (Deep Symbolic Optimization) ==== Real-world Track ==== In the real-world track, methods were trained to build interpretable predictive models for 14-day forecast counts of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in New York State. These models were reviewed by a subject expert and assigned trust ratings and evaluated for accuracy and simplicity. The ranking of the methods was: uDSR (Deep Symbolic Optimization) QLattice geneticengine (Genetic Engine) == Non-standard methods == Most symbolic regression algorithms prevent combinatorial explosion by implementing evolutionary algorithms that iteratively improve the best-fit expression over many generations. Recently, researchers have proposed algorithms utilizing other tactics in AI. Silviu-Marian Udrescu and Max Tegmark developed the "AI Feynman" algorithm, which attempts symbolic regression by training a neural network to represent the mystery function, then runs tests against the neural network to attempt to break up the problem into smaller parts. For example, if f ( x 1 , . . . , x i , x i + 1 , . . . , x n ) = g ( x 1 , . . . , x i ) + h ( x i + 1 , . . . , x n ) {\displaystyle f(x_{1},...,x_{i},x_{i+1},...,x_{n})=g(x_{1},...,x_{i})+h(x_{i+1},...,x_{n})} , tests against the neural network can recognize the separation and proceed to solve for g {\displaystyle g} and h {\displaystyle h} separately and with different variables as inputs. This is an example of divide and conquer, which reduces the size of the problem to be more manageable. AI Feynman also transforms the inputs and outputs of the mystery function in order to produce a new function which can be solved with other techniques, and performs dimensional analysis to reduce the number of independent variables involved. The algorithm was able to "discover" 100 equations from The Feynman Lectures on Physics, while a leading software using evolutionary algorithms, Eureqa, solved only 71. AI Feynman, in contrast to classic symbolic regression methods, requires a very large dataset in order to first train the neural network and is naturally biased towards equations that are common in elementary physics.
Julie Beth Lovins
Julie Beth Lovins (October 19, 1945, in Washington, D.C. – January 26, 2018, in Mountain View, California) was a computational linguist who published The Lovins Stemming Algorithm - a type of stemming algorithm for word matching - in 1968. The Lovins Stemmer is a single pass, context sensitive stemmer, which removes endings based on the longest-match principle. The stemmer was the first to be published and was extremely well developed considering the date of its release, having been the main influence on a large amount of the future work in the area. -Adam G., et al == Background == Born on October 19, 1945, in Washington, D.C., Lovins grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father Gerald H. Lovins was an engineer and her mother, Miriam Lovins, a social services administrator. Lovins' brother Amory Lovins is the co-founder and chief environmental scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute. For her undergraduate degree, Lovins attended Pembroke College, the women's college of Brown University, which later combined into Brown University in 1971. At Pembroke College, Lovins studied mathematics and linguistics, graduating with honors. Her thesis was named, A Study of Idioms. She received the inaugural Bloch Fellowship in 1970 from the Linguistic Society of America to attend graduate school. Lovins obtained her Master of Arts in 1970 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1973 from the University of Chicago, studying linguistics. At the University of Chicago, her dissertation was titled, Loan Phonology -- Subject Matter. A revision of her thesis on loanwords and the phonological structure of Japanese was published in 1975 by the Indiana University Linguistics Club. == Teaching career == Following Lovins' PhD, she spent a year working as a linguist-at-large at a University of Tokyo language research institute and as an English conversation teacher. She then joined the faculty at Tsuda College as a professor of English and linguistics, where she taught for seven years. During her time as a faculty member at Tsuda College, Lovins also served as a guest researcher in the University of Tokyo's Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, a research center for speech science. == Industry career == After teaching Japanese phonology at Japanese universities abroad, Lovins moved back to the U.S. to work in the computing industry. She worked on early speech synthesis at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. At Bell Labs, Lovins worked with Osamu Fujimura, a Japanese linguist who is credited as a pioneer in speech sciences. Lovins also worked as a software engineer at various companies in Silicon Valley and served as a consultant for computational linguistics throughout the 1990s. As a consultant, she called her business, "The Language Doctor." == The Lovins Stemming Algorithm == Lovins published an article about her work on developing a stemming algorithm through the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT in 1968. Lovins' stemming algorithm is frequently referred to as the Lovins stemmer. A stemming algorithm is the process of taking a word with suffixes and reducing it to its root, or base word. Stemming algorithms are used to improve the accuracy in information retrieval and in domain analysis. These algorithms help find variants of the terms being queried. Stemming algorithms bring value in their reduction of a given query into its less complex form, allowing more similar documents to be retrieved for similar queries. Stemming algorithms are prevalent in search engines, such as Google Search, which did not implement word stemming until 2003. This means that up until 2003, a Google search for the word warm would not have explicitly returned results for related words like warmth or warming. As the first published stemming algorithm, Lovins' work set a precedent and influenced future work in stemming algorithms, such as the Porter Stemmer published by Martin Porter in 1980 which has been recognized widely as the most common stemming algorithm for stemming English. Additionally, the Dawson Stemmer developed by John Dawson is an extension of the Lovins stemmer. The Lovins stemmer follows a rule-based affix elimination approach. It first removes the longest identifiable suffix from the target word - producing a base stem word - then indexes a lookup table to convert the (potentially malformed) stem word to a valid word. This process can be split into two phases. In the first phase, a word is compared with a pre-determined list of endings, and when a word is found to contain one of these endings, the ending is removed, leaving only the stem of the word. The second phase standardizes spelling exceptions that come from the first phase, ensuring that words with only marginally varying stems are appropriately paired together. For example, with the word dried, phase one results in dri, which should match with the word dry. The second phase takes care of these exceptions. Compared to other stemmers, Lovins' algorithm is fast and equipped to handle irregular plural words like person and people. Disadvantages, however, include many suffixes not being available in the table of endings. Furthermore, it is sometimes highly unreliable and frequently fails to form valid words from the stems or to match the stems of like-meaning words. This is most often caused by the usage of specialist terminology and domain-specific vocabulary by the author. == Personal life == Lovins moved to Mountain View, California, in 1979, and later to Old Mountain View in 1981 with her partner and later husband Greg Fowler, a software engineer and advocate for environmental issues & the blind. In their free time, she and her husband enjoyed taking walks and volunteering for their local community. Lovins actively volunteered for organizations like the Old Mountain View Neighborhood Association, Mountain View Friends of the Library, League of Women Voters, Mountain View Cool Cities Team, and the Mountain View Sustainability Task Force. In 2016, Lovins' husband died unexpectedly, following a heart attack. Eighteen days after her husband died, Lovins was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died on January 26, 2018, at a hospice, surrounded by friends, family and caregivers.