Intelligent control is a class of control techniques that use various artificial intelligence computing approaches like neural networks, Bayesian probability, fuzzy logic, machine learning, reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation and genetic algorithms. == Overview == Intelligent control can be divided into the following major sub-domains: Neural network control Machine learning control Reinforcement learning Bayesian control Fuzzy control Neuro-fuzzy control Expert Systems Genetic control New control techniques are created continuously as new models of intelligent behavior are created and computational methods developed to support them. === Neural network controller === Neural networks have been used to solve problems in almost all spheres of science and technology. Neural network control basically involves two steps: System identification Control It has been shown that a feedforward network with nonlinear, continuous and differentiable activation functions have universal approximation capability. Recurrent networks have also been used for system identification. Given, a set of input-output data pairs, system identification aims to form a mapping among these data pairs. Such a network is supposed to capture the dynamics of a system. For the control part, deep reinforcement learning has shown its ability to control complex systems. === Bayesian controllers === Bayesian probability has produced a number of algorithms that are in common use in many advanced control systems, serving as state space estimators of some variables that are used in the controller. The Kalman filter and the Particle filter are two examples of popular Bayesian control components. The Bayesian approach to controller design often requires an important effort in deriving the so-called system model and measurement model, which are the mathematical relationships linking the state variables to the sensor measurements available in the controlled system. In this respect, it is very closely linked to the system-theoretic approach to control design.
Artificial intelligence in spirituality
Some users of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, especially chatbots, may develop beliefs that AI has or can attain supernatural or spiritual powers. AI models such as ChatGPT are turned to for fortune telling, mysticism and remote viewing. Recent and sudden advances in large language models have led to folk myths about their origin or capabilities, as well as their deification or worship by some users. Tucker Carlson has made similar claims, including directly to Sam Altman. Pope Leo XIV advised priests against using LLM models when it came to the creation of sermons.
ShowScoop
ShowScoop is a website and mobile app platform on which users can rate and review artists, concerts, and music festivals that they have seen/attended. The reviews and ratings are designed to be informative of how well such performances are live. This helps concert-goers decide which live music events they want to attend. == History == ShowScoop was founded in August 2012 by Micah Smurthwaite and is based out of San Diego, CA. In February 2013, ShowScoop launched its mobile app at the SF Music Tech Summit. The application is currently available on the iPhone, with plans to expand into the Android market in the future. == Services == ShowScoop uses crowdsourcing to provide accurate ratings of live concert experiences. In addition to viewing ratings, users are encouraged to rate and review concerts they have attended. The ShowScoop database includes nearly one million artists and over 2.5 million live music events. ShowScoop users can rate artists on four aspects of the performance: stage presence, crowd interaction, sound quality, and visual effects. The rating system uses an ascending scale from one to five in each of the aspects, with five being the highest score. In addition to the quantitative ratings, ShowScoop users are also free to write qualitative reviews in a provided comment section. This allows users to explain their ratings and add further insight or opinion. ShowScoop incorporates several facets of social media into its services. Users can create a user profile to share limited personal information and store their ratings and reviews. Users are also given the option of sharing their evaluations with their social networks on Facebook and Twitter. Users can "like" reviews, follow artists, and follow other ShowScoop users. The mobile app allows users to take photos, apply filters, and share the final image in conjunction with reviews and through Instagram. == Road Crew == ShowScoop's "Road Crew" is a group made up of top contributors within the ShowScoop community. The Road Crew assists in curating artist pages, assuring information quality and accuracy. In return, members of the Road Crew are given incentives, including free tickets to concerts and personal invitations to exclusive shows. Applicants to the Road Crew are judged on the number and quality of their reviews, the photos and videos they have posted, and their general engagement with the ShowScoop community in following and liking users and reviews.
Tabletopia
Tabletopia is an online portal for users to play and create virtual tabletop games. The platform is developed by Tabletopia Inc and initially was released as a web browser based service after a successful crowdfunding campaign in August 2015. In December 2016 Tabletopia was released on Steam, and later in 2018 became available in AppStore and Google Play. == Gameplay == Tabletopia is a sandbox system for running any game. That means no AI or rules enforcement. Participating players will have to know how to play the game. Nevertheless, the platform has some automated actions available, like card-shuffling and dealing, dice-rolling, magnetic placement of components in special zones, hand management, and some others. Tabletopia also features ready game setups for various player numbers to facilitate gameplay. It also has customisable camera controls which let players save camera positions and switch between them using hot keys. People can use the Game Designer mode to design and create their own board games using the component library. They can then monetise the games with a 70/30 split to the game designer. == Development == Tabletopia was created in early 2014, by Tim Bokarev and his partners Artem Zinoviev and Dmitry Sergeev. These co-founders already had experience in the video and board games industry. Their other projects include Promo Interactive, an internet advertising agency, Playtox, a mobile MMORPG, Igrology, a game studio, and Tesera.ru, the main Russian-speaking board gaming portal. By Spring 2014, Artem, Dmitry and Tim created Tabletopia Inc. USA and started development. Tabletopia is a multinational crew that includes professionals from USA, Ukraine, Australia, Ireland, and Germany. The Kickstarter campaign in August 2015 earned $133,721 by 2,545 backers. Tabletopia received Green Light on Steam in September 2015 and was released on Steam in March 2016. The platform remained in Early Access until December 2016, when it was officially released on Steam and on the web. In February 2018 it was released as a stand-alone app for iOS tablets, and in September 2018 for Android tablets.
SMART Health Card
The SMART Health Card framework is an open source immunity passport program designed to store and share medical information in paper or digital form. It was initially launched as a vaccine passport during the COVID-19 pandemic, but is envisioned for use for other infectious diseases. SMART Health Cards include a QR code which can be scanned and verified using the official SMART Health Card Verifier mobile app, supported by Apple and Android. It was rolled out by the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) based on technology developed at Boston Children's Hospital, and standards set by Health Level Seven International (HL7) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is recognized by the International Organization for Standardization. == History == === Founding === In February 2009, United States president Barack Obama signed an economic stimulus package which included $19 billion in funds for investment in health information technology. The following month, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Kenneth Mandl and Isaac Kohane, published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine calling for the modernization of electronic health records through API integrations on mobile devices. In April 2010, the pair secured a $15 million grant through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology's Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program. With this federal funding, the researchers began development of an interoperable healthcare IT platform they called "Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies" (SMART). The first iteration of the platform API was previewed later that year, and "SMART Classic" was released in 2011. In 2013, SMART adopted the open-source Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard developed by Health Level Seven International (HL7). The newly named SMART on FHIR platform was debuted in February 2014 at the Health Information Management Systems Society conference. === 21st Century Cures Act === According to SMART Health IT, Mandl successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a universal API requirement in the 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law on December 13, 2016. The team also advocated for a federal rule establishing SMART as the universal API. In 2019, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology published the "final rule" specifying the SMART framework as the standard to satisfy the requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act; the rule was implemented in June 2020. === COVID-19 === The SMART Health Card framework was deployed as a "de facto standard" for vaccine passports in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and other international jurisdictions. On January 14, 2021, the Mitre Corporation announced the launch of a new public–private partnership called the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) alongside the CARIN Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, The Commons Project Foundation, Epic Systems, Evernorth, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Oracle, Safe Health, and Salesforce. VCI's purpose was to employ the SMART Health Card framework in order to create a unified proof-of-vaccination system for COVID-19 vaccines.The California Department of Public Health introduced a Digital Covid-19 Vaccine Record portal in June 2021, allowing individuals to verify their vaccination status using the SMART Health Card reader. On August 5, 2021, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the introduction of the "Excelsior Pass Plus" which would expand its Excelsior Pass program into other states and internationally by connecting it to the SMART Health Card system. As of August 27, 2021, 415,000 citizens of Louisiana had added their COVID-19 vaccination status to their state-run, SMART Health Card enabled LA Wallet. On September 8, 2021, Hawaii governor David Ige announced the rollout of the state's Hawaiʻi SMART Health Card. County-level health departments across the United States partnered with VaccineCheck to issue SMART Health Cards by verifying vaccine cards provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Government of Canada spent CAD$4.6 million to develop a proof-of-vaccination credential on the SMART Health Card framework, enabling its ArriveCAN travel application to store, recognize and verify credentials from every province, territory and foreign country. Since October 2021, Canadian provinces and territories used the SMART Health Card format as a requirement by the federal government, including British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and the Yukon. On October 13, 2021, the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) published a statement encouraging adoption of SMART Health Cards as a common standard "where allowed by local law and policy." "SMARTHealth.Cards" was listed as a supporting member of AIRA through the VCI. A SMART Health Cards Global Forum was held on October 28, 2021. The event featured keynote speakers Andy Slavitt (former Senior Pandemic Advisor to President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 pandemic response team) and Mike Leavitt (former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services). On December 20, 2021, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare launched its COVID-19 Vaccination Certificate Application using the SMART Health Card. By January 2022, about 80% of Americans who had received a COVID-19 vaccine had access to a SMART Health Card through their state governments, local businesses, universities and healthcare systems. == Participants == === Developers === SMART Health IT is based out of the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at the Boston Children's Hospital. CHIP's related projects include Apache cTAKES, Genomic Information Commons, HealthMap, and VaccineFinder. The SMART Health Card's project sponsor is HL7 International's Public Health Work Group, consisting of representatives from Allscripts, the Altarum Institute, Tennessee Department of Health and Washington State Department of Health. === Issuers === Official registries of authorized SMART Health Card issuers are maintained by SMART Health IT, the Vaccination Credential Initiative, and the CommonTrust Network. Authorized issuers include:
Auralization
Auralization is a procedure designed to model and simulate the experience of acoustic phenomena rendered as a soundfield in a virtualized space. This is useful in configuring the soundscape of architectural structures, concert venues, and public spaces, as well as in making coherent sound environments within virtual immersion systems. == History == The English term auralization was used for the first time by Kleiner et al. in an article in the journal of the AES en 1991. The increase of computational power allowed the development of the first acoustic simulation software towards the end of the 1960s. == Principles == Auralizations are experienced through systems rendering virtual acoustic models made by convolving or mixing acoustic events recorded 'dry' (or in an anechoic chamber) projected within a virtual model of an acoustic space, the characteristics of which are determined by means of sampling its impulse response (IR). Once this h ( t ) {\displaystyle h(t)} has been determined, the simulation of the resulting soundfield s ( t ) {\displaystyle s(t)} in the target environment is obtained by convolution: r ( t ) = h ( t ) ∗ s ( t ) {\displaystyle r(t)=h(t)s(t)} The resulting sound r ( t ) {\displaystyle r(t)} is heard as it would if emitted in that acoustic space. == Binaurality == For auralizations to be perceived as realistic, it is critical to emulate the human hearing in terms of position and orientation of the listener's head with respect to the sources of sound. For IR data to be convolved convincingly, the acoustic events are captured using a dummy head where two microphones are positioned on each side of the head to record an emulation of sound arriving at the locations of human ears, or using an ambisonics microphone array and mixed down for binaurality. Head-related transfer functions (HRTF) datasets can be used to simplify the process insofar as a monaural IR can be measured or simulated, then audio content is convolved with its target acoustic space. In rendering the experience, the transfer function corresponding to the orientation of the head is applied to simulate the corresponding spatial emanation of sound.
Yahoo Mail
Yahoo! Mail (also written as Yahoo Mail) is a mailbox provider by Yahoo. It is one of the largest email services worldwide, with 225 million users. It is accessible via a web browser (webmail), mobile app, or through third-party email clients via the POP, SMTP, and IMAP protocols. Users can also connect non-Yahoo e-mail accounts to their Yahoo Mail inbox. The service was launched on October 8, 1997. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. It is also available in several languages other than English. == History == === 1997–2002 === On October 8, 1997, Yahoo announced its acquisition of online communications company Four11 for $92 million in stock. As part of the purchase, Yahoo received Four11's RocketMail webmail service. Yahoo Mail, based on the RocketMail technology, launched at the same time. Yahoo! chose acquisition rather than internal platform development, because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. The speed of the market was critical." On March 21, 2002, Yahoo! eliminated free software client access and introduced the $29.99 per year Mail Forwarding Service. Mary Osako, a Yahoo! Spokeswoman, told CNET, "For-pay services on Yahoo!, originally launched in February 1999, have experienced great acceptance from our base of active registered users, and we expect this adoption to continue to grow." === 2002–2010 === During 2002, the Yahoo network was gradually redesigned, including the company website, Yahoo Mail and other services. Along with the new design, new features were implemented, including drop-down menus in DHTML and keyboard shortcuts. On July 9, 2004, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost, a webmail service which simulated a desktop email client. Oddpost had features such as drag-and-drop support, right-click menus, RSS feeds, a preview pane, and increased speed using email caching to shorten response time. Many of the features were incorporated into an updated Yahoo! Mail service. ==== Competition ==== On April 1, 2004, Google announced its Gmail service with 1 GB of storage, although Gmail's invitation-only accounts kept the other webmail services at the forefront. Most major webmail providers, including Yahoo! Mail, increased their mailbox storage in response. Yahoo! first announced 100 MB of storage for basic accounts and 2 GB of storage for premium users. However, soon Yahoo Mail increased its free storage quota to 1 GB, before eventually allowing unlimited storage from March 27, 2007, until October 8, 2013. === 2011–2021 === In May 2011, Yahoo Mail rolled out a new interface. It included updated design, enhanced performance, and improved Facebook integration. In 2013, Yahoo! redesigned the site and removed several features, such as simultaneously opening multiple emails in tabs, sorting by sender name, and dragging mails to folders. The new email interface was geared to give an improved user-experience for mobile devices, but was criticized for having an inferior desktop interface. Many users objected to the unannounced nature of the changes through an online post asking Yahoo! to bring back mail tabs with one hundred thousand voting and nearly ten thousand commenting. The redesign produced a problem that caused an unknown number of users to lose access to their accounts for several weeks. In December 2013, Yahoo! Mail suffered a major outage where approximately one million users, one percent of the site's total users, could not access their emails for several days. Yahoo!'s then-CEO Marissa Mayer publicly apologized to the site's users. China Yahoo Mail announced in April 2013 that it would shut down that August as part of Yahoo ceasing services in China since acquiring a stake in Alibaba in 2005. Users with email address suffixes @yahoo.com.cn and @yahoo.cn could transfer their accounts to AliCloud to continue receiving messages through the end of 2014. In January 2014, an undisclosed number of usernames and passwords were released to hackers, following a security breach that Yahoo! believed had occurred through a third-party website. Yahoo! contacted affected users and requested that passwords be changed. In October 2015, Yahoo! updated the mail service with a "more subtle" redesign, as well as improved mobile features. The same release introduced the Yahoo! Account Key, a smartphone-based replacement for password logins. The app also added support for third-party mail accounts. In 2017, Yahoo! again redesigned the web interface with a "more minimal" look, and introduced the option to customize it with different color themes and layouts. In 2019, Yahoo released a redesigned Yahoo Mail app to organize user inboxes, introducing features including a one-tap unsubscribe tool, package tracking, and travel updates. In 2020, Yahoo Mail users were able to fill Walmart shopping carts directly from their inboxes, an industry first. Yahoo! also added a feature to view NFL matches. === 2022–present === In 2022, updates to the Yahoo Mail mobile app added tools to help manage receipts, gift cards, and subscriptions. AI-based additions in 2023 included a feature that automates tracking coupon codes and credits for online shopping, as well as updates to search suggestions, message summaries and AI writing assistance. In 2024, updates to the desktop interface added more AI-based features, including a "priority inbox" tab with automatically generated summaries of important messages and automated suggestions of next actions based on message contents. In February 2025, Yahoo aired its first Super Bowl ad since 2002, in which Bill Murray invited viewers to contact him at his Yahoo Mail email address ([email protected]). The address received nearly 150,000 emails in the first two hours after broadcast. In June 2025, Yahoo Mail introduced a "Catch Up" feature that provides AI-generated summaries and email previews and prompts users to choose to delete or retain each one. As part of the feature's launch, Yahoo Mail collaborated with streetwear brand Anti Social Social Club on an apparel release. == User interface == As many as three web interfaces were available at any given time. The traditional "Yahoo! Mail Classic" preserved the availability of their original 1997 interface until July 2013 in North America. A 2005 version included a new Ajax interface, drag-and-drop, improved search, keyboard shortcuts, address auto-completion, and tabs. However, other features were removed, such as column widths and one click delete-move-to-next. In October 2010, Yahoo! released a beta version of Yahoo! Mail, which included improvements to performance, search, and Facebook integration. In May 2011, this became the default interface. Their current Webmail interface was introduced in 2017. == Spam policy == Yahoo! Mail is often used by spammers to provide a "remove me" email address. Often, these addresses are used to verify the recipient's address, thus opening the door for more spam. Yahoo! does not tolerate this practice and terminates accounts connected with spam-related activities without warning, causing spammers to lose access to any other Yahoo! services connected with their ID under the Terms of Service. Additionally, Yahoo! stresses that its servers are based in California and any spam-related activity which uses its servers could potentially violate that state's anti-spam laws. In February 2006, Yahoo! announced its decision (along with AOL) to give some organizations the option to "certify" mail by paying up to one cent for each outgoing message, allowing the mail in question to bypass inbound spam filters. Few mailers used it and, Goodmail, the company running the certification process, shut down in 2011. === Filters === In order to prevent abuse, in 2002 Yahoo! Mail activated filters which changed certain words (that could trigger unwanted JavaScript events) and word fragments into other words. "mocha" was changed to "espresso", "expression" became "statement", and "eval" (short for "evaluation") became "review". This resulted in many unintended corrections, such as "prevent" (prevalent), "revalidation" (evaluation) and "media review" (medieval). When asked about these changes, Yahoo! explained that the changed words were common terms used in their privacy dashboard and were blacklisted to prevent hackers from sending damaging commands via the program's HTML function. Starting before February 7, 2006, Yahoo! Mail ended the practice, and began to add an underscore as a prefix to certain suspicious words and word fragments. === Greylisting === Incoming mail to Yahoo! addresses can be subjected to deferred delivery as part of Yahoo's incoming spam controls. This can delay delivery of mail sent to Yahoo! addresses without the sender or recipients being aware of it. The deferral is typically of short duration, but