Claire Cardie is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing. Since 2006, she has been a professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, and from 2010 to 2011 she was the first Charles and Barbara Weiss Chair of Information Science at Cornell. Her research interests include coreference resolution and sentiment analysis. == Education and career == Cardie is a 1982 graduate of Yale University, majoring in computer science. After working for several companies as a computer programmer, she returned to graduate study in the late 1980s and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994. Her dissertation, Domain-Specific Knowledge Acquisition for Conceptual Sentence Analysis, was supervised by Wendy Lehnert. She has been on the Cornell University faculty since 1994, initially in computer science and since 2005 also in information science. She was an assistant professor (1994–2000) and associate professor (2000–06), before being promoted to a full professorship in 2006. In 2007 she founded a start-up company, Appinions, and she was its chief scientist until 2015. Her doctoral students at Cornell have included Amit Singhal and Kiri Wagstaff. == Recognition == Cardie became a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2016. She was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to natural language processing, including coreference resolution, information and opinion extraction". She was named to the 2021 class of Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Aphelion (software)
The Aphelion Imaging Software Suite is a software suite that includes three base products - Aphelion Lab, Aphelion Dev, and Aphelion SDK for addressing image processing and image analysis applications. The suite also includes a set of extension programs to implement specific vertical applications that benefit from imaging techniques. The Aphelion software products can be used to prototype and deploy applications, or can be integrated, in whole or in part, into a user's system as processing and visualization libraries whose components are available as both DLLs or .Net components. == History and evolution == The development of Aphelion started in 1995 as a joint project of a French company, ADCIS S.A., and an American company, Amerinex Applied Imaging, Inc. (AAI) Aphelion's image processing and analysis functions were made from operators available from the KBVision software developed and sold by Amerinex's predecessor, Amerinex Artificial Intelligence Inc. In the 1990s, the XLim software library was developed at the Center of Mathematical Morphology of Mines ParisTech, and both companies carried out its development tasks. The first version of Aphelion was completed and released in April 1996. Successive versions were released before the first official stable release in December 1996 at the Photonics East conference in Boston and the Solutions Vision show in Paris in January 1997, where at the latter it competed with Stemmer Imaging's CVB imaging toolbox. In 1998, version 2.3 of Aphelion for Windows 98 was released, and its user base was growing in both France and the United States. Version 3.0, totally rewritten to take advantage of Microsoft's then-recent ActiveX technology, was officially released in 2000. It also became available as a « Developer » version, for rapid prototyping of applications using its intuitive GUI and the macro recording capability, and a « Core » version, including the full library as a set of ActiveX components to be used by software developers, integrators and original equipment manufacturers (OEM). As AAI turned its focus to security, in 2001, ADCIS took the lead on developing Aphelion. AAI focused on millimeter wave scanners for concealed weapon detection at airports, and eventually merged with Millimetrics to become Millivision. In 2004, ADCIS specified version 4.0 of Aphelion. The set of image processing/analysis functions was rewritten one more time to be compatible with the .NET technology and the emergence of 64 bit architecture PCs. In addition, the GUI was redesigned to address two usage types: a semi-automatic use where the user is guided through the different steps of functions, and a fully automatic use where the expert user can quickly invoke imaging functions. Its first release was presented at the IPOT exhibition in Birmingham, UK the same year. During the Vision Show in Paris in October 2008, the new Aphelion Lab product was launched for users that are not specialists in image processing. It is easier to use, and only includes fewer image processing functions. It was then included in the Aphelion Image Processing Suite, consisting of Aphelion Dev (replacing Aphelion Developer), Aphelion Lab, Aphelion SDK (replacing Aphelion Core), and a set of extensions. Nowadays, ADCIS is still working on the suite, and updated versions with new extensions and functionalities continually become available from the websites of both companies. In 2015, support was added for very large images and scan microscope images (virtual slides compound into a very large JPEG 2000 image) for high throughput imaging, and new specific extensions were also added. In late 2015, ADCIS announced Aphelion's port for tablets and smartphones, for vertical applications. The name "Aphelion" comes from the astronomical term of the same name, meaning the point on a planet rotating around the Sun where it lies farthest from it, applying the term in a metaphorical sense. Unix was the operating system used on scientific workstations in the 1990s, such as on the workstations manufactured by market leader Sun Microsystems, which Windows suite Aphelion was quite removed from. == Description == Aphelion is a software suite to be used for image processing and image analysis. It supports 2D and 3D, monochrome, color, and multi-band images. It is developed by ADCIS, a French software house located in Saint-Contest, Calvados, Normandy. Aphelion is widely used in the scientific/industry community to solve basic and complex imaging applications. First, the imaging application is quickly developed from the Graphical User Interface, involving a set of functions that can be automatically recorded into a macro command. The macro languages available in Aphelion (i.e. BasicScript, Python, and C#) help to process batch of images, and prompt the user if needed for specific parameters that are applied to the imaging functions. All Aphelion image processing functions are written in C++, and the Aphelion user interface is written in C#. C++ functions can be called from the C# language thanks the use of dedicated wrappers. The main principle of image processing is to automatically process pixels of a digital image, then extract one or more objects of interest (i.e. cells in the field of biology, inclusions in the field of material science) and compute one or more measurements on those objects to quantify the image and generate a verdict (good image, image with defects, cancerous cells). In other words, starting from an image, pixels are processed by a set of successive functions or operators until only measurements are computed and used as the input of a 3rd party system or a classification software that will classify objects of interest that have been extracted during the imaging process. An acquisition system such as a digital camera, a video camera, an optical or electron microscope, a medical scanner, or a smartphone can be used to capture images. The set of values or pixels can be processed as a 1D image (1D signal), a 2D image (array of pixel values corresponding to a monochrome or color image), or a 3D image displayed using volume rendering (array of voxels in the 3D space) or displaying surfaces by using 3D rendering. A 2D color image is made of 3 value pixels (typically Red, Green, and Blue information or another color space), and a 3D image is made of monochrome, color (indexed color are often used), multispectral, or hyperspectral data. When dealing with videos, an additional band is added corresponding to temporal information. The Aphelion Software Suite includes three base products, and a set of optional extensions for specific applications: Aphelion Lab: Entry-level package for non-experts in image processing. It helps to quickly segment an image in a semi-automatic or manual ways, and compute a set of measurements computed on objects of interest that have been extracted during the segmentation process. A set of wizards guides the user from image acquisition to report generation. Aphelion Dev: Full imaging environment including over 450 functions to develop and deploy an application that involves image processing and analysis. It also includes a set of macro-command languages to automate any application to be invoked from the user interface. It also helps to run the imaging algorithm on more than one image that are stored on disk, available on the network, or captured by an acquisition device. Aphelion libraries for image processing and visualization are provided in Aphelion Dev as DLLs and .Net components. Aphelion SDK: A set of libraries to develop a stand-alone application with a custom interface based on the Aphelion libraries. This software development kit including display, processing and analysis functions that can be used by software developers and OEMs. It is provided as DLLs and .Net components. The stand-alone application is typically developed in C# on one computer, and then deployed on multiple PCs and systems. A set of optional extensions can be added to the « Aphelion Dev » product, depending on the application. An evaluation version of Aphelion can be run on a PC for 30 days. A permanent version of Aphelion is available based on a perpetual license. Upgrades are available through a maintenance agreement based on a yearly fee. Technical support is provided by the engineers who are developing the product. The goal of image processing is usually to extract object(s) of interest in an image, and then to classify them based on some characteristics such as shape, density, position, etc. Using Aphelion, this goal is achieved by performing the following tasks: Load an image from disk or acquire an image using an acquisition device. Enhance the image removing noise or modifying its contrast. Segment the image extracting objects of interest to be measured and analyzed. Typically, for simple applications, a threshold is performed to generate a binary image. Then, morphological operators are applied to clean the image and only keep obj
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.
Ashutosh Saxena
Ashutosh Saxena is an Indian-American computer scientist, researcher, and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and large-scale robot learning. His interests include building enterprise AI agents and embodied AI. Saxena is the co-founder and CEO of Caspar.AI, where generative AI parses data from ambient 3D radar sensors to predict 20+ health & wellness markers for pro-active patient care. Prior to Caspar.AI, Ashutosh co-founded Cognical Katapult (NSDQ: KPLT), which provides a no credit required alternative to traditional financing for online and omni-channel retail. Before Katapult, Saxena was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and faculty director of the RoboBrain Project (a large-scale AI model for robotics) at Cornell University. == Education == In 2009, with artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng as his advisor, Saxena received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence from Stanford University. Saxena received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2004. == Career == Saxena was the chief scientist of New York-based Holopad, where he worked with Steven Spielberg's team to create walkthroughs and 3D experiences for his movie TinTin. His past experiences include building acoustic AI models at Bose Corporation. Once Ashutosh completed his undergraduate degree, he became a researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, where he developed AI models for medical devices. Before Caspar, Saxena pursued other entrepreneurial ventures, such as ZunaVision, an artificial intelligence startup he co-founded with Andrew Ng that uses AI to embed advertising space within videos. Ashutosh served as the CTO of ZunaVision from 2008 to 2010. After ZunaVision, Saxena co-founded Cognical Katapult, which provided financing solutions to nonprime and underbanked consumers powered by artificial intelligence. From 2014 to 2016, Saxena served as the faculty director of the RoboBrain project, which was a joint venture that he started between Stanford University, Cornell University, Brown University, and the University of California, Berkeley that made a knowledge engine for robots. Saxena co-founded Brain of Things in 2015 with David Cheriton, who serves as chief scientist, and was listed as the fastest growing private company reaching an annual recurring revenue of $8 million in three years. It has been widely covered in several outlets including Forbes Japan, and MIT Technology Review. Saxena's work on deep learning won test of time award in 2023 by Robotics Science and Systems. Ashutosh has been recognized for his work by receiving the Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2011, Google Faculty Research Award in 2012, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship in 2012, NSF Career award in 2013, One of the Eight Innovators to Watch by the Smithsonian Institution in 2015, and received TR35 Innovator Award by MIT Technology Review in 2018. He was named by San Francisco Business Times as a 40 under 40 young business leader. == Research == Saxena has authored over 100 published papers in the areas of large-scale robot learning and artificial intelligence, with 20,000+ citations. His work in the fields of computer vision and deep learning have been featured in press releases and academic journal reviews. Ashutosh's early work includes the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR), an AI models that enables to perform tasks such as unload items from a dishwasher, which was covered on the front-page of New York Times. His work on Make3D, was the first work that estimated 3D depth from a single still image. At Cornell University, Ashutosh led the Robot Learning Lab, which used a machine learning approach to train robots to perform tasks in human environments such as generalizing manipulation in 3D point-clouds where robots learn to transfer manipulation trajectories to novel objects utilizing a large sample of demonstrations from crowdsourcing.
Leslie P. Kaelbling
Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American roboticist and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is widely recognized for adapting partially observable Markov decision processes from operations research for application in artificial intelligence and robotics. Kaelbling received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1997 for applying reinforcement learning to embedded control systems and developing programming tools for robot navigation. In 2000, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. == Career == Kaelbling received an A. B. in Philosophy in 1983 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1990, both from Stanford University. During this time she was also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information. She then worked at SRI International and the affiliated robotics spin-off Teleos Research before joining the faculty at Brown University. She left Brown in 1999 to join the faculty at MIT. Her research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty, machine learning, and sensing with applications to robotics. == Journal of Machine Learning Research == In the spring of 2000, she and two-thirds of the editorial board of the Kluwer-owned journal Machine Learning resigned in protest to its pay-to-access archives with simultaneously limited financial compensation for authors. Kaelbling co-founded and served as the first editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, a peer-reviewed open access journal on the same topics which allows researchers to publish articles for free and retain copyright with its archives freely available online. In response to the mass resignation, Kluwer changed their publishing policy to allow authors to self-archive their papers online after peer-review. Kaelbling responded that this policy was reasonable and would have made the creation of an alternative journal unnecessary, but the editorial board members had made it clear they wanted such a policy and it was only after the threat of resignations and the actual founding of JMLR that the publishing policy finally changed. == Selected works == Reinforcement Learning: A Survey (LP Kaelbling, ML Littman, AW Moore). Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) 4 (1996) 237-285. A highly cited survey on the field of reinforcement learning. Planning and acting in partially observable stochastic domains (LP Kaelbling, ML Littman, AR Cassandra). Artificial Intelligence 101 (1), 99-134. Acting under uncertainty: Discrete Bayesian models for mobile-robot navigation (AR Cassandra, LP Kaelbling, JA Kurien). Intelligent Robots and Systems (2) 963-972. The synthesis of digital machines with provable epistemic properties (SJ Rosenschein, LP Kaelbling). Proceedings of the 1986 Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge, 83-98. Practical reinforcement learning in continuous spaces (WD Smart, LP Kaelbling). 2000 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 903-910. Hierarchical task and motion planning in the now (LP Kaelbling, T Lozano-Pérez). 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 1470-1477.
Crackme
A crackme is a small computer program designed to test a programmer's reverse engineering skills. Crackmes are made as a legal way to crack software, since no intellectual property is being infringed. == Description == Crackmes often incorporate protection schemes and algorithms similar to those used in proprietary software. However, they can sometimes be more challenging because they may use advanced packing or protection techniques, making the underlying algorithm harder to analyze and modify. == Keygenme == A keygenme is specifically designed for the reverser to not only identify the protection algorithm used in the application but also create a small key generator (keygen) in the programming language of their choice. Most keygenmes, when properly manipulated, can be made self-keygenning. For example, during validation, they might generate the correct key internally and compare it to the user's input. This allows the key generation algorithm to be easily replicated. Anti-debugging and anti-disassembly routines are often used to confuse debuggers or render disassembly output useless. Code obfuscation is also used to further complicate reverse engineering.
Google matrix
A Google matrix is a particular stochastic matrix that is used by Google's PageRank algorithm. The matrix represents a graph with edges representing links between pages. The PageRank of each page can then be generated iteratively from the Google matrix using the power method. However, in order for the power method to converge, the matrix must be stochastic, irreducible and aperiodic. == Adjacency matrix A and Markov matrix S == In order to generate the Google matrix G, we must first generate an adjacency matrix A which represents the relations between pages or nodes. Assuming there are N pages, we can fill out A by doing the following: A matrix element A i , j {\displaystyle A_{i,j}} is filled with 1 if node j {\displaystyle j} has a link to node i {\displaystyle i} , and 0 otherwise; this is the adjacency matrix of links. A related matrix S corresponding to the transitions in a Markov chain of given network is constructed from A by dividing the elements of column "j" by a number of k j = Σ i = 1 N A i , j {\displaystyle k_{j}=\Sigma _{i=1}^{N}A_{i,j}} where k j {\displaystyle k_{j}} is the total number of outgoing links from node j to all other nodes. The columns having zero matrix elements, corresponding to dangling nodes, are replaced by a constant value 1/N. Such a procedure adds a link from every sink, dangling state a {\displaystyle a} to every other node. Now by the construction the sum of all elements in any column of matrix S is equal to unity. In this way the matrix S is mathematically well defined and it belongs to the class of Markov chains and the class of Perron-Frobenius operators. That makes S suitable for the PageRank algorithm. == Construction of Google matrix G == Then the final Google matrix G can be expressed via S as: G i j = α S i j + ( 1 − α ) 1 N ( 1 ) {\displaystyle G_{ij}=\alpha S_{ij}+(1-\alpha ){\frac {1}{N}}\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;(1)} By the construction the sum of all non-negative elements inside each matrix column is equal to unity. The numerical coefficient α {\displaystyle \alpha } is known as a damping factor. Usually S is a sparse matrix and for modern directed networks it has only about ten nonzero elements in a line or column, thus only about 10N multiplications are needed to multiply a vector by matrix G. == Examples of Google matrix == An example of the matrix S {\displaystyle S} construction via Eq.(1) within a simple network is given in the article CheiRank. For the actual matrix, Google uses a damping factor α {\displaystyle \alpha } around 0.85. The term ( 1 − α ) {\displaystyle (1-\alpha )} gives a surfer probability to jump randomly on any page. The matrix G {\displaystyle G} belongs to the class of Perron-Frobenius operators of Markov chains. The examples of Google matrix structure are shown in Fig.1 for Wikipedia articles hyperlink network in 2009 at small scale and in Fig.2 for University of Cambridge network in 2006 at large scale. == Spectrum and eigenstates of G matrix == For 0 < α < 1 {\displaystyle 0<\alpha <1} there is only one maximal eigenvalue λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} with the corresponding right eigenvector which has non-negative elements P i {\displaystyle P_{i}} which can be viewed as stationary probability distribution. These probabilities ordered by their decreasing values give the PageRank vector P i {\displaystyle P_{i}} with the PageRank K i {\displaystyle K_{i}} used by Google search to rank webpages. Usually one has for the World Wide Web that P ∝ 1 / K β {\displaystyle P\propto 1/K^{\beta }} with β ≈ 0.9 {\displaystyle \beta \approx 0.9} . The number of nodes with a given PageRank value scales as N P ∝ 1 / P ν {\displaystyle N_{P}\propto 1/P^{\nu }} with the exponent ν = 1 + 1 / β ≈ 2.1 {\displaystyle \nu =1+1/\beta \approx 2.1} . The left eigenvector at λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} has constant matrix elements. With 0 < α {\displaystyle 0<\alpha } all eigenvalues move as λ i → α λ i {\displaystyle \lambda _{i}\rightarrow \alpha \lambda _{i}} except the maximal eigenvalue λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} , which remains unchanged. The PageRank vector varies with α {\displaystyle \alpha } but other eigenvectors with λ i < 1 {\displaystyle \lambda _{i}<1} remain unchanged due to their orthogonality to the constant left vector at λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} . The gap between λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} and other eigenvalue being 1 − α ≈ 0.15 {\displaystyle 1-\alpha \approx 0.15} gives a rapid convergence of a random initial vector to the PageRank approximately after 50 multiplications on G {\displaystyle G} matrix. At α = 1 {\displaystyle \alpha =1} the matrix G {\displaystyle G} has generally many degenerate eigenvalues λ = 1 {\displaystyle \lambda =1} (see e.g. [6]). Examples of the eigenvalue spectrum of the Google matrix of various directed networks is shown in Fig.3 from and Fig.4 from. The Google matrix can be also constructed for the Ulam networks generated by the Ulam method [8] for dynamical maps. The spectral properties of such matrices are discussed in [9,10,11,12,13,15]. In a number of cases the spectrum is described by the fractal Weyl law [10,12]. The Google matrix can be constructed also for other directed networks, e.g. for the procedure call network of the Linux Kernel software introduced in [15]. In this case the spectrum of λ {\displaystyle \lambda } is described by the fractal Weyl law with the fractal dimension d ≈ 1.3 {\displaystyle d\approx 1.3} (see Fig.5 from ). Numerical analysis shows that the eigenstates of matrix G {\displaystyle G} are localized (see Fig.6 from ). Arnoldi iteration method allows to compute many eigenvalues and eigenvectors for matrices of rather large size [13]. Other examples of G {\displaystyle G} matrix include the Google matrix of brain [17] and business process management [18], see also. Applications of Google matrix analysis to DNA sequences is described in [20]. Such a Google matrix approach allows also to analyze entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles abouts persons [21] == Historical notes == The Google matrix with damping factor was described by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 [22], see also articles on PageRank history [23], [24].