In computer graphics, a texture atlas (also called a spritesheet or an image sprite in 2D game development) is an image containing multiple smaller images, usually packed together to reduce overall dimensions. An atlas can consist of uniformly-sized images or images of varying dimensions. A sub-image is drawn using custom texture coordinates to pick it out of the atlas. == Benefits == In an application where many small textures are used frequently, it is often more efficient to store the textures in a texture atlas which is treated as a single unit by the graphics hardware. This reduces both the disk I/O overhead and the overhead of a context switch by increasing memory locality. Careful alignment may be needed to avoid bleeding between sub textures when used with mipmapping and texture compression. In web development, images are packed into a sprite sheet to reduce the number of image resources that need to be fetched in order to display a page. == Gallery ==
TIMIT
TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of American English speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time. TIMIT was designed to further acoustic-phonetic knowledge and automatic speech recognition systems. It was commissioned by DARPA and corpus design was a joint effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and Texas Instruments (TI). The speech was recorded at TI, transcribed at MIT, and verified and prepared for publishing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). There is also a telephone bandwidth version called NTIMIT (Network TIMIT). TIMIT and NTIMIT are not freely available — either membership of the Linguistic Data Consortium, or a monetary payment, is required for access to the dataset. == Data == TIMIT contains ~5 hours of speech, of 10 sentences spoken by each of 630 speakers. The sentences were randomly sampled from a corpus of 2342 sentences. The speakers were native speakers of American English, classified under 8 major dialect regions: New England, Northern, North Midland, South Midland, Southern, New York City, Western, Army Brat (moved around). The speakers were 70% male and 30% female. Recordings were made in a noise-isolated recording booth at Texas Instrument, using a semi-automatic computer system (STEROIDS) to control the presentation of prompts to the speaker and the recording. Two-channel recordings were made using a Sennheiser HMD 414 headset-mounted microphone and a Brüel & Kjær 1/2" far-field pressure microphone (#4165). The speech was digitized at a sample rate of 20 kHz then and downsampled to 16 kHz. == History == The TIMIT telephone corpus was an early attempt to create a database with speech samples. It was published in the year 1988 on CD-ROM and consists of only 10 sentences per speaker. Two 'dialect' sentences were read by each speaker, as well as another 8 sentences selected from a larger set Each sentence averages 3 seconds long and is spoken by 630 different speakers. It was the first notable attempt in creating and distributing a speech corpus and the overall project has produced costs of 1.5 million US$. An update was released in October 1990. It included full 630-speaker corpus; checked and corrected transcriptions; word-alignment transcriptions; NIST SPHERE-headered waveform files and header manipulation software; phonemic dictionary; new test and training subsets balanced for dialectal and phonetic coverage; more extensive documentation. The full name of the project is DARPA-TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus and the acronym TIMIT stands for Texas Instruments/Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The main reason why a corpus of telephone speech was created was to train speech recognition software. In the Blizzard challenge, different software has the obligation to convert audio recordings into textual data and the TIMIT corpus was used as a standardized baseline.
Boundary vector field
The boundary vector field (BVF) is an external force for parametric active contours (i.e. Snakes). In the fields of computer vision and image processing, parametric active contours are widely used for segmentation and object extraction. The active contours move progressively towards its target based on the external forces. There are a number of shortcomings in using the traditional external forces, including the capture range problem, the concave object extraction problem, and high computational requirements. The BVF is generated by an interpolation scheme which reduces the computational requirement significantly, and at the same time, improves the capture range and concave object extraction capability. The BVF is also tested in moving object tracking and is proven to provide fast detection method for real time video applications.
Software engineering professionalism
Software engineering professionalism is a movement to make software engineering a profession, with aspects such as degree and certification programs, professional associations, professional ethics, and government licensing. The field is a licensed discipline in Texas in the United States (Texas Board of Professional Engineers, since 2013), Engineers Australia(Course Accreditation since 2001, not Licensing), and many provinces in Canada. == History == In 1993 the IEEE and ACM began a joint effort called JCESEP, which evolved into SWECC in 1998 to explore making software engineering into a profession. The ACM pulled out of SWECC in May 1999, objecting to its support for the Texas professionalization efforts, of having state licenses for software engineers. ACM determined that the state of knowledge and practice in software engineering was too immature to warrant licensing, and that licensing would give false assurances of competence even if the body of knowledge were mature. The IEEE continued to support making software engineering a branch of traditional engineering. In Canada the Canadian Information Processing Society established the Information Systems Professional certification process. Also, by the late 1990s (1999 in British Columbia) the discipline of software engineering as a professional engineering discipline was officially created. This has caused some disputes between the provincial engineering associations and companies who call their developers software engineers, even though these developers have not been licensed by any engineering association. In 1999, the Panel of Software Engineering was formed as part of the settlement between Engineering Canada and the Memorial University of Newfoundland over the school's use of the term "software engineering" in the name of a computer science program. Concerns were raised over the inappropriate use of the name "software engineering" to describe non-engineering programs could lead to student and public confusion, and ultimately threaten public safety. The Panel issued recommendations to create a Software Engineering Accreditation Board, but the task force created to carry out the recommendations was unable to get the various stakeholders to agree to concrete proposals, resulting in separate accreditation boards. == Ethics == Software engineering ethics is a large field. In some ways it began as an unrealistic attempt to define bugs as unethical. More recently it has been defined as the application of both computer science and engineering philosophy, principles, and practices to the design and development of software systems. Due to this engineering focus and the increased use of software in mission critical and human critical systems, where failure can result in large losses of capital but more importantly lives such as the Therac-25 system, many ethical codes have been developed by a number of societies, associations and organizations. These entities, such as the ACM, IEEE, EGBC and Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals (ICCP) have formal codes of ethics. Adherence to the code of ethics is required as a condition of membership or certification. According to the ICCP, violation of the code can result in revocation of the certificate. Also, all engineering societies require conformance to their ethical codes; violation of the code results in the revocation of the license to practice engineering in the society's jurisdiction. These codes of ethics usually have much in common. They typically relate the need to act consistently with the client's interest, employer's interest, and most importantly the public's interest. They also outline the need to act with professionalism and to promote an ethical approach to the profession. A Software Engineering Code of Ethics has been approved by the ACM and the IEEE-CS as the standard for teaching and practicing software engineering. === Examples of codes of conduct === The following are examples of codes of conduct for Professional Engineers. These 2 have been chosen because both jurisdictions have a designation for Professional Software Engineers. Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia (EGBC): All members in the association's code of Ethics must ensure that the government, the public can rely on BC's professional engineers and Geoscientists to act at all times with fairness, courtesy and good faith to their employers, employee and customers, and to uphold the truth, honesty and trustworthiness, and to safe guard human life and the environment. This is just one of the many ways in which BC's Professional Engineers and Professional Geoscientists maintain their competitive edge in today's global marketplace. Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA): Different with British Columbia, the Alberta Government granted self governance to engineers, Geoscientists and geophysicists. All members in the APEGA have to accept legal and ethical responsibility for the work and to hold the interest of the public and society. The APEGA is a standards guideline of professional practice to uphold the protection of public interest for engineering, Geoscientists and geophysics in Alberta. === Opinions on ethics === Bill Joy argued that "better software" can only enable its privileged end users, make reality more power-pointy as opposed to more humane, and ultimately run away with itself so that "the future doesn't need us." He openly questioned the goals of software engineering in this respect, asking why it isn't trying to be more ethical rather than more efficient. In his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig argues that computer code can regulate conduct in much the same way as the legal code. Lessig and Joy urge people to think about the consequences of the software being developed, not only in a functional way, but also in how it affects the public and society as a whole. Overall, due to the youth of software engineering, many of the ethical codes and values have been borrowed from other fields, such as mechanical and civil engineering. However, there are many ethical questions that even these, much older, disciplines have not encountered. Questions about the ethical impact of internet applications, which have a global reach, have never been encountered until recently and other ethical questions are still to be encountered. This means the ethical codes for software engineering are a work in progress, that will change and update as more questions arise. == Independent licensing and certification exams == Since 2002, the IEEE Computer Society offered the Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) certification exam (in 2015 this was replaced by several similar certifications). A group of experts from industry and academia developed the exam and maintained it. Donald Bagert, and at a later period Stephen Tockey headed the certification committee. Contents of the exam centered around the SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) guide, with an additional emphasis on Professional Practices and Software Engineering Economics knowledge areas (KAs). The motivation was to produce a structure at an international level for software engineering's knowledge areas. == Criticism of licensing == Professional licensing has been criticized for many reasons. The field of software engineering is too immature Licensing would give false assurances of competence even if the body of knowledge were mature Software engineers would have to study years of calculus, physics, and chemistry to pass the exams, which is irrelevant to most software practitioners. Many (most?) computer science majors don't earn degrees in engineering schools, so they are probably unqualified to pass engineering exams. == Licensing by country == === United States === The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) classifies computer software engineers as a subcategory of "computer specialists", along with occupations such as computer scientist, Programmer, Database administrator and Network administrator. The BLS classifies all other engineering disciplines, including computer hardware engineers, as engineers. Many states prohibit unlicensed persons from calling themselves an Engineer, or from indicating branches or specialties not covered licensing acts. In many states, the title Engineer is reserved for individuals with a Professional Engineering license indicating that they have shown minimum level of competency through accredited engineering education, qualified engineering experience, and engineering board's examinations. In April 2013 the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) began offering a Professional Engineer (PE) exam for Software Engineering. The exam was developed in association with the IEEE Computer Society. NCEES ended the exam in April 2019 due to lack of participation. The American National Society of Professional Engineers provides a model law and lobbies legislatures to adopt occ
TinEye
TinEye is a reverse image search engine developed and offered by Idée, Inc., a company based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. TinEye allows users to search not using keywords but with images. Upon submitting an image, TinEye creates a "unique and compact digital signature or fingerprint" of the image and matches it with other indexed images. This procedure is able to match even heavily edited versions of the submitted image, but will not usually return similar images in the results. == History == Idée, Inc. was founded by Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore in 1999. Idée launched the service on May 6, 2008 and went into open beta in August that year. While computer vision and image identification research projects began as early as the 1980s, the company claims that TinEye is the first web-based image search engine to use image identification technology. The service was created with copyright owners and brand marketers as the intended user base, to look up unauthorized use and track where the brands are showing up respectively. In June 2014, TinEye claimed to have indexed more than five billion images for comparisons. However, this is a relatively small proportion of the total number of images available on the World Wide Web. As of September 2025, TinEye's search results claim to have over 77.6 billion images indexed for comparison. == Technology == A user uploads an image to the search engine (the upload size is limited to 20 MB) or provides a URL for an image or for a page containing the image. The search engine will look up other usage of the image in the internet, including modified images based upon that image, and report the date and time at which they were posted. TinEye does not recognize outlines of objects or perform facial recognition, but recognizes the entire image, and some altered versions of that image. This includes smaller, larger, and cropped versions of the image. TinEye has shown itself capable of retrieving different images from its database of the same subject, such as famous landmarks. TinEye is capable of searching for images in JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and TIFF format. Results generated from TinEye include the total number of matches in their database, a preview image, and the URL to each match. TinEye can sort results by best match, most changed, biggest image, newest, and oldest. User registration is optional and offers storage of the user's previous queries. Other features include embeddable widgets and bookmarklets. TinEye has also released their commercial API. == Usage == TinEye's ability to search the web for specific images (and modifications of those images) makes it a potential tool for the copyright holders of visual works to locate infringements on their copyright. It also creates a possible avenue for people who are looking to make use of imagery under orphan works to find the copyright holders of that imagery. Being that orphan works can be defined as "copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or impossible to identify and/or locate," the use of TinEye could potentially remove the orphan work status from online images that can be found in its database. === Fact-checking === It has been recommended by fact-checkers as a useful resource in attempts to verify the origin of images. As of 2019, TinEye specialized in copyright violations and finding exact versions of images online.
Ed (chatbot)
Ed was a chatbot co-developed by the Los Angeles Unified School District and AllHere Education. Described as a learning acceleration platform, it was the first personal assistant for students in the United States. Part of the district's Individual Acceleration Plan, it was able to interact with students both verbally and visually, offering support in 100 languages. The chatbot was launched on March 20, 2024, as part of the district's plan for academic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and to improve overall academic performance. Utilizing artificial intelligence, Ed organizes data and reports on grades, test scores, and attendance, creating individualized plans for each student. After the company behind it, AllHere, collapsed, the district shuttered operations of the chatbot on June 14, 2024. The firm is under investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. == History == On February 14, 2022, Alberto M. Carvalho became the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, pledging to give the district a full academic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2022, he announced the Individual Acceleration Plan for the district, which aimed to provide each student with a unique progress report and help them determine if they were on track to graduate. The district faced criticism from disability advocates for its management of Individualized Education Programs, and in April 2022, the United States Department of Education announced that the district had failed to provide appropriate educational services to students with disabilities during the pandemic. The district had been grappling with significant absenteeism issues since the pandemic, which led to declining academic performance and disengagement among students. On February 17, 2023, the district issued a request for proposals to develop a fully integrated portal system. Later that year, they signed a $6 million, five-year contract with AllHere Education, a Boston-based company founded in 2016. The introduction of Ed follows the public launch of ChatGPT, which has been utilized by both teachers and students in educational settings. On August 4, 2023, during an annual address at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Carvalho and the Los Angeles Unified School District announced the launch of Ed. The district invested $4 million into the chatbot, with Carvalho noting that this cost would be halved thanks to donor and grant funding. The chatbot was launched on March 20, 2024. Following its launch, a press conference was held to address security and technology concerns. Carvalho stated that the district had collaborated with security companies and incorporated filters to screen for threatening language. Months after its launch, AllHere Education furloughed most of its staff on June 14, citing their “current financial position” on its website as the reason. After learning about the furlough, the district terminated its dealings with AllHere Education. However, it stated its intention to bring the chatbot back in the future once officials determine the best course of action. Carvalho announced that he would appoint an independent task force to review what went wrong with AllHere Education and the chatbot. On February 25, 2026, the FBI served a search warrant on Carvalho’s home and office in connection with AllHere. The FBI also raided the LAUSD's headquarters. == Service == The chatbot was described as a personal assistant and a "one-stop shop for parents and students" who want to see information about a student's attendance and grades, as well as other resources from the district. Additionally, the application can function as an alarm clock, provide daily lunch menus from the school cafeteria, and offer updates on the location of school buses. The chatbot also helps students and parents who do not speak English as their first language by translating displayed information into approximately 100 different languages. The application can also help with submitting applications and give updates on progress and upcoming assignments. The district stated that the primary goal of Ed was to actively motivate students to complete homework and other tasks. == Reception == The chatbot received a mostly positive reception among parents and observers upon its launch. Some parents and teachers expressed caution about the technology, voicing concerns that the district's push for its implementation lacked public accountability. Rob Nelson from the University of Pennsylvania described the district's strategy as risky, saying that the release felt "like the beginning of a Clippy-level disaster". After the chatbot's shutdown, The 74 criticized it for misusing student data. Chris Whiteley, a former software engineer at AllHere Education, alleged that the data collected by the chatbot likely violated the district's data privacy rules.
Box blur
A box blur (also known as a box linear filter) is a spatial domain linear filter in which each pixel in the resulting image has a value equal to the average value of its neighboring pixels in the input image. It is a form of low-pass ("blurring") filter. A 3 by 3 box blur ("radius 1") can be written as matrix 1 9 [ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ] . {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{9}}{\begin{bmatrix}1&1&1\\1&1&1\\1&1&1\end{bmatrix}}.} Due to its property of using equal weights, it can be implemented using a much simpler accumulation algorithm, which is significantly faster than using a sliding-window algorithm. Box blurs are frequently used to approximate a Gaussian blur. By the central limit theorem, repeated application of a box blur will approximate a Gaussian blur. In the frequency domain, a box blur has zeros and negative components. That is, a sine wave with a period equal to the size of the box will be blurred away entirely, and wavelengths shorter than the size of the box may be phase-reversed, as seen when two bokeh circles touch to form a bright spot where there would be a dark spot between two bright spots in the original image. == Extensions == Gwosdek, et al. has extended Box blur to take a fractional radius: the edges of the 1-D filter are expanded with a fraction. It makes slightly better gaussian approximation possible due to the elimination of integer-rounding error. Mario Klingemann has a "stack blur" that tries to better emulate gaussian's look in one pass by stacking weights: 1 9 [ 1 2 3 2 1 ] {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{9}}{\begin{bmatrix}1&2&3&2&1\end{bmatrix}}} The triangular impulse response it forms decomposes to two rounds of box blur. Stacked Integral Image by Bhatia et al. takes the weighted average of a few box blurs to fit the gaussian response curve. == Implementation == The following pseudocode implements a 3x3 box blur. The example does not handle the edges of the image, which would not fit inside the kernel, so that these areas remain unblurred. In practice, the issue is better handled by: Introducing an alpha channel to represent the absence of colors; Extending the boundary by filling in values, ranked by quality: Fill in a mirrored image at the border Fill in a constant color extending from the last pixel Pad in a fixed color A number of optimizations can be applied when implementing the box blur of a radius r and N pixels: The box blur is a separable filter, so that only two 1D passes of averaging 2 r + 1 pixels will be needed, one horizontal and one vertical, for each pixel. This lowers the complexity from O(Nr2) to O(Nr). In digital signal processing terminology, each pass is a moving-average filter. Accumulation. Instead of discarding the sum for each pixel, the algorithm re-uses the previous sum, and updates it by subtracting away the old pixel and adding the new pixel in the blurring range. A summed-area table can be used similarly. This lowers the complexity from O(Nr) to O(N). When being used in multiple passes to approximate a Gaussian blur, the cascaded integrator–comb filter construction allows for doing the equivalent operation in a single pass.