Bernard Vauquois ((1929-06-14)June 14, 1929 — (1985-09-30)September 30, 1985) was a French mathematician and computer scientist. He was a pioneer of computer science and machine translation (MT) in France. An astronomer-turned-computer scientist, he is known for his work on the programming language ALGOL 60, and later for extensive work on the theoretical and practical problems of MT, of which the eponymous Vauquois triangle is one of the most widely-known contributions. He was a professor at what would become the Grenoble Alpes University. == Biography == Bernard Vauquois was initially a researcher at French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1952 to 1958 at the Astrophysics Institute of the Meudon Observatory, after completing studies in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Since 1957, his research program has also focused on methods applied to physics from the perspective of electronic computers, and he has taught programming to physicists. This double interest in astrophysics and electronic computers is reflected in the subject of his thesis and that of the complementary thesis in physical sciences that he defended in 1958. In 1960, at 31 years old, he was appointed professor of computer science at Grenoble University, where, alongside professors Jean Kuntzmann and Noël Gastinel, he began work in the field. At that time, he was also contributing to the definition of the language ALGOL 60. Also in 1960, he founded the Centre d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique (CETA), later renamed as Groupe d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique (GETA) and currently known as GETALP, a team at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Grenoble, and soon showed his gift for rapid understanding, synthesis, and innovation, and his taste for personal communication across linguistic borders and barriers. After visiting a number of centers, mainly in the United States, where machine translation research was conducted, he analyzed the shortcomings of the "first-generation" approach and evaluated the potential of a new generation based on grammar and formal language theory, and proposed a new approach based on a representational "pivot" and the use of (declarative) rule systems that transform a sequential sentence from one level of representation to another. He led the GETA in constructing the first large second-generation system, applied to Russian–French, from 1962 to 1971. At the end of this period, the accumulated experience led him to correct some defects of the "pure" declarative and interlingual approach, and to use heuristic programming methods, implemented with procedural grammars written in LSPLs ("specialized languages for linguistic programming", langages spécialisés pour la programmation linguistique) that were developed under his direction, and integrated into the ARIANE-78 machine translation system. In 1974, when he cofounded the Leibniz laboratory, he proposed "multilevel structure descriptors" (descripteurs de structures multiniveaux) for units larger than sentence translation. This idea, premonitory of later theoretical work (Ray Jackendoff, Gerald Gazdar) is still the cornerstone of all machine translation software built by GETA and the French national TA project. Bernard Vauquois' last contribution was "static grammar" (grammaire statique) in 1982–83, during the ESOPE project, the preparatory phase of the French national MT project. He was a key figure in the field of computational linguistics in France. At CNRS, he was a member of section 22 of the National Committee in 1963: "General Linguistics, Modern Languages and Comparative Literature", and then, in 1969, of section 28: "General Linguistics, Foreign Languages and Literature". Since 1965, he has been vice-president of the Association for Natural Language Processing (ATALA). He was its president from 1966 to 1971. He was also one of the founders, in 1965, of the ICCL (International Committee on Computational Linguistics), which organizes COLING conferences. He was its president from 1969 to 1984. From France, he often collaborated with other countries (notably Canada, the United States, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Japan, China, Brazil, Malaysia, and Thailand), working on the specification and implementation of grammars and dictionaries. He began cooperating with Malaysia, for example, in 1979, which led to the creation of the Automatic Terjemaan Project, with a first prototype of an English-Malay MT system demonstrated in 1980. == Vauquois triangle == The Vauquois triangle is a conceptual model and diagram illustrating possible approaches to the design of machine translation systems, first proposed in 1968. == Legacy == Bernard Vauquois is regarded as a pioneer of machine translation in France. He played a key role in developing the first large-scale second-generation machine translation system, and his work influenced the field of machine translation for many years. He supervised some twenty doctoral theses, most of them concerning formal aspects of natural and artificial languages, with an emphasis on machine translation. The Center for Studies on Automatic Translation, which Vauquois founded in 1960, later became the Group for the Study of Machine Translation and Automated Processing of Languages and Speech (GETALP). It is still a research institution in natural language processing. Vauquois was a prolific writer and speaker, disseminating knowledge about machine translation and related topics. His papers and presentations were instrumental in establishing the field of machine translation in France and beyond. == Publications == Vauquois, Bernard (1973). Traduction automatique (in French). Paris: Gauthier-Villars. Vauquois, Bernard (1967). Introduction à la traduction automatique (in French). Paris: Gauthier-Villars.
Symbolic artificial intelligence
In artificial intelligence, symbolic artificial intelligence (also known as classical artificial intelligence or logic-based artificial intelligence) is the term for the collection of all methods in artificial intelligence research that are based on high-level symbolic (human-readable) representations of problems, logic, and search. Symbolic AI used tools such as logic programming, production rules, semantic nets and frames, and it developed applications such as knowledge-based systems (in particular, expert systems), symbolic mathematics, automated theorem provers, ontologies, the semantic web, and automated planning and scheduling systems. The Symbolic AI paradigm led to important ideas in search, symbolic programming languages, agents, multi-agent systems, the semantic web, and the strengths and limitations of formal knowledge and reasoning systems. Symbolic AI was the dominant paradigm of AI research from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s. Researchers in the 1960s and the 1970s were convinced that symbolic approaches would eventually succeed in creating a machine with artificial general intelligence and considered this the ultimate goal of their field. An early boom, with early successes such as the Logic Theorist and Samuel's Checkers Playing Program, led to unrealistic expectations and promises and was followed by the first AI Winter as funding dried up. A second boom (1969–1986) occurred with the rise of expert systems, their promise of capturing corporate expertise, and an enthusiastic corporate embrace. That boom, and some early successes, e.g., with XCON at DEC, was followed again by later disappointment. Problems with difficulties in knowledge acquisition, maintaining large knowledge bases, and brittleness in handling out-of-domain problems arose. Another, second, AI Winter (1988–2011) followed. Subsequently, AI researchers focused on addressing underlying problems in handling uncertainty and in knowledge acquisition. Uncertainty was addressed with formal methods such as hidden Markov models, Bayesian reasoning, and statistical relational learning. Symbolic machine learning addressed the knowledge acquisition problem with contributions including Version Space, Valiant's PAC learning, Quinlan's ID3 decision-tree learning, case-based learning, and inductive logic programming to learn relations. Neural networks, a subsymbolic approach, had been pursued from early days and reemerged strongly in 2012. Early examples are Rosenblatt's perceptron learning work, the backpropagation work of Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams, and work in convolutional neural networks by LeCun et al. in 1989. However, neural networks were not viewed as successful until about 2012: "Until Big Data became commonplace, the general consensus in the Al community was that the so-called neural-network approach was hopeless. Systems just didn't work that well, compared to other methods. ... A revolution came in 2012, when a number of people, including a team of researchers working with Hinton, worked out a way to use the power of GPUs to enormously increase the power of neural networks." Over the next several years, deep learning had spectacular success in handling vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, image generation, and machine translation, though symbolic approaches continue to be useful in a few domains such as computer algebra systems and proof assistants. == History == A short history of symbolic AI to the present day follows below. Time periods and titles are drawn from Henry Kautz's 2020 AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture and the longer Wikipedia article on the History of AI, with dates and titles differing slightly for increased clarity. === The first AI summer: irrational exuberance, 1948–1966 === Success at early attempts in AI occurred in three main areas: artificial neural networks, knowledge representation, and heuristic search, contributing to high expectations. This section summarizes Kautz's reprise of early AI history. ==== Approaches inspired by human or animal cognition or behavior ==== Cybernetic approaches attempted to replicate the feedback loops between animals and their environments. A robotic turtle, with sensors, motors for driving and steering, and seven vacuum tubes for control, based on a preprogrammed neural net, was built as early as 1948. This work can be seen as an early precursor to later work in neural networks, reinforcement learning, and situated robotics. An important early symbolic AI program was the Logic theorist, written by Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw in 1955–56, as it was able to prove 38 elementary theorems from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. Newell, Simon, and Shaw later generalized this work to create a domain-independent problem solver, GPS (General Problem Solver). GPS solved problems represented with formal operators via state-space search using means-ends analysis. During the 1960s, symbolic approaches achieved great success at simulating intelligent behavior in structured environments such as game-playing, symbolic mathematics, and theorem-proving. AI research was concentrated in four institutions in the 1960s: Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, MIT and (later) University of Edinburgh. Each one developed its own style of research. Earlier approaches based on cybernetics or artificial neural networks were abandoned or pushed into the background. Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied human problem-solving skills and attempted to formalize them, and their work laid the foundations of the field of artificial intelligence, as well as cognitive science, operations research and management science. Their research team used the results of psychological experiments to develop programs that simulated the techniques that people used to solve problems. This tradition, centered at Carnegie Mellon University would eventually culminate in the development of the Soar architecture in the middle 1980s. ==== Heuristic search ==== In addition to the highly specialized domain-specific kinds of knowledge that we will see later used in expert systems, early symbolic AI researchers discovered another more general application of knowledge. These were called heuristics, rules of thumb that guide a search in promising directions: "How can non-enumerative search be practical when the underlying problem is exponentially hard? The approach advocated by Simon and Newell is to employ heuristics: fast algorithms that may fail on some inputs or output suboptimal solutions." Another important advance was to find a way to apply these heuristics that guarantees a solution will be found, if there is one, not withstanding the occasional fallibility of heuristics: "The A algorithm provided a general frame for complete and optimal heuristically guided search. A is used as a subroutine within practically every AI algorithm today but is still no magic bullet; its guarantee of completeness is bought at the cost of worst-case exponential time. ==== Early work on knowledge representation and reasoning ==== Early work covered both applications of formal reasoning emphasizing first-order logic, along with attempts to handle common-sense reasoning in a less formal manner. ===== Modeling formal reasoning with logic: the "neats" ===== Unlike Simon and Newell, John McCarthy felt that machines did not need to simulate the exact mechanisms of human thought, but could instead try to find the essence of abstract reasoning and problem-solving with logic, regardless of whether people used the same algorithms. His laboratory at Stanford (SAIL) focused on using formal logic to solve a wide variety of problems, including knowledge representation, planning and learning. Logic was also the focus of the work at the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere in Europe which led to the development of the programming language Prolog and the science of logic programming. ===== Modeling implicit common-sense knowledge with frames and scripts: the "scruffies" ===== Researchers at MIT (such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert) found that solving difficult problems in vision and natural language processing required ad hoc solutions—they argued that no simple and general principle (like logic) would capture all the aspects of intelligent behavior. Roger Schank described their "anti-logic" approaches as "scruffy" (as opposed to the "neat" paradigms at CMU and Stanford). Commonsense knowledge bases (such as Doug Lenat's Cyc) are an example of "scruffy" AI, since they must be built by hand, one complicated concept at a time. === The first AI winter: crushed dreams, 1967–1977 === The first AI winter was a shock: During the first AI summer, many people thought that machine intelligence could be achieved in just a few years. The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched programs to support AI research to use AI to solve problems of national security; in particular, to automate the translation of Russian to English for inte
Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had completed an early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation. == History == By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI. Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitor Anthropic. In January 2026, it was reported that Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, departed the startup to return to OpenAI. Other former OpenAI employees who have been hired include Jonathan Lachman and Andrew Tulloch (although Tulloch departed after getting recruited for Meta Superintelligence Labs). Thinking Machines Lab's advisers include Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI's chief research officer, and Alec Radford, who was a lead researcher for OpenAI. On October 1, 2025, it announced Tinker, an API for fine-tuning language models. Users would submit jobs through the API for fine-tuning one of the various open-weight models supported. The Lab would run the jobs on its internal clusters and training infrastructure. == Business structure == Thinking Machines Lab grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders. In July 2025, Andreessen Horowitz was reported to have led the company's initial funding round, raising "about $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion". The government of Albania (Murati's country of origin) was also included in this round, making a $10 million investment which required an amendment to the country's 2025 budget. == Partnership == In March 2026, Thinking Machines Lab announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA involving an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity.
National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence
The Memorandum on Advancing the United States' Leadership in Artificial Intelligence; Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Fulfill National Security Objectives; and Fostering the Safety, Security, and Trustworthiness of Artificial Intelligence is a memorandum signed by U.S. president Joe Biden. The memorandum is described as seeking to advance U.S. leadership in the development of safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI); enable the U.S. government to use AI for national security; and contribute to international AI governance.
Cleverpath AION Business Rules Expert
Cleverpath AION Business Rules Expert (formerly Platinum AIONDS, and before that Trinzic AIONDS, and originally Aion) is an expert system and Business rules engine owned by Computer Associates by 2000. == History == The product was created around 1986 as "Aion" by the Aion company. In its initial release Aion was multi-platform and continues to be deliverable to the PC, Unixs, and Mainframe computer's. In addition it ties in seamlessly with a variety of databases including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and ODBC. Aion was founded by Harry Reinstein, Larry Cohn, Garry Hallee, Scott Grinis, and others. From Scott Grinis's bio: Scott founded Aion, a company that developed expert systems and whose advanced inference engine and object technology were used by financial services and insurance firms to develop risk-scoring and underwriting applications. Harry Reinstein was quoted as saying: “Our biggest competitor was not AICorp, it was COBOL” Trinzic owned AION by 1993. A reference in a 1993 announcement indicates that Trinzic's formation was the result of a merger (paraphased): Trinzic set three development initiatives shortly after its formation from the merger of Aion Corp. and AICorp. The other initiatives -- adding SQL extensions to Aion/DS and evaluating the unbundling of some of that product's object-oriented programming capabilities -- are still active. Writing in 1993 Judith Hodges and Deborah Melewski give the date for the merger: Two rival artificial intelligence software vendors -- AICorp, Inc. and Aion Corp. -- merged in September 1992 to form Trinzic Corp. As part of the merger, redundant jobs were eliminated (20% of the combined work force), leaving a total work force of 245 employees worldwide. The new firm also boasted a combined installed base of more than 1,200 sites representing more than 10,000 software licenses. Although in the merger, technically AICorp bought Aion, as AICorp was a public company and Aion was still private, the reality was that Aion's leadership and technology subsumed AICorp's. Jim Gagnard, the CEO of Aion, became CEO of Trinzic and AICorp's flagship product, KBMS, was discontinued, while the Aion Development System continued to be enhanced and KBMS customers were assisted in converting to AIONDS, under the continued technical leadership of Garry Hallee and Scott Grinis. On August 1, 1994 Trinzic released version 6.4 of AIONDS saying, in part: Trinzic Corp., Palo Alto, Calif., has unveiled The Aion Development System (AionDS) Version 6.4, an upgrade to the company's development environment for building business process automation applications. Version 6.4 provides a visual development environment for Microsoft Windows or OS/2 PM applications using business rules. Trinzic was acquired by PLATINUM Technologies in 1995 which retained at least some of Trinzic's acquisitions Platinum Technologies was acquired by Computer Associates in 1999. CA changed the system's name to CA Aion Business Rules Expert" on or before 2009. It is currently (June 2011) at Release 11 on a wide range of supported platforms. == Applications using Aion == Aion has been used in a variety of industries including Energy, Insurance, Military, Aviation, and Banking. At one point an Aion expert system application written by Covia, LLC existed to do airport gate assignment. Colossus, a computer program, developed by Computer Sciences Corporation is the insurance industry’s leading expert system for assisting adjusters in the evaluation of bodily injury claims (aka "pain and suffering"). Colossus helps adjusters reduce variance in payouts on similar bodily injury claims through objective use of industry standard rules.
Feature (machine learning)
In machine learning and pattern recognition, a feature is an individual measurable property or characteristic of a data set. Choosing informative, discriminating, and independent features is crucial to producing effective algorithms for pattern recognition, classification, and regression tasks. Features are usually numeric, but other types such as strings and graphs are used in syntactic pattern recognition, after some pre-processing step such as one-hot encoding. The concept of "features" is related to that of explanatory variables used in statistical techniques such as linear regression. == Feature types == In feature engineering, two types of features are commonly used: numerical and categorical. Numerical features are continuous values that can be measured on a scale. Examples of numerical features include age, height, weight, and income. Numerical features can be used in machine learning algorithms directly. Categorical features are discrete values that can be grouped into categories. Examples of categorical features include gender, color, and zip code. Categorical features typically need to be converted to numerical features before they can be used in machine learning algorithms. This can be done using a variety of techniques, such as one-hot encoding, label encoding, and ordinal encoding. The type of feature that is used in feature engineering depends on the specific machine learning algorithm that is being used. Some machine learning algorithms, such as decision trees, can handle both numerical and categorical features. Other machine learning algorithms, such as linear regression, can only handle numerical features. == Classification == A numeric feature can be conveniently described by a feature vector. One way to achieve binary classification is using a linear predictor function (related to the perceptron) with a feature vector as input. The method consists of calculating the scalar product between the feature vector and a vector of weights, qualifying those observations whose result exceeds a threshold. Algorithms for classification from a feature vector include nearest neighbor classification, neural networks, and statistical techniques such as Bayesian approaches. == Examples == In character recognition, features may include histograms counting the number of black pixels along horizontal and vertical directions, number of internal holes, stroke detection and many others. In speech recognition, features for recognizing phonemes can include noise ratios, length of sounds, relative power, filter matches, logarithmic Mel-scale spectral vectors and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, which represent the frequency characteristics of audio signals. In spam detection algorithms, features may include the presence or absence of certain email headers, the email structure, the language, the frequency of specific terms, the grammatical correctness of the text. In computer vision, there are a large number of possible features, such as edges and objects. == Feature vectors == In pattern recognition and machine learning, a feature vector is an n-dimensional vector of numerical features that represent some object. Many algorithms in machine learning require a numerical representation of objects, since such representations facilitate processing and statistical analysis. When representing images, the feature values might correspond to the pixels of an image, while when representing texts the features might be the frequencies of occurrence of textual terms. Feature vectors are equivalent to the vectors of explanatory variables used in statistical procedures such as linear regression. Feature vectors are often combined with weights using a dot product in order to construct a linear predictor function that is used to determine a score for making a prediction. The vector space associated with these vectors is often called the feature space. In order to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space, a number of dimensionality reduction techniques can be employed. Higher-level features can be obtained from already available features and added to the feature vector; for example, for the study of diseases the feature 'Age' is useful and is defined as Age = 'Year of death' minus 'Year of birth' . This process is referred to as feature construction. Feature construction is the application of a set of constructive operators to a set of existing features resulting in construction of new features. Examples of such constructive operators include checking for the equality conditions {=, ≠}, the arithmetic operators {+,−,×, /}, the array operators {max(S), min(S), average(S)} as well as other more sophisticated operators, for example count(S, C) that counts the number of features in the feature vector S satisfying some condition C or, for example, distances to other recognition classes generalized by some accepting device. Feature construction has long been considered a powerful tool for increasing both accuracy and understanding of structure, particularly in high-dimensional problems. Applications include studies of disease and emotion recognition from speech. == Selection and extraction == The initial set of raw features can be redundant and large enough that estimation and optimization is made difficult or ineffective. Therefore, a preliminary step in many applications of machine learning and pattern recognition consists of selecting a subset of features, or constructing a new and reduced set of features to facilitate learning, and to improve generalization and interpretability. Extracting or selecting features is a combination of art and science; developing systems to do so is known as feature engineering. It requires the experimentation of multiple possibilities and the combination of automated techniques with the intuition and knowledge of the domain expert. Automating this process is feature learning, where a machine not only uses features for learning, but learns the features itself.
Hallin's spheres
Hallin's spheres is a theory of news reporting and its rhetorical framing posited by journalism historian Daniel C. Hallin in his 1986 book The Uncensored War to explain the news coverage of the Vietnam War. Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts. Hallin's spheres, which deals with the media, are similar to the Overton window, which deals with public opinion generally, and posits a sliding scale of public opinion on any given issue ranging from conventional wisdom to unacceptable. Hallin used the concept of framing to describe the presentation and reception of issues in public. For example, framing the use of drugs as criminal activity can encourage the public to consider that behavior anti-social. Hallin's work was later referred to in the controversial formulation of the concept of an opinion corridor, in which the range of acceptable public opinion narrows, and opinion outside that corridor moves from legitimate controversy into deviance. == Description == === Sphere of consensus === This sphere contains those topics on which there is widespread agreement, or at least the perception thereof. Within the sphere of consensus, "journalists feel free to invoke a generalized 'we' and to take for granted shared values and shared assumptions". Examples include such things as motherhood and apple pie. For topics in this sphere, journalists feel free to be advocating cheerleaders without having to be neutral or present any opposing view point and be disinterested observers." === Sphere of legitimate controversy === For topics in this sphere rational and informed people hold differing views within limited range. These topics are therefore the most important to cover, and also ones upon which journalists are seemingly obliged to remain disinterested reporters, rather than advocating for or against a particular view. Schudson notes that Hallin, in his influential study of the US media during the Vietnam War, argues that journalism's commitment to objectivity has always been compartmentalized. That is, within a certain sphere—the sphere of legitimate controversy—journalists seek conscientiously to be balanced and objective. The work of Walter Williams professor at the University of Missouri, Rod Petersen, advanced the idea that priming—controlling the narratives that media covers—can be the tool that media use to get deviant news subjects into the legitimate controversial circles of new coverage. === Sphere of deviance === Topics in this sphere are rejected by journalists as being unworthy of general consideration. Such views are perceived as being out of hand, unfounded, taboo, or of such minor consequence that they are not newsworthy. Hallin argues that in the sphere of deviance, "journalists also depart from standard norms of objective reporting and feel authorized to treat as marginal, laughable, dangerous". They either avoid mentioning or ridicule the controversial subject as outside the bounds of acceptable controversy; and they censor the individuals and groups who are associated with it. A simple example: a person claiming that aliens are manipulating college basketball scores might have difficulty finding sports media coverage for such a claim. A more political example: the US media regulator FCC's "Fairness Doctrine" aimed at radio stations, advocated balance between right and left political news and opinions, yet specified that broadcasters did not have to reserve any space or time for Communist viewpoints. == Uses of the terms == Craig Watkins (2001, pp. 92–94) makes use of the Hallin's spheres in a paper examining ABC, CBS, and NBC television network television news coverage of the Million Man March, a demonstration that took place in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. Watkins analyzes the dominant framing practices—problem definition, rhetorical devices, use of sources, and images—employed by journalists to make sense of this particular expression of political protest. He argues that Hallin's three spheres are a way for media framing practices to develop specific reportorial contexts, and each sphere develops its own distinct style of news reporting resources by different rhetorical tropes and discourses. Piers Robinson (2001, p. 536) uses the concept in relation to debates that have emerged over the extent to which the mass media serves elite interests or, alternatively, plays a powerful role in shaping political outcomes. His article reviews Hallin's spheres as an example of media-state relations, that highlights theoretical and empirical shortcomings in the 'manufacturing consent' thesis (Chomsky, McChesney). Robinson argues that a more nuanced and bi-directional understanding is needed of the direction of influence between media and the state that builds upon, rather than rejecting, existing theoretical accounts. Hallin's theory assumed a relatively homogenized media environment, where most producers were trying to reach most consumers. A more fractured media landscape can challenge this assumption because different audiences may place topics in different spheres, a concept related to the filter bubble, which posits that many members of the public choose to limit their media consumption to the areas of consensus and deviance that they personally prefer.