Anonymous social media

Anonymous social media

Anonymous social media is a subcategory of social media wherein the main social function is to share and interact around content and information anonymously on mobile and web-based platforms. Another key aspect of anonymous social media is that content or information posted is not connected with particular online identities or profiles. == Background == Appearing very early on the web as mostly anonymous-confession websites, this genre of social media has evolved into various types and formats of anonymous self-expression. One of the earliest anonymous social media forums was 2channel, which was first introduced online on May 30, 1999, as a Japanese text board forum. With the way digital content is consumed and created continuously changing, the trending shift from web to mobile applications is also affecting anonymous social media. This can be seen as anonymous blogging, or various other format based content platforms such as nameless question and answer online platforms like Ask.fm introduced mobile versions of their services. The number of new networks joining the anonymous social sharing scene continues to grow rapidly. == Degrees of anonymity == Across different forms of anonymous social media there are varying degrees of anonymity. Some applications, such as Librex, require users to sign up for an account, even though their profile is not linked to their posts. While these applications remain anonymous, some of these sites can sync up with the user's contact list or location to develop a context within the social community and help personalize the user's experience, such as Yik Yak or Secret. Other sites, such as 4chan and 2channel, allow for a purer form of anonymity as users are not required to create an account, and posts default to the username of "Anonymous". While users can still be traced through their IP address, there are anonymizing services like I2P or various proxy server services that encrypt a user's identity online by running it through different routers. Secret users must provide a phone number or email when signing up for the service, and their information is encrypted into their posts. Stylometry poses a risk to the anonymity or pseudonymity of social media users, who may be identifiable by writing style; in turn, they may use adversarial stylometry to resist such identification. == Controversy == Apps such as Formspring, Ask, Sarahah, Whisper, and Secret have elicited discussion around the rising popularity of anonymity apps, including debate and anticipation about this social sharing class. As more and more platforms join the league of anonymous social media, there is growing concern about the ethics and morals of anonymous social networking as cases of cyber-bullying, and personal defamation occurs. Formspring, also known as spring.me, and Ask.fm have both been associated with teen suicides as a result of cyberbullying on the sites. Formspring has been associated with at least three teen suicides and Ask.fm with at least five. For instance, the app Secret got shut down due to its escalated use of cyberbullying. The app Yik Yak has also helped to contribute to more cyberbullying situations and, in turn, was blocked on some school networks. Their privacy policy meant that users could not be identified without a subpoena, search warrant, or court order. Another app called After School also sparked controversy for its app design that lets students post any anonymous content. Due to these multiple controversies, the app has been removed from both Apple and Google app stores. As the number of people using these platforms multiplies, unintended uses of the apps have increased, urging popular networks to enact in-app warnings and prohibit the use for middle and high school students. 70% of teens admit to making an effort to conceal their online behavior from their parents. Even Snapchat has some relation to the health of children after using social media. This is an app that is meant to be quick and simple but in many ways it can be overwhelming. A person can post something, and it will be gone in seconds. Oftentimes, the post that was made was inappropriate and harmful to another person. It's a never-ending cycle. Some of these apps have also been criticized for causing chaos in American schools, such as lockdowns and evacuations. In order to limit the havoc caused, anonymous apps are currently removing all abusive and harmful posts. Apps such as Yik Yak, Secret, and Whisper are removing these posts by outsourcing the job of content supervision to oversea surveillance companies. These companies hire a team of individuals to inspect and remove any harmful or abusive posts. Furthermore, algorithms are also used to detect and remove any abusive posts the individuals may have missed. Another method used by the anonymous app named Cloaq to reduce the number of harmful and abusive posts is to limit the number of users that can register during a certain period. Under this system, all contents are still available to the public, but only registered users can post. Other websites such as YouTube have gone on to create new policies regarding anonymity. YouTube now does not allow anonymous comments on videos. Users must have a Google account to like, dislike, comment or reply to comments on videos. Once a sign-in user "likes" a video, it will be added to that user's 'Liked video playlist'. YouTube changed their "Liked video playlist" policy in December 2019, allowing a signed-in user to keep their "Liked video playlist" private. Historically, these controversies and the rise of cyberbullying have been blamed on the anonymous aspect of many social media platforms, but about half of US adult online harassment cases do not involve anonymity, and researchers have found that if targeted harassment exists offline it will also be found online, because online harassment is a reflection of existing prejudices. == As platforms for anonymous discussion == Anonymous social media can be used for political discussion in countries where political opinions opposed to the government are normally suppressed, and allow persons of different genders to communicate freely in cultures where such communication is not generally accepted. In the United States, the 2016 presidential election led to an increase in the use of anonymous social media websites to express political stances. Moreover, anonymous social media can also provide authentic connection to complete anonymous communication. There have been cases where these anonymous platforms have saved individuals from life-threatening situation or spread news about a social cause. Additionally, anonymous social websites also allow internet users to communicate while also safeguarding personal information from criminal actors and corporations that sell users' data. A study in 2017 on the content posted to 4chan's /pol/ board found that the majority of the content was unique, including 70% of the 1 million images included in the studied data set. == Revenue generated by anonymous social media == === Anonymous apps === Generating revenue from anonymous apps has been a discussion for investors. Since little information is collected about the users, it is difficult for anonymous apps to advertise to users. However some apps, such as Whisper, have found a method to overcome this obstacle. They have developed a "keyword-based" approach, where advertisements are shown to users depending on certain words they type. The app Yik Yak has been able to capitalize on the features they provide. Anonymous apps such a Chrends take the approach of using anonymity to provide freedom of speech. Telephony app Burner has regularly been a top grossing utilities app in the iOS and Android app stores using its phone number generation technology. Despite the success of some anonymous apps, there are also apps, such as Secret, which have yet to find a way to generate revenue. The idea of an anonymous app has also caused mixed opinions within investors. Some investors have invested a large sum of money because they see the potential revenue generated within these apps. Other investors have stayed away from investing these apps because they feel these apps bring more harm than good. === Anonymous sites === There are several sources to generate revenue for anonymous social media sites. One source of revenue is by implementing programs such as a premium membership or a gift-exchanging program. Another source of revenue is by merchandising goods and specific usernames to users. In addition, sites such as FMyLife, have implemented a policy where the anonymous site will receive 50% of profit from apps that makes money off it. In terms of advertisements, some anonymous sites have had troubles implementing or attracting them. There are several reasons for this problem. Anonymous sites, such as 4chan, have received few advertisement offers due to some of the contents it generates. Other anonymous sites, such as Reddit, have been ca

Percept (artificial intelligence)

A percept is the input that an intelligent agent is perceiving at any given moment. It is essentially the same concept as a percept in psychology, except that it is being perceived not by the brain but by the agent. A percept is detected by a sensor, often a camera, processed accordingly, and acted upon by an actuator. Each percept is added to a "percept sequence", which is a complete history of each percept ever detected. The agent's action at any instant point may depend on the entire percept sequence up to that particular instant point. An intelligent agent chooses how to act not only based on the current percept, but the percept sequence. The next action is chosen by the agent function, which maps every percept to an action. For example, if a camera were to record a gesture, the agent would process the percepts, calculate the corresponding spatial vectors, examine its percept history, and use the agent program (the application of the agent function) to act accordingly. == Examples == Examples of percepts include inputs from touch sensors, cameras, infrared sensors, sonar, microphones, mice, and keyboards. A percept can also be a higher-level feature of the data, such as lines, depth, objects, faces, or gestures.

Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Dilek Z. Hakkani-Tür is a Turkish-American computer scientist focusing on speech processing, speech recognition, and dialogue systems. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. == Education and career == Hakkani-Tür is a 1994 graduate of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She continued her studies at Bilkent University, also in Ankara, where she earned a master's degree in 1996 and completed her Ph.D. in 2000. She worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs from 2001 to 2005, at the International Computer Science Institute from 2006 to 2010, at Microsoft Research from 2010 to 2016, at Google Research from 2016 to 2018, and at Amazon Alexa from 2018 to 2023. At Microsoft, she was in the team of scientists that built the first prototype of the Cortana virtual assistant. While working for Amazon Alexa, she also taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a distinguished visiting instructor. She joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty in 2023. She was editor-in-chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing from 2019 to 2021, and is president of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue of the Association for Computational Linguistics for the 2023–2025 term. She has served as co-editor-in-chief of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics since 2024. == Recognition == In 2014, Hakkani-Tür was elected as an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to spoken language processing", and as a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association "for contributions to advancing the state-of-the-art in spoken language processing, especially for human/human and human/machine conversational understanding". In 2024, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics for her contributions to spoken dialogue systems.

Philipp Koehn

Philipp Koehn (born 1 August 1971 in Erlangen, West Germany) is a computer scientist and researcher in the field of machine translation. His primary research interest is statistical machine translation and he is one of the inventors of a method called phrase based machine translation. This is a sub-field of statistical translation methods that employs sequences of words (or so-called "phrases") as the basis of translation, expanding the previous word based approaches. A 2003 paper which he authored with Franz Josef Och and Daniel Marcu called Statistical phrase-based translation has attracted wide attention in Machine translation community and has been cited over a thousand times. Phrase based methods are widely used in machine translation applications in industry. Philipp Koehn received his PhD in computer science in 2003 from the University of Southern California, where he worked at the Information Sciences Institute advised by Kevin Knight. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow under Michael Collins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in the School of Informatics in 2005. He was appointed reader in 2010 and professor in 2012. In 2014, he was appointed professor at the computer science department of The Johns Hopkins University, where he is affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing. == Moses statistical machine translation decoder == The Moses machine translation decoder is an open source project that was created by and is maintained under the guidance of Philipp Koehn. The Moses decoder is a platform for developing Statistical machine translation systems given a parallel corpus for any language pair. The decoder was mainly developed by Hieu Hoang and Philipp Koehn at the University of Edinburgh and extended during a Johns Hopkins University Summer Workshop and further developed under Euromatrix and GALE project funding. The decoder (which is part of a complete statistical machine translation toolkit) is the de facto benchmark for research in the field. Although Koehn continues to play a major role in the development of Moses, the Moses decoder was supported by the European Framework 6 projects Euromatrix, TC-Star, the European Framework 7 projects EuroMatrixPlus, Let's MT, META-NET and MosesCore and the DARPA GALE project, as well as several universities such as the University of Edinburgh, the University of Maryland, ITC-irst, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others. Substantial additional contributors to the Moses decoder include Hieu Hoang, Chris Dyer, Josh Schroeder, Marcello Federico, Richard Zens, and Wade Shen. == Europarl corpus == The Europarl corpus is a set of documents that consists of the proceedings of the European Parliament from 1996 to the present. The corpus has been compiled and expanded by a group of researchers led by Philipp Koehn at University of Edinburgh. The data that makes up the corpus was extracted from the website of the European Parliament and then prepared for linguistic research. The latest release (2012) comprised up to 60 million words per language, with 21 European languages represented: Romanic (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian), Germanic (English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish), Slavic (Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene), Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), and Greek. == Other interests and activities in chronological order == Koehn is a professor at Johns Hopkins University where he continues his research into machine translation through his affiliation with the Center for Language and Speech Processing Koehn is a professor and chair of machine translation at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics and contributes to its statistical machine translation group which organises workshops, seminars and project related to the subject. Koehn has consulted to SYSTRAN periodically between 2006 and 2011. SYSTRAN was acquired by CLSI, a Korean machine translation company in April 2014. Koehn worked for Facebook/META AI Research from 2018 to 2022. Koehn is also chief scientist for Omniscien Technologies and a shareholder in Omniscien Technologies since 2007. Omniscien Technologies is a private company developing and commercialising machine translation technologies. Koehn authored a book titled "Statistical Machine Translation" in 2009 and a book titled "Neural Machine Translation" in 2020. == Awards and recognition == 2013: One of three finalists in the category of Research for the European Patent Office (EPO) 2013 European Inventor Award. Koehn was recognised for patent EP 1488338 B, Phrase-Based Joint Probability Model for Statistical Machine Translations, a translation model that uses mathematical probabilities to determine the most likely interpretation of chunks of text between foreign languages. 2015: Koehn received the Award of Honor of the International Association for Machine Translation. 2024: Koehn was named Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

How to Choose an AI Code Generator

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Universal IR Evaluation

In computer science, Universal IR Evaluation (information retrieval evaluation) aims to develop measures of database retrieval performance that shall be comparable across all information retrieval tasks. == Measures of "relevance" == IR (information retrieval) evaluation begins whenever a user submits a query (search term) to a database. If the user is able to determine the relevance of each document in the database (relevant or not relevant), then for each query, the complete set of documents is naturally divided into four distinct (mutually exclusive) subsets: relevant documents that are retrieved, not relevant documents that are retrieved, relevant documents that are not retrieved, and not relevant documents that are not retrieved. These four subsets (of documents) are denoted by the letters a, b, c, d respectively and are called Swets variables, named after their inventor. In addition to the Swets definitions, four relevance metrics have also been defined: Recall refers to the fraction of relevant documents that are retrieved (a/(a+b)), and Precision refers to the fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant (a/(a+c)). These are the most commonly used and well-known relevance metrics found in the IR evaluation literature. Two less commonly used metrics include the Fallout, i.e., the fraction of not relevant documents that are retrieved (b/(b+d)), and the Miss, which refers to the fraction of relevant documents that are not retrieved (c/(c+d)) during any given search. == Universal IR evaluation techniques == Universal IR evaluation addresses the mathematical possibilities and relationships among the four relevance metrics Precision, Recall, Fallout and Miss, denoted by P, R, F and M, respectively. One aspect of the problem involves finding a mathematical derivation of a complete set of universal IR evaluation points. The complete set of 16 points, each one a quadruple of the form (P, R, F, M), describes all the possible universal IR outcomes. For example, many of us have had the experience of querying a database and not retrieving any documents at all. In this case, the Precision would take on the undetermined form 0/0, the Recall and Fallout would both be zero, and the Miss would be any value greater than zero and less than one (assuming a mix of relevant and not relevant documents were in the database, none of which were retrieved). This universal IR evaluation point would thus be denoted by (0/0, 0, 0, M), which represents only one of the 16 possible universal IR outcomes. The mathematics of universal IR evaluation is a fairly new subject since the relevance metrics P, R, F, M were not analyzed collectively until recently (within the past decade). A lot of the theoretical groundwork has already been formulated, but new insights in this area await discovery.

European Association for Machine Translation

The European Association for Machine Translation is the European branch of the International Association for Machine Translation Archived 2010-06-24 at the Wayback Machine. It is a non-profit organisation and organises conferences and workshops on the subject of machine translation. It was registered in 1991 in Switzerland and is the only organisation of its type in Europe.