Maike Osborne (born Michael Osborne, 1982) is an Australian academic and scientist who serves as a professor of machine learning at University of Oxford in the Machine Learning Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science. In 2016 she co-founded Mind Foundry, an artificial intelligence company, along with fellow professor Stephen Roberts. == Education == She has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and a BSc in both Pure Mathematics and Physics from the University of Western Australia. She has a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Oxford. == Career == Osborne has contributed to over 100 publications, and her work has received over 24,000 citations with an h-index of 46 according to Google Scholar. and has acted as principal or co-investigator for £10.6M of research funding. Her career has focused in particular on Bayesian approaches to AI and machine learning, named after the famous British statistician Thomas Bayes. Osborne's work has contributed to Probabilistic numerics, with Osborne co-authoring the first textbook on the subject. In 2013, Osborne co-authored a paper alongside Swedish-German economist Carl Benedikt Frey called "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?". The paper has received over 13,000 citations and extensive media coverage. In 2023 Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on the subject of the "Governance of Artificial Intelligence". Her testimony received significant coverage around her warnings of the threat of "rogue AI". == Honors == She is also an Official Fellow of Exeter College, and St Peter's College, Oxford, a Fellow of the ELLIS society, and a Faculty Member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. She joined the Oxford Martin School as Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment in 2015. She is a Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems.
Sprite (computer graphics)
In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional bitmap that is integrated into a larger scene, most often in a 2D video game. Originally, the term sprite referred to fixed-sized objects composited together, by hardware, with a background. Use of the term has since become more general. Systems with hardware sprites include arcade video games of the 1970s and 1980s; game consoles including as the Atari VCS (1977), ColecoVision (1982), Famicom (1983), Genesis/Mega Drive (1988); and home computers such as the TI-99/4 (1979), Atari 8-bit computers (1979), Commodore 64 (1982), MSX (1983), Amiga (1985), and X68000 (1987). Hardware varies in the number of sprites supported, the size and colors of each sprite, and special effects such as scaling or reporting pixel-precise overlap. Hardware composition of sprites occurs as each scan line is prepared for the video output device, such as a cathode-ray tube, without involvement of the main CPU and without the need for a full-screen frame buffer. Sprites can be positioned or altered by setting attributes used during the hardware composition process. The number of sprites which can be displayed per scan line is often lower than the total number of sprites a system supports. For example, the Texas Instruments TMS9918 chip supports 32 sprites, but only four can appear on the same scan line. The CPUs in modern computers, video game consoles, and mobile devices are fast enough that bitmaps can be drawn into a frame buffer without special hardware assistance. Beyond that, GPUs can render vast numbers of scaled, rotated, anti-aliased, partially translucent, very high resolution images in parallel with the CPU. == Etymology == According to Karl Guttag, one of two engineers for the 1979 Texas Instruments TMS9918 video display processor, this use of the word sprite came from David Ackley, a manager at TI. It was also used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s. The term was derived from the fact that sprites "float" on top of the background image without overwriting it, much like a ghost or mythological sprite. Some hardware manufacturers used different terms, especially before sprite became common: Player/Missile Graphics was a term used by Atari, Inc. for hardware sprites in the Atari 8-bit computers (1979) and Atari 5200 console (1982). The term reflects the use for both characters ("players") and smaller associated objects ("missiles") that share the same color. The earlier Atari Video Computer System and some Atari arcade games used player, missile, and ball. Stamp was used in some arcade hardware in the early 1980s, including Ms. Pac-Man. Movable Object Block, or MOB, was used in MOS Technology's graphics chip literature. Commodore, the main user of MOS chips and the owner of MOS for most of the chip maker's lifetime, instead used the term sprite for the Commodore 64. OBJs (short for objects) is used in the developer manuals for the NES, Super NES, and Game Boy. The region of video RAM used to store sprite attributes and coordinates is called OAM (Object Attribute Memory). This also applies to the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. == History == === Arcade video games === The use of sprites originated with arcade video games. Nolan Bushnell came up with the original concept when he developed the first arcade video game, Computer Space (1971). Technical limitations made it difficult to adapt the early mainframe game Spacewar! (1962), which performed an entire screen refresh for every little movement, so he came up with a solution to the problem: controlling each individual game element with a dedicated transistor. The rockets were essentially hardwired bitmaps that moved around the screen independently of the background, an important innovation for producing screen images more efficiently and providing the basis for sprite graphics. The earliest video games to represent player characters as human player sprites were arcade sports video games, beginning with Taito's TV Basketball, released in April 1974 and licensed to Midway Manufacturing for release in North America. Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, he wanted to move beyond simple Pong-style rectangles to character graphics, by rearranging the rectangle shapes into objects that look like basketball players and basketball hoops. Ramtek released another sports video game in October 1974, Baseball, which similarly displayed human-like characters. The Namco Galaxian arcade system board, for the 1979 arcade game Galaxian, displays animated, multi-colored sprites over a scrolling background. It became the basis for Nintendo's Radar Scope and Donkey Kong arcade hardware and home consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. According to Steve Golson from General Computer Corporation, the term "stamp" was used instead of "sprite" at the time. === Home systems === Signetics devised the first chips capable of generating sprite graphics (referred to as objects by Signetics) for home systems. The Signetics 2636 video processors were first used in the 1978 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System and later in the 1979 Elektor TV Games Computer. The Atari VCS, released in 1977, has a hardware sprite implementation where five graphical objects can be moved independently of the game playfield. The term sprite was not in use at the time. The VCS's sprites are called movable objects in the programming manual, further identified as two players, two missiles, and one ball. These each consist of a single row of pixels that are displayed on a scan line. To produce a two-dimensional shape, the sprite's single-row bitmap is altered by software from one scan line to the next. The 1979 Atari 400 and 800 home computers have similar, but more elaborate, circuitry capable of moving eight single-color objects per scan line: four 8-bit wide players and four 2-bit wide missiles. Each is the full height of the display—a long, thin strip. DMA from a table in memory automatically sets the graphics pattern registers for each scan line. Hardware registers control the horizontal position of each player and missile. Vertical motion is achieved by moving the bitmap data within a player or missile's strip. The feature was called player/missile graphics by Atari. Texas Instruments developed the TMS9918 chip with sprite support for its 1979 TI-99/4 home computer. An updated version is used in the 1981 TI-99/4A. === In 2.5D and 3D games === Sprites remained popular with the rise of 2.5D games (those which recreate a 3D game space from a 2D map) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A technique called billboarding allows 2.5D games to keep onscreen sprites rotated toward the player view at all times. Some 2.5D games, such as 1993's Doom, allow the same entity to be represented by different sprites depending on its rotation relative to the viewer, furthering the illusion of 3D. Fully 3D games usually present world objects as 3D models, but sprites are supported in some 3D game engines, such as GoldSrc and Unreal, and may be billboarded or locked to fixed orientations. Sprites remain useful for small details, particle effects, and other applications where the lack of a third dimension is not a major detriment. == Systems with hardware sprites == These are base hardware specs and do not include additional programming techniques, such as using raster interrupts to repurpose sprites mid-frame.
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Security type system
In computer science, a type system can be described as a syntactic framework which contains a set of rules that are used to assign a type property (int, boolean, char etc.) to various components of a computer program, such as variables or functions. A security type system works in a similar way, only with a main focus on the security of the computer program, through information flow control. Thus, the various components of the program are assigned security types, or labels. The aim of a such system is to ultimately be able to verify that a given program conforms to the type system rules and satisfies non-interference. Security type systems is one of many security techniques used in the field of language-based security, and is tightly connected to information flow and information flow policies. In simple terms, a security type system can be used to detect if there exists any kind of violation of confidentiality or integrity in a program, i.e. the programmer wants to detect if the program is in line with the information flow policy or not. == A simple information flow policy == Suppose there are two users, A and B. In a program, the following security classes (SC) are introduced: SC = {∅, {A}, {B}, {A,B}}, where ∅ is the empty set. The information flow policy should define the direction that information is allowed to flow, which is dependent on whether the policy allows read or write operations. This example considers read operations (confidentiality). The following flows are allowed: → = {({A}, {A}), ({B}, {B}), ({A,B}, {A,B}), ({A,B}, {A}), ({A,B}, {B}), ({A}, ∅), ({B}, ∅), ({A,B}, ∅)} This can also be described as a superset (⊇). In words: information is allowed to flow towards stricter levels of confidentiality. The combination operator (⊕) can express how security classes can perform read operations with respect to other security classes. For example: {A} ⊕ {A,B} = {A} — the only security class that can read from both {A} and {A,B} is {A}. {A} ⊕ {B} = ∅ — neither {A} nor {B} are allowed to read from both {A} and {B}. This can also be described as an intersection (∩) between security classes. An information flow policy can be illustrated as a Hasse diagram. The policy should also be a lattice, that is, it has a greatest lower-bound and least upper-bound (there always exists a combination between security classes). In the case of integrity, information will flow in the opposite direction, thus the policy will be inverted. == Information flow policy in security type systems == Once the policy is in place, the software developer can apply the security classes to the program components. Use of a security type system is usually combined with a compiler that can perform the verification of the information flow according to the type system rules. For the sake of simplicity, a very simple computer program, together with the information flow policy as described in the previous section, can be used as a demonstration. The simple program is given in the following pseudocode: if y{A} = 1 then x{A,B} := 0 else x{A,B} := 1 Here, an equality check is made on a variable y that is assigned the security class {A}. A variable x with a lower security class ({A,B}) is influenced by this check. This means that information is leaking from class {A} to class {A,B}, which is a violation of the confidentiality policy. This leak should be detected by the security type system. === Example === Designing a security type system requires a function (also known as a security environment) that creates a mapping from variables to security types, or classes. This function can be called Γ, such that Γ(x) = τ, where x is a variable and τ is the security class, or type. Security classes are assigned (also called "judgement") to program components, using the following notation: Types are assigned to read operations by: Γ ⊢ e : τ. Types are assigned to write operations by: Γ ⊢ S : τ cmd. Constants can be assigned any type. The following bottom-up notation can be used to decompose the program: assumption1 ... assumptionn/conclusion. Once the program is decomposed into trivial judgements, by which the type can easily be determined, the types for the less trivial parts of the program can be derived. Each "numerator" is considered in isolation, looking at the type of each statement to see if an allowed type can be derived for the "denominator", based on the defined type system "rules". ==== Rules ==== The main part of the security type system is the rules. They say how the program should be decomposed and how type verification should be performed. This toy program consists of a conditional test and two possible variable assignments. Rules for these two events are defined as follows: Applying this to the simple program introduced above yields: The type system detects the policy violation in line 2, where a read operation of security class {A} is performed, followed by two write operations of a less strict security class {A,B}. In more formalized terms, {A} ⋢ {A,B}, {A,B} (from the rule of the conditional test). Thus, the program is classified as "not typeable". === Soundness === The soundness of a security type system can be informally defined as: If program P is well typed, P satisfies non-interference. Volpano, Smith and Irvine were the first to prove soundness of a security type system for a deterministic imperative programming language with a standard (non-instrumented) semantics using the notion of non-interference.
Boris Katz
Boris Gershevich Katz (Russian: Борис Гершевич Кац; born October 5, 1947) is a principal American research scientist (computer scientist) at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and head of the Laboratory's InfoLab Group. His research interests include natural language processing and understanding, machine learning and intelligent information access. His brother Victor Kac is a mathematician at MIT. He was able to get out of the USSR with the help of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, before the end of the Cold War. Over the last several decades, Boris Katz has been developing the START natural language system that allows the user to access various types of information using English. == Biography == Boris Katz was born on October 5, 1947, in Chișinău in the family of Hersh Katz (died 1976) and Hayki (Klara) Landman (born 1921, Lipcani, Briceni District - died 2006, Cambridge, Middlesex County), who moved from Lipcani, a town located in the northern Bessarabian, to Chișinău before the war. He graduated from Moscow State University and in November 1978, he left for the United States thanks to the personal intervention of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He defended his thesis as a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences in 1975 under the supervision of Evgenii M. Landis. He currently lives in Boston and heads the InfoLabresearch team at the Laboratory of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Boris Katz is the creator of the START information processing system (since 1993 - on the Internet), the author of several works in the field of processing, generation and perception of natural languages, machine learning, and accelerated access to multimedia information. == Family == Brothers - Victor Gershevich Katz, American mathematician, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mikhail Gershevich Katz, Israeli mathematician, graduate of Harvard and Columbia (Ph.D., 1984) universities, professor at Bar-Ilan University, author of the monograph "Systolic Geometry and Topology" (Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, vol. 137. American Mathematical Society: Providence, 2007). Daughter - Luba Katz, a bioinformatics scientist (her husband is Alan Jasanoff, a neuroimaging scientist, a professor at MIT, the son of Harvard University professors Jay Jasanoff and Sheila Jasanoff). == Past works == A Knowledge Entry System for Subject Matter Experts: The goal of SHAKEN project is to enable subject matter experts, without any assistance from AI technologists, to assemble the models of processes and mechanisms so that questions about them can be answered by declarative inference and simulation. Exploiting lexical regularities in designing natural language systems Word sense disambiguation for information retrieval HIKE (HPKB integrated knowledge environment)- a query interface and integrated knowledge environment for HPKB Quantitative evaluation of passage retrieval algorithms for question answering Sticky notes for the semantic web Question answering from the web using knowledge annotation and knowledge mining techniques The role of context in question answering systems