Ecoinformatics, or ecological informatics, is the science of information in ecology and environmental science. It integrates environmental and information sciences to define entities and natural processes with language common to both humans and computers. However, this is a rapidly developing area in ecology and there are alternative perspectives on what constitutes ecoinformatics. A few definitions have been circulating, mostly centered on the creation of tools to access and analyze natural system data. However, the scope and aims of ecoinformatics are certainly broader than the development of metadata standards to be used in documenting datasets. Ecoinformatics aims to facilitate environmental research and management by developing ways to access, integrate databases of environmental information, and develop new algorithms enabling different environmental datasets to be combined to test ecological hypotheses. Ecoinformatics is related to the concept of ecosystem services. Ecoinformatics characterize the semantics of natural system knowledge. For this reason, much of today's ecoinformatics research relates to the branch of computer science known as knowledge representation, and active ecoinformatics projects are developing links to activities such as the Semantic Web. Current initiatives to effectively manage, share, and reuse ecological data are indicative of the increasing importance of fields like ecoinformatics to develop the foundations for effectively managing ecological information. Examples of these initiatives are National Science Foundation Datanet projects, DataONE, Data Conservancy, and Artificial Intelligence for Environment & Sustainability. == Software Development Lifecycle == Central to the concept of ecoinformatics is the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), a systematic framework for writing, implementing, and maintaining software products. Typically in Ecoinformatics projects, the development pipeline includes data collection, usually from several different environmental data sources, then integrating these data sources together, and then analyzing the data. Here, each step of the SDLC is described in the context of ecoinformatics, per Michener et al. It is important to note that the plan, collect, assure, describes and preserve steps refer to the data collection entity, which can be individual researchers or large data-collection networks, while the discover, integrate, and analyze steps typically refer to the individual researcher. Plan: Ecoinformatics projects require data from several databases. Each database holds different data, and therefore researchers should identify what types of environmental or ecological data they will need to answer their research question. Collect: Data is collected in several different ways. In ecoinformatics, this is usually restricted to manually entering data into a spreadsheet, and parsing data from an existing database. The growth of relational databases has made it easier for ecologists to download relevant data and integrate datasets together Assure: Data entries should be checked thoroughly to validate their accuracy and usability, such as to check for outliers and erroneous points. The same principle applies to data downloaded from datasets. This responsibility falls on both the ecologist downloading the data, and the entity that sets up the data collection system. Describe: An accurate description of the metadata of a dataset that is used in a study should include enough information to deduce the data collection and processing methodology, when the data were collected, why the data were collected, and how the data were stored. This is important for reproducibility, especially for projects that build on each other and may recycle data Preserve: After data is collected by an institutional entity, it should be archived such that it is easily accessible. Ideally, this is in databases that are maintained and not at risk of deprecation Discover: While there are good practices for discovering data to start a research project, this process is often marred by a lack of usable, published data, as researchers may collect data specific to their study, but may not publish this data for wider use. On the data collection end, this can be addressed by better data-sharing practices, such as by linking datasets when publishing papers or studies. On the data procurement end, this can be addressed by more precise data searching, such as using key words to find relevant datasets. Integrate: Synthesizing datasets together can be difficult and labor-intensive, largely due to the methodological differences in data collection. There are several approaches to this, but the best practices typically involve computational approaches, namely using R or Python, to automate the processes and prevent errors Analyze: Data analysis can take several forms, and should be tailored to the specific ecological project. However, all data analysis methods should be well-documented, including the procedure for analysis, justification for analysis methods, and any shortcomings in a specific approach. == Applications of Ecoinformatics Across Ecology == === Ecosystem Ecology === Source: Ecosystem studies, by definition, encompass interactions across the entire life sciences spectrum, from microscopic biochemical reactions to large-scale geological phenomena. As a result, big databases may not be designed specifically for any particular research question, but should be inclusive enough to support most studies. Since ecosystem-level questions require a broad perspective, data-related ecosystem projects would likely incorporate data from several databases. A common framework for incorporating data into ecosystem-level studies is the network science model, in which data collection mechanisms and resources are treated like a large, interconnected network instead of individual entities. The network may include several data collection stations within one databases, or may span across multiple databases. Currently there are several large-scale networks, but they do not generate data on the scale to consider ecology as a big data science. A current challenge for ecoinformatics in ecosystem ecology is that most funding is prioritized for generating new data rather than maintaining existing data infrastructures. Integrating data across the different spatial scales can also be difficult, since each dataset may hold different types of data. === Urban Ecology === Source: The current push for smart cities, and sensor network integration into infrastructure, has positioned as a major source of data for ecological studies. Typical urban ecology questions address the effects of urbanization on the local ecosystem, and how to drive future development to promote urban biodiversity. While sensor networks in cities typically collect environmental data to optimize city processes, they may also be used for ecological initiatives, especially with respect to understanding the complex, multi-layered relationship between cities and their local ecosystem. It can also be used to better understand the current landscape of cities, and identify avenues for rewinding of cities. For example, analyzing mobility patterns can identify areas that may lend themselves well to building parks and green spaces. Bird watching data can also be used to identify the types of bird species in a local area. === Infectious Disease === Source: Like other disciplines of ecology, emerging infectious disease and epidemiology span multiple scales, from understanding the genetics that drive disease trends to large-scale spatiotemporal analyses. As a result, infectious disease studies can incorporate everything from bioinformatics, genetic sequences, amino acid sequences, and environmental observation data. On the micro-scale, these data can then be used to predict infectivity/transmissibility, drug resistance, drug candidates, and mutation sites. On the macro-scale, it can be used to identify societal trends or environmental factors that lend themselves to spillover, locations of infection, and practices that cause disease transmission. == Databases == Source: USGS National Streamflow sensor network GBIF Neotoma Paleobiology database European Vegetation Archive USDA Forest Inventory Analysis TRY BIEN AmeriFlux TEAM iNaturalist NEON GLEON LTER CZO TERN SAEON
AFNLP
AFNLP (Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing Associations) is the organization for coordinating the natural language processing related activities and events in the Asia-Pacific region. == Foundation == AFNLP was founded on 4 October 2000. == Member Associations == ALTA – Australasian Language Technology Association ANLP Japan Association of Natural Language Processing ROCLING Taiwan ROC Computational Linguistics Society SIG-KLC Korea SIG-Korean Language Computing of Korea Information Science Society == Existing Asian Initiatives == NLPRS: Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium IRAL: International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages PACLING: Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics PACLIC: Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation PRICAI: Pacific Rim International Conference on AI ICCPOL: International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages ROCLING: Research on Computational Linguistics Conference == Conferences == IJCNLP-04: The 1st International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Hainan Island, China IJCNLP-05: The 2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Jeju Island, Korea IJCNLP-08: The 3rd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Hyderabad, India ACL-IJCNLP-2009: Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) in Singapore IJNCLP-11: The 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Human-readable medium and data
In computing, a human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans, resulting in human-readable data. It is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary data. In most contexts, the alternative to a human-readable representation is a machine-readable format or medium of data primarily designed for reading by electronic, mechanical or optical devices, or computers. For example, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes are very difficult to read for humans, but very effective and reliable with the proper equipment, whereas the strings of numerals that commonly accompany the label are the human-readable form of the barcode information. Since any type of data encoding can be parsed by a suitably programmed computer, the decision to use binary encoding rather than text encoding is usually made to conserve storage space. Encoding data in a binary format typically requires fewer bytes of storage and increases efficiency of access (input and output) by eliminating format parsing or conversion. With the advent of standardized, highly structured markup languages, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), the decreasing costs of data storage, and faster and cheaper data communication networks, compromises between human-readability and machine-readability are now more common-place than they were in the past. This has led to humane markup languages and modern configuration file formats that are far easier for humans to read. In addition, these structured representations can be compressed very effectively for transmission or storage. Human-readable protocols greatly reduce the cost of debugging. Various organizations have standardized the definition of human-readable and machine-readable data and how they are applied in their respective fields of application, e.g., the Universal Postal Union. Often the term human-readable is also used to describe shorter names or strings, that are easier to comprehend or to remember than long, complex syntax notations, such as some Uniform Resource Locator strings. Occasionally "human-readable" is used to describe ways of encoding an arbitrary integer into a long series of English words. Compared to decimal or other compact binary-to-text encoding systems, English words are easier for humans to read, remember, and type in.
Sasha Luccioni
Alexandra Sasha Luccioni (née Vorobyova; born 1990) is a computer scientist specializing in the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and climate change. Her work focuses on quantifying the environmental impact of AI technologies and promoting sustainable practices in machine learning development. == Early life and education == Alexandra Sasha Vorobyova was born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1990. When she was four years old, her family relocated to Ontario, Canada. Her interest in science is influenced by her family's history; her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all pursued careers in scientific fields. Luccioni earned a B.A. in language science from University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2010. Subsequently, she completed a M.S. in cognitive science, with a minor in natural language processing, at École normale supérieure in Paris in 2012. Luccioni obtained her PhD in cognitive computing from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 2018. == Career == Luccioni began her professional career at Nuance Communications in 2017, where she focused on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques to enhance conversational agents. She then joined Morgan Stanley’s AI/ML Center of Excellence in 2018, working on explainable artificial intelligence (AI) and decision-making systems. In 2019, she became a postdoctoral researcher at Université de Montréal and Mila, collaborating with computer scientist Yoshua Bengio on a project titled This Climate Does Not Exist. This initiative used generative adversarial networks to visualize the effects of climate change. During this time, she also contributed to integrating fairness and accountability into machine learning education at Mila. Luccioni briefly worked with the United Nations Global Pulse in 2021, developing tools to monitor COVID-19 misinformation. Later that year, she joined Hugging Face as a research scientist. Her role includes quantifying the carbon footprint of AI systems, co-chairing the carbon working group in the Big Science project, and advancing responsible machine learning practices. She helped create "CodeCarbon," an open-source software tool that estimates the carbon emissions produced during the training and operation of machine learning models. In addition to her research, she has developed tools to measure the environmental impact of AI models, communicated findings through media engagements, and presented at international conferences, including a TED Talk. In 2024, she was listed on BBC 100 Women and Time 100 AI.
How to Choose an AI Video Editor
In search of the best AI video editor? An AI video editor is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI video editor slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.
Headway (app)
Headway, also known as the Headway App, is an educational technology (EdTech) product that provides short text and audio summaries of nonfiction books. The product was launched in 2019 by Anton Pavlovsky and is developed by Headway Inc, a global consumer tech company that operates in the lifelong learning space. == History == The Headway app was launched in January 2019, with the first version of the application released the same year. In 2021, Headway ranked first globally in downloads within the book summary application niche. In 2022, the application received the Golden Novum Design Award for product design. In 2023 and 2024, Headway appeared in several App Store editorial selections, including App of the Day in multiple countries, and received an Editors’ Choice label in the United States. In April 2025, the application was listed as a Webby Honoree in the Learning & Education category. The company has also launched the Headway Scholarship for Book Lovers. As of 2025, publicly available reporting notes that the Headway app has surpassed 50 million downloads and is among the Top 10 iOS applications by revenue in the Education category worldwide. == Products and features == The Headway app provides short-form summaries of nonfiction books in both text and audio formats. Content is produced by an in-house team of writers, editors, and voice actors. Features include highlighting and saving key insights, spaced repetition for knowledge retention, and offline access to downloaded summaries. The app is available on iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, Android, CarPlay, and Android Auto, and supports multiple languages. == Pricing == Headway operates on a subscription business model, with optional paid plans alongside free access. The company publicly provides its terms of use, privacy policy, subscription details, and AI usage policy on its official website. == Technology and integrations == Headway reports that its book summaries are written and edited manually, while artificial intelligence tools are used in limited supporting functions, such as experimental conversational features and selected marketing processes. == Adoption == According to figures released by the company, the app has exceeded 50 million downloads worldwide. Sensor Tower data indicates that Headway has been the most downloaded application in its niche since October 2020. In January 2025, the app claimed the #1 position in the Education category in both the United States and United Kingdom App Stores and remained among the Top 10 iOS applications globally by revenue within the Education category. == Awards == The Headway app has received several product-level distinctions. In 2023 and 2024, it appeared in multiple App Store editorial selections, including App of the Day features and an Editors’ Choice label in the United States. In 2025, the app was recognized as a Webby Honoree in the Learning & Education category. The product has also been featured in independent media roundups of notable educational applications.
Synchronizing word
In computer science, more precisely, in the theory of deterministic finite automata (DFA), a synchronizing word or reset sequence is a word in the input alphabet of the DFA that sends any state of the DFA to one and the same state. That is, if an ensemble of copies of the DFA are each started in different states, and all of the copies process the synchronizing word, they will all end up in the same state. Not every DFA has a synchronizing word; for instance, a DFA with two states, one for words of even length and one for words of odd length, can never be synchronized. == Existence == Given a DFA, the problem of determining if it has a synchronizing word can be solved in polynomial time using a theorem due to Ján Černý. A simple approach considers the power set of states of the DFA, and builds a directed graph where nodes belong to the power set, and a directed edge describes the action of the transition function. A path from the node of all states to a singleton state shows the existence of a synchronizing word. This algorithm is exponential in the number of states. A polynomial algorithm results however, due to a theorem of Černý that exploits the substructure of the problem, and shows that a synchronizing word exists if and only if every pair of states has a synchronizing word. == Length == The problem of estimating the length of synchronizing words has a long history and was posed independently by several authors, but it is commonly known as the Černý conjecture. In 1969, Ján Černý conjectured that (n − 1)2 is the upper bound for the length of the shortest synchronizing word for any n-state complete DFA (a DFA with complete state transition graph). If this is true, it would be tight: in his 1964 paper, Černý exhibited a class of automata (indexed by the number n of states) for which the shortest reset words have this length. The best upper bound known is 0.1654n3, far from the lower bound. For n-state DFAs over a k-letter input alphabet, an algorithm by David Eppstein finds a synchronizing word of length at most 11n3/48 + O(n2), and runs in time complexity O(n3+kn2). This algorithm does not always find the shortest possible synchronizing word for a given automaton; as Eppstein also shows, the problem of finding the shortest synchronizing word is NP-complete. However, for a special class of automata in which all state transitions preserve the cyclic order of the states, he describes a different algorithm with time O(kn2) that always finds the shortest synchronizing word, proves that these automata always have a synchronizing word of length at most (n − 1)2 (the bound given in Černý's conjecture), and exhibits examples of automata with this special form whose shortest synchronizing word has length exactly (n − 1)2. == Road coloring == The road coloring problem is the problem of labeling the edges of a regular directed graph with the symbols of a k-letter input alphabet (where k is the outdegree of each vertex) in order to form a synchronizable DFA. It was conjectured in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler that any strongly connected and aperiodic regular digraph can be labeled in this way; their conjecture was proven in 2007 by Avraham Trahtman. == Related: transformation semigroups == A transformation semigroup is synchronizing if it contains an element of rank 1, that is, an element whose image is of cardinality 1. A DFA corresponds to a transformation semigroup with a distinguished generator set.