Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation founded in 2015 to support cloud-native computing. == History == It was announced alongside Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the Linux Foundation by Google as a seed technology. Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, RX-M, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware. Today, CNCF is supported by over 450 members. In August 2018 Google announced that it was handing over operational control of Kubernetes to the community. == Projects == Argo is a collection of tools for getting work done with Kubernetes. Among its main features are Workflows and Events. It was accepted to CNCF on March 26, 2020 at the Incubating maturity level and then moved to the Graduated maturity level on December 6, 2022. cert-manager provisions and manages TLS certificates in Kubernetes. It was accepted to CNCF on November 10, 2020, moved to the Incubating maturity level on September 19, 2022, and then moved to the Graduated maturity level on September 29, 2024. Cilium provides networking, security, and observability for Kubernetes deployments using eBPF technology. It joined the CNCF at incubation level in October 2021 and the CNCF announced its graduation in October 2023. containerd is an industry-standard core container runtime. It is currently available as a daemon for Linux and Windows, which can manage the complete container lifecycle of its host system. In 2015, Docker donated the OCI Specification to The Linux Foundation with a reference implementation called runc. Since February 28, 2019 it is an official CNCF project. Its general availability and intention to donate the project to CNCF was announced by Docker in 2017. CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. Its graduation was announced in 2019. Dapr, the distributed application runtime, provides APIs for building secure and reliable microservices and agentic AI systems. Dapr was donated to the CNCF in November 2021 and joined at incubation level. The CNCF announced its graduation in November 2024. Envoy: Originally built at Lyft to move their architecture away from a monolith, Envoy is a high-performance open source edge and service proxy that makes the network transparent to applications. Lyft contributed Envoy to Cloud Native Computing Foundation in September 2017. etcd is a distributed key value store, providing a method of storing data across a cluster of machines. It became a CNCF incubating project in 2018 at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle that year. Falco is an open source and cloud native runtime security initiative. It is the "de facto Kubernetes threat detection engine". It became an incubating project in January 2020 and graduated in February 2024. Flux is an open source project for powering GitOps in Kubernetes clusters. It provides the GitOps Toolkit, a set of Kubernetes APIs that allow you to define how configuration source code is securely pulled into your cluster and deployed by popular Kubernetes manifests rendering engines like Kustomize and Helm. The most recommended source mechanism is the OCIRepository API, which provides enhanced security and benefits from container image tooling out there. Flux has also notification integrations with popular services like Prometheus Alertmanager, PagerDuty, Slack and so on. Flux has graduated in CNCF in 2022. Harbor is an "open source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, signs, and scans content." It became an incubating project in September 2019 and graduated in June 2020. Helm is a package manager that helps developers "easily manage and deploy applications onto the Kubernetes cluster." It joined the incubating level in June 2018 and graduated in April 2020. Istio is a service mesh technology. It was accepted by CNCF in September 2022 and graduated on July 12, 2023. Jaeger, Created by Uber Engineering, Jaeger is an open source distributed tracing system inspired by Google Dapper paper and OpenZipkin community. It can be used for tracing microservice-based architectures, including distributed context propagation, distributed transaction monitoring, root cause analysis, service dependency analysis, and performance/latency optimization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept Jaeger as the 12th hosted project in September 2017 and became a graduated project in 2019. In 2020 it became an approved and fully integrated part of the CNCF ecosystem. Kubernetes is an open source framework for automating deployment and managing applications in a containerized and clustered environment. "It aims to provide better ways of managing related, distributed components across the varied infrastructure." It was originally designed by Google and donated to The Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Kubernetes as the seed technology. The "large and diverse" community supporting the project has made its staying power more robust than other, older technologies of the same ilk. In January 2020, the CNCF annual report showed significant growth in interest, training, event attendance and investment related to Kubernetes. Linkerd is CNCF's fifth member project, and the project that coined the term "service mesh". Linkerd adds observability, security, and reliability features to applications by adding them to the platform rather than the application layer, and features a "micro-proxy" to maximize speed and security of its data plane. Linkerd graduated from CNCF in July 2021. Open Policy Agent (OPA) is "an open source general-purpose policy engine and language for cloud infrastructure." It became a CNCF incubating project in April 2019. OPA graduated from CNCF in February 2021. Prometheus is a cloud monitoring tool sponsored by SoundCloud in early iterations. In August 2018, the tool was designated a graduated project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation member project. Rook is CNCF's first cloud native storage project. It became an incubation level project in 2018 and graduated in October 2020. SPIFFE is an open standard and framework for workload identity, much the same way that OAuth is an open standard and framework for human identity. It is built from the ground up to accommodate modern computing environments, which operate with systems scale and velocity (as opposed to human scale and velocity), while still maintaining interoperability with existing technologies like OAuth and X.509 Public key infrastructure. Unlike other identity standards, SPIFFE supports multiple credential types for a single identity, ensuring that the highly varied needs of production environments are consistently met without compromise. SPIFFE joined the CNCF as a sandbox project in 2018, was accepted to incubation in 2020, and graduated in 2022. SPIRE is an open source identity provider for workloads based on the SPIFFE framework. It is highly pluggable, and fills the attestation and issuance needs required by any workload identity solution. The plugin interfaces it exposes allows users to write integrations with in-house systems, build internal self-service portals, and more. It is a very powerful building block for issuing short-lived identity credentials to dynamic cloud workloads. SPIRE became a CNCF Graduated project in 2022. The Update Framework (TUF) helps developers to secure new or existing software update systems, which are often found to be vulnerable to many known attacks. TUF addresses this widespread problem by providing a comprehensive, flexible security framework that developers can integrate with any software update system. TUF was CNCF's first security-focused project and the ninth project overall to graduate from the foundation's hosting program. TiKV provides a distributed key–value database. Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, first created for internal use by YouTube. It became a CNCF project in 2018 and graduated in November 2019. Contour is a management server for Envoy that can direct the management of Kubernetes' traffic. Contour also provides routing features that are more advanced than Kubernetes' out-of-the-box Ingress specification. VMWare contributed the project to CNCF in July 2020. Cortex offers horizontally scalable, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus and works alongside Amazon DynamoDB, Google Bigtable, Cassandra, S3, GCS, and Microsoft Azure. It was introduced into the ecosystem incubator alongside Thanos in August 2020. CRI-O is an Open Container Initiative (OCI) based "implementation of Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface". CRI-O allows Kubernetes to be container runtime-agnostic. It became an incubating project in 2019. gRPC is a "modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment." The project was formed in 2015 when Google decided to open sou

Topincs

Topincs is a software for rapid development of web databases and web applications. It is based on LAMP and the semantic technology Topic Maps. A Topincs web database makes information accessible through browsing very much like a Wiki. Editing a page on a subject is done through forms rather than markup editing. A web database can be tailored into a web application to provide specific user groups a contextualized approach to the data. All modeling and development tasks are performed in the web browser. No other development tools are necessary. The server requires Apache, MySQL and PHP. The client works on any standards-compliant web browser on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. The layout is automatically adjusted to smaller screens. The programmatic access to data is done via a virtual object-oriented programming interface which is set up over the schema in a few minutes. It is interpreted rather than generated. Portions of the database can be pulled into memory to accelerate bulk access. == Features == Browseable data High-quality web forms Little to no programming Development done in the browser, no other tools required Client runs in any standard-compliant web browser Virtual object-oriented programming interface User interface adjusts to screen size Supports desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones Flexible data modeling == Challenges == Requires rethinking the development process and dropping many hard learned habits Requires a familiarity with two ISO standards ISO 13259 and 19756 Forms cannot be easily adjusted in layout and behavior Server installation difficult and prone to error == License == Topincs can be used in a private network for any purpose for free. The use in a public network is restricted to non-commercial applications.

AlphaGo

AlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go. It was developed by the London-based DeepMind Technologies, an acquired subsidiary of Google. Subsequent versions of AlphaGo became increasingly powerful, including a version that competed under the name Master. After retiring from competitive play, AlphaGo Master was succeeded by an even more powerful version known as AlphaGo Zero, which was completely self-taught without learning from human games. AlphaGo Zero was then generalized into a program known as AlphaZero, which played additional games, including chess and shogi. AlphaZero has in turn been succeeded by a program known as MuZero which learns without being taught the rules. AlphaGo and its successors use a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to find its moves based on knowledge previously acquired by machine learning, specifically by an artificial neural network (a deep learning method) by extensive training, both from human and computer play. A neural network is trained to identify the best moves and the winning percentages of these moves. This neural network improves the strength of the tree search, resulting in stronger move selection in the next iteration. In October 2015, in a match against Fan Hui, the original AlphaGo became the first computer Go program to beat a human professional Go player without handicap on a full-sized 19×19 board. In March 2016, it beat Lee Sedol in a five-game match, the first time a computer Go program has beaten a 9-dan professional without handicap. Although it lost to Lee Sedol in the fourth game, Lee resigned in the final game, giving a final score of 4 games to 1 in favour of AlphaGo. In recognition of the victory, AlphaGo was awarded an honorary 9-dan by the Korea Baduk Association. The lead up and the challenge match with Lee Sedol were documented in a documentary film also titled AlphaGo, directed by Greg Kohs. The win by AlphaGo was chosen by Science as one of the Breakthrough of the Year runners-up on 22 December 2016. At the 2017 Future of Go Summit, the Master version of AlphaGo beat Ke Jie, the number one ranked player in the world at the time, in a three-game match, after which AlphaGo was awarded professional 9-dan by the Chinese Weiqi Association. After the match between AlphaGo and Ke Jie, DeepMind retired AlphaGo, while continuing AI research in other areas. The self-taught AlphaGo Zero achieved a 100–0 victory against the early competitive version of AlphaGo, and its successor AlphaZero was perceived as the world's top player in Go by the end of the 2010s. == History == Go is considered much more difficult for computers to win than other games such as chess, because its strategic and aesthetic nature makes it hard to directly construct an evaluation function, and its much larger branching factor makes it prohibitively difficult to use traditional AI methods such as alpha–beta pruning, tree traversal and heuristic search. Almost two decades after IBM's computer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1997 match, the strongest Go programs using artificial intelligence techniques only reached about amateur 5-dan level, and still could not beat a professional Go player without a handicap. In 2012, the software program Zen, running on a four PC cluster, beat Masaki Takemiya (9p) twice at five- and four-stone handicaps. In 2013, Crazy Stone beat Yoshio Ishida (9p) at a four-stone handicap. According to DeepMind's David Silver, the AlphaGo research project was formed around 2014 to test how well a neural network using deep learning can compete at Go. AlphaGo represents a significant improvement over previous Go programs. In 500 games against other available Go programs, including Crazy Stone and Zen, AlphaGo running on a single computer won all but one. In a similar matchup, AlphaGo running on multiple computers won all 500 games played against other Go programs, and 77% of games played against AlphaGo running on a single computer. The distributed version in October 2015 was using 1,202 CPUs and 176 GPUs. === Match against Fan Hui === In October 2015, the distributed version of AlphaGo defeated the European Go champion Fan Hui, a 2-dan (out of 9 dan possible) professional, five to zero. This was the first time a computer Go program had beaten a professional human player on a full-sized board without handicap. The announcement of the news was delayed until 27 January 2016 to coincide with the publication of a paper in the journal Nature describing the algorithms used. === Match against Lee Sedol === AlphaGo played South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol, ranked 9-dan, one of the best players at Go, with five games taking place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea on 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15 March 2016, which were video-streamed live. Out of five games, AlphaGo won four games and Lee won the fourth game which made him recorded as the only human player who beat AlphaGo in all of its 74 official games. AlphaGo ran on Google's cloud computing with its servers located in the United States. The match used Chinese rules with a 7.5-point komi, and each side had two hours of thinking time plus three 60-second byoyomi periods. The version of AlphaGo playing against Lee used a similar amount of computing power as was used in the Fan Hui match. The Economist reported that it used 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs. At the time of play, Lee Sedol had the second-highest number of Go international championship victories in the world after South Korean player Lee Chang-ho who kept the world championship title for 16 years. Since there is no single official method of ranking in international Go, the rankings may vary among the sources. While he was ranked top sometimes, some sources ranked Lee Sedol as the fourth-best player in the world at the time. AlphaGo was not specifically trained to face Lee nor was designed to compete with any specific human players. The first three games were won by AlphaGo following resignations by Lee. However, Lee beat AlphaGo in the fourth game, winning by resignation at move 180. AlphaGo then continued to achieve a fourth win, winning the fifth game by resignation. The prize was US$1 million. Since AlphaGo won four out of five and thus the series, the prize will be donated to charities, including UNICEF. Lee Sedol received $150,000 for participating in all five games and an additional $20,000 for his win in Game 4. In June 2016, at a presentation held at a university in the Netherlands, Aja Huang, one of the Deep Mind team, revealed that they had patched the logical weakness that occurred during the 4th game of the match between AlphaGo and Lee, and that after move 78 (which was dubbed the "divine move" by many professionals), it would play as intended and maintain Black's advantage. Before move 78, AlphaGo was leading throughout the game, but Lee's move caused the program's computing powers to be diverted and confused. Huang explained that AlphaGo's policy network of finding the most accurate move order and continuation did not precisely guide AlphaGo to make the correct continuation after move 78, since its value network did not determine Lee's 78th move as being the most likely, and therefore when the move was made AlphaGo could not make the right adjustment to the logical continuation. === Sixty online games === On 29 December 2016, a new account on the Tygem server named "Magister" (shown as 'Magist' at the server's Chinese version) from South Korea began to play games with professional players. It changed its account name to "Master" on 30 December, then moved to the FoxGo server on 1 January 2017. On 4 January, DeepMind confirmed that the "Magister" and the "Master" were both played by an updated version of AlphaGo, called AlphaGo Master. As of 5 January 2017, AlphaGo Master's online record was 60 wins and 0 losses, including three victories over Go's top-ranked player, Ke Jie, who had been quietly briefed in advance that Master was a version of AlphaGo. After losing to Master, Gu Li offered a bounty of 100,000 yuan (US$14,400) to the first human player who could defeat Master. Master played at the pace of 10 games per day. Many quickly suspected it to be an AI player due to little or no resting between games. Its adversaries included many world champions such as Ke Jie, Park Jeong-hwan, Yuta Iyama, Tuo Jiaxi, Mi Yuting, Shi Yue, Chen Yaoye, Li Qincheng, Gu Li, Chang Hao, Tang Weixing, Fan Tingyu, Zhou Ruiyang, Jiang Weijie, Chou Chun-hsun, Kim Ji-seok, Kang Dong-yun, Park Yeong-hun, and Won Seong-jin; national champions or world championship runners-up such as Lian Xiao, Tan Xiao, Meng Tailing, Dang Yifei, Huang Yunsong, Yang Dingxin, Gu Zihao, Shin Jinseo, Cho Han-seung, and An Sungjoon. All 60 games except one were fast-paced games with three 20 or 30 seconds byo-yomi. Master offered to extend the byo-yomi to one minute when playing with Nie Weiping in consideration of his age. After winning its 59th game Master revealed itse

TD-Gammon

TD-Gammon is a computer backgammon program developed in the 1990s by Gerald Tesauro at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Its name comes from the fact that it is an artificial neural net trained by a form of temporal-difference learning, specifically TD-Lambda. It explored strategies that humans had not pursued and led to advances in the theory of correct backgammon play. In 1993, TD-Gammon (version 2.1) was trained with 1.5 million games of self-play, and achieved a level of play just slightly below that of the top human backgammon players of the time. In 1998, during a 100-game series, it was defeated by the world champion by a mere margin of 8 points. Its unconventional assessment of some opening strategies had been accepted and adopted by expert players. TD-gammon is commonly cited as an early success of reinforcement learning and neural networks, and was cited in, for example, papers for deep Q-learning and AlphaGo. == Algorithm for play and learning == During play, TD-Gammon examines on each turn all possible legal moves and all their possible responses (lookahead search), feeds each resulting board position into its evaluation function, and chooses the move that leads to the board position that got the highest score. In this respect, TD-Gammon is no different than almost any other computer board-game program. TD-Gammon's innovation was in how it learned its evaluation function. TD-Gammon's learning algorithm consists of updating the weights in its neural net after each turn to reduce the difference between its evaluation of previous turns' board positions and its evaluation of the present turn's board position—hence "temporal-difference learning". The score of any board position is a set of four numbers reflecting the program's estimate of the likelihood of each possible game result: White wins normally, Black wins normally, White wins a gammon, Black wins a gammon. For the final board position of the game, the algorithm compares with the actual result of the game rather than its own evaluation of the board position. The core of TD-gammon is a neural network with 3 layers. The input layer has two types of neurons. One type codes for the board position. They are non-negative integers ranging from 0 to 15, indicating the number of White or Black checkers at each board location. There are 99 input neurons for each, totaling 198 neurons. Another type codes for hand-crafted features previously used in Neurogammon. These features encoded standard concepts used by human experts, such as "advanced anchor," "blockade strength," "home board strength" and the probability of a "blot" (single checker) being hit. The hidden layer contains hidden neurons. Later versions had more of these. The output layer contains 4 neurons, representing the network's estimate of the probability ("equity") that the current board would lead to. The 4 neurons code for: White normal win, White gammon win, Black normal win, Black gammon win. Backgammon win is so rare that Tesauro opted to not represent it. After each turn, the learning algorithm updates each weight in the neural net according to the following rule: w t + 1 − w t = α ( Y t + 1 − Y t ) ∑ k = 1 t λ t − k ∇ w Y k {\displaystyle w_{t+1}-w_{t}=\alpha (Y_{t+1}-Y_{t})\sum _{k=1}^{t}\lambda ^{t-k}\nabla _{w}Y_{k}} where: It was found that picking small λ {\displaystyle \lambda } offered performance roughly equally good, and large λ {\displaystyle \lambda } degraded performance. Because of this, after 1992, TD-Gammon was trained with λ = 0 {\displaystyle \lambda =0} , degenerating into standard TD-learning. This saved compute by a factor of 2. == Development history == Version 1.0 used simple 1-ply search: every next move is scored by the neural net, and the highest-scoring move is selected. Versions 2.0 and 2.1 used 2-ply search: Make a 1-ply analysis to remove unlikely moves ("forward pruning"). Make a 2-play minimax analysis for only the likely moves. Pick the best move, probability-weighted by each of the opponent's 21 possible dice rolls (weighting non-doubles twice as much as doubles). Versions 3.0 and 3.1 used 3-ply search, using 21 2 = 441 {\displaystyle 21^{2}=441} possible dice rolls instead of 21. The last version, 3.1, was trained specifically for an exhibition match against Malcolm Davis at the 1998 AAAI Hall of Champions. It lost at -8 points, mainly due to one blunder, where TD-Gammon opted to double and got gammoned at -32 points. == Experiments and stages of training == Unlike previous neural-net backgammon programs such as Neurogammon (also written by Tesauro), where an expert trained the program by supplying the "correct" evaluation of each position, TD-Gammon was at first programmed "knowledge-free". In early experimentation, using only a raw board encoding with no human-designed features, TD-Gammon reached a level of play comparable to Neurogammon: that of an intermediate-level human backgammon player. Even though TD-Gammon discovered insightful features on its own, Tesauro wondered if its play could be improved by using hand-designed features like Neurogammon's. Indeed, the self-training TD-Gammon with expert-designed features soon surpassed all previous computer backgammon programs. It stopped improving after about 1,500,000 games (self-play) using a three-layered neural network, with 198 input units encoding expert-designed features, 80 hidden units, and one output unit representing predicted probability of winning. == Advances in backgammon theory == TD-Gammon's exclusive training through self-play (rather than imitation learning) enabled it to explore strategies that humans previously had not considered or had ruled out erroneously. Its success with unorthodox strategies had a significant impact on the backgammon community. Late 1991, Bill Robertie, Paul Magriel, and Malcolm Davis, were invited to play against TD-Gammon (version 1.0). A total of 51 games were played, with TD-Gammon losing at -0.25 ppg. Robertie found TD-Gammon to be at the level of a competent advanced player, and better than any previous backgammon program. Robertie subsequently wrote about the use of TD-Gammon for backgammon study. For example, on the opening play, the conventional wisdom was that given a roll of 2-1, 4-1, or 5-1, White should move a single checker from point 6 to point 5. Known as "slotting", this technique trades the risk of a hit for the opportunity to develop an aggressive position. TD-Gammon found that the more conservative play of splitting 24-23 was superior. Tournament players began experimenting with TD-Gammon's move, and found success. Within a few years, slotting had disappeared from tournament play, replaced by splitting, though in 2006 it made a reappearance for 2-1. Backgammon expert Kit Woolsey found that TD-Gammon's positional judgement, especially its weighing of risk against safety, was superior to his own or any human's. TD-Gammon's excellent positional play was undercut by occasional poor endgame play. The endgame requires a more analytical approach, sometimes with extensive lookahead. TD-Gammon's limitation to two-ply lookahead put a ceiling on what it could achieve in this part of the game. TD-Gammon's strengths and weaknesses were the opposite of symbolic artificial intelligence programs and most computer software in general: it was good at matters that require an intuitive "feel" but bad at systematic analysis. It is also poor at doubling strategies. This is likely due to the fact that the neural network is trained without the doubling cube, with the doubling added by feeding the neural network's cubeless equity estimates into theoretically-based heuristic formulae. This was particularly the case in the 1998 exhibition match, where it played 100 games against Malcolm Davis. A single doubling blunder lost the match. TD-gammon was never commercialized or released to the public in some other form, but it inspired commercial backgammon programs based on neural networks, such as JellyFish (1994) and Snowie (1998).

Rohit Chadda

Rohit Chadda (born 26 August 1982) is an Indian investment banker and entrepreneur, who is the President & COO of Times Network. He leads the tech business portfolio and AI transformation of Times Group covering verticals like media tech, OTT, fintech, health tech, edu tech, ecommerce, gaming and sports. Previously, CEO of the digital business at Essel Group (Zee Entertainment, Zee Media and DNA), he was the co-founder of online food ordering platform Foodpanda. He is also the founder of omni-channel digital payments platform PayLo. He has been attributed for the turnaround of Zee Digital driving 4x growth in 2 years and bringing Zee's digital business to the second position on ComScore from ninth position making Zee the second largest digital media group in India. He has been featured among Top Tech CEOs of the decade (2010–2020) in India and was featured among Fortune 40 under 40 in 2015. == Education and early career == Chadda graduated from Delhi Technological University (formerly Delhi College of Engineering) with a degree in computer engineering and worked as a software engineer for Computer Sciences Corporation. In 2007 he joined Indian Institute of Management Calcutta to do his MBA after which he worked at Merrill Lynch as an investment banker in United Kingdom. He took an internal transfer to India in 2011. == Career == === Foodpanda === Chadda began his career in 2012 when he co-founded foodpanda. foodpanda expanded to around 40 countries before being bought by Delivery Hero. Before foodpanda got popular, he joked that he delivered pizza for a living. foodpanda had raised a total investment of over US$300 million till 2015. Chadda in the middle of 2015 stepped down from day-to-day responsibilities at Foodpanda to launch his digital payments startup. Foodpanda was acquired by its global competitor Delivery Hero in 2016. === Paylo === In 2015, he launched an omni-channel digital payments platform PayLo which acquired the in-restaurant payments app Ruplee in March 2016 for an undisclosed sum. PayLo was successful in the wake of demonetisation in India and expanded pan-India before being acquired by Immortal Technologies. Chadda believes that execution is more important than the idea to make a startup successful and the key challenge for experienced professionals to work in a startup environment is to unlearn what they have previously learned. PayLo acquired Ruplee before being itself acquired by Immortal Technologies. === Zee Group === Chadda took over as CEO of digital publishing of Zee Group in May 2019. Since 2017, he had led global product and strategy for Zee Group launching ZEE5, the flagship OTT of Zee Entertainment, across 170+ countries. Since June 2019, Zee Digital, the online arm of the Zee group, has registered the highest growth year-on-year among the top media publishers in India. Times Internet Limited, Network 18 Group, and India Today Group have grown by 45%, 21%, and 22% respectively from June 2020 over June 2019 while Zee Digital witnessed a growth of 123% over the same period. Zee Digital achieved its first milestone in September 2019 by crossing 100 million unique monthly visitors and was ranked 6th in the news and information category on ComScore India rankings at the time. Later in the month of March 2020 it crossed 150 million unique monthly visitors mark moving to 4th position. Further in May 2020 Zee Digital moved to 3rd position by crossing 185 million unique monthly visitors mark before finally ranking 2nd position in June 2020 in the ComScore rankings among all digital media groups in India. Chadda has led the transformation of the business of Zee Digital by scaling it to over 200 million users from 60 million users making it the second-largest digital media group in India. He attributes the growth from rank 9 to rank 2 in one year to the data and technology driven approach to content and the focus on vernacular languages. During his tenure, Zee Digital launched 8 new brand websites and 3 new languages to expand the product portfolio to 20 brands and 12 languages. During the US elections in November 2020, Zee Digital launched the English global news channel WION through a digital first approach across Asia Pacific, Middle East, UK and North America. Chadda launched Zee's UGC short video platform HiPi in the midst of the TikTok ban in India. Hipi was first launched within ZEE5 app ecosystem to capitalise on the reach of the OTT platform. After the success of the POC, he launched a standalone app for HiPi. HiPi is a short video platform that provides a complete video creation ecosystem along with news avenues of monetisation to content creators. He plans to use Zee's network reach of 600 million broadcast viewers and 300 million digital users to get creators on HiPi. HiPi launched India's first digital star hunt to allow users to audition for ZEE5 original shows through the short video platform. === Times Group === Chadda took over as President & COO of Times Network in September 2022. Leading the digital transformation of the group Chadda launched 11 new products in 18 months expanding the group's presence to various verticals in the tech business like fintech, health tech, edu tech, auto tech, OTT, ecommerce and gaming while extending the news vertical into business news, tech news and various vernacular languages. Within 4 months of his stint, in January 2023 he launched the digital platform for ET Now, targeting Gen Z, early jobbers and first time investors and laying the foundation for the fintech expansion for the brand. Since then, the product has expended to Hindi language targeting the larger Indian audience through the launch of ET Now Swadesh and further expanding to fintech business by launching ET Now Advisor, a distribution business focussing to upselling of cards, loans etc. to consumers by educating them and enabling them to make the right choices. ET Now reached 10 million users within the first 20 days of launch and became the No.1 business news channel on YouTube with 200 million views in April and May 2024. Expanding to health-tech, he launched AI powered daily health companion Health & Me in the presence of actor & fitness enthusiast Milind Soman. Chadda unveiled the auto-tech platform for Times Drive together with Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari showcasing the AI assisted platform that helps consumers make the right decisions when it comes to their automotive needs. In order to expand the group's presence into tech and gaming, Chadda acquired India's largest and most popular tech magazine Digit along with their digital platforms Digit.in and Skoar.gg in June 2024. Within a year, he was able to turnaround Digit's business with Digit.in becoming the No.1 Tech news platform in India in April 2025. Times Network launched college discovery platform unilist.in to enable students and parents search for the right course and institute for their higher education needs. With a focus on sports and gaming, Chadda launched India's first Inter-college esports championship under the brand of SKOAR College Gaming Championship. Times Network launched its OTT app Times Play under his leadership. The platform expanded its presence in the US through a partnership with Sling TV. He launched Pickleball Now which is the World's first TV channel focussed on the sport of Pickleball covering tournaments and leagues across the World. The channel has presence on TV and digital platforms and is being distributed to global markets through partnerships with BOTIM, Distro TV, Yupp TV and Rumble. In India, the channel is available on Jio TV, Jio TV+, Airtel Xtream Play, OTT Play, Dailyhunt. Times Group has launched India's Official Pickleball League affiliated with Indian Pickleball Association and Global Pickelball Federation which shall also be streamed live on Pickleball Now from 1st to 7th Dec 2025. === Investing and speaking === Chadda is a mentor at Esselerator, a Startup accelerator by Subhash Chandra Foundation. Esselerator is an initiative by Subhash Chandra, a billionaire Media baron, to promote and support tech entrepreneurs in domains like Media, Fintech and Education. Its powered by TiE Mumbai. Chadda is an angel investor in multiple technology startups like online school aggregator platform SchoolForSure.com. In 2019, he spoke at DPS to students on starting a business. At the time he remained CEO of Zee group's digital business division. == Philanthropy == Chadda organised a £1 mliion charity bike ride in aid of the British Asian Trust which saw participation by the Prince of Wales. Chadda presented the Prince of Wales with a cycling vest, which was said to be for his grandchildren. Chadda supports a non-profit organisation Mukkamaar founded by Bollywood actress Ishita Sharma that works towards fighting crime against women by teaching free self defence to young girls. He is helping the organisation launch their digital program through a WhatsApp-based chatbot. == A

Symbol level

In knowledge-based systems, agents choose actions based on the principle of rationality to move closer to a desired goal. The agent is able to make decisions based on knowledge it has about the world (see knowledge level). But for the agent to actually change its state, it must use whatever means it has available. This level of description for the agent's behavior is the symbol level. The term was coined by Allen Newell in 1982. For example, in a computer program, the knowledge level consists of the information contained in its data structures that it uses to perform certain actions. The symbol level consists of the program's algorithms, the data structures themselves, and so on.

Utah Artificial Intelligence Policy Act

The Utah Artificial Intelligence Policy Act (SB-149) was signed into law in Utah in 2024 and amended in 2025. The first state law in the United States specifically regulating generative AI, it went into effect on May 1, 2024. The law requires companies to disclose if their customers interact with AI instead of a human. It also established an Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. Amendments to the Act went into effect on May 7, 2025. While the 2024 Act requires companies to disclose generative AI use when asked by customers, the amendments introduced stricter requirements for higher-risk interactions. SB 226 mandates disclosure of AI use in high-risk interactions involving health, financial, and biometric data, or when providing consumers with advice on financial, legal, or healthcare matters.