Fingerprint scanners are a type of biometric security device that identify an individual by identifying the structure of their fingerprints. They are used in police stations, security industries, smartphones, and other mobile devices. == Fingerprints == People have patterns of friction ridges on their fingers, these patterns are called the fingerprints. Fingerprints are uniquely detailed, durable over an individual's lifetime, and difficult to alter. Due to the unique combinations, fingerprints have become an ideal means of identification. == Types of fingerprint scanners == There are four types of fingerprint scanners: Optical scanners take a visual image of the fingerprint using a digital camera. Capacitive or CMOS scanners use capacitors and thus electric current to form an image of the fingerprint. This type of scanner tends to excel in terms of precision. Ultrasonic fingerprint scanners use high frequency sound waves to penetrate the epidermal (outer) layer of the skin. Thermal scanners sense the temperature differences on the contact surface, in between fingerprint ridges and valleys. All fingerprint scanners are susceptible to spoofing through fingerprints replicated using photographs and 3D printing. == Construction forms == Each type of fingerprint sensor can take two basic forms: the stagnant and the moving fingerprint scanner. Stagnant: The scanning module is mounted statically, and the user is required to swipe their fingers across it. This is cheaper but also less reliable than the moving form. Imaging can be less than ideal if the finger is not dragged over the scanning area at constant speed. Moving: The scanning module is mounted on a movable surface, while the user's finger can remain static. Because this layout allows the scanning module to pass the fingerprint at a constant speed, this method is generally more reliable. == Form factors == === Peripherals === Add-on fingerprint readers for PCs initially appeared in the late 1990's in the form of PCMCIA modules. Microsoft released a model in its IntelliMouse line with an integrated fingerprint reader in 2005. === Integrated readers === Laptops with built-in readers emerged around the same time as peripheral readers with devices such as NECs MC/R730F. IBM produced laptops with integrated readers starting in 2004. Apple introduced fingerprint scanners to their devices under the name Touch ID in 2013. These were initially released on the iPhone 5S, with the technology remaining exclusive to iPhones until the release of the 2016 MacBook Pro. On both laptops and smartphones, the fingerprint sensor usually uses a USB or I2C interface internally.
CloudPassage
CloudPassage is a company that provides an automation platform, delivered via software as a service, that improves security for private, public, and hybrid cloud computing environments. CloudPassage is headquartered in San Francisco. == History == CloudPassage was founded by Carson Sweet, Talli Somekh, and Vitaliy Geraymovych in 2010. The company used cloud computing and big data analytics to implement security monitoring and control in a platform called Halo. CloudPassage spent a year in stealth developing the Halo technology, coming out of stealth mode to a closed beta in January 2011. In June 2012, the company launched the commercial product that included configuration security monitoring, network microsegmentation, and two-factor authentication for privileged access management. By 2013, CloudPassage expanded Halo to support large enterprises with advanced security and compliance requirements with a product called Halo Enterprise. The first round of venture funding for the company raised $6.5 million. In April 2012, CloudPassage raised $14 million. The financing round was led by Tenaya Capital. In February 2014, CloudPassage announced that it had raised $25.5 million in funding led by Shasta Ventures. In total, the company has invested over $30 million in its technology and raised approximately $88 million in capital. == Product == The CloudPassage platform provides cloud workload security and compliance for systems hosted in public or private cloud infrastructure environments, including hybrid cloud and multi-cloud workload hosting models. The flagship product the company offers is called Halo. Halo secures virtual servers in public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures and provides file integrity monitoring (FIM) while also administering firewall automation, vulnerability monitoring, network access control, security event alerting, and assessment. The Halo platform also provides security applications such as privileged access management, software vulnerability scanning, multifactor authentication, and log-based IDS. In December 2013, CloudPassage set up six servers with Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems and combinations of popular programs and invited hackers to attempt to hack into the servers. The top prize was $5,000 and the winning hacker was a novice that completed the task in four hours. CloudPassage programmed the servers to use basic default security settings to show how vulnerable cloud computing programs can be to security threats. == Awards and recognition == In May 2011, Gigaom named CloudPassage in its list of the Top 50 Cloud Innovators. That same month, eWeek recognized CloudPassage as one of 16 Hot Startup Companies Flying Under the Radar. SC Magazine named CloudPassage an Industry Innovator in the Virtualization and Cloud Security category in 2012. Also in 2012, The Wall Street Journal named CloudPassage a runner-up in the Information Security category of its Technology Innovation Awards. The CloudPassage large-scale security program, Halo, won Best Security Solution in 2014 at the SIIA Codie awards.
Alec Radford
Alec Radford is an American artificial intelligence researcher. == Biography == Radford grew up in Texas. He graduated from Cistercian Preparatory School in 2011, where he became an Eagle Scout, and dropped out of Olin College in August 2014, where he and fellow students Slater Victoroff, Diana Yuan, and Madison May had formed the startup Indico in their dorm room. In 2015, the quartet were joined by Luke Metz and the firm and the Facebook AI research lab in New York used generative adversarial networks to create realistic low pixel images. A demonstration of Indico's technology was used without proper attribution in an April 2016 demonstration by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. Radford joined OpenAI around 2016, where he worked on natural-language processing. The following year, Radford trained a neural network on Amazon reviews. The model was fairly basic, with layers which allowed for human understanding. Upon exploring it, he saw that it had a special neuron linked to the sentiment of the reviews, which it had created on its own. This was a drastic improvement from previous neural networks that had analysed sentiment, because they had to be told to do so and specially trained on data that was explicitly labeled according to sentiment. This development made OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever consider that a future model, using more diverse language data, could map far more structures of meaning, eventually becoming a "learned core module" for superintelligence. In 2018, Radford was the lead author on OpenAI's seminal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers, which form the foundation of ChatGPT. At OpenAI, he worked on early GPT models, Whisper, a speech recognition model, and the image generator DALL-E. He left OpenAI in December 2024 to pursue independent research. Around March 2025, Radford joined Thinking Machines Lab as an advisor. He joined along with Bob McGrew who was previously the chief research officer of OpenAI. In April 2026, Radford, Nick Levine, and David Duvenaud released Talkie, an AI model trained on books, newspapers, scientific journals, patents, and case law published before December 31, 1930. When asked about the state of the world in 2026, it stated that one billion people would live in Europe, that London and New York would be connected by steamships that transit between the two in ten days, and "winter will be passed in Paris, and the summer in London."
AgMES
The AgMES (Agricultural Metadata Element set) initiative was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and aims to encompass issues of semantic standards in the domain of agriculture with respect to description, resource discovery, interoperability, and data exchange for different types of information resources. There are numerous other metadata schemas for different types of information resources. The following list contains a list of a few examples: Document-like Information Objects (DLIOs): Dublin Core, Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) Events: VCalendar Geographic and Regional Information: Geographic information—Metadata ISO/IEC 11179 Standards Persons: Friend-of-a-friend (FOAF), vCard Plant Production and Protection: Darwin Core (1.0 and 2.0) (DwC) AgMES as a namespace is designed to include agriculture specific extensions for terms and refinements from established standard metadata namespaces like Dublin Core, AGLS etc. Thus, to be used for Document-like Information Objects, for example like publications, articles, books, web sites, papers, etc., it will have to be used in conjunction with the standard namespaces mentioned before. The AgMES initiative strives to achieve improved interoperability between information resources in agricultural domain by enabling means for exchange of information. Describing a DLIO with AgMES means exposing its major characteristics and contents in a standard way that can be reused easily in any information system. The more institutions and organizations in the agricultural domain that use AgMES to describe their DLIOs, the easier it will be to interchange data in between information systems like digital libraries and other repositories of agricultural information. == Use of AgMES == Metadata on agricultural Document-like Information Objects (DLIOs) can be created and stored in various formats: embedded in a web site (in the manner as with the HTML meta tag) in a separate metadata database in an XML file in an RDF file AgMES defines elements that can be used to describe a DLIO that can be used together with other metadata standards such as the Dublin Core, the Australian Government Locator Service. A complete list of all elements, refinements and schemes endorsed by AgMES is available from the AgMES website. === Creating application profiles === Application profiles are defined as schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined by implementers, and optimized for a particular local application. Application profiles share the following four characteristics: They draw upon existing pool of metadata definition standards to extract suitable application- or requirement oriented elements. An application profile cannot create new elements. Application profiles specify the application specific details such as the schemes or controlled vocabularies. An application profile also contains information such as the format for the element value, cardinality or data type. Lastly, an application profile can refine standardized definitions as long as it is "semantically narrower or more specific". This capability of application profiles caters to situations where a domain specific terminology is needed to replace a more general one. === Sample application profiles using AgMES === The AGRIS Application Profile is a standard created specifically to enhance the description, exchange and subsequent retrieval of agricultural Document-like Information Objects (DLIOs). It is a format that allows sharing of information across dispersed bibliographic systems and is based on well-known and accepted metadata standards. The Event Application Profile is a standard created to allow members of the Agricultural community to 'know' about an upcoming event and guide them to the event Web site where they can find further information. The information communicated is thus minimum yet interoperable across domains and organizations. == AgMES and the semantic web == One of the advantages of the AgMES metadata schema is the ability to link between the metadata element and controlled vocabularies. The use of controlled vocabulary provides a "known" set of options to the indexer (and the search programmer) as to how the field can be filled out. Often the values may come from a specific thesaurus (e.g. AGROVOC) or classification schemes (e.g. the AGRIS/CARIS classification scheme) etc. Thanks to the possibility to use controlled vocabularies for metadata elements, the user is provided with the most precise information. In this context, work is also being carried out on exploiting the power of controlled vocabularies expressed as using URIs and machine-understandable semantics. In this context, FAO is promoting the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) initiative with the objective of expressing more semantics within the traditional thesaurus AGROVOC and build a Concept Server as a repository from which it will be always possible to extract traditional KOS.
Revoscalepy
revoscalepy is a machine learning package in Python created by Microsoft. It is available as part of Machine Learning Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and Machine Learning Server 9.2.0 and later. The package contains functions for creating linear model, logistic regression, random forest, decision tree and boosted decision tree, in addition to some summary functions for inspecting data. Other machine learning algorithms such as neural network are provided in microsoftml, a separate package that is the Python version of MicrosoftML. revoscalepy also contains functions designed to run machine learning algorithms in different compute contexts, including SQL Server, Apache Spark, and Hadoop. In June 2021, Microsoft announced to open source the revoscalepy and RevoScaleR packages, making them freely available under the MIT License.
Automated attendant
In telephony, an automated attendant (also auto attendant, auto-attendant, autoattendant, automatic phone menus, AA, or virtual receptionist) allows callers to be automatically transferred to an extension without the intervention of an operator/receptionist. Many AAs will also offer a simple menu system ("for sales, press 1, for service, press 2," etc.). An auto attendant may also allow a caller to reach a live operator by dialing a number, usually "0". Typically the auto attendant is included in a business's phone system such as a PBX, but some services allow businesses to use an AA without such a system. Modern AA services (which now overlap with more complicated interactive voice response or IVR systems) can route calls to mobile phones, VoIP virtual phones, other AAs/IVRs, or other locations using traditional land-line phones or voice message machines. == Feature description == Telephone callers will recognize an automated attendant system as one that greets calls incoming to an organization with a recorded greeting of the form, "Thank you for calling .... If you know your party's extension, you may dial it any time during this message." Callers who have a touch-tone (DTMF) phone can dial an extension number or, in most cases, wait for operator ("attendant") assistance. Since the telephone network does not transmit the DC signals from rotary dial telephones (except for audible clicks), callers who have rotary dial phones have to wait for assistance. On a purely technical level it could be argued that an automated attendant is a very simple kind of IVR however, in the telecom industry the terms IVR and auto attendant are generally considered distinct. An automated attendant serves a very specific purpose (replace live operator and route calls), whereas an IVR can perform all sorts of functions (telephone banking, account inquiries, etc.). An AA will often include a directory which will allow a caller to dial by name in order to find a user on a system. There is no standard format to these directories, and they can use combinations of first name, last name, or both. The following lists common routing steps that are components of an automated attendant: Transfer to extension Transfer to voicemail Play message (i.e., "our address is ...") Go to a sub-menu Repeat choices In addition, an automated attendant would be expected to have values for the following: '0' – where to go when the caller dials '0' Timeout – what to do if the caller does nothing (usually go to the same place as '0') Default mailbox – where to send calls if '0' is not answered (or is not pointing to a live person) == Background == PBXs (private branch exchanges) or PABXs (private automatic branch exchanges) are telephone systems that serve an organization that has many telephone extensions but fewer telephone lines (sometimes called "trunks") that connect that organization to the rest of the global telecommunications network. While persons within an enterprise served by a PBX can call each other by dialing their extension numbers, incoming calls, i.e., calls originating from a telephone not served by the PBX but intended for a party served by the PBX, required assistance from a switchboard operator (also called a "switchboard attendant") or a telephone service called DID ("direct inward dialing"). Direct inward dialing has advantages such as rapid connection to the destination party and disadvantages including cost, lack of identification of the called organization and use of ten-digit telephone numbers. Automated attendants provide, among many other things, a way for an external caller to be directed to an extension or department served by a PBX system without using direct inward dialing or without switchboard attendant assistance. == History == Automated attendants are not part of voicemail systems. Voice messaging (or voicemail or VM) technology has existed since the late 1970s; in the early 1980s companies provided voice-prompting systems that allowed callers to reach (route the call) to an intended party, not necessarily to leave a message. Automated attendant systems are also referred to as automated menu systems and much early work in this field was done by Michael J. Freeman, Ph.D. == Time-based routing == Many auto attendants will have options to allow for time-of-day routing, as well as weekend and holiday routing. The specifics of these features will depend entirely on the particular automated attendant, but typically there would be a normal greeting and routing steps that would take place during normal business hours, and a different greeting and routing for non-business hours.
Information Coding Classification
The Information Coding Classification (ICC) is a classification system covering almost all extant 6500 knowledge fields (knowledge domains). Its conceptualization goes beyond the scope of the well known library classification systems, such as Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), and Library of Congress Classification (LCC), by extending also to knowledge systems that so far have not afforded to classify literature. ICC actually presents a flexible universal ordering system for both literature and other kinds of information, set out as knowledge fields. From a methodological point of view, ICC differs from the above-mentioned systems along the following three lines: Its main classes are not based on disciplines but on nine live stages of development, so-called ontical levels. It breaks them roughly down into hierarchical steps by further nine categories which makes decimal number coding possible. The contents of a knowledge field is earmarked via a digital position scheme, which makes the first hierarchical step refer to the nine ontical levels (object areas as subject categories), and the second hierarchical step refer to nine functionally ordered form categories. Respective knowledge fields permit to step down by the same principle to a third and forth level, and even further to a fifth and sixth level. Finally, knowledge field subdivisions will have to conform to said digital position scheme. Hence, for a given knowledge field identical codes will mark identical categories under respective numbers of the coding system. This mnemotechnical aspect of the system helps memorizing and straightaway retrieving the whereabouts of respective interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields. The first two hierarchical levels may be regarded as a top- or upper ontology for ontologies and other applications. The terms of the first three hierarchical levels were set out in German and English in Wissensorganisation. Entwicklung, Aufgabe, Anwendung, Zukunft, on pp. 82 to 100. It was published in 2014 and available so far only in German. In the meantime, also the French terms of the knowledge fields have been collected. Competence for maintenance and further development rests with the German Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) e.V. == Historical development == At the end of 1970, Prof. Alwin Diemer, Univ.of Düsseldorf proposed to Ingetraut Dahlberg to undertake a philosophical dissertation on The universal classification system of knowledge, its ontological, epistemological, and information theoretical foundations. Diemer had in mind an innovating ontological approach for such a system based on the whole spectrum of kinds of being and complying with epistemological requirements. The third requirement had already been taken up somehow in the Indian Colon Classification, yet it still called for explanations and additions. In 1974, the dissertation was published in German entitled Grundlagen universaler Wissensordnung. It started with conceptual clarifications, and why and how the term „universal“ was linked to knowledge, including knowledge fields, such as commodity science, artefacts, statistics, patents, standardization, communication, utility services et al. In chapter 3, six universal classification systems (DDC, UDC, LCC, BC, CC and BBK) were presented, analyzed and compared. While preparing the dissertation, Dahlberg started with elaborating the new universal system by first gleaning a lot of extant designations of knowledge fields from whatever available reference works. This was funded by the German Documentation Society (DGD) (1971-2) under the title of Order system of knowledge fields. In addition, the syllabuses of German universities and polytechniques were explored for relevant terms and documented (1975). Thereafter, it seemed necessary to add definitions from special dictionaries and encyclopediae; it soon appeared that the 12.500 terms included numerous synonyms, so that the whole collection boiled down to about 6.500 concept designations (Project Logstruktur, supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) 1976-78). The outcome of this work was the formulation of 30 theses which ended up in 12 principles for the new system, published 40 years later under. These principles refer not only to theoretical foundations but also to structure and other organizational aspects of the whole array of knowledge fields. In 1974, the digital position scheme for field subdivision had already been developed to allow for classifying classification literature in the bibliographical section of the first issue of the Journal International Classification. In 1977, the entire ICC was ready for presentation at a seminar in Bangalore, India. A publication of the first three hierarchical levels appeared however only in 1982. It was applied to the bibliography of classification systems and thesauri in vol.1 of the International Classification and Indexing Bibliography; it has been updated. == Governing principles == These were published in full length in the book Wissensorganisation. Entwicklung, Aufgabe, Anwendung, Zukunft and the article Information Coding Classification. Geschichtliches, Prinzipien, Inhaltliches, hence it suffices to just mention their topics with some necessary additions. Principle 1: Concept theoretical approaches. Concepts are the contents of ICC, they are understood as being units of knowledge. The „birth“ of a concept. Where do the characteristics, the knowledge elements come from? How do conceptual relations arise? Principle 2: The four kinds of concept relations and their applications. Principle 3: Decimal numbers form the ICC codes as its universal language. Principle 4: The nine ontical levels of ICC. They were grouped under three captions: Prolegomena (1-3), life sciences (4-6) and human output (7-9): Structure and form Matter and energy Cosmos and earth Biosphere Anthroposphere Sociosphere Material products (economics and technology) Intellectual products (knowledge and information) Spiritual products (products of mind and culture) Principle 5: Knowledge fields are structured by categories, based on the Aristotelian form-categories, under a digital position scheme, a kind of scaling rule for subdividing a given field as follows: General area: problems, theories, principles (axiom and structure) Object area: objects, kinds, parts, properties of objects Activity area: methods, processes, activities Field properties or first characterization Persons or secondary characterization Societies or tertiary characterization Influences from outside Applications of the field to other fields Field information and synthesizing tasks The digital position scheme, called Systematifier, has also been used for structuring the entire system via the categories figuring on the upper zero level. An example of its application is the structure of the classification system for knowledge organization literature Gliederung der Klassifikationsliteratur. (A simplified version with an additional introduction is given in, p. 71) Principle 6: The ontical levels outlined under principle 4 conform to the „integrative level theory“ which means that every level is integrated in the following one. In addition, each knowledge area presumes the following one. Principle 7: The combination potential of knowledge fields (interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity)is determined by the digital position scheme. (Examples are given in, p. 103-4) Principle 8: The categories of the zero-level are general concepts, their possible subdivisions could once be used for classificatory statements. (These subdivisions still need elaboration) Principle 9 and 10: These relate to the combination potential of classificatory statements with space and time concepts. (Still to be elaborated) Principle 11: The system's mnemotechnical aspect relies on the fixed system position codes and on the 3x3 form- and subject-categories. Principle 12: The combination potential of system position 1, 8 and 9 make ICC to a self-networking system which complies with the present scientific development. == In matrix form == The first two levels of ICC can be represented by following matrix. The first hierarchical level of the 9 subject categories results from the first vertical array under codes 1-9. The second hierarchical level of subject categories is structured by the 9 functionally ordered form categories, listed in the first horizontal line under codes 01-09. Some exceptions are mentioned in principle 7. == Research == === Exploration of automatic classification === For classifying web documents as conceived by Jens Hartmann, University of Karlsruhe, Prof.Walter Koch, University of Graz, has explored in his Institute for Applied Information Technology Research Society (AIT) the application of ICC to automatically classifying metadata of some 350.000 documents. This was facilitated by data generated within the framework of an E