GEPIR (Global Electronic Party Information Registry) was a distributed database operated and owned by GS1 that contains basic information on over 1,000,000 companies in over 100 countries. The database could be searched by Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) code (including Universal Product Code (UPC) and EAN-13 codes), container Code (Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC)), location number (Global Location Number (GLN)), and (in some countries) the company name. A SOAP webservice existed for API access. As of end December 2023, GEPIR was replaced by a service called Verified by GS1. While it operated, GEPIR had more than 1 million members in more than 100 countries. In 2013, all GS1 111 member organisations joined GEPIR. == Access == GEPIR was accessible for free in almost all countries but the number of request per day was limited (from 20 to 30). Since October 2013, GS1 France restricts access to GEPIR to companies (registration with SIREN code was required to use it). A premium access service had been created by GS1 France in January 2010 which allows companies to use GS1 web and SOAP interface without any limit. == System architecture == GEPIR was a lookup service coordinated by the GS1 GO that provided all end users with the ability to look up information about GS1 Identification Keys. Depending on the service, systems were provided by GS1 Member Organisations (MOs) or 3rd party service providers, or both. Where a GS1 MO did not choose to provide the service directly to its end users, the GS1 Global Office provided the service for that geography. Some services involved a technical component deployed by the GS1 Global Office that coordinates the systems provided by GS1 MOs and/or 3rd party service providers. The GEPIR service was provided by systems deployed by GS1 MOs, with the GS1 GO providing a central point of coordination to federate the local systems. The GS1 GO also provides the MO-level service for MOs that could not or did not wish to deploy their own system.
Neural processing unit
A neural processing unit (NPU), also known as an AI accelerator or deep learning processor, is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and computer vision. == Use == Their purpose is either to efficiently execute already trained AI models (inference) or to train AI models. NPUs can be more efficient in terms of speed or power consumption. NPU applications include algorithms for robotics, Internet of things, and data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks. They are often manycore or spatial designs and focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures, or in-memory computing capability. As of 2024, a widely used datacenter-grade AI integrated circuit chip, the Nvidia H100 GPU, contains tens of billions of MOSFETs. === Consumer devices === AI accelerators are used in Apple silicon, Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, and Google Tensor smartphone processors. Vision processing units are accelerators specialized for machine vision algorithms such as CNN (convolutional neural networks) and SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform). They are used in devices that need to keep track of objects visually such as AR headsets and drones. It is more recently (circa 2017) added to processors from Apple and (circa 2022) to processors from Intel and AMD. All models of Intel Meteor Lake processors have a built-in versatile processor unit (VPU) for accelerating inference for computer vision and deep learning. On consumer devices, the NPU is intended to be small, power-efficient, but reasonably fast when used to run small models. To do this they are designed to support low-bitwidth operations using data types such as INT4, INT8, FP8, and FP16. A common metric is trillions of operations per second (TOPS). Although TOPS does not explicitly specify the kind of operations, it is typically INT8 additions and multiplications. === Datacenters === Accelerators are used in cloud computing servers: e.g., tensor processing units (TPU) for Google Cloud Platform, and Trainium and Inferentia chips for Amazon Web Services. Many vendor-specific terms exist for devices in this category, and it is an emerging technology without a dominant design. Since the late 2010s, graphics processing units designed by companies such as Nvidia and AMD often include AI-specific hardware in the form of dedicated functional units for low-precision matrix-multiplication operations. These GPUs are commonly used as AI accelerators, both for training and inference. === Scientific computation === Although NPUs are tailored for low-precision (e.g., FP16, INT8) matrix multiplication operations, they can be used to emulate higher-precision matrix multiplications in scientific computing. As modern GPUs place much focus on making the NPU part fast, using emulated FP64 (Ozaki scheme) on NPUs can potentially outperform native FP64. This has been demonstrated using FP16-emulated FP64 on NVIDIA TITAN RTX and using INT8-emulated FP64 on NVIDIA consumer GPUs and the A100 GPU. Consumer GPUs especially benefited as they have limited FP64 hardware capacity, showing a 6× speedup. Since CUDA Toolkit 13.0 Update 2, cuBLAS automatically uses INT8-emulated FP64 matrix multiplication of the equivalent precision if it is faster than native. This is in addition to the FP16-emulated FP32 feature introduced in version 12.9. == Programming == An operating system or a higher-level library may provide application programming interfaces such as TensorFlow with LiteRT Next (Android), CoreML (iOS, macOS) or DirectML (Windows). Formats such as ONNX are used to represent trained neural networks. Consumer CPU-integrated NPUs are accessible through vendor-specific APIs. AMD (Ryzen AI), Intel (OpenVINO), Apple silicon (CoreML), and Qualcomm (SNPE) each have their own APIs, which can be built upon by a higher-level library. GPUs generally use existing GPGPU pipelines such as CUDA and OpenCL adapted for lower precisions and specialized matrix-multiplication operations. Vulkan is also being used. Custom-built systems such as the Google TPU use private interfaces. There are a large number of separate underlying acceleration APIs and compilers/runtimes in use in the AI field, causing a great increase in software development effort due to the many combinations involved. As of 2025, the open standard organization Khronos Group is pursuing standardization of AI-related interfaces to reduce the amount of work needed. Khronos is working on three separate fronts: expansion of data types and intrinsic operations in OpenCL and Vulkan, inclusion of compute graphs in SPIR-V, and a NNEF/SkriptND file format for describing a neural network.
Dynamic epistemic logic
Dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) is a logical framework dealing with knowledge and information change. Typically, DEL focuses on situations involving multiple agents and studies how their knowledge changes when events occur. These events can change factual properties of the actual world (they are called ontic events): for example a red card is painted in blue. They can also bring about changes of knowledge without changing factual properties of the world (they are called epistemic events): for example, a card is revealed publicly (or privately) to be red. Originally, DEL focused on epistemic events. Only some of the basic ideas are present in this entry of the original DEL framework; more details about DEL in general can be found in the references. Due to the nature of its object of study and its abstract approach, DEL is related and has applications to numerous research areas, such as computer science (artificial intelligence), philosophy (formal epistemology), economics (game theory) and cognitive science. In computer science, DEL is for example very much related to multi-agent systems, which are systems where multiple intelligent agents interact and exchange information. As a combination of dynamic logic and epistemic logic, dynamic epistemic logic is a young field of research. It really started in 1989 with Plaza's logic of public announcement. Independently, Gerbrandy and Groeneveld proposed a system dealing moreover with private announcement and that was inspired by the work of Veltman. Another system was proposed by van Ditmarsch whose main inspiration was the Cluedo game. But the most influential and original system was the system proposed by Baltag, Moss and Solecki. This system can deal with all the types of situations studied in the works above and its underlying methodology is conceptually grounded. This entry will present some of its basic ideas. Formally, DEL extends ordinary epistemic logic by the inclusion of event models to describe actions, and a product update operator that defines how epistemic models are updated as the consequence of executing actions described through event models. Epistemic logic will first be recalled. Then, actions and events will enter into the picture and we will introduce the DEL framework. == Epistemic logic == Epistemic logic is a modal logic dealing with the notions of knowledge and belief. As a logic, it is concerned with understanding the process of reasoning about knowledge and belief: which principles relating the notions of knowledge and belief are intuitively plausible? Like epistemology, it stems from the Greek word ϵ π ι σ τ η μ η {\displaystyle \epsilon \pi \iota \sigma \tau \eta \mu \eta } or ‘episteme’ meaning knowledge. Epistemology is nevertheless more concerned with analyzing the very nature and scope of knowledge, addressing questions such as “What is the definition of knowledge?” or “How is knowledge acquired?”. In fact, epistemic logic grew out of epistemology in the Middle Ages thanks to the efforts of Burley and Ockham. The formal work, based on modal logic, that inaugurated contemporary research into epistemic logic dates back only to 1962 and is due to Hintikka. It then sparked in the 1960s discussions about the principles of knowledge and belief and many axioms for these notions were proposed and discussed. For example, the interaction axioms K p → B p {\displaystyle Kp\rightarrow Bp} and B p → K B p {\displaystyle Bp\rightarrow KBp} are often considered to be intuitive principles: if an agent Knows p {\displaystyle p} then (s)he also Believes p {\displaystyle p} , or if an agent Believes p {\displaystyle p} , then (s)he Knows that (s)he Believes p {\displaystyle p} . More recently, these kinds of philosophical theories were taken up by researchers in economics, artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science where reasoning about knowledge is a central topic. Due to the new setting in which epistemic logic was used, new perspectives and new features such as computability issues were then added to the research agenda of epistemic logic. === Syntax === In the sequel, A G T S = { 1 , … , n } {\displaystyle AGTS=\{1,\ldots ,n\}} is a finite set whose elements are called agents and P R O P {\displaystyle PROP} is a set of propositional letters. The epistemic language is an extension of the basic multi-modal language of modal logic with a common knowledge operator C A {\displaystyle C_{A}} and a distributed knowledge operator D A {\displaystyle D_{A}} . Formally, the epistemic language L EL C {\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}_{\textsf {EL}}^{C}} is defined inductively by the following grammar in BNF: L EL C : ϕ ::= p ∣ ¬ ϕ ∣ ( ϕ ∧ ϕ ) ∣ K j ϕ ∣ C A ϕ ∣ D A ϕ {\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}_{\textsf {EL}}^{C}:\phi ~~::=~~p~\mid ~\neg \phi ~\mid ~(\phi \land \phi )~\mid ~K_{j}\phi ~\mid ~C_{A}\phi ~\mid ~D_{A}\phi } where p ∈ P R O P {\displaystyle p\in PROP} , j ∈ A G T S {\displaystyle j\in {AGTS}} and A ⊆ A G T S {\displaystyle A\subseteq {AGTS}} . The basic epistemic language L E L {\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}_{EL}} is the language L E L C {\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}_{EL}^{C}} without the common knowledge and distributed knowledge operators. The formula ⊥ {\displaystyle \bot } is an abbreviation for ¬ p ∧ p {\displaystyle \neg p\land p} (for a given p ∈ P R O P {\displaystyle p\in PROP} ), ⟨ K j ⟩ ϕ {\displaystyle \langle K_{j}\rangle \phi } is an abbreviation for ¬ K j ¬ ϕ {\displaystyle \neg K_{j}\neg \phi } , E A ϕ {\displaystyle E_{A}\phi } is an abbreviation for ⋀ j ∈ A K j ϕ {\displaystyle \bigwedge \limits _{j\in A}K_{j}\phi } and C ϕ {\displaystyle C\phi } an abbreviation for C A G T S ϕ {\displaystyle C_{AGTS}\phi } . Group notions: general, common and distributed knowledge. In a multi-agent setting there are three important epistemic concepts: general knowledge, distributed knowledge and common knowledge. The notion of common knowledge was first studied by Lewis in the context of conventions. It was then applied to distributed systems and to game theory, where it allows to express that the rationality of the players, the rules of the game and the set of players are commonly known. General knowledge. General knowledge of ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } means that everybody in the group of agents A G T S {\displaystyle {AGTS}} knows that ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } . Formally, this corresponds to the following formula: E ϕ := ⋀ j ∈ A G T S K j ϕ . {\displaystyle E\phi :={\underset {j\in {AGTS}}{\bigwedge }}K_{j}\phi .} Common knowledge. Common knowledge of ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } means that everybody knows ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } but also that everybody knows that everybody knows ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } , that everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } , and so on ad infinitum. Formally, this corresponds to the following formula C ϕ := E ϕ ∧ E E ϕ ∧ E E E ϕ ∧ … {\displaystyle C\phi :=E\phi \land EE\phi \land EEE\phi \land \ldots } As we do not allow infinite conjunction the notion of common knowledge will have to be introduced as a primitive in our language. Before defining the language with this new operator, we are going to give an example introduced by Lewis that illustrates the difference between the notions of general knowledge and common knowledge. Lewis wanted to know what kind of knowledge is needed so that the statement p {\displaystyle p} : “every driver must drive on the right” be a convention among a group of agents. In other words, he wanted to know what kind of knowledge is needed so that everybody feels safe to drive on the right. Suppose there are only two agents i {\displaystyle i} and j {\displaystyle j} . Then everybody knowing p {\displaystyle p} (formally E p {\displaystyle Ep} ) is not enough. Indeed, it might still be possible that the agent i {\displaystyle i} considers possible that the agent j {\displaystyle j} does not know p {\displaystyle p} (formally ¬ K i K j p {\displaystyle \neg K_{i}K_{j}p} ). In that case the agent i {\displaystyle i} will not feel safe to drive on the right because he might consider that the agent j {\displaystyle j} , not knowing p {\displaystyle p} , could drive on the left. To avoid this problem, we could then assume that everybody knows that everybody knows that p {\displaystyle p} (formally E E p {\displaystyle EEp} ). This is again not enough to ensure that everybody feels safe to drive on the right. Indeed, it might still be possible that agent i {\displaystyle i} considers possible that agent j {\displaystyle j} considers possible that agent i {\displaystyle i} does not know p {\displaystyle p} (formally ¬ K i K j K i p {\displaystyle \neg K_{i}K_{j}K_{i}p} ). In that case and from i {\displaystyle i} ’s point of view, j {\displaystyle j} considers possible that i {\displaystyle i} , not knowing p {\displaystyle p} , will drive on the left. So from i {\displaystyle i} ’s point of view, j {\displaystyle j} might drive on the left as well (by the same argument as abov
Character computing
Character computing is a trans-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of computer science and psychology. It is any computing that incorporates the human character within its context. Character is defined as all features or characteristics defining an individual and guiding their behavior in a specific situation. It consists of stable trait markers (e.g., personality, background, history, socio-economic embeddings, culture,...) and variable state markers (emotions, health, cognitive state, ...). Character computing aims at providing a holistic psychologically driven model of human behavior. It models and predicts behavior based on the relationships between a situation and character. Three main research modules fall under the umbrella of character computing: character sensing and profiling, character-aware adaptive systems, and artificial characters. == Overview == Character computing can be viewed as an extension of the well-established field of affective computing. Based on the foundations of the different psychology branches, it advocates defining behavior as a compound attribute that is not driven by either personality, emotions, situation or cognition alone. It rather defines behavior as a function of everything that makes up an individual i.e., their character and the situation they are in. Affective computing aims at allowing machines to understand and translate the non-verbal cues of individuals into affect. Accordingly, character computing aims at understanding the character attributes of an individual and the situation to translate it to predicted behavior, and vice versa. ''In practical terms, depending on the application context, character computing is a branch of research that deals with the design of systems and interfaces that can observe, sense, predict, adapt to, affect, understand, or simulate the following: character based on behavior and situation, behavior based on character and situation, or situation based on character and behavior.'' The Character-Behavior-Situation (CBS) triad is at the core of character computing and defines each of the three edges based on the other two. Character computing relies on simultaneous development from a computational and psychological perspective and is intended to be used by researchers in both fields. Its main concept is aligning the computational model of character computing with empirical results from in-lab and in-the-wild psychology experiments. The model is to be continuously built and validated through the emergence of new data. Similar to affective and personality computing, the model is to be used as a base for different applications towards improving user experience. == History == Character computing as such was first coined in its first workshop in 2017. Since then it has had 3 international workshops and numerous publications. Despite its young age, it has already drawn some interest in the research community, leading to the publication of the first book under the same title in early 2020 published by Springer Nature. Research that can be categorized under the field dates much older than 2017. The notion of combining several factors towards the explanation of behavior or traits and states has long been investigated in both Psychology and Computer Science, for example. == Character == The word character originates from the Greek word meaning “stamping tool”, referring to distinctive features and traits. Over the years it has been given many different connotations, like the moral character in philosophy, the temperament in psychology, a person in literature or an avatar in various virtual worlds, including video games. According to character computing character is a unification of all the previous definitions, by referring back to the original meaning of the word. Character is defined as the holistic concept representing all interacting trait and state markers that distinguish an individual. Traits are characteristics that mainly remain stable over time. Traits include personality, affect, socio-demographics, and general health. States are characteristics that vary in short periods of time. They include emotions, well-being, health, cognitive state. Each characteristic has many representation methods and psychological models. The different models can be combined or one model can be preset for each characteristic. This depends on the use-case and the design choices. == Areas == Research into character computing can be divided into three areas, which complement each other but can each be investigated separately. The first area is sensing and predicting character states and traits or ensuing behavior. The second area is adapting applications to certain character states or traits and the behavior they predict. It also deals with trying to change or monitor such behavior. The final area deals with creating artificial agents e.g., chatbots or virtual reality avatars that exhibit certain characteristics. The three areas are investigated separately and build on existing findings in the literature. The results of each of the three areas can also be used as a stepping stone for the next area. Each of the three areas has already been investigated on its own in different research fields with focus on different subsets of character. For example, affective computing and personality computing both cover different areas with a focus on some character components without the others to account for human behavior. == The Character-Behavior-Situation triad == Character computing is based on a holistic psychologically driven model of human behavior. Human behavior is modeled and predicted based on the relationships between a situation and a human's character. To further define character in a more formal or holistic manner, we represent it in light of the Character–Behavior–Situation triad. This highlights that character not only determines who we are but how we are, i.e., how we behave. The triad investigated in Personality Psychology is extended through character computing to the Character–Behavior–Situation triad. Any member of the CBS triad is a function of the two other members, e.g., given the situation and personality, the behavior can be predicted. Each of the components in the triad can be further decomposed into smaller units and features that may best represent the human's behavior or character in a particular situation. Character is thus behind a person's behavior in any given situation. While this is a causality relation, the correlation between the three components is often more easily used to predict the components that are most difficult to measure from those measured more easily. There are infinitely many components to include in the representation of any of C, B, and S. The challenge is always to choose the smallest subset needed for prediction of a person's behavior in a particular situation.
Purged cross-validation
Purged cross-validation is a variant of k-fold cross-validation designed to prevent look-ahead bias in time series and other structured data, developed in 2017 by Marcos López de Prado at Guggenheim Partners and Cornell University. It is primarily used in financial machine learning to ensure the independence of training and testing samples when labels depend on future events. It provides an alternative to conventional cross-validation and walk-forward backtesting methods, which often yield overly optimistic performance estimates due to information leakage and overfitting. == Motivation == Standard cross-validation assumes that observations are independently and identically distributed (IID), which often does not hold in time series or financial datasets. If the label of a test sample overlaps in time with the features or labels in the training set, the result may be data leakage and overfitting. Purged cross-validation addresses this issue by removing overlapping observations and, optionally, adding a temporal buffer ("embargo") around the test set to further reduce the risk of leakage. The figure below illustrates standard 5 Fold Cross-Validation == Purging == Purging removes from the training set any observation whose timestamp falls within the time range of formation of a label in the test set. This can be the case for train set observations before and after the test set. Their removal ensures that the algorithm cannot learn during train time information that will be used to assess the performance of the algorithm. See the figure below for an illustration of purging. == Embargoing == Embargoing addresses a more subtle form of leakage: even if an observation does not directly overlap the test set, it may still be affected by test events due to market reaction lag or downstream dependencies. To guard against this, a percentage-based embargo is imposed after each test fold. For example, with a 5% embargo and 1000 observations, the 50 observations following each test fold are excluded from training. Unlike purging, embargoing can only occur after the test set. The figure below illustrates the application of embargo: == Applications == Purged and embargoed cross-validation has been useful in: Backtesting of trading strategies Validation of classifiers on labeled event-driven returns Any machine learning task with overlapping label horizons == Example == To illustrate the effect of purging and embargoing, consider the figures below. Both diagrams show the structure of 5-fold cross-validation over a 20-day period. In each row, blue squares indicate training samples and red squares denote test samples. Each label is defined based on the value of the next two observations, hence creating an overlap. If this overlap is left untreated, test set information leaks into the train set. The second figure applies the Purged CV procedure. Notice how purging removes overlapping observations from the training set and the embargo widens the gap between test and training data. This approach ensures that the evaluation more closely resembles a true out-of-sample test and reduces the risk of backtest overfitting. == Combinatorial Purged Cross-Validation == Walk-forward backtesting analysis, another common cross-validation technique in finance, preserves temporal order but evaluates the model on a single sequence of test sets. This leads to high variance in performance estimation, as results are contingent on a specific historical path. Combinatorial Purged Cross-Validation (CPCV) addresses this limitation by systematically constructing multiple train-test splits, purging overlapping samples, and enforcing an embargo period to prevent information leakage. The result is a distribution of out-of-sample performance estimates, enabling robust statistical inference and more realistic assessment of a model's predictive power. === Methodology === CPCV divides a time-series dataset into N sequential, non-overlapping groups. These groups preserve the temporal order of observations. Then, all combinations of k groups (where k < N) are selected as test sets, with the remaining N − k groups used for training. For each combination, the model is trained and evaluated under strict controls to prevent leakage. To eliminate potential contamination between training and test sets, CPCV introduces two additional mechanisms: Purging: Any training observations whose label horizon overlaps with the test period are excluded. This ensures that future information does not influence model training. Embargoing: After the end of each test period, a fixed number of observations (typically a small percentage) are removed from the training set. This prevents leakage due to delayed market reactions or auto-correlated features. Each data point appears in multiple test sets across different combinations. Because test groups are drawn combinatorially, this process produces multiple backtest "paths," each of which simulates a plausible market scenario. From these paths, practitioners can compute a distribution of performance statistics such as the Sharpe ratio, drawdown, or classification accuracy. === Formal definition === Let N be the number of sequential groups into which the dataset is divided, and let k be the number of groups selected as the test set for each split. Then: The number of unique train-test combinations is given by the binomial coefficient: ( N k ) {\displaystyle {\binom {N}{k}}} Each observation is used in k {\displaystyle k} test sets and contributes to φ [ N , k ] {\displaystyle \varphi [N,k]} unique backtest paths: φ [ N , k ] = k N ( N k ) {\displaystyle \varphi [N,k]={\frac {k}{N}}{\binom {N}{k}}} This yields a distribution of performance metrics rather than a single point estimate, making it possible to apply Monte Carlo-based or probabilistic techniques to assess model robustness. === Illustrative example === Consider the case where N = 6 and k = 2. The number of possible test set combinations is ( 6 2 ) = 15 {\displaystyle {\binom {6}{2}}=15} . Each of the six groups appears in five test splits. Consequently, five distinct backtest paths can be constructed, each incorporating one appearance from every group. ==== Test group assignment matrix ==== This table shows the 15 test combinations. An "x" indicates that the corresponding group is included in the test set for that split. ==== Backtest path assignment ==== Each group contributes to five different backtest paths. The number in each cell indicates the path to which the group's result is assigned for that split. === Advantages === Combinatorial Purged Cross-Validation offers several key benefits over conventional methods: It produces a distribution of performance metrics, enabling more rigorous statistical inference. The method systematically eliminates lookahead bias through purging and embargoing. By simulating multiple historical scenarios, it reduces the dependence on any single market regime or realization. It supports high-confidence comparisons between competing models or strategies. CPCV is commonly used in quantitative strategy research, especially for evaluating predictive models such as classifiers, regressors, and portfolio optimizers. It has been applied to estimate realistic Sharpe ratios, assess the risk of overfitting, and support the use of statistical tools such as the Deflated Sharpe Ratio (DSR). === Limitations === The main limitation of CPCV stems from its high computational cost. However, this cost can be managed by sampling a finite number of splits from the space of all possible combinations.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a discontinued cloud-based task management application. It allowed users to create lists to manage their tasks from a smartphone, tablet, computer and smartwatch. Wunderlist was free; additional collaboration features were available in a paid version known as Wunderlist Pro, released April 2013. Wunderlist was created in 2011 by Berlin-based startup 6Wunderkinder (Engl.: 6Prodigies). The company was acquired by Microsoft in June 2015, at which time the app had over 13 million users. In April 2017, Microsoft announced that Wunderlist would eventually be discontinued in favor of Microsoft To Do, a new multi-platform app developed by the Wunderlist team that has direct integration with the company's Office 365 service. On December 6, 2019, Microsoft announced that it would shut down Wunderlist on May 6, 2020. After this date, the application would no longer sync but users could still import their content into Microsoft To Do. == History == In 2009, Wunderlist's CEO Christian Reber called on the social network platform XING for business partners to create a new to-do app. Frank Thelen responded and together Reber and Thelen developed first concepts for Wunderlist. The necessary seed funding was granted by High-Tech Gründerfonds and e42 GmbH. The first version of Wunderlist was launched on November 9, 2010. Initially, the program was created for desktop PCs and platforms such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. In December 2011, the app received approval for the iPhone. Subsequently, the developers released a version prepared for the iPad with the name Wunderlist HD. In September 2012, the developers announced a shutdown of their service Wunderkit. Instead they wanted to focus on creating a new version of Wunderlist, which was later on released in December 2012 under the name Wunderlist 2. In September 2013, the company announced it had over 5 million users. In July 2014, a new major update was released under the name of Wunderlist 3, with a new real-time sync architecture. Wunderlist reached 10 million users in December 2014. On June 1, 2015, it was announced that Microsoft had acquired 6Wunderkinder, makers of Wunderlist, for between US$100 million and US$200 million (~$258 million in 2024). Following its acquisition of the app, Microsoft announced in April 2017 a preview of To-Do, a multi-platform task management app developed by the Wunderlist team that was intended to eventually replace Wunderlist and incorporate most of its features. As of January 2019, To-Do had not yet reached feature parity with Wunderlist, with its team citing that the service had to be completely re-written to use Microsoft Azure instead of Amazon Web Services. Frustrated by the perceived lack of roadmap, in September 2019, Reber began to publicly ask Microsoft-related accounts on Twitter whether he could buy Wunderlist back. Shortly afterward, however, Microsoft unveiled updates to To-Do that make it more closely resemble Wunderlist. In December 2019, Microsoft announced that it would fully shut down Wunderlist as of May 6, 2020. The team responsible for creating Wunderlist, led by co-founder Christian Reber, created that Superlist app in early 2024. == Finances == In its initial round of funding, 100,000 euro was invested in 6Wunderkinder by Frank Thelen and others. In December 2010, High-Tech Gründerfonds invested 500,000 euro (approximately US$660,000) in the company. T-Venture also invested an undisclosed amount in the startup. In its Series A round of funding in November 2011, Atomico invested $4.2 million (~$5.76 million in 2024) while High-Tech Gründerfonds invested an undisclosed additional amount. In May 2012, High-Tech Gründerfonds sold off its stake in 6Wunderkinder to Earlybird Venture Capital. In November 2013, $19 million (~$25.2 million in 2024) was raised in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Earlybird and Atomico. == Awards == In 2013, Wunderlist for Mac was named App of the Year. Wunderlist was selected as a Google Play Top Developer in 2013. In 2014, Wunderlist won the "Golden Mi" award from Xiaomi, and also named as one of its Best Apps of 2014 was given a "Google Play Editor's Choice" award, and was named in Google Play's Best Apps of 2014 as well as Apple's Best of 2014.
Artificial intelligence controversies
The controversies surrounding artificial intelligence encompass a broad range of public, academic, and political debates regarding the societal effects of artificial intelligence (AI). These debates intensified particularly in the late 2010s and 2020s, coinciding with an accelerated period of development known as the AI boom. While advocates emphasize the technology's potential to solve complex problems and enhance human quality of life, detractors highlight a wide array of dangers and challenges. These include concerns over ethics, plagiarism and theft, fraud, safety and alignment, environmental impacts, technological unemployment, and the spread of misinformation. It also covers severe future or theoretical challenges, such as the emergence of artificial superintelligence and existential risks. == 2016 == === Microsoft Tay chatbot (2016) === On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released Tay, a chatbot designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl and learn from interactions with Twitter users. Soon after its launch, Tay began posting racist, sexist, and otherwise inflammatory tweets after Twitter users deliberately taught it offensive phrases and exploited its "repeat after me" capability. Examples of controversial outputs included Holocaust denial and calls for genocide using racial slurs. Within 16 hours of its release, Microsoft suspended the Twitter account, deleted the offensive tweets, and stated that Tay had suffered from a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" that "exploited a vulnerability." Tay was briefly and accidentally re-released on March 30 during testing, after which it was permanently shut down. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later stated that Tay "has had a great influence on how Microsoft is approaching AI" and taught the company the importance of taking accountability. == 2022 == === Voiceverse NFT plagiarism scandal (2022) === On January 14, 2022, voice actor Troy Baker announced a partnership with Voiceverse, a blockchain-based company that marketed proprietary AI voice cloning technology as non-fungible tokens (NFT), triggering immediate backlash over environmental concerns, fears that AI could displace human voice actors, and concerns about fraud. Later that same day, the pseudonymous creator of 15.ai—a free, non-commercial AI voice synthesis research project—revealed through server logs that Voiceverse had used 15.ai to generate voice samples, pitch-shifted them to make them unrecognizable, and falsely marketed them as their own proprietary technology before selling them as NFTs; the developer of 15.ai had previously stated that they had no interest in incorporating NFTs into their work. Voiceverse confessed within an hour and stated that their marketing team had used 15.ai without attribution while rushing to create a demo. News publications and AI watchdog groups universally characterized the incident as theft stemming from generative artificial intelligence. === Théâtre D'opéra Spatial (2022) === On August 29, 2022, Jason Michael Allen won first place in the "emerging artist" (non-professional) division of the "Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography" category of the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition with Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, a digital artwork created using the AI image generator Midjourney, Adobe Photoshop, and AI upscaling tools, becoming one of the first images made using generative AI to win such a prize. Allen disclosed his use of Midjourney when submitting, though the judges did not know it was an AI tool but stated they would have awarded him first place regardless. While there was little contention about the image at the fair, reactions to the win on social media were negative. On September 5, 2023, the United States Copyright Office ruled that the work was not eligible for copyright protection as the human creative input was de minimis and that copyright rules "exclude works produced by non-humans." == 2023 == === Statements on AI risk (2023) === On March 22, 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling on "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", citing risks such as AI-generated propaganda, extreme automation of jobs, human obsolescence, and a society-wide loss of control. The letter, published a week after the release of OpenAI's GPT-4, asserted that current large language models were "becoming human-competitive at general tasks". It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari. The letter was criticized for diverting attention from more immediate societal risks such as algorithmic biases, with Timnit Gebru and others arguing that it amplified "some futuristic, dystopian sci-fi scenario" instead of current problems with AI. On May 30, 2023, the Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement signed by hundreds of artificial intelligence experts and other notable figures: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Signatories included Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, as well as the scientific and executive leaders of several major AI companies, including Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Bill Gates. The statement prompted responses from political leaders, including UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who retweeted it with a statement that the UK government would look carefully into it, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who commented that AI "is one of the most powerful technologies that we see currently in our time." Skeptics, including from Human Rights Watch, argued that scientists should focus on known risks of AI instead of speculative future risks. === Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI (2023) === On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board of directors ousted co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman, stating that "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." The removal was precipitated by employee concerns about his handling of artificial intelligence safety and allegations of abusive behavior. Altman was reinstated on November 22 after pressure from employees and investors, including a letter signed by 745 of OpenAI's 770 employees threatening mass resignations if the board did not resign. The removal and subsequent reinstatement caused widespread reactions, including Microsoft's stock falling nearly three percent following the initial announcement and then rising over two percent to an all-time high after Altman was hired to lead a Microsoft AI research team before his reinstatement. The incident also prompted investigations from the Competition and Markets Authority and the Federal Trade Commission into Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI. == 2024 == === Taylor Swift deepfake pornography controversy (2024) === In late January 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake images of Taylor Swift were proliferated on X, with one post reported to have been seen over 47 million times before its removal. Disinformation research firm Graphika traced the images back to 4chan, while members of a Telegram group had discussed ways to circumvent censorship safeguards of AI image generators to create pornographic images of celebrities. The images prompted responses from anti-sexual assault advocacy groups, US politicians, and Swifties. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called the incident "alarming and terrible." X briefly blocked searches of Swift's name on January 27, 2024, and Microsoft enhanced its text-to-image model safeguards to prevent future abuse. On January 30, US senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar, and Josh Hawley introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow victims to sue individuals who produced or possessed "digital forgeries" with intent to distribute, or those who received the material knowing it was made without consent. === Google Gemini image generation controversy (2024) === In February 2024, social media users reported that Google's Gemini chatbot was generating images that featured people of color and women in historically inaccurate contexts—such as Vikings, Nazi soldiers, and the Founding Fathers—and refusing prompts to generate images of white people. The images were derided on social media, including by conservatives who cited them as evidence of Google's "wokeness", and criticized by Elon Musk, who denounced Google's products as biased and racist. In response, Google paused Gemini's ability to generate images of people. Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan released a statement explaining that Gemini had "overcompensate[d]" in its efforts to strive for diversity and acknowledging that the images were "embarrassing and wrong". Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the incident offensive and unacceptable in an internal memo, promising struc