Browsing is a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something of relevance for the browsing organism. In context of humans, it is a metaphor taken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing open shelves in libraries, window shopping, or browsing databases or the Internet. In library and information science, it is an important subject, both purely theoretically and as applied science aiming at designing interfaces which support browsing activities for the user. == Definition == In 2011, Birger Hjørland provided the following definition: "Browsing is a quick examination of the relevance of a number of objects which may or may not lead to a closer examination or acquisition/selection of (some of) these objects. It is a kind of orienting strategy that is formed by our "theories", "expectations" and "subjectivity". == Controversies == As with any kind of human psychology, browsing can be understood in biological, behavioral, or cognitive terms on the one hand or in social, historical, and cultural terms on the other hand. In 2007, Marcia Bates researched browsing from "behavioural" approaches, while Hjørland (2011a+b) defended a social view. Bates found that browsing is rooted in our history as exploratory, motile animals hunting for food and nesting opportunities. According to Hjørland (2011a), on the other hand, Marcia Bates' browsing for information about browsing is governed by her behavioral assumptions, while Hjørland's browsing for information about browsing is governed by his socio-cultural understanding of human psychology. In short: Human browsing is based on our conceptions and interests. === Is browsing a random activity? === Browsing is often understood as a random activity. Dictionary.com, for example, has this definition: "to glance at random through a book, magazine, etc.". Hjørland suggests, however, that browsing is an activity that is governed by our metatheories. We may dynamically change our theories and conceptions but when we browse, the activity is governed by the interests, conceptions, priorities and metatheories that we have at that time. Therefore, browsing is not totally random. == Browsing versus analytical search strategies == In 1997, Gary Marchionini wrote: "A fundamental distinction is made between analytical and browsing strategies [...]. Analytical strategies depend on careful planning, the recall of query terms, and iterative query reformulations and examinations of results. Browsing strategies are heuristic and opportunistic and depend on recognizing relevant information. Analytic strategies are batch oriented and half duplex (turn talking) like human conversation, whereas browsing strategies are more interactive, real-time exchanges and collaborations between the information seeker and the information system. Browsing strategies demand a lower cognitive load in advance and a steadier attentional load throughout the information-seeking process. When it comes to Browsing, giblets are amazing." == Orienting strategies == Some sociologists, such as Berger and Zelditch in 1993, Wagner in 1984, and Wagner & Berger in 1985, have used the term "orienting strategies". They find that orienting strategies should be understood as metatheories: "Consider the very large proportion of sociological theory that is in the form of metatheory. It is discussion about theory: about what concepts it should include, about how those concepts should be linked, and about how theory should be studied. Similar to Kuhn’s paradigms, theories of this sort provide guidelines or strategies for understanding social phenomena and suggest the proper orientation of the theorist to these phenomena; they are orienting strategies. Textbooks in theory frequently focus on orienting strategies such as functionalism, exchange, or ethnomethodology." Sociologists thus use metatheories as orienting strategies. We may generalize and say that all people use metatheories as orienting strategies and that this is what direct our attention and also our browsing – also when we are not conscious about it.
Pray.com
Pray.com is a Christian social networking service and mobile application designed to facilitate religious communities. Launched in 2016, it was founded by Steve Gatena, Michael Lynn, Ryan Beck and Matthew Potter. The platform offers features for social networking, daily prayers, sermons, biblical content, and podcasts. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased Pray.com's user base, with downloads surging by 955%. During this period, the platform collaborated with churches to support virtual ministry services as in-person gatherings were restricted. The Federal Election Commission issued an opinion in 2021 that allows the platform to feature members of the United States Congress. Pray.com serves as a specialized social media platform for religious groups. Congregations can establish their own groups where members and leaders can participate in discussions, livestream services, and manage donations. Additionally, users can join "prayer communities" to post and respond to prayer requests. For those who subscribe to premium services, the platform provides access to biblically-inspired meditations and bedtime stories, and Bible stories for children. Pray.com also produces Radio drama-style productions with notable actors such as Kristen Bell and Blair Underwood narrating biblical stories. == History == === Funding and development === Pray.com has secured significant funding to support its development and growth. In 2017, the platform raised $2 million in seed funding from Science Inc., Greylock Partners, and Spark Capital. This was followed by a Series A funding round in March 2018, in which the company secured an additional $14 million from TPG Growth, Science Inc., and Greylock Partners. Founder Steve Gatena has highlighted difficulties in securing funding, noting some venture capitalists' negative attitudes towards faith-based technology. === Clinical studies === There have been clinical studies on Pray.com. In one study, the app was found to be acceptable and easy to use among racial and ethnic minority groups, with participants reporting improved mental health and well-being. Greater app use was associated with better outcomes, though low and variable usage suggests the need for further research to fully understand its impact. Another study examined Pray.com's impact on mental health by assigning 192 participants to use the app freely, use its meditative prayer function, or not use it at all. Over two months, participants reported overall improvements in mental health and well-being. Although no significant differences were found between groups, greater app usage correlated with better mental health outcomes. This suggests that religiously based mobile apps may help improve mental health and well-being. Another study of pray.com had similar findings. === National Day of Prayer === Pray first hosted a National Day of Prayer event in 2020 when it streamed to nearly one million viewers on Facebook. In 2021, Pray hosted a virtual event for the National Day of Prayer in the United States. The event featured remarks from public figures including United States President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. President Biden spoke of his faith and prayed for an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden remarked: "It means the world to me to know that there are people across the country who include Jill and me in their prayers. And I hope you know that you and your families are in our prayers as well. Today I am praying for the end of this great COVID crisis." The event featured musical performances from Gary Valenciano, Brooke Ligertwood from the Christian band Hillsong Worship, Lecrae, Heather Headley and Michael Neale. Other notable speakers included Ronnie Floyd, Ed Young, Mark Driscoll, and Samuel Rodriguez. Pray.com partnered with Sirius XM, DirecTV and Facebook to stream the event across multiple platforms. Pray.com was featured as a pop-up channel on Sirius XM, channel 154, to host the prayer event and celebrate people of all faith. === Partnerships and sponsorships === In 2024, Pray.com partnered with Sting Ray Robb as the primary sponsor for his No. 41 Chevrolet in the 2024 NTT IndyCar Series. The partnership, highlighting Robb's Christian faith, aims to engage younger audiences with faith-based content. The car, featuring Pray.com's branding, was set to debut at the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg. A partnership with Palantir Technologies for use of its AI systems was also announced in 2024. === Censorship in China === The app was removed from Apple's App Store in China as part of the country's broader efforts to restrict access to religious content. The app was targeted due to China's stringent regulations on religious material, particularly content distributed through digital platforms. The removal aligns with China's ongoing campaign to control online religious expression and maintain state-approved religious activities.
Class activation mapping
Class activation mapping methods are explainable AI (XAI) techniques used to visualize the regions of an input image that are the most relevant for a particular task, especially image classification, in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These methods generate heatmaps by weighting the feature maps from a convolutional layer according to their relevance to the target class. In the field of artificial intelligence, generically defined as "the effort to automate intellectual tasks normally performed by humans", machine learning and deep learning were created. They both use statistical and computational methods to learn patterns from data, reducing the need for manually coded rules. Machine learning models are trained on input data and the known respective answers, learning the underlying patterns or structures present in the data. Traditional Machine learning algorithms employ manually designed feature sets, posing a direct link between machine learning designers and employed features. Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, based on the concept of successive layers of representation, in which the data is progressively unfolded in different ways, to extract relevant and informative patterns in data analysis. Deep learning algorithms are defined as feature learning algorithms automatically learning hierarchical feature representations from raw data, extracting increasingly abstract features through multiple layers. CNNs are a specific architecture of deep learning models, designed to process spatially structured data, such as images, exploiting a series of convolution, non-linear activation and pooling operations to extract relevant features, contained in the so-called feature maps from input data. CNNs have demonstrated to be highly effective in a variety of computer vision and image processing tasks. CNNs (and deep learning models more broadly) are described as black boxes due to their complex and non-transparent internal layers of representation. The need for clearer indications on its internal working and decision-making process gave birth to XAI techniques. Among the proposed XAI techniques for computer vision tasks, Class activation mapping methods can show which pixels in an input image are important to the predicted logit for a class of interest, in a classification task. Class activation mapping methods were originally developed for class-discriminative scenarios to visualize which parts of the input image influenced the classification decision, namely to visually highlight the regions of those feature maps that contribute most strongly to the prediction of a given class. More advanced versions of these methods are not limited to image classification tasks, but have been extended also to several vision-related tasks, such as object detection, image captioning, visual question answering and image segmentation. == Background == The following methods laid the groundwork for the class activation maps approaches, forming the conceptual basis of using gradients to highlight class-discriminative regions. === Class model visualization and saliency maps for convolutional neural networks === The class model visualization and image-specific saliency maps approaches have been presented in the foundational work "Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps" by Karen Simonyan, Andrea Vedaldi, and Andrew Zisserman and it generalizes the deconvnet method by Zeiler and Fergus. Class model visualization synthesizes an artificial input image that strongly activates the output neurons associated with a target class. Given a trained, fixed model, this method starts with a zero-initialized image, backpropagates the gradients from the class score to the image pixels, updates the image pixels increasing the specific class scores and it repeats the pixel updating process, showing an encoded (idealized version) prototype of the class of interest. Image-specific class saliency visualization method provides a visual explanation by highlighting the most relevant pixels in an image for predicting a certain class C of interest. This is done by computing the gradient of the class score with respect to the input image, I 0 , {\displaystyle I_{0},} w = ∂ S C ∂ I | I 0 {\displaystyle w=\left.{\frac {\partial S_{C}}{\partial I}}\right|_{I_{0}}} approximating the model locally (around I 0 {\displaystyle I_{0}} ) as linear, using a first-order Taylor expansion: S C ( I ) ≈ w C T I + b {\displaystyle S_{C}(I)\approx w_{C}^{T}I+b} . The magnitude of w C {\displaystyle w_{C}} , the gradient, indicates the importancy of the pixels: larger gradients suggest greater influence on the prediction. Once the gradient is known, the saliency map is defined as the maximum absolute gradient across the color channels: M i j = m a x C | ∂ S C ∂ I i j C | {\displaystyle M_{ij}=max_{C}\left|{\frac {\partial S_{C}}{\partial I_{ij}^{C}}}\right|} resulting in an saliency map (i.e. heatmap). === Guided backpropagation === The concept of guided backpropagation can be traced for the first time in the paper by Springenberg et al. "Striving For Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net" and also this method builds upon the work by Zeiler and Fergus "Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks". Guided backpropagation core is to understand what a CNN is learning, by visualizing the patterns that activate more strongly individual neurons (or filters), in architectures which do not rely on max-pooling layer. When propagating gradients back through a rectified linear unit (ReLU), guided backpropagation passes the gradient if and only if the input to the ReLU was positive (forward pass) and the output gradient is positive (backward signal), tackling both inactive neurons, negative gradients and suppressing the noise. The result displays sharper, high-resolution visualizations of what each neuron is responding to. Guided backpropagation represents a simple and practical method for model interpretability, helping understand how and where neural networks detect semantic concepts across layers. Moreover, it can be applied to any network architecture, due to its working principle. == Base versions == Class activation mapping and gradient-weighted class activation mapping are the original and most widely used methods for visual explanations in convolutional neural networks. These methods serve as the foundation for many later developments in explainable AI. Notation: In this article, the symbols i and j represent integer indices that disappear inside sums or averages, while x and y are the continuous (or up-sampled integer) coordinates of the final heat-map that is plotted. === Class activation mapping (CAM) === Class activation mapping (CAM) was the first, and the original, version of CAM methods, and it gave the name to the whole category. The approach was firstly introduced by Zhou et al. in their seminal work "Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization". This approach achieves class-specific heatmaps by modifying image classification CNN architectures, replacing fully-connected layers with convolutional layers and a final global average pooling layer. Its main scope is to localize and highlight discriminative regions of an input image that a CNN uses to identify a particular class, without needing explicit bounding box annotations. ==== Global average pooling (GAP) ==== Global average pooling (GAP) represents the key element in the original CAM approach. It is a dimensionality reduction technique and, similarly to other pooling layers, it allows the downsampling of the feature maps, calculating representative values for a specific region of the feature map. The particularity of GAP is that it calculates a single value for an entire feature map, significantly reducing the model dimensions. ==== Mathematical description ==== The mathematical description considers as its key the combination of convolutional and GAP layers. In CAM, it is mandatory to have the GAP layer after the last convolutional layer and before the final linear classifier layer. This last element of the architecture connects the output logits (the network predictions) y C {\displaystyle y^{C}} , to the GAP values, with its respective fine-tuned weights, w k C {\displaystyle w_{k}^{C}} . Considering A k {\displaystyle A^{k}} as the last feature maps of the last convolutional layer, GAP produces one value for each feature map, by averaging all the matrix elements (i, j) of the feature map: F k = 1 m n ∑ i = 1 m ∑ j = 1 n A i j k {\displaystyle F^{k}={\frac {1}{mn}}\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sum _{j=1}^{n}A_{ij}^{k}} with A k = [ A 11 k A 12 k ⋯ A 1 n k A 21 k A 22 k ⋯ A 2 n k ⋮ ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ A m 1 k A m 2 k ⋯ A m n k ] = { A i j k ∣ 1 ≤ i ≤ m , 1 ≤ j ≤ n } {\displaystyle A^{k}={\begin{bmatrix}A_{11}^{k}&A_{12}^{k}&\cdots &A_{1n}^{k}\\A_{21}^{k}&A_{22}^{k}&\cdots &A_{2n}^{k}\\\vdots &\vdots &\ddots &\vdots \\A_{m1}^{k}&A_{m2}^{k}&\cdots &A_{mn}^{k}\end{bmatrix}}=\left\{A_{
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
Video Super Resolution
RTX Video Super Resolution (RTX VSR) is a video scaling feature by Nvidia. It was released on February 28, 2023. == History == The feature was first unveiled during CES 2023 as RTX Video Super Resolution. It uses the on-board Tensor Cores to upscale browser video content in real time. Video Super Resolution was initially only available on RTX 30 and 40 series GPUs, while support for 20 series GPUs was added afterwards; it is now available on all Nvidia RTX-branded GPUs. The feature supports input resolutions from 360p to 1440p and a max output of 4K and comes without support for HDR content although that could be likely added in the future. Nvidia released RTX Video Super Resolution 1.5 with improved video quality and RTX 20 series support on October 17, 2023. == Reception == According to ComputerBase, although "the algorithm is not yet working flawlessly", the feature is "overall recommendable".
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks. InDesign can also publish content suitable for tablet devices in conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Graphic designers and production artists are the principal users. InDesign is the successor to PageMaker, which Adobe acquired by buying Aldus Corporation in late 1994. (Freehand, Aldus's competitor to Adobe Illustrator, was licensed from Altsys, the maker of Fontographer.) By 1998, PageMaker had lost much of the professional market to the comparatively feature-rich QuarkXPress version 3.3, released in 1992, and version 4.0, released in 1996. In 1999, Quark announced its offer to buy Adobe and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid problems under United States antitrust law. Adobe declined Quark's offer and continued to develop a new desktop publishing application. Aldus had begun developing a successor to PageMaker, code-named "Shuksan". Later, Adobe code-named the project "K2", and Adobe released InDesign 1.0 in 1999. InDesign exports documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and supports multiple languages. It was the first DTP application to support Unicode character sets, advanced typography with OpenType fonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment, and cross-platform scripting with JavaScript. Later versions of the software introduced new file formats. To support the new features, especially typography, introduced with InDesign CS, the program and its document format are not backward-compatible. Instead, InDesign CS2 introduced the INX (.inx) format, an XML-based document representation, to allow backward compatibility with future versions. InDesign CS versions updated with the 3.1 April 2005 update can read InDesign CS2-saved files exported to the .inx format. The InDesign Interchange format does not support versions earlier than InDesign CS. With InDesign CS4, Adobe replaced INX with InDesign Markup Language (IDML), another XML-based document representation. InDesign was the first native Mac OS X publishing software. With the third major version, InDesign CS, Adobe increased InDesign's distribution by bundling it with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Acrobat in Adobe Creative Suite. Adobe developed InDesign CS3 (and Creative Suite 3) as universal binary software compatible with native Intel and PowerPC Macs in 2007, two years after the announced 2005 schedule, inconveniencing early adopters of Intel-based Macs. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said, "Adobe will be first with a complete line of universal applications." == File format == The MIME type is not official File Open formats: indd, indl, indt, indb, inx, idml, pmd, xqx New File formats: indd, indl, indb File Save As formats: indd, indt Save file format for InCopy: icma (Assignment file) icml (Content file, Exported file) icap (Package for InCopy) idap (Package for InDesign) File Export formats: pdf, idml, icml, eps, jpg, txt, XML, rtf == Versions == Newer versions can, as a rule, open files created by older versions, but the reverse is not true. Current versions can export the InDesign file as an IDML file (InDesign Markup Language), which can be opened by InDesign versions from CS4 upwards; older versions from CS4 down can export to an INX file (InDesign Interchange format). === Server version === In October 2005, Adobe released InDesign Server CS2, a modified version of InDesign (without a user interface) for Windows and Macintosh server platforms. It does not provide any editing client; rather, it is for use by developers in creating client-server solutions with the InDesign plug-in technology. In March 2007 Adobe officially announced Adobe InDesign CS3 Server as part of the Adobe InDesign family. == Features == Paragraph styles are an essential tool for designers when working with text in Adobe InDesign. Despite their menacing appearance, they are straightforward to operate. Other features that make InDesign a good tool for working with text and paragraphs include: Creating frames and shapes Aligning objects with grids and guides Manipulating objects Organizing objects Importing text Formatting text Spell checking Importing images Parent pages (formerly master pages) Paragraph styles == Internationalization and localization == InDesign Middle Eastern editions have unique settings for laying out Arabic or Hebrew text. They feature: Text settings: Special settings for laying out Arabic or Hebrew text, such as: Ability to use Arabic, Persian or Hindi digits; Use kashidas for letter spacing and full justification; Ligature option; Adjust the position of diacritics, such as vowels of the Arabic script; Justify text in three possible ways: Standard, Arabic, Naskh; Option to insert special characters, including Geresh, Gershayim, Maqaf for Hebrew and Kashida for Arabic texts; Apply standard, Arabic, or Hebrew styles for page, paragraph, and footnote numbering. Bi-directional text flow: Right-to-left behavior applies to several objects: Story, paragraph, character, and table. It allows mixing right-to-left and left-to-right words, paragraphs, and stories in a document. Changing the direction of neutral characters (e.g., / or ?) is possible according to the user's keyboard language. Table of contents: Provides a table of contents titles, one for each supported language. This table is sorted according to the chosen language. InDesign CS4 Middle Eastern versions allow users to select the language of the index title and cross-references. Indices: This allows the creation of a simple keyword index or a somewhat more detailed index of the information in the text using embedded indexing codes. Unlike more sophisticated programs, InDesign cannot insert character style information as part of an index entry (e.g., when indexing book, journal, or movie titles). Indices are limited to four levels (the top level and three sub-levels). Like tables of contents, indices can be sorted according to the selected language. Importing and exporting: Can import QuarkXPress files up to version 4.1 (1999), even using Arabic XT, Arabic Phonyx, or Hebrew XPressWay fonts, retaining the layout and content. Includes 50 import/export filters, including a Microsoft Word 97-98-2000 import filter and a plain text import filter. Exports IDML files can be read by QuarkXPress 2017. Reverse layout: Include a reverse layout feature to reverse the layout of a document when converting a left-to-right document to a right-to-left one or vice versa. Complex script rendering: InDesign supports Unicode character encoding, and Middle Eastern editions support complex text layouts for Arabic and Hebrew complex scripts. The underlying Arabic and Hebrew support is present in the Western editions of InDesign CS4, CS5, CS5.5, and CS6, but the user interface is not exposed, making it difficult to access.
Learning automaton
A learning automaton is one type of machine learning algorithm studied since 1970s. Learning automata select their current action based on past experiences from the environment. It will fall into the range of reinforcement learning if the environment is stochastic and a Markov decision process (MDP) is used. == History == Research in learning automata can be traced back to the work of Michael Lvovitch Tsetlin in the early 1960s in the Soviet Union. Together with some colleagues, he published a collection of papers on how to use matrices to describe automata functions. Additionally, Tsetlin worked on reasonable and collective automata behaviour, and on automata games. Learning automata were also investigated by researches in the United States in the 1960s. However, the term learning automaton was not used until Narendra and Thathachar introduced it in a survey paper in 1974. == Definition == A learning automaton is an adaptive decision-making unit situated in a random environment that learns the optimal action through repeated interactions with its environment. The actions are chosen according to a specific probability distribution which is updated based on the environment response the automaton obtains by performing a particular action. With respect to the field of reinforcement learning, learning automata are characterized as policy iterators. In contrast to other reinforcement learners, policy iterators directly manipulate the policy π. Another example for policy iterators are evolutionary algorithms. Formally, Narendra and Thathachar define a stochastic automaton to consist of: a set X of possible inputs, a set Φ = { Φ1, ..., Φs } of possible internal states, a set α = { α1, ..., αr } of possible outputs, or actions, with r ≤ s, an initial state probability vector p(0) = ≪ p1(0), ..., ps(0) ≫, a computable function A which after each time step t generates p(t+1) from p(t), the current input, and the current state, and a function G: Φ → α which generates the output at each time step. In their paper, they investigate only stochastic automata with r = s and G being bijective, allowing them to confuse actions and states. The states of such an automaton correspond to the states of a "discrete-state discrete-parameter Markov process". At each time step t=0,1,2,3,..., the automaton reads an input from its environment, updates p(t) to p(t+1) by A, randomly chooses a successor state according to the probabilities p(t+1) and outputs the corresponding action. The automaton's environment, in turn, reads the action and sends the next input to the automaton. Frequently, the input set X = { 0,1 } is used, with 0 and 1 corresponding to a nonpenalty and a penalty response of the environment, respectively; in this case, the automaton should learn to minimize the number of penalty responses, and the feedback loop of automaton and environment is called a "P-model". More generally, a "Q-model" allows an arbitrary finite input set X, and an "S-model" uses the interval [0,1] of real numbers as X. A visualised demo/ Art Work of a single Learning Automaton had been developed by μSystems (microSystems) Research Group at Newcastle University. == Finite action-set learning automata == Finite action-set learning automata (FALA) are a class of learning automata for which the number of possible actions is finite or, in more mathematical terms, for which the size of the action-set is finite.