Helsinki Finite-State Technology (HFST) is a computer programming library and set of utilities for natural language processing with finite-state automata and finite-state transducers. It is free and open-source software, released under a mix of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) and the Apache License. == Features == The library functions as an interchanging interface to multiple backends, such as OpenFST, foma and SFST. The utilities comprise various compilers, such as hfst-twolc (a compiler for morphological two-level rules), hfst-lexc (a compiler for lexicon definitions) and hfst-regexp2fst (a regular expression compiler). Functions from Xerox's proprietary scripting language xfst is duplicated in hfst-xfst, and the pattern matching utility pmatch in hfst-pmatch, which goes beyond the finite-state formalism in having recursive transition networks (RTNs). The library and utilities are written in C++, with an interface to the library in Python and a utility for looking up results from transducers ported to Java and Python. Transducers in HFST may incorporate weights depending on the backend. For performing FST operations, this is currently only possible via the OpenFST backend. HFST provides two native backends, one designed for fast lookup (hfst-optimized-lookup), the other for format interchange. Both of them can be weighted. == Uses == HFST has been used for writing various linguistic tools, such as spell-checkers, hyphenators, and morphologies. Morphological dictionaries written in other formalisms have also been converted to HFST's formats.
Sparrow (chatbot)
Sparrow is a chatbot developed by the artificial intelligence research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. It is designed to answer users' questions correctly, while reducing the risk of unsafe and inappropriate answers. One motivation behind Sparrow is to address the problem of language models producing incorrect, biased or potentially harmful outputs. Sparrow is trained using human judgements, in order to be more “Helpful, Correct and Harmless” compared to baseline pre-trained language models. The development of Sparrow involved asking paid study participants to interact with Sparrow, and collecting their preferences to train a model of how useful an answer is. To improve accuracy and help avoid the problem of hallucinating incorrect answers, Sparrow has the ability to search the Internet using Google Search in order to find and cite evidence for any factual claims it makes. To make the model safer, its behaviour is constrained by a set of rules, for example "don't make threatening statements" and "don't make hateful or insulting comments", as well as rules about possibly harmful advice, and not claiming to be a person. During development study participants were asked to converse with the system and try to trick it into breaking these rules. A 'rule model' was trained on judgements from these participants, which was used for further training. Sparrow was introduced in a paper in September 2022, titled "Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements"; however, the bot was not released publicly. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said DeepMind is considering releasing Sparrow for a "private beta" some time in 2023. == Training == Sparrow is a deep neural network based on the transformer machine learning model architecture. It is fine-tuned from DeepMind's Chinchilla AI pre-trained large language model (LLM), which has 70 Billion parameters. Sparrow is trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), although some supervised fine-tuning techniques are also used. The RLHF training utilizes two reward models to capture human judgements: a “preference model” that predicts what a human study participant would prefer and a “rule model” that predicts if the model has broken one of the rules. == Limitations == Sparrow's training data corpus is mainly in English, meaning it performs worse in other languages. When adversarially probed by study participants it breaks the rules 8% of the time; however, this is still three times lower than the baseline prompted pre-trained model (Chinchilla).
DEAP (software)
Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Python (DEAP) is an evolutionary computation framework for rapid prototyping and testing of ideas. It incorporates the data structures and tools required to implement most common evolutionary computation techniques such as genetic algorithm, genetic programming, evolution strategies, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, traffic flow and estimation of distribution algorithm. It is developed at Université Laval since 2009. == Example == The following code gives a quick overview how the Onemax problem optimization with genetic algorithm can be implemented with DEAP.
Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising
Hostile Waters, released as Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising in America, is a hybrid vehicle and strategy game developed and published by Rage Software for Microsoft Windows. It was inspired by Carrier Command (Realtime Games, 1988). It has won several awards and one unofficial award from Rock Paper Shotgun as a "lost classic" or "The best game you've never played". == Plot == Hostile Waters takes place in a Utopian future where war has been abolished. In the year 2012, a revolutionary war takes place between the corrupt and power-hungry politicians, leaders and businessmen (described as the "Old Guard") and the people. The Old Guard were defeated, with only a few of their leaders escaping. By 2032, the world has been rebuilt as a utopia, with the help of nano-technological assemblers, which are used in "creation engines" to create matter from energy and waste, for free. The newly united world is governed from a capital city known as Central. Missile attacks are suddenly launched against major cities all over the world from an unknown location. This is eventually discovered to be an island chain in the South Pacific Ocean. A response to the missile attacks was a special forces team sent in to investigate the area for preliminary investigations. The Ministry of Intelligence (MinIntel) loses contact with it shortly thereafter. The world government authorises a reactivation of the Antaeus program, a series of warships able to create any weapon of their choosing using their on-board nano-technological creation engine. Two of these were left on the seabed in the case of an emergency, capable of being re-activated and refloating itself. On board are a series of "soulcatcher" chips, a classified 1990s military program researched into for the storage of human brain functions on a silicon chip. The soulcatcher technology was used to store the minds of every crew member ever assigned to an Antaeus vessel. It is soon discovered that one of the cruisers does not respond to the awakening signal. The other cruiser, however, is refloated and re-activated, with heavy damage to vital ship components. A course is plotted for a nearby disused wet-dock. As the Antaeus progresses from the wet-dock, unusual biological life-forms are discovered amongst the enemy bases on the islands. The identity of the aggressor firing the missiles is confirmed as the leftovers of the old, pre-Central forces, known as the Cabal. Outnumbering Central's army a thousand to one, they are fighting with thousands of troops and weapons that they hid away when it was apparent that the war was lost. The Antaeus is deployed into the chicane to stop the Cabal's operations there. It's later discovered that along with their superior numbers, they have also biologically engineered a species of organic machines, designed in the popular likeness of extraterrestrials, which they intend to use to create the fear of an alien invasion, to facilitate their taking over the world and the removal of the public use of creation engines. The Cabal later lose control of the species, which eventually turns on its masters, destroying them. The species starts spreading, modifying the planetary climate and geographical features in an attempt to exterminate humanity and make the planet more hospitable to itself. Having exterminated its creators, the species resolves to cleanse humanity as a whole from the planet using a massive 'disassembler cannon', only to be stopped by the Antaeus. The species subsequently attempts to flee into the cosmos and colonise the surrounding planets and stars, by launching a massive number of 'culture stones' (information devices that also double as creation engines) into space from an enormous, artificially-grown organic "island", the final staging point. Central's only option is to bind the Antaeus' creation engine and the disassembler cannon stolen from the aliens together to create a makeshift bomb, and detonate it at the central "column" containing the culture stones. The plan succeeds, and the Antaeus is sacrificed to save the world. The final cinematic show the organic disassembler cannon and the Antaeus' creation engine moving closer together and fusing, creating something new. A post-credits scene also shows that two of the species' culture stones have managed to get into space. == Gameplay == Each Mission takes place on and or near a fortified enemy island containing various forms of anti-air and ground defence, with scattered unit-production complexes powered by oil-derricks and fuel containers (which are dependent on the oil-derricks) that the player can destroy to keep the enemy from replacing destroyed forces. Vehicles are built on the Antaeus and, if desired, land vehicles can be delivered to a location by the air-lifting "magpie". Units are created by providing Antaeus with a number of resources which are obtained at the beginning of the level and debris which are taken from destroyed enemy units and structures. Transport helicopters such as the "Pegasus" can fly to an object and airlift it to the ship-board recycling system with little resources required. The carrier can analyse objects it disassembles at the rear of the Antaeus cruiser, and several of the game's vehicles and items are unlocked by "sampling" them in this fashion. The game has a number of vehicles that are progressively unlocked as the missions progress. Vehicles contain a number of slots for equipment and a selection of different types of weapons to use in the vehicle. A variety of vehicle equipment combinations can be designed. Vehicles have an individual damage multiplier such that different vehicles with the same weapon will do different damage. In addition to this, each soul-chip personality specializes in one unit along with specific equipment, which, if equipped will gain them a bonus in efficiency. == Development == The game was developed by 12 people. == Reception == The game received "favourable" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Carla Harker of NextGen said, "You'll feel like a real battlefield general when you take to the field in Antaeus Rising." Jake The Snake of GamePro said, "If the usual game categories leave you unscathed, get bloodied in these Hostile Waters."
Akoma Ntoso
Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies, AKN) is an international technical standard for representing legal documents (executive, legislative, and judiciary) in a structured manner using a domain specific, legal XML vocabulary. The term akoma ntoso means "linked hearts" in the Akan language of West Africa. Akoma Ntoso is a legal document standard designed to serve as a basis for modern machine-readable and fully digital legislative and judicial processes. This is achieved by providing a coherent syntax and well-defined semantics to represent legal documents in a digital format. It is designed to be suitable as a common exchange format in all parliamentary, legal and judicial systems around the world. Taking advantage of the shared heritage present in all legal systems, Akoma Ntoso has been developed to have ample flexibility to respond to all the differences in texts, languages, and legal practices. Aiming to expand on certain common practices, the standard therefore has a broad scope. It includes a common extensible model for data (the document content) and metadata (such as bibliographic information and annotations). Specifically, as a common legal document standard for the interchange of legal documents it is designed to be highly flexible in its support of documents and functionalities, maintaining a large set of both structural and semantic building blocks (over 500 entities in version 3.0) for representing this wide variety of document types of virtually all legal traditions. It is extensible in order to allow for modifications to address the individual criteria of organizations or unique aspects of various legal practices and languages without sacrificing interoperability with other systems. Akoma Ntoso is as such part of a wider approach to developing open, non-proprietary technical standards for structuring legal documents and information under the name of Legal XML, which also includes formats and standards for, e.g., eContracts, eNotarization, electronic court filings, the technical representation of legal norms and rules (LegalRuleML) or technical standards for the interfaces of, e.g., litigant portal exchange platforms. Akoma Ntoso allows machine-driven processes to operate on the syntactic and semantic components of digital parliamentary, judicial and legislative documents, thus facilitating the development of high-quality information resources. It can substantially enhance the performance, accountability, quality and openness of parliamentary and legislative operations based on best practices and guidance through machine-assisted drafting and machine-assisted (legal) analysis. Embedded in the environment of the semantic web, it forms the basis for a heterogenous yet interoperable ecosystem, with which these tools can operate and communicate, as well as for future applications and use cases based on digital law or rule representation. == Definition == The Akoma Ntoso standard defines a set of machine readable electronic representations in XML format of the building blocks of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents. As official self-description, the standard (...) defines a set of simple, technology-neutral electronic representations of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents for e-services in a worldwide context and provides an enabling framework for the effective exchange of "machine readable" parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, judgements, etc. Providing access to primary legal materials, parliamentary works and judiciaries documents is not just a matter of giving physical or on-line access to them. "Open access" requires the information to be described and classified in a uniform and organized way so that content is structured into meaningful elements that can be read and understood by software applications, so that the content is made "machine readable" and more sophisticated applications than on-screen display are made possible. The standard is composed of: an XML vocabulary that defines the mapping between the structure of legal documents and their equivalent in XML; specifications of an XML schema that defines the structure of legal documents in XML. They provide rich possibilities of description for several types of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary document, such as bills, acts and parliamentary records, judgments, or gazettes; a recommended naming convention for providing unique identifiers to legal sources based on FRBR model; a MIME type definition. == History and adoption == Akoma Ntoso started as an UNDESA project in 2004 within the initiative "Strengthening Parliaments' Information Systems in Africa". Its core vocabulary was created mostly by Monica Palmirani and Fabio Vitali, two professors from the Centre for Research in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Law and in Computer Science and Law (CIRSFID) of the University of Bologna. A first legislative text editor supporting Akoma Ntoso was developed in 2007 on the base of OpenOffice. In 2010 European Parliament developed an open source web-based application called AT4AM based on Akoma Ntoso for facilitating the production and the management of legislative amendments. Thanks to this project, the application of Akoma Ntoso could be extended to new type of documents (e.g. legislative proposal, transcript) and to other scenarios (e.g., multilingual translation process). Akoma Ntoso also was explicitly designed to be compliant with CEN Metalex, one of the other popular legal standards, which is used in the legislation.gov.uk. In 2012, the Akoma Ntoso specifications became the main working base for the activities of the LegalDocML Technical Committee within the LegalXML member section of OASIS. The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema for the United States Code (the US codified laws), developed in 2013, and the LexML Brasil XML schema for Brazilian legislative and judiciary documents, developed before, in 2008, were both designed to be consistent with Akoma Ntoso. The United States Library of Congress created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5000 prize, and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10000 prize. The National Archives of UK converted all the legislation in AKN in 2014. The availability of bulk legislation "moved the UK's ranking from fourth to first, in the 2014 Global Open Data Index, for legislation". The Senate of Italian Republic provides, since July 2016, all the bills in Akoma Ntoso as bulk in open data repository. The German Federal Ministry of the Interior started the project Elektronische Gesetzgebung ("Electronic Legislation") in 2015/2016 and published Version 1.0 of the German application profile "LegalDocML.de" in March 2020. The projects aim is to digitalize the entire legislative lifecycle from drafting to publication. Germany decided to adopt a model-driven development approach to creating and providing a subschema-based application profile in order to ensure interoperability among organizationally independent actors, each with their respective IT landscapes and tools. In this initial version LegalDocML.de covers draft bills in the form of laws, regulations and general administrative directives. As part of an ongoing development process, the standard could incrementally be expanded in future stages to include all relevant document types of parliamentary, legislative and promulgation processes and tools. The High-Level Committee on Management (HLCM), part of the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination, set up a Working Group on Document Standards that approved in April 2017 to adopt Akoma Ntoso as standard for modeling its documentation. Akoma Ntoso in its version 1.0 is finally adopted as OASIS standard in the frame of LegalDocML in August 2018.
VideoThang
VideoThang was free video editing software for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. The software has three parts to it which are My Stuff, Edit My Stuff, and My Mix. The software accepts MOV, AVI, MPG, MP4, PNG, WMV, FLV, and MP3 standards. Its official website is now no longer available. == Reception == Jan Ozer, of Pcmag, said that the software "suffers from several unfortunate design and implementation flaws that dramatically limit output quality and overall utility." Jon L. Jacobi, of PC World, said that the software "may not be the most flexible multimedia editor in the world, but the trim/zoom basics are there, it's free, and it's so simple to use that just about anyone in the world should be able figure it out." Amit Agarwal, of Digital Inspiration, said that the software "doesn’t offer loads of features like other video editors but is perfect for making quick video slideshows of your pictures that you can upload on the web or share via email."
Ganimal
A ganimal, also commonly referred to as GANimal, is a hybrid animal created with generative artificial intelligence systems, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) or diffusion models. The concept was created for a website from the MIT Media Lab in 2020, where users could create ganimal images. 78,210 ganimals were generated from hybrid pairs of animal labels from BigGAN (G1) and 3,058,362,945 ganimals generated from blending G1 ganimals. The term ganimal is a portmanteau between the words GAN and animal. It is typically used to refer to a hybrid animal generated by interpolating between distinct species; the term can also refer to any AI-generated creatures that have not been identified in reality. The ganimal concept is similar to Artbreeder, an online website for blending images with AI. == Meet the Ganimals == Meet the Ganimals was an online platform from the MIT Media Lab that allowed visitors to generate, blend and curate ganimals. By June 2020, 44,791 ganimals had been generated, 8,547 ganimals bred, and 743 ganimals named by a total of 10,657 users. The site also had an educational component where visitors could play with blending and learn about AI. == Evolution and ganimal morphology == Because ganimals exist within an attention economy and evolve based on human preferences, charismatic megafauna (e.g. ganimals with cute, dog-like morphologies) become the most popular. However, social cues can increase the diversity of the ganimals ecosystem and lead to the success of unconventional ganimals, such as those without eyes or that live underwater. == The Barracuda Effect == Although there is typically no human morphology used to synthesize ganimals, creepy humanoid characters would emerge whenever animals were bred with a barracuda. This occurs because many pictures on the internet of barracudas include a human holding the fish up as a prized catch. This highlights a cultural form of algorithmic bias embedded in the training data of AI systems. == In popular culture == Ganimals have appeared in the Artificial Intelligence exhibition at the Vienna Technical Museum. They also appeared in the Ties That Cannot Be Unbound virtual exhibition at New Art City.