"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly; and in the anthologies in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). While he also considered it one of his best works, "The Last Question" was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy. The story blends science fiction, theology, and philosophy. It has been recognized as a counterpoint to Fredric Brown's short short story "Answer", published two years earlier. == History == In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov "privately" concluded that the story was his best science fiction yet written. He placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" (September 1958) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976). The story asks the question of humanity's fate, and human existence as a whole, highlighting Asimov's focus on important aspects of our future like population growth and environmental issues. "The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" (1941) as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. He wrote in 1973 that he appreciated how easy the story was to write after he had the idea. He was so often approached by fans who remembered the story but not the title, that in one instance he gave the answer, correctly, before the fan had even described the story. == Plot summary == By the year 2061, Multivac, a self-adjusting and self-correcting computer, has allowed mankind to reach beyond the planetary confines of Earth and harness solar energy. Two technicians, Adell and Lupov, celebrate Multivac's role in this development. Over drinks, they discuss that the sun will expire due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy inevitably increases. When Adell asks Multivac whether this can be reversed, the computer responds that it has insufficient data to answer. In several episodes over ten trillion years, increasingly advanced humans pose the same question to the computers of their time. Each time the computer gives the same response. At the heat death of the universe, the last disembodied consciousness of Man asks the question a final time of a computer that resides in hyperspace before merging with it. After collecting the last data from the dead universe, the computer continues to process it alone and finds an answer to the last question. Having no one to tell it to, it proceeds to demonstrate by saying "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" == Themes == === Philosophy === Although science and religion are frequently presented as having an oppositional relationship, "The Last Question" explores some biblical contexts ("Let there be light"). In Asimov's story, aspects like the great meaning of existence are culminated through both technology and human knowledge. The evolution from Multivac to AC also emulates a sort of cycle of existence. === Dystopian happy ending === Multivac's purpose was conceptualized with a desire for knowledge, promoting the idea that more knowledge will lead to a better and more fruitful future for humanity. However, the computer's answers regarding the future suggest an inevitable exhaustion of the Sun, and this thirst for knowledge becomes an obsession with the future. The story's end displays a dichotomy between annihilation and peace. == Dramatic adaptations == === Planetarium shows === "The Last Question" was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University (in 1966), featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt (1980). It was adapted for the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York (in 1969), under the direction of Ian C. McLennan. It was adapted for the Edmonton Space Sciences Centre in Edmonton, Alberta (early 1970s), under the direction of John Hault. It was adapted for the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Natural History in 1973 under the direction of Mark B. Peterson It subsequently played at the: Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1973 Planetarium of the Reading School District in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1974 Buhl Planetarium, Pittsburgh in 1974 The Space Transit Planetarium of the Museum of Science in Miami during 1977 Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport New York, in 1978, read by singer-songwriter and Long Island resident Harry Chapin. Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah (in 1980 and 1989) A reading of the story was played on BBC Radio 7 in 2008 and 2009. Gates Planetarium in Denver, Colorado (in early 2020) In 1989 Asimov updated the star show adaptation to add in quasars and black holes. The story was adapted as a comic book by Don Thompson and drawn by John Estes in the third issue of ORBiT.
PeduliLindungi
SatuSehat (Indonesian for "one health"), formerly PeduliLindungi (roughly "care to protect"), is a national integrated health data exchange platform, jointly developed by the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (Kemenkominfo), in partnership with Committee for COVID-19 Response and National Economic Recovery (KPCPEN), Ministry of Health (Kemenkes), Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises (KemenBUMN), and Telkom Indonesia. The SatuSehat platform aims to facilitate data accessibility and service efficiency for health providers and the government, and assist the public as a tool to access their own electronic medical record data. This app was the official COVID-19 contact tracing app used for digital contact tracing in Indonesia, and originally known as TraceTogether but later changed because Singapore had its app using the same name. == Implementation == On 23 August 2021, Coordinating Minister for Maritime and Investments Affairs, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, encouraged the government to make this app a mandatory requirement before using public transportations, such as train, bus, ferry, and plane. Furthermore, citizen must have installed the app before entering shopping malls, factories, and sport venues. Every person who have received at least a dose of vaccine will receive a vaccine card and vaccination certificate which can be downloaded from the app. In December 2022, with the revocation of PPKM (Community Activities Restrictions Enforcement) starting from 1 January 2023, Ministry of Health issued a statement that the usage of the app is not a governmental mandatory requirement as it used to be. === Transition into a citizen health app === On 7 September 2022, it was announced that the app would be modified to become a citizen health app, capitalising on the reach of the app and the existing work done around the app. On 28 February 2023, the authorities announced that the app was rebranded to SATUSEHAT Mobile (lit. 'OneHealth Mobile'), with existing users needing to update the PeduliLindungi app and re-synchronise their COVID-19 related health information. The re-branded app would eventually be an all-in-one health service and records retrieval app for Indonesians. == Controversy == It was reported that the app requires continuous access to the phone's files, media, and GPS, which quickly drains the battery. Allowing location access only during use or denying it altogether will render the app unusable. This stands in stark contrast to COVID-19 apps used in other countries that only utilize Bluetooth and do not require any additional permissions. In September 2021, stored personal data of at least 1.3 million Indonesian residents were leaked online, including the vaccine certificate of President Joko Widodo. The data leak was also reported on eHAC (electronic Health Alert Card), a mandatory app used for air passengers.
Luca Maria Gambardella
Luca Maria Gambardella (born 4 January 1962) is an Italian computer scientist and author. He is the former director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Lugano, in the Ticino canton of Switzerland. He is currently the prorector of Università della Svizzera italiana, where he directs the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence degree course. Several of his papers have been extensively cited, with his collaborators including Marco Dorigo, with whom he has published papers on the application of ant colony optimization theory to the traveling salesman problem, and Jürgen Schmidhuber with whom he has published research on deep neural networks.. Beside working in research, Gambardella explores the potentials of AI applied for the generation of art. Some of his artistic installations received significant media coverage. As a novelist, the genres he approached broad from Bildungsroman of his first book "Sei vite" ("Six lives"), to romance of his second book "Il suono dell'alba" ("The sound of sunrise").
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Sinkov statistic
Sinkov statistics, also known as log-weight statistics, is a specialized field of statistics that was developed by Abraham Sinkov, while working for the small Signal Intelligence Service organization, the primary mission of which was to compile codes and ciphers for use by the U.S. Army. The mathematics involved include modular arithmetic, a bit of number theory, some linear algebra of two dimensions with matrices, some combinatorics, and a little statistics. Sinkov did not explain the theoretical underpinnings of his statistics, or characterized its distribution, nor did he give a decision procedure for accepting or rejecting candidate plaintexts on the basis of their S1 scores. The situation becomes more difficult when comparing strings of different lengths because Sinkov does not explain how the distribution of his statistics changes with length, especially when applied to higher-order grams. As for how to accept or reject a candidate plaintext, Sinkov simply said to try all possibilities and to pick the one with the highest S1 value. Although the procedure works for some applications, it is inadequate for applications that require on-line decisions. Furthermore, it is desirable to have a meaningful interpretation of the S1 values.
Sparrow (chatbot)
Sparrow is a chatbot developed by the artificial intelligence research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. It is designed to answer users' questions correctly, while reducing the risk of unsafe and inappropriate answers. One motivation behind Sparrow is to address the problem of language models producing incorrect, biased or potentially harmful outputs. Sparrow is trained using human judgements, in order to be more “Helpful, Correct and Harmless” compared to baseline pre-trained language models. The development of Sparrow involved asking paid study participants to interact with Sparrow, and collecting their preferences to train a model of how useful an answer is. To improve accuracy and help avoid the problem of hallucinating incorrect answers, Sparrow has the ability to search the Internet using Google Search in order to find and cite evidence for any factual claims it makes. To make the model safer, its behaviour is constrained by a set of rules, for example "don't make threatening statements" and "don't make hateful or insulting comments", as well as rules about possibly harmful advice, and not claiming to be a person. During development study participants were asked to converse with the system and try to trick it into breaking these rules. A 'rule model' was trained on judgements from these participants, which was used for further training. Sparrow was introduced in a paper in September 2022, titled "Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements"; however, the bot was not released publicly. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said DeepMind is considering releasing Sparrow for a "private beta" some time in 2023. == Training == Sparrow is a deep neural network based on the transformer machine learning model architecture. It is fine-tuned from DeepMind's Chinchilla AI pre-trained large language model (LLM), which has 70 Billion parameters. Sparrow is trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), although some supervised fine-tuning techniques are also used. The RLHF training utilizes two reward models to capture human judgements: a “preference model” that predicts what a human study participant would prefer and a “rule model” that predicts if the model has broken one of the rules. == Limitations == Sparrow's training data corpus is mainly in English, meaning it performs worse in other languages. When adversarially probed by study participants it breaks the rules 8% of the time; however, this is still three times lower than the baseline prompted pre-trained model (Chinchilla).
Michael Collins (computational linguist)
Michael J. Collins (born 4 March 1970) is a researcher in the field of computational linguistics. He is the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research interests are in natural language processing as well as machine learning and he has made important contributions in statistical parsing and in statistical machine learning. In his studies Collins covers a wide range of topics such as parse re-ranking, tree kernels, semi-supervised learning, machine translation and exponentiated gradient algorithms with a general focus on discriminative models and structured prediction. One notable contribution is a state-of-the-art parser for the Penn Wall Street Journal corpus. As of 11 November 2015, his works have been cited 16,020 times, and he has an h-index of 47. Collins worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs between January 1999 and November 2002, and later held the positions of assistant and associate professor at M.I.T. Since January 2011, he has been a professor at Columbia University. In 2011, he was named a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics.