Dropbox Carousel was a photo and video management app offered by Dropbox. The third-party native app, available on Android and iOS, allowed users to store, manage, and organize photos. Photos were organized by date, time and event and backed up on Dropbox. It competed in this space against other online photo storage services such as Google's Google Photos, Apple's iCloud, and Yahoo's Flickr. Chris Lee, Dropbox's head of product development for Carousel described the app as an add-on to Dropbox, a “dedicated experience for photos and videos” and a space for “reliving personal memories”. == History == Mailbox founder, Gentry Underwood unveiled Carousel at a gathering in San Francisco on April 9, 2014. Much of the features in Carousel come from Snapjoy, a photo start-up, that Dropbox acquired on December 19, 2012. When Carousel was launched, it marked amongst many others, a series of acquisitions made by Dropbox to prep up before opening its stock for public offering. The acquisitions would help demonstrate its expansive product offerings pitching potential profitability to investors. In December 2015, Dropbox announced that Carousel would be shut down and some Carousel features would be integrated into the primary Dropbox application. On March 31, 2016, Carousel was deactivated. == Features == Carousel prompted users to free local storage once it had synced and backed-up local photos to the cloud. Flashback was a feature (enabled by default) that showed past photos or videos taken the same day, a year, or some years back. Flashback used an algorithm designed to identify human faces - resulting in greater likelihood of the user's picture or people in the user's close circle appearing. A scrollable timeline, which was earlier a scroll wheel, at the bottom let the user scroll to photo(s) at a specific date with a finger swipe.
Feature hashing
In machine learning, feature hashing, also known as the hashing trick (by analogy to the kernel trick), is a fast and space-efficient way of vectorizing features, i.e. turning arbitrary features into indices in a vector or matrix. It works by applying a hash function to the features and using their hash values as indices directly (after a modulo operation), rather than looking the indices up in an associative array. In addition to its use for encoding non-numeric values, feature hashing can also be used for dimensionality reduction. This trick is often attributed to Weinberger et al. (2009), but there exists a much earlier description of this method published by John Moody in 1989. == Motivation == === Motivating example === In a typical document classification task, the input to the machine learning algorithm (both during learning and classification) is free text. From this, a bag of words (BOW) representation is constructed: the individual tokens are extracted and counted, and each distinct token in the training set defines a feature (independent variable) of each of the documents in both the training and test sets. Machine learning algorithms, however, are typically defined in terms of numerical vectors. Therefore, the bags of words for a set of documents is regarded as a term-document matrix where each row is a single document, and each column is a single feature/word; the entry i, j in such a matrix captures the frequency (or weight) of the j'th term of the vocabulary in document i. (An alternative convention swaps the rows and columns of the matrix, but this difference is immaterial.) Typically, these vectors are extremely sparse—according to Zipf's law. The common approach is to construct, at learning time or prior to that, a dictionary representation of the vocabulary of the training set, and use that to map words to indices. Hash tables and tries are common candidates for dictionary implementation. E.g., the three documents John likes to watch movies. Mary likes movies too. John also likes football. can be converted, using the dictionary to the term-document matrix ( John likes to watch movies Mary too also football 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 ) {\displaystyle {\begin{pmatrix}{\textrm {John}}&{\textrm {likes}}&{\textrm {to}}&{\textrm {watch}}&{\textrm {movies}}&{\textrm {Mary}}&{\textrm {too}}&{\textrm {also}}&{\textrm {football}}\\1&1&1&1&1&0&0&0&0\\0&1&0&0&1&1&1&0&0\\1&1&0&0&0&0&0&1&1\end{pmatrix}}} (Punctuation was removed, as is usual in document classification and clustering.) The problem with this process is that such dictionaries take up a large amount of storage space and grow in size as the training set grows. On the contrary, if the vocabulary is kept fixed and not increased with a growing training set, an adversary may try to invent new words or misspellings that are not in the stored vocabulary so as to circumvent a machine learned filter. To address this challenge, Yahoo! Research attempted to use feature hashing for their spam filters. Note that the hashing trick isn't limited to text classification and similar tasks at the document level, but can be applied to any problem that involves large (perhaps unbounded) numbers of features. === Mathematical motivation === Mathematically, a token is an element t {\displaystyle t} in a finite (or countably infinite) set T {\displaystyle T} . Suppose we only need to process a finite corpus, then we can put all tokens appearing in the corpus into T {\displaystyle T} , meaning that T {\displaystyle T} is finite. However, suppose we want to process all possible words made of the English letters, then T {\displaystyle T} is countably infinite. Most neural networks can only operate on real vector inputs, so we must construct a "dictionary" function ϕ : T → R n {\displaystyle \phi :T\to \mathbb {R} ^{n}} . When T {\displaystyle T} is finite, of size | T | = m ≤ n {\displaystyle |T|=m\leq n} , then we can use one-hot encoding to map it into R n {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} . First, arbitrarily enumerate T = { t 1 , t 2 , . . , t m } {\displaystyle T=\{t_{1},t_{2},..,t_{m}\}} , then define ϕ ( t i ) = e i {\displaystyle \phi (t_{i})=e_{i}} . In other words, we assign a unique index i {\displaystyle i} to each token, then map the token with index i {\displaystyle i} to the unit basis vector e i {\displaystyle e_{i}} . One-hot encoding is easy to interpret, but it requires one to maintain the arbitrary enumeration of T {\displaystyle T} . Given a token t ∈ T {\displaystyle t\in T} , to compute ϕ ( t ) {\displaystyle \phi (t)} , we must find out the index i {\displaystyle i} of the token t {\displaystyle t} . Thus, to implement ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } efficiently, we need a fast-to-compute bijection h : T → { 1 , . . . , m } {\displaystyle h:T\to \{1,...,m\}} , then we have ϕ ( t ) = e h ( t ) {\displaystyle \phi (t)=e_{h(t)}} . In fact, we can relax the requirement slightly: It suffices to have a fast-to-compute injection h : T → { 1 , . . . , n } {\displaystyle h:T\to \{1,...,n\}} , then use ϕ ( t ) = e h ( t ) {\displaystyle \phi (t)=e_{h(t)}} . In practice, there is no simple way to construct an efficient injection h : T → { 1 , . . . , n } {\displaystyle h:T\to \{1,...,n\}} . However, we do not need a strict injection, but only an approximate injection. That is, when t ≠ t ′ {\displaystyle t\neq t'} , we should probably have h ( t ) ≠ h ( t ′ ) {\displaystyle h(t)\neq h(t')} , so that probably ϕ ( t ) ≠ ϕ ( t ′ ) {\displaystyle \phi (t)\neq \phi (t')} . At this point, we have just specified that h {\displaystyle h} should be a hashing function. Thus we reach the idea of feature hashing. == Algorithms == === Feature hashing (Weinberger et al. 2009) === The basic feature hashing algorithm presented in (Weinberger et al. 2009) is defined as follows. First, one specifies two hash functions: the kernel hash h : T → { 1 , 2 , . . . , n } {\displaystyle h:T\to \{1,2,...,n\}} , and the sign hash ζ : T → { − 1 , + 1 } {\displaystyle \zeta :T\to \{-1,+1\}} . Next, one defines the feature hashing function: ϕ : T → R n , ϕ ( t ) = ζ ( t ) e h ( t ) {\displaystyle \phi :T\to \mathbb {R} ^{n},\quad \phi (t)=\zeta (t)e_{h(t)}} Finally, extend this feature hashing function to strings of tokens by ϕ : T ∗ → R n , ϕ ( t 1 , . . . , t k ) = ∑ j = 1 k ϕ ( t j ) {\displaystyle \phi :T^{}\to \mathbb {R} ^{n},\quad \phi (t_{1},...,t_{k})=\sum _{j=1}^{k}\phi (t_{j})} where T ∗ {\displaystyle T^{}} is the set of all finite strings consisting of tokens in T {\displaystyle T} . Equivalently, ϕ ( t 1 , . . . , t k ) = ∑ j = 1 k ζ ( t j ) e h ( t j ) = ∑ i = 1 n ( ∑ j : h ( t j ) = i ζ ( t j ) ) e i {\displaystyle \phi (t_{1},...,t_{k})=\sum _{j=1}^{k}\zeta (t_{j})e_{h(t_{j})}=\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left(\sum _{j:h(t_{j})=i}\zeta (t_{j})\right)e_{i}} ==== Geometric properties ==== We want to say something about the geometric property of ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } , but T {\displaystyle T} , by itself, is just a set of tokens, we cannot impose a geometric structure on it except the discrete topology, which is generated by the discrete metric. To make it nicer, we lift it to T → R T {\displaystyle T\to \mathbb {R} ^{T}} , and lift ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } from ϕ : T → R n {\displaystyle \phi :T\to \mathbb {R} ^{n}} to ϕ : R T → R n {\displaystyle \phi :\mathbb {R} ^{T}\to \mathbb {R} ^{n}} by linear extension: ϕ ( ( x t ) t ∈ T ) = ∑ t ∈ T x t ζ ( t ) e h ( t ) = ∑ i = 1 n ( ∑ t : h ( t ) = i x t ζ ( t ) ) e i {\displaystyle \phi ((x_{t})_{t\in T})=\sum _{t\in T}x_{t}\zeta (t)e_{h(t)}=\sum _{i=1}^{n}\left(\sum _{t:h(t)=i}x_{t}\zeta (t)\right)e_{i}} There is an infinite sum there, which must be handled at once. There are essentially only two ways to handle infinities. One may impose a metric, then take its completion, to allow well-behaved infinite sums, or one may demand that nothing is actually infinite, only potentially so. Here, we go for the potential-infinity way, by restricting R T {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{T}} to contain only vectors with finite support: ∀ ( x t ) t ∈ T ∈ R T {\displaystyle \forall (x_{t})_{t\in T}\in \mathbb {R} ^{T}} , only finitely many entries of ( x t ) t ∈ T {\displaystyle (x_{t})_{t\in T}} are nonzero. Define an inner product on R T {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{T}} in the obvious way: ⟨ e t , e t ′ ⟩ = { 1 , if t = t ′ , 0 , else. ⟨ x , x ′ ⟩ = ∑ t , t ′ ∈ T x t x t ′ ⟨ e t , e t ′ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle e_{t},e_{t'}\rangle ={\begin{cases}1,{\text{ if }}t=t',\\0,{\text{ else.}}\end{cases}}\quad \langle x,x'\rangle =\sum _{t,t'\in T}x_{t}x_{t'}\langle e_{t},e_{t'}\rangle } As a side note, if T {\displaystyle T} is infinite, then the inner product space R T {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{T}} is not complete. Taking its completion would get us to a Hilbert space, which allows well-behaved infinite sums. Now we have an inner product space, with enough structure to describe the geometry of the feature hashing function ϕ : R T → R n {\displaystyle \phi :\ma
Age Of
Age Of is the eighth studio album by American electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never, released on June 1, 2018, on Warp Records. Recorded over two years, it is the first Oneohtrix Point Never album to prominently feature Daniel Lopatin's own vocals. The album was accompanied by the MYRIAD tour, which premiered as a "conceptual concertscape" in 2018 at the Park Avenue Armory and ended its run in 2019. It features contributions from James Blake (who additionally produced and mixed the album), Anohni, Prurient, Kelsey Lu and Eli Keszler. The artwork, which employs Jim Shaw's "The Great Whatsit" as a central image, was designed by David Rudnick. While not entering the official United States Billboard 200 chart, it peaked at number 59 on the magazine's Top Current Albums chart. == Background == Lopatin produced Age Of in parts of a two-year period, during which he was also producing for other artists, including Anohni, FKA Twigs, Iggy Pop, and David Byrne. After composing the soundtrack for the Safdie Brothers' 2017 film Good Time, Lopatin moved to an Airbnb lodge in South Central Massachusetts, derived from his aspiration to live out the modern cliche of musicians moving to the woods to record albums; the eerie atmosphere in the lodge at nighttime influenced his desire to make "weird, little nightmare ballads". In addition to Lopatin's own singing, the album also features vocal performances from Anohni and Prurient, while instrumentalists Kelsey Lu and Eli Keszler contribute to several tracks. When the record was nearly finished, Lopatin reached out to musician James Blake to contribute to the mixing process, eventually traveling to Los Angeles to complete the album. The track "The Station" was originally composed as a demo for R&B singer Usher which was ultimately not used. On July 9, 2018, Lopatin released the original topline (vocal melody) demo for The Station through Sendspace. The track "Toys 2" imagines a theoretical sequel to the 1992 film Toys where actor Robin Williams' image has been recreated with CGI (as his will specifically forbade any usage of his image after his death), and pokes fun at the common electronic music trope of composing a soundtrack to a theoretical film (which Lopatin described as "horribly cliché"). == Concept and MYRIAD == Influences on Age Of included Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which inspired the narrative of the album's accompanying performance installation and tour MYRIAD, as well as William Strauss's The Fourth Turning, a favorite book of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, which Lopatin described as "insidious, like the voice of a computer insisting on the truth about history without any sensitivity given to how complex and non-linear systems might be"; Lopatin was subsequently inspired to "[use] that sort of taxonomy as a kind of farce to then create these little frameworks for understanding". Other inspirations included the writings of the 1990s multidisciplinary collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and the works of singer-songwriters such as Bruce Cockburn, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon. Around the time Lopatin began finalizing Age Of in his Airbnb lodge, he began working on the concept for MYRIAD, a conceptual concert performance which premiered at Park Avenue Armory. He described the concept as a four-part "epochal song cycle" showcasing the idiocy of previous generations of living organisms. The loose story concerns a group of artificial intelligences near the end of time named a "Limitless Living Informational Intelligence" (represented in the MYRIAD logo as nine squares) which, for leisurely purposes, attempt to replicate the cultures and behaviors of the previously existent human species. It does this by determining an "average" of human experiences through the species' "recorded output", and does so through imperfect, heuristic techniques. The show was consequently divided into four sections, each representing an epoch of the cycle concept loosely inspired by the Strauss–Howe generational theory: the Age of Ecco, the Age of Harvest, the Age of Excess, and the Age of Bondage. Ecco is "a phase of pre-evolutionary ignorance", Harvest is "living in agrarian harmony with the world", Excess is "the age of unchecked industrial ambition", and Bondage is "an era of engorgement, wherein "we keep making more and more shit until there's no space left." MYRIAD mainly featured "three-hundred pound sculptures that hang from the ceiling like kebabs that secrete ooze", and a full ensemble that toured to perform songs from Age Of, including Eli Keszler, Kelly Moran and Aaron David Ross. The sculptures, as well as the visuals displayed on five polygon panels, were created by frequent Oneohtrix Point Never collaborator Nate Boyce. Initially, Lopatin planned for each of the album's four epoches to be represented by fragrances, the more noisy epochs being pleasant to the nose to make a "weird dissonance". However, due to lack of time and resources, that part of the plan was scrapped. == Composition == Whereas previous Oneohtrix Point Never albums followed musical styles from only distinctive eras, Age Of is the first album by Lopatin to incorporate elements of unique genres from a variety of periods, hence the "incompleteness" of its title according to reviewer Heather Phares, and his first pop-song-oriented release since his work for Ford & Lopatin. The sound palettes it uses are those from a variety of styles such as chamber pop, "android"-like folk and country music, yacht rock, smooth jazz, R&B, Future-style soul, black metal, new age, and stadium pop, as well as post-industrial sounds on tracks like "Warning", "We'll Take It" and "Same", and, in particular, baroque music and medieval music on the opening title track, "Age Of". Critics also noted elements of Lopatin's past discography being present on Age Of. The instrumentation of Age Of is made up of MIDI harpsichords, guitars, pianos, brass and vocals, as well as Lopatin's trademark unorthodox sound design, samples and synth presets. The LP's use of the harpsichord shows its similarities "with Eastern instruments such as the koto and with rapid-fire electronic melodies", wrote Phares. == Critical reception == Age Of was critically well-received upon its distribution. Some reviewers praised the album's use of collaborators. Reviewing the album for AllMusic, Heather Phares called Age Of a "landmark work" for Lopatin. She praised it as his "widest-ranging" release, elaborating that he "matches the album's ambition with plenty of emotion" and "gives his music exciting new shapes." Ross Devlin of The Skinny, in a five-star review of the record, also highlighted the album's amount of ambition, particularly the "wealth of exquisitely baroque moments, exploring history as a pliable, multi-dimensional rift", that gave it "exceptional sonic depth". The Observer praised Age Of for continuing the "off-kilter composition and unexpected instrumentation" of Lopatin's previous releases, and critic Matt McDermott highlighted that the producer increased his musical range with the record: "It's a dizzying trip meant to shore up Lopatin's status as an avant-garde auteur while aiding his forays into mainstream pop culture." Age Of was ranked the 15th best release of the year in The Wire magazine's annual critics' poll. == Track listing == Notes "Myriad Industries" is stylized as "myriad.industries". Sample credits "Age Of" contains a sample of "Blow the Wind" by Jocelyn Pook. "Manifold" contains a sample from "Overture (Ararat the Border Crossing)" by Tayfun Erdem; and a sample from "Venice Beach in Winter" (listed in the liner notes as "a keyboard sample from Reharmonization") by Julian Bradley. "Myriad Industries" contains a sample of "EchoSpace" by Gil Trythall. == Accolades == == Personnel == Daniel Lopatin – production, lead vocals, album art, design James Blake – additional production, mixing, keyboards Gabriel Schuman, Joshua Smith and Evan Sutton – assistance Greg Calbi – mastering David Rudnick – album art, design Prurient – vocals Kelsey Lu – keyboards Anohni – vocals Eli Keszler – drums Shaun Trujillo – words == Charts ==
Computer-assisted legal research
Computer-assisted legal research (CALR) or computer-based legal research is a mode of legal research that uses databases of court opinions, statutes, court documents, and secondary material. Electronic databases make large bodies of case law easily available. Databases also have additional benefits, such as Boolean searches, evaluating case authority, organizing cases by topic, and providing links to cited material. Databases are available through paid subscription or for free. Subscription-based services include Westlaw, LexisNexis, JustCite, HeinOnline, Bloomberg Law, Lex Intell, VLex and LexEur. As of 2015, the commercial market grossed $8 billion. Free services include OpenJurist, Google Scholar, AltLaw, Ravel Law, WIPO Lex, Law Delta and the databases of the Free Access to Law Movement. == Purposes == Computer-assisted legal research is undertaken by a variety of actors. It is taught as a topic in many law degrees and is used extensively by undergraduate and postgraduate law students in meeting the work requirements of their degree courses. Professors of Law rely on the digitization of primary and secondary sources of law when conducting their research and writing the material that they submit for publication. Professional lawyers rely on computer-assisted legal research in order to properly understand the status of the law and so to act effectively in the best interest of their client. They may also consult the text of case judgements and statutes specifically, as well as wider academic comment, in order to form the basis of (or response to) an appeal. The availability of legal information online differs by type, jurisdiction and subject matter. The types of information available include: Texts of statutes, statutory instruments, civil codes, etc. Explanatory notes and government publications relating to statutes and their operation Texts of governing documents such as constitutions and treaties Case judgements Journals on legal matters or legal theory Dictionaries and legal encyclopedia Legal texts and materials in the form of e-books Current affairs and market information Educational information on the law and its operation == Before the Internet == Prior to the advent and popularization of the World Wide Web, access to digital legal information was largely through the use of CD-ROMs, designed and sold by commercial organizations. Dial-up services were also available from the 1970s. As the use of the Internet spread in the early 1990s, companies such as LexisNexis and Westlaw incorporated Internet connectivity into their software packages. Browser-based legal information started to be published by Legal Information Institutes from 1992. == Publicly available information == The first effort to provide free computer access to legal information was made by two academics, Peter Martin and Tom Bruce, in 1992. Today, the Legal Information Institute freely publishes such resources as the text of the United States Constitution, judgements of the United States Supreme Court, and the text of the United States Code. The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AusLII) was established soon after in 1995. Other legal information institutes, such as those of Great Britain and Ireland (BAILII), Canada (CII) and South Africa (SAfLI) soon followed. LIIs were partially formalized in 2002 following the signing of the Declaration of Free Access to the Law, which has been signed by 54 countries. At the time of writing, the World Legal Information Institute contains in excess of 1800 databases from 123 jurisdictions. Many governments also publish legal information online. For example, UK legislation and statutory instruments have been publicly available online since 2010. Depending on the jurisdiction in question, the decisions of higher appellate courts may also be published online, either by the Legal Information Institute or by the court service directly. Sources of European Union Law are published for free by EUR-Lex in 23 languages, including judgments of the European Courts. Similarly, judgements of the European Court of Human Rights are published on its website.
Legal Knowledge Interchange Format
The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) was developed in the European ESTRELLA project and was designed with the goal of becoming a standard for representing and interchanging policy, legislation and cases, including their justificatory arguments, in the legal domain. LKIF builds on and uses the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for representing concepts and includes a reusable basic ontology of legal concepts. The core of LKIF consists of a combination of OWL-DL and SWRL. LKIF was designed with two main roles in mind: the translation of legal knowledge bases written in different representation formats and formalisms and to be a knowledge representation formalism which could be part of larger architectures for developing legal knowledge systems.
Brain technology
Brain technology, or self-learning know-how systems, defines a technology that employs latest findings in neuroscience. [see also neuro implants] The term was first introduced by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, in the context of the Roboy project. Brain Technology can be employed in robots, know-how management systems and any other application with self-learning capabilities. In particular, Brain Technology applications allow the visualization of the underlying learning architecture often coined as "know-how maps". == Research and applications == The first demonstrations of BC in humans and animals took place in the 1960s when Grey Walter demonstrated use of non-invasively recorded encephalogram (EEG) signals from a human subject to control a slide projector (Graimann et al., 2010). Soon after Jacques J. Vidal coined the term brain–computer interface (BCI) in 1971, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) first starting funding brain–computer interface research and has since funded several brain–computer interface projects. That market is expected to reach a value of $1.72 billion by 2022. Brain–computer interfaces record brain activity, transmit the information out of the body, signal-process the data via algorithms, and convert them into command control signals. In 2012, a landmark study in Nature, led by pioneer Leigh Hochberg, MD, PhD, demonstrated that two people with tetraplegia were able to control robotic arms through thought when connected to the BrainGate neural interface system. The two participants were able to reach for and grasp objects in three-dimensional space, and one participant used the system to serve herself coffee for the first time since becoming paralyzed nearly 15 years prior. And in October 2020, two patients were able to wirelessly control an operating system to text, email, shop and bank using direct thought through the Stentrode brain computer interface (Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery) in a study led by Thomas Oxley. This was the first time a brain–computer interface was implanted via the patient's blood vessels, eliminating the need for open brain surgery. Currently a number of groups are exploring a range of experimental devices using brain–computer interfaces, which have the potential to fundamentally change the way of life for patients with paralysis and a wide range of neurological disorders. These include: as Elon Musk, Facebook, and the University of California in San Francisco. The systems. This technology is also being explored as a neuromodulation device and may ultimately help diagnose and treat a range of brain pathologies, such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease.
Artificial intelligence engineering
Artificial intelligence engineering (AI engineering) is a technical discipline that focuses on the design, development, and deployment of AI systems. AI engineering involves applying engineering principles and methodologies to create scalable, efficient, and reliable AI-based solutions. It merges aspects of data engineering and software engineering to create real-world applications in diverse domains such as healthcare, finance, autonomous systems, and industrial automation. == Terminology ambiguity == According to Chip Huyen's book AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models, the term AI engineering refers to the process of building applications that use foundation models, which are typically models developed by a small number of research laboratories and made available as a service. Huyen distinguishes this from machine learning (ML) engineering, which involves building and deploying models developed in-house. She notes that most practical AI systems combine both approaches. For example, a customer-support chatbot may use a generative model to produce responses while also incorporating locally built components such as request classifiers or scoring mechanisms to assess response quality. As a result, the terms AI engineering and ML engineering are often used together or interchangeably in practice. The distinction and broader usage of the term have been discussed in industry publications and interviews, where AI engineering has been described as an emerging discipline focused on productionizing applications built with foundation models. == Key components == AI engineering integrates a variety of technical domains and practices, all of which are essential to building scalable, reliable, and ethical AI systems. === Data engineering and infrastructure === Data serves as the cornerstone of AI systems, necessitating careful engineering to ensure premium quality, wide spread availability, and usability. AI engineers gather large, diverse datasets from multiple sources such as databases, APIs, and real-time streams. This data undergoes cleaning, normalization, and preprocessing, often facilitated by automated data pipelines that manage extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes. Efficient storage solutions, such as SQL (or NoSQL) databases and data lakes, must be selected based on data characteristics and use cases. Security measures, including encryption and access controls, are critical for protecting sensitive information and ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR. Scalability is essential, frequently involving cloud services and distributed computing frameworks to handle growing data volumes effectively. === Algorithm selection and optimization === Selecting the appropriate algorithm is crucial for the success of any AI system. Engineers evaluate the problem (which could be classification or regression, for example) to determine the most suitable machine learning algorithm, including deep learning paradigms. Once an algorithm is chosen, optimizing it through hyperparameter tuning is essential to enhance efficiency and accuracy. Techniques such as grid search or Bayesian optimization are employed, and engineers often utilize parallelization to expedite training processes, particularly for large models and datasets. For existing models, techniques like transfer learning can be applied to adapt pre-trained models for specific tasks, reducing the time and resources needed for training. === Deep learning engineering === Deep learning is particularly important for tasks involving large and complex datasets. Engineers design neural network architectures tailored to specific applications, such as convolutional neural networks for visual tasks or recurrent neural networks for sequence-based tasks. Transfer learning, where pre-trained models are fine-tuned for specific use cases, helps streamline development and often enhances performance. Optimization for deployment in resource-constrained environments, such as mobile devices, involves techniques like pruning and quantization to minimize model size while maintaining performance. Engineers also mitigate data imbalance through augmentation and synthetic data generation, ensuring robust model performance across various classes. === Natural language processing === Natural language processing (NLP) is a crucial component of AI engineering, focused on enabling machines to understand and generate human language. The process begins with text preprocessing to prepare data for machine learning models. Recent advancements, particularly transformer-based models like BERT and GPT, have greatly improved the ability to understand context in language. AI engineers work on various NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, machine translation, and information extraction. These tasks require sophisticated models that utilize attention mechanisms to enhance accuracy. Applications range from virtual assistants and chatbots to more specialized tasks like named-entity recognition (NER) and Part of speech (POS) tagging. === Reasoning and decision-making systems === Developing systems capable of reasoning and decision-making is a significant aspect of AI engineering. Whether starting from scratch or building on existing frameworks, engineers create solutions that operate on data or logical rules. Symbolic AI employs formal logic and predefined rules for inference, while probabilistic reasoning techniques like Bayesian networks help address uncertainty. These models are essential for applications in dynamic environments, such as autonomous vehicles, where real-time decision-making is critical. === Security === Security is a critical consideration in AI engineering, particularly as AI systems become increasingly integrated into sensitive and mission-critical applications. AI engineers implement robust security measures to protect models from adversarial attacks, such as evasion and poisoning, which can compromise system integrity and performance. Techniques such as adversarial training, where models are exposed to malicious inputs during development, help harden systems against these attacks. Additionally, securing the data used to train AI models is of paramount importance. Encryption, secure data storage, and access control mechanisms are employed to safeguard sensitive information from unauthorized access and breaches. AI systems also require constant monitoring to detect and mitigate vulnerabilities that may arise post-deployment. In high-stakes environments like autonomous systems and healthcare, engineers incorporate redundancy and fail-safe mechanisms to ensure that AI models continue to function correctly in the presence of security threats. === Ethics and compliance === As AI systems increasingly influence societal aspects, ethics and compliance are vital components of AI engineering. Engineers design models to mitigate risks such as data poisoning and ensure that AI systems adhere to legal frameworks, such as data protection regulations like GDPR. Privacy-preserving techniques, including data anonymization and differential privacy, are employed to safeguard personal information and ensure compliance with international standards. Ethical considerations focus on reducing bias in AI systems, preventing discrimination based on race, gender, or other protected characteristics. By developing fair and accountable AI solutions, engineers contribute to the creation of technologies that are both technically sound and socially responsible. == Workload == An AI engineer's workload revolves around the AI system's life cycle, which is a complex, multi-stage process. This process may involve building models from scratch or using pre-existing models through transfer learning, depending on the project's requirements. Each approach presents unique challenges and influences the time, resources, and technical decisions involved. === Problem definition and requirements analysis === Regardless of whether a model is built from scratch or based on a pre-existing model, the work begins with a clear understanding of the problem. The engineer must define the scope, understand the business context, and identify specific AI objectives that align with strategic goals. This stage includes consulting with stakeholders to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and operational requirements. When developing a model from scratch, the engineer must also decide which algorithms are most suitable for the task. Conversely, when using a pre-trained model, the workload shifts toward evaluating existing models and selecting the one most aligned with the task. The use of pre-trained models often allows for a more targeted focus on fine-tuning, as opposed to designing an entirely new model architecture. === Data acquisition and preparation === Data acquisition and preparation are critical stages regardless of the development method chosen, as the performance of any AI system relies heavily on high-quality, re