Kurt Keutzer (born November 9, 1955) is an American computer scientist. == Early life and education == Kurt Keutzer grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Maharishi University of Management (formerly Mararishi International University) in 1978, and a PhD in computer science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1984. == Career == Keutzer joined Bell Labs in 1984, where he worked on logic synthesis. In 1991, he joined the electronic design automation company Synopsys, where he was promoted to chief technology officer. He subsequently joined the University of California, Berkeley as a professor in 1998. His research at Berkeley has focused on the intersection of high performance computing and machine learning. Working with a number of graduate students at Berkeley, Keutzer developed FireCaffe, which scaled the training of deep neural networks to over 100 GPUs. Later, with LARS and LAMB optimizers, they scaled it to over 1000 servers. Keutzer and his students also developed deep neural networks such as SqueezeNet, SqueezeDet, and SqueezeSeg, which can run efficiently on mobile devices. Keutzer co-founded DeepScale with his PhD student Forrest Iandola in 2015, and Keutzer served as the company's chief strategy officer. The firm was focused on developing deep neural networks for advanced driver assistance systems in passenger cars. On October 1, 2019, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, Inc. purchased DeepScale to augment and accelerate its self-driving vehicle work. == Honors and awards == Keutzer was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 1996. Recipient of DAC Most Influential Paper (MIP) award (24th DAC, 1987) for his "Dagon: technology binding and local optimization by DAG matching” publication. == Books by Keutzer == 1988. Dwight Hill, Don Shugard, John Fishburn, and Kurt Keutzer. Algorithms and Techniques for VLSI Layout Synthesis. Springer. 1994. Srinivas Devadas, Abhijit Ghosh, and Kurt Keutzer. Logic Synthesis. McGraw-Hill. 2002. David Chinnery and Kurt Keutzer. Closing the Gap Between ASIC & Custom: Tools and Techniques for High-Performance ASIC Design. Springer. (2nd edition appeared in 2007.) 2004. Pinhong Chen, Desmond A. Kirkpatrick, and Kurt Keutzer. Static Crosstalk-Noise Analysis: For Deep Sub-Micron Digital Designs. Springer. 2005. Matthias Gries and Kurt Keutzer. Building ASIPs: The Mescal Methodology. Springer.
Toad (software)
Toad is a database management toolset from Quest Software for managing relational and non-relational databases using SQL aimed at database developers, database administrators, and data analysts. The Toad toolset runs against Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2 (LUW & z/OS), SAP and MySQL. A Toad product for data preparation supports many data platforms. == History == A practicing Oracle DBA, Jim McDaniel, designed Toad for his own use in the mid-1990s. He called it Tool for Oracle Application Developers, shortened to "TOAD". McDaniel initially distributed the tool as shareware and later online as freeware. Quest Software acquired TOAD in October 1998. Quest Software itself was acquired by Dell in 2012 to form Dell Software. In June 2016, Dell announced the sale of their software division, including the Quest business, to Francisco Partners and Elliott Management Corporation. On October 31, 2016, the sale was finalized. On November 1, 2016, the sale of Dell Software to Francisco Partners and Elliott Management was completed, and the company re-launched as Quest Software. == Features == Connection Manager - Allow users to connect natively to the vendor’s database whether on-premise or DBaaS. Browser - Allow users to browse all the different database/schema objects and their properties effective management. Editor - A way to create and maintain scripts and database code with debugging and integration with source control. Unit Testing (Oracle) - Ensures code is functionally tested before it is released into production. Static code review (Oracle) - Ensures code meets required quality level using a rules-based system. SQL Optimization - Provides developers with a way to tune and optimize SQL statements and database code without relying on a DBA. Advanced optimization enables DBAs to tune SQL effectively in production. Scalability testing and database workload replay - Ensures that database code and SQL will scale properly before it gets released into production. == Books == Toad Pocket Reference for Oracle plsql 1st Edition by Jim McDaniel and Patrick McGrath, O'Reilly, 2002 (ISBN 0596003374, ISBN 978-0-596-00337-1) Toad Pocket Reference for Oracle 2nd Edition by Jeff Smith, Bert Scalzo, and Patrick McGrath, O'Reilly, 2005 (ISBN 0596009712, ISBN 978-0-596-00971-7) TOAD Handbook by Bert Scalzo and Dan Hotka, Sams, 2003 (ISBN 0672324865, ISBN 978-0-672-32486-4) TOAD Handbook 2nd Edition by Bert Scalzo and Dan Hotka, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2009 (ISBN 0321649109, ISBN 978-0-321-64910-2). TOAD Handbook 2nd Edition by Bert Scalzo and Dan Hotka, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2009 (ISBN 0321649109, ISBN 978-0-321-64910-2).
Bare machine
In information technology, a bare machine (or bare-metal computer) is a computer which has no operating system. The software executed by a bare machine, commonly called a bare metal program or bare metal application, is designed to interact directly with hardware. Bare machines are widely used in embedded systems, particularly in cases where resources are limited or high performance is required. == Bare machine computing == Bare Machine Computing is a computing paradigm in which application software runs directly on a bare machine as a single, stand-alone executable, without an operating system or device drivers. The application software has direct access to hardware resources, and there is typically no distinction between user and kernel mode. It is self-managed software that boots, loads and runs without using any other software components. Bare metal programs are typically written in a close-to-hardware language such as C or assembly language. == Advantages == Typically, a bare-metal application will run faster, use less memory and be more power efficient than an equivalent program that relies on an operating system, due to the inherent overhead imposed by system calls. For example, hardware inputs and outputs are directly accessible to bare metal software, whereas they must usually be accessed through system calls when using an OS. It has no OS and therefore has no OS-related vulnerabilities. == Disadvantages == Bare metal applications typically require more effort to develop because operating system services such as memory management and task scheduling are not available. Debugging a bare-metal program may be complicated by factors such as: Lack of a standard output. The target machine may differ from the hardware used for program development (e.g., emulator, simulator). This forces setting up a way to load the bare-metal program onto the target (flashing), start the program execution and access the target resources. == Examples == === Early computers === Early computers, such as the PDP-11, allowed programmers to load a program, supplied in machine code, to RAM. The resulting operation of the program could be monitored by lights, and output derived from magnetic tape, print devices, or storage. Amdahl UTS's performance improves by 25% when run on bare metal without VM, the company said in 1986. === Embedded systems === Bare machine programming is a common practice in embedded systems, in which microcontrollers or microprocessors boot directly into monolithic, single-purpose software without loading an operating system. Such embedded software can vary in structure. For example, one such program paradigm, known as foreground-background or superloop architecture, consists of an infinite main loop in which each task is executed sequentially and must voluntarily return control back to the loop. The loop runs these cooperative background processes that are not time-critical, while interrupt service routines momentarily interrupt the loop to handle time-critical foreground tasks.
CSS box model
In web development, the CSS box model refers to how HTML elements are modeled in browser engines and how the dimensions of those HTML elements are derived from CSS properties. It is a fundamental concept for the composition of HTML webpages. The guidelines of the box model are described by web standards World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifically the CSS Working Group. For much of the late-1990s and early 2000s there had been non-standard compliant implementations of the box model in mainstream browsers. With the advent of CSS2 in 1998, which introduced the box-sizing property, the problem had mostly been resolved. == Specifics == The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification describes how elements of web pages are displayed by graphical browsers. Section 4 of the CSS1 specification defines a "formatting model" that gives block-level elements—such as p and blockquote—a width and height, and three levels of boxes surrounding it: padding, borders, and margins. While the specification never uses the term "box model" explicitly, the term has become widely used by web developers and web browser vendors. All HTML elements can be considered "boxes", this includes div tag, p tag, or a tag. Each of those boxes has five modifiable dimensions: the height and width describe dimensions of the actual content of the box (text, images, ...) the padding describes the space between this content and the border of the box the border is any kind of line (solid, dotted, dashed...) surrounding the box, if present the margin is the space around the border According to the CSS1 specification, released by W3C in 1996 and revised in 1999, when a width or height is explicitly specified for any block-level element, it should determine only the width or height of the visible element, with the padding, borders, and margins applied afterward. Before CSS3, this box model was known as W3C box model, in CSS3, it is known as the content-box. The total width of a box is therefore margin-left + border-left + padding-left + width + padding-right + border-right + margin-right. Similarly, the total height of a box equals margin-top + border-top + padding-top + height + padding-bottom + border-bottom + margin-bottom. For example, the following CSS code would specify the box dimensions of each block belonging to 'my-class'. Moreover, each such box will have total height 140px and width 240px. CSS3 introduced the Internet Explorer box model to the standard, known referred to as border-box. == History == Before HTML 4 and CSS, very few HTML elements supported both border and padding, so the definition of the width and height of an element was not very contentious. However, it varied depending on the element. The HTML width attribute of a table defined the width of the table including its border. On the other hand, the HTML width attribute of an image defined the width of the image itself (inside any border). The only element to support padding in those early days was the table cell. Width for the cell was defined as "the suggested width for a cell content in pixels excluding the cell padding." In 1996, CSS introduced margin, border and padding for many more elements. It adopted a definition width in relation to content, border, margin and padding similar to that for a table cell. This has since become known as the W3C box model. At the time, very few browser vendors implemented the W3C box model to the letter. The two major browsers at the time, Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 both defined width and height as the distance from border to border. This has been referred to as the traditional or the Internet Explorer box model. Internet Explorer in "quirks mode" includes the content, padding and borders within a specified width or height; this results in a narrower or shorter rendering of a box than would result following the standard behavior. The Internet Explorer box model behavior was often considered a bug, because of the way in which earlier versions of Internet Explorer handle the box model or sizing of elements in a web page, which differs from the standard way recommended by the W3C for the Cascading Style Sheets language. As of Internet Explorer 6, the browser supports an alternative rendering mode (called the "standards-compliant mode") which solves this discrepancy. However, for backward compatibility reasons, all versions still behave in the usual, non-standard way by default (see quirks mode). Internet Explorer for Mac is not affected by this non-standard behavior. === Workarounds === Internet Explorer versions 6 and onward are not affected by the bug if the page contains certain HTML document type declarations. These versions maintain the buggy behavior when in quirks mode for reasons of backward compatibility. For example, quirks mode is triggered: When the document type declaration is absent or incomplete; When an HTML 3 or earlier document is encountered; When an HTML 4.0 Transitional or Frameset document type declaration is used and a system identifier (URI) is not present; When an SGML comment or other unrecognized content appears before the document type declaration Internet Explorer 6 also uses quirks mode if there is an XML declaration prior to the document type declaration. Various workarounds have been devised to force Internet Explorer versions 5 and earlier to display Web pages using the W3C box model. These workarounds generally exploit unrelated bugs in Internet Explorer's CSS selector processing in order to hide certain rules from the browser. The best known of these workarounds is the "box model hack" developed by Tantek Çelik, a former Microsoft employee who developed this idea while working on Internet Explorer for the Macintosh. It involves specifying a width declaration for Internet Explorer for Windows, and then overriding it with another width declaration for CSS-compliant browsers. This second declaration is hidden from Internet Explorer for Windows by exploiting other bugs in the way that it parses CSS rules. The implementation of these CSS “hacks” has been further complicated by the public release of Internet Explorer 7, which has had some issues fixed, but not others, causing undesired results in pages using these hacks. Box model hacks have proven unreliable because they rely on bugs in browsers' CSS support that may be fixed in later versions. For this reason, some Web developers have instead recommended either avoiding specifying both width and padding for the same element or using conditional comment and/or CSS filters to work around the box model bug in older versions of Internet Explorer. == Support for Internet Explorer's box model == Web designer Doug Bowman has said that the original Internet Explorer box model represents a better, more logical approach. Peter-Paul Koch gives the example of a physical box, whose dimensions always refer to the box itself, including potential padding, but never its content. He says that this box model is more useful for graphic designers, who create designs based on the visible width of boxes rather than the width of their content. Bernie Zimmermann says that the Internet Explorer box model is closer to the definition of cell dimensions and padding used in the HTML table model. The W3C has included a "box-sizing" property in CSS3. When box-sizing: border-box; is specified for an element, any padding or border of the element is drawn inside the specified width and height, "as commonly implemented by legacy HTML user agents". Internet Explorer 8, WebKit browsers such as Apple Safari 5.1+ and Google Chrome, Gecko-based browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 29.0 and later, Opera 7.0 and later, and Konqueror 3.3.2 and later support the CSS3 box-sizing property. Gecko browsers previous than 29.0 support the same functionality using the browser-specific -moz-box-sizing property. border-box is the default box model used in Bootstrap framework.
Influencer speak
Influencer speak is a speech pattern commonly associated with English-speaking digital content creators, particularly on platforms such as TikTok. This style is characterized by linguistic features such as uptalk, where intonation rises at the end of declarative sentences, and vocal fry, a low, creaky vibration in speech. These features are often used to engage audiences. == Characteristics == Influencer speak is commonly associated with: Uptalk – a rising intonation at the end of statements Vocal fry – a creaky sound often occurring at the end of sentences Use of filler words and slang – contributes to a conversational tone that resonates with audiences == Origins == The origins of "influencer speak" are linked to the "Valley Girl" accent, which became prominent in the 1980s. This earlier style included features such as uptalk and vocal fry, which have been adapted for digital platforms. Linguists have noted that these patterns are often led by young women, who are recognized as linguistic innovators in sociolinguistic research. == Sociolinguistic significance == "Influencer speak" is used to maintain audience engagement. Features such as uptalk help speakers retain the "conversational floor," ensuring continuous attention from listeners. A study conducted by UCLA researchers has shown that creators adjust their speech styles based on the platform and audience. For example, a comedic tone may be emphasized on TikTok, while a more professional tone may be used on platforms such as LinkedIn or YouTube.
Saliency map
In computer vision, a saliency map is an image that highlights either the region on which people's eyes focus first or the most relevant regions for machine learning models. The goal of a saliency map is to reflect the degree of importance of a pixel to the human visual system or an otherwise opaque ML model. For example, in this image, a person first looks at the fort and light clouds, so they should be highlighted on the saliency map. == Application == === Overview === Saliency maps have applications in a variety of different problems. Some general applications: ==== Human eye ==== Image and video compression: The human eye focuses only on a small region of interest in the frame. Therefore, it is not necessary to compress the entire frame with uniform quality. According to the authors, using a salience map reduces the final size of the video with the same visual perception. Image and video quality assessment: The main task for an image or video quality metric is a high correlation with user opinions. Differences in salient regions are given more importance and thus contribute more to the quality score. Image retargeting: It aims at resizing an image by expanding or shrinking the noninformative regions. Therefore, retargeting algorithms rely on the availability of saliency maps that accurately estimate all the salient image details. Object detection and recognition: Instead of applying a computationally complex algorithm to the whole image, we can use it to the most salient regions of an image most likely to contain an object. the primary visual cortex (V1) appears to be responsible for the saliency map, according to the V1 Saliency Hypothesis. ==== Explainable artificial intelligence ==== Saliency maps are a prominent tool in explainable artificial intelligence, providing visual explanations of the decision-making process of machine learning models, particularly deep neural networks. These maps highlight the regions in input data that are most influential on the model's output, effectively indicating where the model is "looking" when making a prediction. In image classification tasks, for example, saliency maps can identify pixels or regions that contribute most to a specific class decision. Developed for convolutional neural networks, saliency mapping techniques range from simply taking the gradient of the class score with respect to the input data to more complex algorithms, such as integrated gradients and class activation mapping. In transformer architecture, attention mechanisms led to analogous saliency maps, such as attention maps, attention rollouts, and class-discriminative attention maps. === Saliency as a segmentation problem === Saliency estimation may be viewed as an instance of image segmentation. In computer vision, image segmentation is the process of partitioning a digital image into multiple segments (sets of pixels, also known as superpixels). The goal of segmentation is to simplify and/or change the representation of an image into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyze. Image segmentation is typically used to locate objects and boundaries (lines, curves, etc.) in images. More precisely, image segmentation is the process of assigning a label to every pixel in an image such that pixels with the same label share certain characteristics. == Algorithms == === Overview === There are three forms of classic saliency estimation algorithms implemented in OpenCV: Static saliency: Relies on image features and statistics to localize the regions of interest of an image. Motion saliency: Relies on motion in a video, detected by optical flow. Objects that move are considered salient. Objectness: Objectness reflects how likely an image window covers an object. These algorithms generate a set of bounding boxes of where an object may lie in an image. In addition to classic approaches, neural-network-based are also popular. There are examples of neural networks for motion saliency estimation: TASED-Net: It consists of two building blocks. First, the encoder network extracts low-resolution spatiotemporal features, and then the following prediction network decodes the spatially encoded features while aggregating all the temporal information. STRA-Net: It emphasizes two essential issues. First, spatiotemporal features integrated via appearance and optical flow coupling, and then multi-scale saliency learned via attention mechanism. STAViS: It combines spatiotemporal visual and auditory information. This approach employs a single network that learns to localize sound sources and to fuse the two saliencies to obtain a final saliency map. There's a new static saliency in the literature with name visual distortion sensitivity. It is based on the idea that the true edges, i.e. object contours, are more salient than the other complex textured regions. It detects edges in a different way from the classic edge detection algorithms. It uses a fairly small threshold for the gradient magnitudes to consider the mere presence of the gradients. So, it obtains 4 binary maps for vertical, horizontal and two diagonal directions. The morphological closing and opening are applied to the binary images to close the small gaps. To clear the blob-like shapes, it utilizes the distance transform. After all, the connected pixel groups are individual edges (or contours). A threshold of size of connected pixel set is used to determine whether an image block contains a perceivable edge (salient region) or not. === Example implementation === First, we should calculate the distance of each pixel to the rest of pixels in the same frame: S A L S ( I k ) = ∑ i = 1 N | I k − I i | {\displaystyle \mathrm {SALS} (I_{k})=\sum _{i=1}^{N}|I_{k}-I_{i}|} I i {\displaystyle I_{i}} is the value of pixel i {\displaystyle i} , in the range of [0,255]. The following equation is the expanded form of this equation. SALS(Ik) = |Ik - I1| + |Ik - I2| + ... + |Ik - IN| Where N is the total number of pixels in the current frame. Then we can further restructure our formula. We put the value that has same I together. SALS(Ik) = Σ Fn × |Ik - In| Where Fn is the frequency of In. And the value of n belongs to [0,255]. The frequencies is expressed in the form of histogram, and the computational time of histogram is O ( N ) {\displaystyle O(N)} time complexity. ==== Time complexity ==== This saliency map algorithm has O ( N ) {\displaystyle O(N)} time complexity. Since the computational time of histogram is O ( N ) {\displaystyle O(N)} time complexity which N is the number of pixel's number of a frame. Besides, the minus part and multiply part of this equation need 256 times operation. Consequently, the time complexity of this algorithm is O ( N + 256 ) {\displaystyle O(N+256)} which equals to O ( N ) {\displaystyle O(N)} . ==== Pseudocode ==== All of the following code is pseudo MATLAB code. First, read data from video sequences. After we read data, we do superpixel process to each frame. Spnum1 and Spnum2 represent the pixel number of current frame and previous pixel. Then we calculate the color distance of each pixel, this process we call it contract function. After this two process, we will get a saliency map, and then store all of these maps into a new FileFolder. ==== Difference in algorithms ==== The major difference between function one and two is the difference of contract function. If spnum1 and spnum2 both represent the current frame's pixel number, then this contract function is for the first saliency function. If spnum1 is the current frame's pixel number and spnum2 represent the previous frame's pixel number, then this contract function is for second saliency function. If we use the second contract function which using the pixel of the same frame to get center distance to get a saliency map, then we apply this saliency function to each frame and use current frame's saliency map minus previous frame's saliency map to get a new image which is the new saliency result of the third saliency function. == Datasets == The saliency dataset usually contains human eye movements on some image sequences. It is valuable for new saliency algorithm creation or benchmarking the existing one. The most valuable dataset parameters are spatial resolution, size, and eye-tracking equipment. Here is part of the large datasets table from MIT/Tübingen Saliency Benchmark datasets, for example. To collect a saliency dataset, image or video sequences and eye-tracking equipment must be prepared, and observers must be invited. Observers must have normal or corrected to normal vision and must be at the same distance from the screen. At the beginning of each recording session, the eye-tracker recalibrates. To do this, the observer fixates their gaze on the screen center. The session is then started, and saliency data are collected by showing sequences and recording eye gazes. The eye-tracking device is a high-speed camera, capable of recording eye movements at least 250 fr
Ajax (programming)
The Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, usually referred to as Ajax (or AJAX, ) is a set of web development techniques that uses various web technologies on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications. With Ajax, web applications can send and retrieve data from a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behaviour of the existing page. By decoupling the data interchange layer from the presentation layer, Ajax allows web pages and, by extension, web applications, to change content dynamically without the need to reload the entire page. In practice, modern implementations commonly utilize JSON instead of XML. Ajax is not a technology, but rather a programming pattern. HTML and CSS can be used in combination to mark up and style information. The webpage can be modified by JavaScript to dynamically display (and allow the user to interact with) the new information. The built-in XMLHttpRequest object is used to execute Ajax on webpages, allowing websites to load content onto the screen without refreshing the page. == History == In the early-to-mid 1990s, most Websites were based on complete HTML pages. Each user action required a complete new page to be loaded from the server. This process was inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappeared, then the new page appeared. Each time the browser reloaded a page because of a partial change, all the content had to be re-sent, even though only some of the information had changed. This placed additional load on the server and made bandwidth a limiting factor in performance. The foundations of AJAX originate back in 1996 with the introduction of JavaScript 1. Developers quickly discovered that any HTML element which accepted a "src" attribute could be used to fetch remote data. By changing the src of a hidden frame, a developer could fetch remote data, process or display it without a page refresh. The remote data could be a string, JavaScript code, XML or a partial HTML page generated on the server. The same could be done with and