TSheets was a web-based and mobile time tracking and employee scheduling app. The service was accessed via a web browser or a mobile app. TSheets was an alternative to a paper timesheet or punch cards. == History == Based in Eagle, Idaho, TSheets was co-founded in 2006 by CEO Matt Rissell and CTO Brandon Zehm. In 2008, TSheets released a native employee time tracking app for the iPhone. In 2012, TSheets released an integration with accounting and payroll software QuickBooks. In 2015, TSheets accepted $15 million in growth equity funding from Summit Partners, bought a building in Eagle, Idaho, and opened a second location in Sydney, Australia. On 5 December 2017, Intuit announced an agreement to acquire TSheets. The transaction was valued at approximately $340 million of cash and other consideration and closed on 11 January 2018. After the transaction closed, Time Capture became a new business unit within Intuit's Small Business and Self-Employed Group with Matt Rissell assuming the leader role reporting to Alex Chriss. TSheets's Eagle, Idaho site became an Intuit location.
Digital omnivore
A digital omnivore is a person who uses multiple modalities (devices) to access the Internet and other media content in their daily life. As people increasingly own mobile devices, cross-platform multimedia consumption has continued to shape the digital landscape, both in terms of the type of media content they consume and how they consume it. As of 2021, at least half of all global digital traffic is generated by mobile devices. == Connected devices and digital consumption == A 2015 study of digital media consumption showed that smartphones were primarily used for communication, and tablets were primarily used for entertainment – additionally, both were frequently used in conjuncture with other devices, like televisions. An earlier 2011 analysis of the way consumers in the U.S. viewed news content on their devices throughout the day demonstrated how people use different mobile devices for different functions. On a typical weekend morning, digital omnivores accessed their news using their tablet, favored their computer during the working day, and returned to tablet use in the evening, peaking between the hours of 9pm and midnight. Mobile phones were used for web-browsing throughout the day when users were away from their personal computer. Increased Wi-Fi availability and mobile broadband adoption have changed the way people are going online. In August 2011, more than a third (37.2%) of U.S. digital traffic coming from mobile phones occurred via a Wi-Fi connection while tablets, which traditionally required a Wi-Fi connection to access the Internet, are increasingly driving traffic using mobile broadband access. As of 2021, LTE, 5G, and other forms of mobile broadband access are available on the majority of mobile devices. Tablets contributed nearly 2% of all web browsing traffic in the United States in 2011. During this period, iPads also began to account for a higher share of Internet traffic than iPhones (46.8% vs. 42.6% of all iOS device traffic. == Implications for marketing, advertisers and publishers == As of 2021, the average amount of time spent daily consuming digital media was eight hours, an increase from 2020 and a further increase from 2019, partially as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, as well as other online platforms like YouTube, incorporate advertisements into the in-app or online experience, with some offering the ability to shop for and sell items through the app or website.
Hebbian theory
Hebbian theory is a neuropsychological theory claiming that an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from a presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of a postsynaptic cell. It is an attempt to explain synaptic plasticity, the adaptation of neurons during the learning process. Hebbian theory was introduced by Donald Hebb in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior. The theory is also called Hebb's rule, Hebb's law, Hebb's postulate, and cell assembly theory. Hebb states it as follows: Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or "trace") tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. ... When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased. The theory is often summarized as "Neurons that fire together, wire together." However, Hebb emphasized that cell A needs to "take part in firing" cell B, and such causality can occur only if cell A fires just before, not at the same time as, cell B. This aspect of causation in Hebb's work foreshadowed what is now known about spike-timing-dependent plasticity, which requires temporal precedence. Hebbian theory attempts to explain associative or Hebbian learning, in which simultaneous activation of cells leads to pronounced increases in synaptic strength between those cells. It also provides a biological basis for errorless learning methods for education and memory rehabilitation. In the study of neural networks in cognitive function, it is often regarded as the neuronal basis of unsupervised learning. == Engrams, cell assembly theory, and learning == Hebbian theory provides an explanation for how neurons might connect to become engrams, which may be stored in overlapping cell assemblies, or groups of neurons that encode specific information. Initially created as a way to explain recurrent activity in specific groups of cortical neurons, Hebb's theories on the form and function of cell assemblies can be understood from the following: The general idea is an old one, that any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated' so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other. Hebb also wrote: When one cell repeatedly assists in firing another, the axon of the first cell develops synaptic knobs (or enlarges them if they already exist) in contact with the soma of the second cell. D. Alan Allport posits additional ideas regarding cell assembly theory and its role in forming engrams using the concept of auto-association, or the brain's ability to retrieve information based on a partial cue, described as follows: If the inputs to a system cause the same pattern of activity to occur repeatedly, the set of active elements constituting that pattern will become increasingly strongly inter-associated. That is, each element will tend to turn on every other element and (with negative weights) to turn off the elements that do not form part of the pattern. To put it another way, the pattern as a whole will become 'auto-associated'. We may call a learned (auto-associated) pattern an engram. Research conducted in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel has provided evidence supporting the role of Hebbian learning mechanisms at synapses in the marine gastropod Aplysia californica. Because synapses in the peripheral nervous system of marine invertebrates are much easier to control in experiments, Kandel's research found that Hebbian long-term potentiation along with activity-dependent presynaptic facilitation are both necessary for synaptic plasticity and classical conditioning in Aplysia californica. While research on invertebrates has established fundamental mechanisms of learning and memory, much of the work on long-lasting synaptic changes between vertebrate neurons involves the use of non-physiological experimental stimulation of brain cells. However, some of the physiologically relevant synapse modification mechanisms that have been studied in vertebrate brains do seem to be examples of Hebbian processes. One such review indicates that long-lasting changes in synaptic strengths can be induced by physiologically relevant synaptic activity using both Hebbian and non-Hebbian mechanisms. == Principles == In artificial neurons and artificial neural networks, Hebb's principle can be described as a method of determining how to alter the weights between model neurons. The weight between two neurons increases if the two neurons activate simultaneously, and reduces if they activate separately. Nodes that tend to be either both positive or both negative at the same time have strong positive weights, while those that tend to be opposite have strong negative weights. The following is a formulaic description of Hebbian learning (many other descriptions are possible): w i j = x i x j , {\displaystyle \,w_{ij}=x_{i}x_{j},} where w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} is the weight of the connection from neuron j {\displaystyle j} to neuron i {\displaystyle i} , and x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} is the input for neuron i {\displaystyle i} . This is an example of pattern learning, where weights are updated after every training example. In a Hopfield network, connections w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} are set to zero if i = j {\displaystyle i=j} (no reflexive connections allowed). With binary neurons (activations either 0 or 1), connections would be set to 1 if the connected neurons have the same activation for a pattern. When several training patterns are used, the expression becomes an average of the individuals: w i j = 1 p ∑ k = 1 p x i k x j k , {\displaystyle w_{ij}={\frac {1}{p}}\sum _{k=1}^{p}x_{i}^{k}x_{j}^{k},} where w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} is the weight of the connection from neuron j {\displaystyle j} to neuron i {\displaystyle i} , p {\displaystyle p} is the number of training patterns and x i k {\displaystyle x_{i}^{k}} the k {\displaystyle k} -th input for neuron i {\displaystyle i} . This is learning by epoch, with weights updated after all the training examples are presented and is last term applicable to both discrete and continuous training sets. Again, in a Hopfield network, connections w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} are set to zero if i = j {\displaystyle i=j} (no reflexive connections). A variation of Hebbian learning that takes into account phenomena such as blocking and other neural learning phenomena is the mathematical model of Harry Klopf. Klopf's model assumes that parts of a system with simple adaptive mechanisms can underlie more complex systems with more advanced adaptive behavior, such as neural networks. == Relationship to unsupervised learning, stability, and generalization == Because of the simple nature of Hebbian learning, based only on the coincidence of pre- and post-synaptic activity, it may not be intuitively clear why this form of plasticity leads to meaningful learning. However, it can be shown that Hebbian plasticity does pick up the statistical properties of the input in a way that can be categorized as unsupervised learning. This can be mathematically shown in a simplified example. Let us work under the simplifying assumption of a single rate-based neuron of rate y ( t ) {\displaystyle y(t)} , whose inputs have rates x 1 ( t ) . . . x N ( t ) {\displaystyle x_{1}(t)...x_{N}(t)} . The response of the neuron y ( t ) {\displaystyle y(t)} is usually described as a linear combination of its input, ∑ i w i x i {\displaystyle \sum _{i}w_{i}x_{i}} , followed by a response function f {\displaystyle f} : y = f ( ∑ i = 1 N w i x i ) . {\displaystyle y=f\left(\sum _{i=1}^{N}w_{i}x_{i}\right).} As defined in the previous sections, Hebbian plasticity describes the evolution in time of the synaptic weight w {\displaystyle w} : d w i d t = η x i y . {\displaystyle {\frac {dw_{i}}{dt}}=\eta x_{i}y.} Assuming, for simplicity, an identity response function f ( a ) = a {\displaystyle f(a)=a} , we can write d w i d t = η x i ∑ j = 1 N w j x j {\displaystyle {\frac {dw_{i}}{dt}}=\eta x_{i}\sum _{j=1}^{N}w_{j}x_{j}} or in matrix form: d w d t = η x x T w . {\displaystyle {\frac {d\mathbf {w} }{dt}}=\eta \mathbf {x} \mathbf {x} ^{T}\mathbf {w} .} As in the previous chapter, if training by epoch is done an average ⟨ … ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \dots \rangle } over discrete or continuous (time) training set of x {\displaystyle \mathbf {x} } can be done: d w d t = ⟨ η x x T w ⟩ = η ⟨ x x T ⟩ w = η C w . {\displaystyle {\frac {d\mathbf {w} }{dt}}=\langle \eta \mathbf {x} \mathbf {x} ^{T}\mathbf {w} \rangle =\eta \langle \mathbf {x} \mathbf {x} ^{T}\rangle \mathbf {w} =\eta C\mathbf {w} .} where C = ⟨ x x T ⟩ {\displaystyle C=\langle \,\mathbf {x} \mathbf {x} ^{T}\rangle } is the correlation matrix of the input under the additional assumption that ⟨ x ⟩ = 0 {\displaystyle \langle \mathbf
Best AI Pair Programmers in 2026
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Monica S. Lam
Monica Sin-Ling Lam is an American computer scientist. She is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. == Education == Monica Lam received a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia in 1980 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. == Career == Lam joined the faculty of Computer Science at Stanford University in 1988. She has contributed to the research of a wide range of computer systems topics including compilers, program analysis, operating systems, security, computer architecture, and high-performance computing. More recently, she is working in natural language processing, and virtual assistants with an emphasis on privacy protection. She is the faculty director of the Open Virtual Assistant Lab, which organized the first workshop for the World Wide Voice Web. The lab developed the open-source Almond voice assistant, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Almond received Popular Science's Best of What's New award in 2019. Previously, Lam led the SUIF (Stanford University Intermediate Format) Compiler project, which produced a widely used compiler infrastructure known for its locality optimizations and interprocedural parallelization. Many of the compiler techniques she developed have been adopted by industry. Her other research projects included the architecture and compiler for the CMU Warp machine, a systolic array of VLIW processors, and the Stanford DASH distributed shared memory machine. In 1998, she took a sabbatical leave from Stanford to help start Tensilica Inc., a company that specializes in configurable processor cores. In another research project, her program analysis group developed a collection of tools for improving software security and reliability. They developed the first scalable context-sensitive inclusion-based pointer analysis and a freely available tool called BDDBDDB, that allows programmers to express context-sensitive analyses simply by writing Datalog queries. Other tools developed include Griffin, static and dynamic analysis for finding security vulnerabilities in Web applications such as SQL injection, a static and dynamic program query language called QL, a static memory leak detector called Clouseau, a dynamic buffer overrun detector called CRED, and a dynamic error diagnosis tool called DIDUCE. In the Collective project, her research group and she developed the concept of a livePC: subscribers of the livePC will automatically run the latest of the published PC virtual images with each reboot. This approach allows computers to be managed scalably and securely. In 2005, the group started a company called MokaFive to transfer the technology to industry. She also directed the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford, as part of the Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 initiative. Lam is also the cofounder of Omlet, which launched in 2014. Omlet is the first product from MobiSocial. Omlet is an open, decentralized social networking tool, based on an extensible chat platform. Lam chaired the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Design and Implementation Conference in 2000, served on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and numerous program committees for conferences on languages and compilers (PLDI, POPL), operating systems (SOSP), and computer architecture (ASPLOS, ISCA). == Awards and honors == National Academy of Engineering member, 2019 University of British Columbia Computer Science 50th Anniversary Research Award, 2018 Fellow of the ACM, 2007 ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation Best Paper Award in 2004 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in 2002 ACM Most Influential Programming Language Design and Implementation Paper Award in 2001 NSF Young Investigator award in 1992 Two of her papers were recognized in "20 Years of PLDI--a Selection (1979-1999)" One of her papers was recognized in the "25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture", 1988. == Selected works == Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools (2d Ed) (2006) (the "Dragon Book") by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman (ISBN 0-321-48681-1) A Systolic Array Optimizing Compiler (1989) (ISBN 0-89838-300-5) Monica Lam, Dissertation
Online service provider
An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider (music, movies), a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, an official government site, social media, a wiki, or a Usenet newsgroup. In its original more limited definition, it referred only to a commercial computer communication service in which paid members could dial via a computer modem the service's private computer network and access various services and information resources such as bulletin board systems, downloadable files and programs, news articles, chat rooms, and electronic mail services. The term "online service" was also used in references to these dial-up services. The traditional dial-up online service differed from the modern Internet service provider in that they provided a large degree of content that was only accessible by those who subscribed to the online service, while ISP mostly serves to provide access to the Internet and generally provides little if any exclusive content of its own. In the U.S., the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) portion of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act has expanded the legal definition of online service in two different ways for different portions of the law. It states in section 512(k)(1): (A) As used in subsection (a), the term "service provider" means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received. (B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term "service provider" means a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefore, and includes an entity described in subparagraph (A). These broad definitions make it possible for numerous web businesses to benefit from the OCILLA. == History == The first commercial online services went live in 1969. CompuServe (owned in the 1980s and 1990s by H&R Block) and The Source (for a time owned by The Reader's Digest) are considered the first major online services created to serve the market of personal computer users. Utilizing text-based interfaces and menus, these services allowed anyone with a modem and communications software to use email, chat, news, financial and stock information, bulletin boards, special interest groups (SIGs), forums and general information. Subscribers could exchange email only with other subscribers of the same service. (For a time a service called DASnet carried mail among several online services, and CompuServe, MCI Mail, and other services experimented with X.400 protocols to exchange email until the Internet rendered these outmoded.) Other text-based online services followed such as Delphi, GEnie and MCI Mail. The 1980s also saw the rise of independent Computer Bulletin Boards, or BBSes. (Online services are not BBSes. An online service may contain an electronic bulletin board, but the term "BBS" is reserved for independent dialup, microcomputer-based services that are usually single-user systems.) The commercial services used pre-existing packet-switched (X.25) data communications networks, or the services' own networks (as with CompuServe). In either case, users dialed into local access points and were connected to remote computer centers where information and services were located. As with telephone service, subscribers paid by the minute, with separate day-time and evening/weekend rates. As the use of computers that supported color and graphics, such the Atari 8-bit computers, Commodore 64, TI-99/4A, Apple II, and early IBM PC compatibles, increased, online services gradually developed framed or partially graphical information displays. Early services such as CompuServe added increasingly sophisticated graphics-based front end software to present their information, though they continued to offer text-based access for those who needed or preferred it. In 1985 Viewtron, which began as a Videotex service requiring a dedicated terminal, introduced software allowing home computer owners access. Beginning in the mid-1980s graphics based online services such as PlayNET, Prodigy, and Quantum Link (aka Q-Link) were developed. Quantum Link, which was based on Commodore-only Playnet software, later developed AppleLink Personal Edition, PC-Link (based on Tandy's DeskMate), and Promenade (for IBM), all of which (including Q-Link) were later combined as America Online. These online services presaged the web browser that would change global online life 10 years later. Before Quantum Link, Apple computer had developed its own service, called AppleLink, which was mostly a support network targeted at Apple dealers and developers. Later, Apple offered the short-lived eWorld, targeted at Mac consumers and based on the Mac version of the America Online software. Beginning in 1992, the Internet, which had previously been limited to government, academic, and corporate research settings, was opened to commercial entities. The first online service to offer Internet access was DELPHI, which had developed TCP/IP access much earlier, in connection with an environmental group that rated Internet access. The explosion of popularity of the World Wide Web in 1994 accelerated the development of the Internet as an information and communication resource for consumers and businesses. The sudden availability of low- to no-cost email and appearance of free independent web sites broke the business model that had supported the rise of the early online service industry. CompuServe, BIX, AOL, DELPHI, and Prodigy gradually added access to Internet e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, ftp, and to web sites. At the same time, they moved from usage-based billing to monthly subscriptions. Similarly, companies that paid to have AOL host their information or early online stores began to develop their own web sites, putting further stress on the economics of the online industry. Only the largest services like AOL (which later acquired CompuServe, just as CompuServe acquired The Source) were able to make the transition to the Internet-centric world. A new class of online service provider arose to provide access to the Internet, the internet service provider or ISP. Internet-only service providers like UUNET, The Pipeline, Panix, Netcom, the World, EarthLink, and MindSpring provided no content of their own, concentrating their efforts on making it easy for nontechnical users to install the various software required to "get online" before consumer operating systems came internet-enabled out of the box. In contrast to the online services' multitiered per-minute or per-hour rates, many ISPs offered flat-fee, unlimited access plans. Independent companies sprang up to offer access and packages to compete with the big networks (eg, the-wire.com, 1994 in Toronto and bway.net 1995 in New York). These providers first offered access through telephone and modem, just as did the early online services providers. By the early 2000s, these independent ISPs had largely been supplanted by high speed and broadband access through cable and phone companies, as well as wireless access. The importance of the online services industry was vital in "paving the road" for the information superhighway. When Mosaic and Netscape were released in 1994, they had a ready audience of more than 10 million people who were able to download their first web browser through an online service. Though ISPs quickly began offering software packages with setup to their customers, this brief period gave many users their first online experience. Two online services in particular, Prodigy and AOL, are often confused with the Internet, or the origins of the Internet. Prodigy's Chief Technical Officer said in 1999: "Eleven years ago, the Internet was just an intangible dream that Prodigy brought to life. Now it is a force to be reckoned with." Despite that statement, neither service provided the back bone for the Internet, nor did either start the Internet. == Online service interfaces == The first online service used a simple text-based interface in which content was largely text only and users made choices via a command prompt. This allowed just about any computer with a modem and terminal communications program the ability to access these text-based online services. CompuServe would later offer, with the advent of the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based PCs, a GUI interface program for their service. This provided a very rudimentary GUI interface. CompuServe continued to offer text-only access for those needing it. Online services like Prodigy and AOL developed their online service around a GUI and thus unlike CompuServe's early GUI-based software, these online services provided a more robust GUI interface. Early GUI-base
Svetlana Lazebnik
Svetlana Lazebnik (born 1979) is a Ukrainian-American researcher in computer vision who works as a professor of computer science and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research involves interactions between image understanding and natural language processing, including the automated captioning of images, and the development of a benchmark database of textually grounded images. == Education and career == Lazebnik was born in Kyiv in 1979 to a family of Ukrainian Jews, and emigrated with her family to the US as a teenager. She majored in computer science at DePaul University, minoring in mathematics and graduating with the highest honors in 2000. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, with the dissertation Local, Semi-Local and Global Models for Texture, Object and Scene Recognition supervised by Jean Ponce. After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois, she became an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. She returned to the University of Illinois as a faculty member in 2012. She is a co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision. == Recognition == Lazebnik was named an IEEE Fellow in 2021, "for contributions to computer vision". With Cordelia Schmid and Jean Ponce, she won the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2016 for the best work in computer vision from ten years earlier, for their work on spatial pyramid matching.