Systems cause representational harm when they misrepresent a group of people in a negative manner. Representational harms include perpetuating harmful stereotypes about or minimizing the existence of a social group, such as a racial, ethnic, gender, or religious group. Machine learning algorithms often commit representational harm when they learn patterns from data that have algorithmic bias, and this has been shown to be the case with large language models. While preventing representational harm in models is essential to prevent harmful biases, researchers often lack precise definitions of representational harm and conflate it with allocative harm, an unequal distribution of resources among social groups, which is more widely studied and easier to measure. However, recognition of representational harms is growing and preventing them has become an active research area. Researchers have recently developed methods to effectively quantify representational harm in algorithms, making progress on preventing this harm in the future. == Types == Three prominent types of representational harm include stereotyping, denigration, and misrecognition. These subcategories present many dangers to individuals and groups. Stereotypes are oversimplified and usually undesirable representations of a specific group of people, usually by race and gender. This often leads to the denial of educational, employment, housing, and other opportunities. For example, the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans as highly intelligent and good at mathematics can be damaging professionally and academically. Representational harm happens when the representation of details teams improves damaging stereotypes, developing social exclusion and prejudice. This experience is particularly noticeable in the depiction of marginalised groups, containing people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, and people with handicaps. Media depictions of these groups generally stop working to catch their array and intricacy. Instead, they are typically reduced to one-dimensional caricatures, which ultimately continue social prejudices. These organised depictions contribute to the help of hazardous stereotypes and the marginalisation of these locations. Denigration is the action of unfairly criticizing individuals. This frequently happens when the demeaning of social groups occurs. For example, when searching for "Black-sounding" names versus "white-sounding" ones, some retrieval systems bolster the false perception of criminality by displaying ads for bail-bonding businesses. A system may shift the representation of a group to be of lower social status, often resulting in a disregard from society. Research shows that hazardous depictions in the media can have substantial emotional and social impacts on both individuals and areas. Lawrence Bobo examined the issue of Ethnic stereotype in film, tv, and marketing. African Americans are commonly received duties specified by features such as "violent tendencies," "laziness," or being "merely for contentment features." While these representations might appear varied externally, they stay to boost underlying frameworks of white prominence and racial inequality. As a circumstances, Black individuals are frequently represented as law offenders or in secondary roles, which adds to the support of Ethnic stereotype and Institutional racism. Misrecognition, or incorrect recognition, can display in many forms, including, but not limited to, erasing and alienating social groups, and denying people the right to self-identify. Erasing and alienating social groups involves the unequal visibility of certain social groups; specifically, systematic ineligibility in algorithmic systems perpetuates inequality by contributing to the underrepresentation of social groups. Not allowing people to self-identify is closely related as people's identities can be 'erased' or 'alienated' in these algorithms. Misrecognition causes more than surface-level harm to individuals: psychological harm, social isolation, and emotional insecurity can emerge from this subcategory of representational harm. == Quantification == As the dangers of representational harm have become better understood, some researchers have developed methods to measure representational harm in algorithms. Modeling stereotyping is one way to identify representational harm. Representational stereotyping can be quantified by comparing the predicted outcomes for one social group with the ground-truth outcomes for that group observed in real data. For example, if individuals from group A achieve an outcome with a probability of 60%, stereotyping would be observed if it predicted individuals to achieve that outcome with a probability greater than 60%. The group modeled stereotyping in the context of classification, regression, and clustering problems, and developed a set of rules to quantitatively determine if the model predictions exhibit stereotyping in each of these cases. Other attempts to measure representational harms have focused on applications of algorithms in specific domains such as image captioning, the act of an algorithm generating a short description of an image. In a study on image captioning, researchers measured five types of representational harm. To quantify stereotyping, they measured the number of incorrect words included in the model-generated image caption when compared to a gold-standard caption. They manually reviewed each of the incorrectly included words, determining whether the incorrect word reflected a stereotype associated with the image or whether it was an unrelated error, which allowed them to have a proxy measure of the amount of stereotyping occurring in this caption generation. These researchers also attempted to measure demeaning representational harm. To measure this, they analyzed the frequency with which humans in the image were mentioned in the generated caption. It was hypothesized that if the individuals were not mentioned in the caption, then this was a form of dehumanization. == Examples == One of the most notorious examples of representational harm was committed by Google in 2015 when an algorithm in Google Photos classified Black people as gorillas. Developers at Google said that the problem was caused because there were not enough faces of Black people in the training dataset for the algorithm to learn the difference between Black people and gorillas. Google issued an apology and fixed the issue by blocking its algorithms from classifying anything as a primate. In 2023, Google's photos algorithm was still blocked from identifying gorillas in photos. Another prevalent example of representational harm is the possibility of stereotypes being encoded in word embeddings, which are trained using a wide range of text. These word embeddings are the representation of a word as an array of numbers in vector space, which allows an individual to calculate the relationships and similarities between words. However, recent studies have shown that these word embeddings may commonly encode harmful stereotypes, such as the common example that the phrase "computer programmer" is oftentimes more closely related to "man" than it is to "women" in vector space. This could be interpreted as a misrepresentation of computer programming as a profession that is better performed by men, which would be an example of representational harm. == Addressing representational harm == Initiatives to minimise representational harm include advertising for even more inclusive and accurate portrayals of marginalised teams in the media. Scholars and protestors recommend that the method to reducing representational injury depends on raising the selection of voices both behind and before the digital video camera. When marginalized groups are provided the chance to represent themselves, they can check traditional stereotypes and present their experiences additional authentically. Over the last few years, efforts to increase representation of people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people in conventional media have made some progression. Films such as Selma, routed by Ava DuVernay, and tv series like Pose, developed by Ryan Murphy, have actually been extensively applauded for their nuanced and respectful representations of marginalised communities. These tasks existing complex individualities and stories that move past streamlined stereotypes. Self-representation is one more crucial method to addressing representational harm. By equipping marginalised locations to create their really own tales, media designers can effectively reduce the perpetuation of hazardous stereotypes. This procedure consists of both the manufacturing of media product by participants of these communities and proactively difficult typical media structures that have actually historically omitted them.
Ayoba
Ayoba is an African communication platform developed in South Africa. It is owned by Progressive Tech Holdings in Mauritius and managed by SIMFY Africa. Launched on May 4, 2019, as of April 2024, it has over 35 million active users. == History == Ayoba was first published on Google Play in February 2019. Its first marketing campaign and brand launch took place in Cameroon on May 4, 2019. In June 2019, the platform introduced its first eight channels. In November 2019, the platform reached one million active users, which increased to two million by June 2020. Subsequently, ayoba expanded its services, including the launch of games for Android in February 2020, Momo (Mobile Money) in Cameroon in May 2020, and MicroApps in May 2020. It also launched music and voice and video calling features in 12 territories in August 2020. The first version of ayoba for iOS was released in September 2020. In December of the same year, games and Messaging 2.0 were launched on the platform. In November 2020, it won Best Mobile Application at the African Digital Awards. In 2021, it won OTT Brand of the Year at the Marketing World Awards in Ghana. In December 2022, it received Top Innovative Technology and Telecom Product of the Year at the National Communications Awards in December 2022. In June 2023 ayoba partnered with BoomPlay and as of April 2024, it had 35 million monthly active users. Ayoba has partnered with Jumia Ghana to offer exclusive deals to users. Ayoba users can get a 10% discount on selected Jumia purchases through the app, with no data charges for MTN users. This partnership aims to make online shopping more affordable and accessible by integrating Jumia's offers into the ayoba app. Ayoba supports over 35 million users across Africa and provides services in 22 languages. To access the deals, users can download the ayoba app from the Google Play Store, iOS Store, or the official website. == Platform features == Chat, Call and Share: ayoba enables instant messaging, voice notes, picture sharing, and file sharing with contacts, even if they do not have the app installed. The app supports voice and video calls on both Android and iOS, as well as group chats, help channel and SMS continuity (non ayoba users receive messages as SMS, their responses appear in the ayoba app). Music: ayoba offers a free music player with daily updates on international and African music. Users can find playlists for different genres. Games: ayoba provides a selection of interactive games, including action, adventure, and children's games available on both Android and iOS. Mobile Money Transfers: In certain territories, ayoba supports mobile money transfers using MTN Mobile Money (MoMo) for transactions within the app. MicroApps: ayoba features individual MicroApps within the platform that offer content and services, including streaming channels, podcasts, and specialized apps. The availability of these apps may vary by country. == Operations == ayoba primarily focuses on the following territories: Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Republic of Congo, Benin, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Senegal, Togo, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Sudan, South Sudan, and Liberia. The company operates from its offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. David Gillaranz served as the CEO from 2019 to 2021, and Burak Akinci has been the CEO since 2021.
Top 10 AI Content Generators Compared (2026)
Comparing the best AI content generator? An AI content generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it lowers the barrier so anyone can produce professional output. Privacy matters too: check whether your data trains the model and whether a no-log or enterprise tier is available. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI content generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.
Heng Ji
Heng Ji is a computer scientist who works on information extraction and natural language processing. She is well known for her work on joined named entity recognition and relation extraction, as well as for her work on cross-document event extraction. She has been coordinating the popular NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task since 2010. She has been recognised as one of AI's 10 to watch by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, and has won multiple awards, including a NSF Career Award in 2009, Google Research awards in 2009 and 2014, and an IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012. == Education == Heng Ji obtained a Bachelor's and master's degree in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University. She subsequently obtained a MSc, then PhD in Computer Science from New York University in 2008 under the supervision of Ralph Grishman. Her PhD thesis was on the topic of information extraction, with a particular focus on joint training of multiple components in the information extraction pipeline, as well as cross-lingual learning. == Career == Upon graduating with a PhD from New York University, Ji took up a position as assistant professor at Queens College, City University of New York, where she founded the BLENDER Lab, which focuses on research on cross-lingual, cross-documents, cross-media information extraction and fusion. In 2013, she joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an Edward P. Hamilton Development Chair and Tenured associate professor in Computer Science. Since 2019, she has been a full professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, as well as an Amazon Scholar. == Research == Heng Ji works in the area of natural language processing, machine learning and information extraction. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed research papers. Her work is published in the proceedings of computer science conferences, including the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, The Web Conference, and the ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Ji is a leading researcher in information extraction, having coordinated the popular NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population shared task since 2010. She is most recognised for her work on modelling interactions between subtasks in information extraction, which was also the topic of her PhD thesis, and for her work on event detection using cross-document signals. == Selected honors and distinctions == 2009 NSF Career Award 2009 Google Research Award 2012 IBM Watson Faculty Award 2013 IEEE AI's 10 to Watch 2014 Google Research Award 2016 World Economic Forum, 'Young Scientist' 2017 World Economic Forum, 'Young Scientist' 2020 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, best demonstration paper
Barbara Di Eugenio
Barbara Di Eugenio is an Italian-American computer scientist, the Collegiate Warren S. McCulloch Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research focuses on natural language processing and its applications to human–computer interaction, educational technology, and artificial intelligence in healthcare. == Education and career == Di Eugenio is originally from Turin. After an undergraduate education in Italy, she completed her Ph.D. in computer and information science in 1993 at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, Understanding Natural Language Instructions: A Computational Approach to Purpose Clauses, was supervised by Bonnie Webber. She became a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1999, and at that time was the only woman faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. == Recognition == In 2022, Di Eugenio received the Zenith Award of the Association for Women in Science. She was named as a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2023, "for outstanding contributions to natural language generation; intelligent tutoring systems; discourse; intercoder agreement; and applying multimodal interactive systems to health".
List of monochrome and RGB color formats
This list of monochrome and RGB palettes includes generic repertoires of colors (color palettes) to produce black-and-white and RGB color pictures by a computer's display hardware. RGB is the most common method to produce colors for displays; so these complete RGB color repertoires have every possible combination of R-G-B triplets within any given maximum number of levels per component. Each palette is represented by a series of color patches. When the number of colors is low, a 1-pixel-size version of the palette appears below it, for easily comparing relative palette sizes. Huge palettes are given directly in one-color-per-pixel color patches. For each unique palette, an image color test chart and sample image (truecolor original follows) rendered with that palette (without dithering) are given. The test chart shows the full 256 levels of the red, green, and blue (RGB) primary colors and cyan, magenta, and yellow complementary colors, along with a full 256-level grayscale. Gradients of RGB intermediate colors (orange, lime green, sea green, sky blue, violet, and fuchsia), and a full hue spectrum are also present. Color charts are not gamma corrected. These elements illustrate the color depth and distribution of the colors of any given palette, and the sample image indicates how the color selection of such palettes could represent real-life images. These images are not necessarily representative of how the image would be displayed on the original graphics hardware, as the hardware may have additional limitations regarding the maximum display resolution, pixel aspect ratio and color placement. Implementation of these formats is specific to each machine. Therefore, the number of colors that can be simultaneously displayed in a given text or graphic mode might be different. Also, the actual displayed colors are subject to the output format used - PAL or NTSC, composite or component video, etc. - and might be slightly different. For simulated images and specific hardware and alternate methods to produce colors other than RGB (ex: composite), see the List of 8-bit computer hardware palettes, the List of 16-bit computer hardware palettes and the List of video game console palettes. For various software arrangements and sorts of colors, including other possible full RGB arrangements within 8-bit color depth displays, see the List of software palettes. == Monochrome palettes == These palettes only have some shades of gray, from black to white (considered the darkest and lightest "grays", respectively). The general rule is that those palettes have 2n different shades of gray, where n is the number of bits needed to represent a single pixel. === Monochrome (1-bit grayscale) === Monochrome graphics displays typically have a black background with a white or light gray image, though green and amber monochrome monitors were also common. Such a palette requires only one bit per pixel. Where photo-realism was desired, these early computer systems had a heavy reliance on dithering to make up for the limits of the technology. In some systems, as Hercules and CGA graphic cards for the IBM PC, a bit value of 1 represents white pixels (light on) and a value of 0 the black ones (light off); others, like the Playdate and Atari ST and Apple Macintosh with monochrome monitors, a bit value of 0 means a white pixel (no ink) and a value of 1 means a black pixel (dot of ink), which it approximates to the printing logic. === 2-bit Grayscale === In a 2-bit color palette each pixel's value is represented by 2 bits resulting in a 4-value palette (22 = 4). 2-bit dithering: It has black, white and two intermediate levels of gray as follows: A monochrome 2-bit palette is used on: The Monochrome Display Adapter for the IBM PC NeXT Computer, NeXTcube and NeXTstation monochrome graphic displays. Original Game Boy system portable video game console. Macintosh PowerBook 150 monochrome LC displays. Amiga with A2024 monochrome monitor in high-resolution mode. The original Amazon Kindle The original WonderSwan The Tiger Electronics Game.com portable video game console The original Neo Geo Pocket. === 4-bit Grayscale === In a 4-bit color palette each pixel's value is represented by 4 bits resulting in a 16-value palette (24 = 16): 4-bit grayscale dithering does a fairly good job of reducing visible banding of the level changes: A monochrome 4-bit palette is used on: MOS Technology VDC (on the Commodore 128 with monochrome monitor) Amstrad CPC series with a GT64/GT65 Green Monitor (16 unique green shades) Amstrad CPC Plus series with the MM12 Monochrome monitor (16 shades of grey) Some Apple PowerBooks equipped with monochrome displays like the PowerBook 5300 The original VideoNow === 8-bit Grayscale === In an 8-bit color palette each pixel's value is represented by 8 bits resulting in a 256-value palette (28 = 256). This is usually the maximum number of grays in ordinary monochrome systems; each image pixel occupies a single memory byte. Most scanners can capture images in 8-bit grayscale, and image file formats like TIFF and JPEG natively support this monochrome palette size. Alpha channels employed for video overlay also use (conceptually) this palette. The gray level indicates the opacity of the blended image pixel over the background image pixel. == Dichrome palettes == === 16-bit RG palette === The RG or red–green color space is a color space that uses only two primary colors: red and green. It was used on early color processes for films. It was used as an additive format, similar to the RGB color model but without a blue channel, on processes such as Kinemacolor, Prizma, Technicolor I, Raycol, etc., producing shades of black, red, green and yellow. Alternatively, it was used as a subtractive format on Brewster Color I, Kodachrome I, Prizma II, Technicolor II, etc., producing shades of transparent, red, green and black. Until recently, its primary use was in low-cost light-emitting diode displays in which red and green tended to be far more common than the still nascent blue LED technology, but full-color LEDs with blue have become more common in recent years. ColorCode 3-D, a anaglyph stereoscopic color scheme, uses the RG color space to simulate a broad spectrum of color in one eye, while the blue portion of the spectrum transmits a black-and-white (black-and-blue) image to the other eye to give depth perception. === 16-bit RB palette === === 16-bit GB palette === == Regular RGB palettes == Here are grouped those full RGB hardware palettes that have the same number of binary levels (i.e., the same number of bits) for every red, green and blue components using the full RGB color model. Thus, the total number of colors are always the number of possible levels by component, n, raised to a power of 3: n×n×n = n3. === 3-bit RGB === 3-bit RGB dithering: Systems with a 3-bit RGB palette use 1 bit for each of the red, green and blue color components. That is, each component is either "on" or "off" with no intermediate states. This results in an 8-color palette ((21)3 = 23 = 8) that has black, white, the three RGB primary colors red, green and blue and their correspondent complementary colors cyan, magenta and yellow as follows: The color indices vary between implementations; therefore, index numbers are not given. The 3-bit RGB palette is used by: Text terminals following the ECMA-48 standard (sometimes known as the "ANSI standard", although ANSI X3.128 does not define colors) World System Teletext Level 1/1.5 Videotex Oric computers BBC Micro PC-8801 (up to the MkII) PC-9801 (with original 8086 CPU, before the VM/VX models) Sharp X1 (models before the X1 Turbo Z) Sharp MZ 700 FM-7, FM New 7, FM 77 (before the FM77AV) Sinclair QL Space Invaders Part II (arcade hardware) Macintosh SE (with a color printer or external monitor) Atari 2600 (SECAM version) Color Maximite (PIC32 based microcomputer) Arcadia 2001 PV-1000 Monkey Magic (arcade hardware) VIC-20 (high-res mode) Mouse Trap (arcade hardware) Sanyo MBC-550 series Windows 1.0 (includes dithering) === 6-bit RGB === Systems with a 6-bit RGB palette use 2 bits for each of the red, green, and blue color components. This results in a (22)3 = 43 = 64-color palette as follows: 6-bit RGB systems include the following: Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) for IBM PC/AT (16 colors at once) Sega Master System video game console (32 colors at once) GIME for TRS-80 Color Computer 3 (16 colors at once) Pebble Time smartwatch which has a 6-bit (64 color) e-paper display Parallax Propeller using the reference VGA circuit === 9-bit RGB === Systems with a 9-bit RGB palette use 3 bits for each of the red, green, and blue color components. This results in a (23)3 = 83 = 512-color palette as follows: 9-bit RGB systems include the following: Atari ST (Normally 4 to 16 at once without tricks) MSX2 computers (up to 16 at once) Sega Genesis video game console, (64 colors at once) Sega Nomad TurboGrafx-16 (NEC PC-Engine) ZX Spectrum Next The NEC PC-88
Muller automaton
In automata theory, a Muller automaton is a type of an ω-automaton. The acceptance condition separates a Muller automaton from other ω-automata. The Muller automaton is defined using a Muller acceptance condition, i.e. the set of all states visited infinitely often must be an element of the acceptance set. Both deterministic and non-deterministic Muller automata recognize the ω-regular languages. They are named after David E. Muller, an American mathematician and computer scientist, who invented them in 1963. == Formal definition == Formally, a deterministic Muller-automaton is a tuple A = (Q,Σ,δ,q0,F) that consists of the following information: Q is a finite set. The elements of Q are called the states of A. Σ is a finite set called the alphabet of A. δ: Q × Σ → Q is a function, called the transition function of A. q0 is an element of Q, called the initial state. F is a set of sets of states. Formally, F ⊆ P(Q) where P(Q) is powerset of Q. F defines the acceptance condition. A accepts exactly those runs in which the set of infinitely often occurring states is an element of F In a non-deterministic Muller automaton, the transition function δ is replaced with a transition relation Δ that returns a set of states and the initial state q0 is replaced by a set of initial states Q0. Generally, 'Muller automaton' refers to a non-deterministic Muller automaton. For more comprehensive formalisation look at ω-automaton. == Equivalence with other ω-automata == The Muller automata are equally expressive as parity automata, Rabin automata, Streett automata, and non-deterministic Büchi automata, to mention some, and strictly more expressive than the deterministic Büchi automata. The equivalence of the above automata and non-deterministic Muller automata can be shown very easily as the accepting conditions of these automata can be emulated using the acceptance condition of Muller automata and vice versa. McNaughton's theorem demonstrates the equivalence of non-deterministic Büchi automaton and deterministic Muller automaton. Thus, deterministic and non-deterministic Muller automata are equivalent in terms of the languages they can accept. == Transformation to non-deterministic Muller automata == Following is a list of automata constructions that each transforms a type of ω-automata to a non-deterministic Muller automaton. From Büchi automata If B is the set of final states in a Büchi automaton with the set of states Q, we can construct a Muller automaton with same set of states, transition function and initial state with the Muller accepting condition as F = { X | X ∈ P(Q) ∧ X ∩ B ≠ ∅}. From Rabin automata/parity automata Similarly, the Rabin conditions ( E j , F j ) {\displaystyle (E_{j},F_{j})} can be emulated by constructing the acceptance set in the Muller automaton as all sets F ⊆ Q {\displaystyle F\subseteq Q} that satisfy F ∩ E j = ∅ {\displaystyle F\cap E_{j}=\emptyset } and F ∩ F j ≠ ∅ {\displaystyle F\cap F_{j}\neq \emptyset } , for some j. Note that this covers the case of parity automata too, as the parity acceptance condition can be expressed as a Rabin acceptance condition easily. From Streett automata The Streett conditions ( E j , F j ) {\displaystyle (E_{j},F_{j})} can be emulated by constructing the acceptance set in the Muller automaton as all sets F ⊆ Q {\displaystyle F\subseteq Q} that satisfy F ∩ F j = ∅ ⟹ F ∩ E j = ∅ {\displaystyle F\cap F_{j}=\emptyset \implies F\cap E_{j}=\emptyset } , for all j. == Transformation to deterministic Muller automata == From Büchi automaton McNaughton's theorem provides a procedure to transform any non-deterministic Büchi automaton into a deterministic Muller automaton.