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.
Stop Motion Studio
Stop Motion Studio is a stop motion animation software developed by Cateater LLC. It is available as both an app for iOS and Android and as a software for Windows and Mac. Two versions of the software exist, the standard Stop Motion Studio for free, and the paid Stop Motion Studio Pro, which contains extra, more advanced features. The software is commonly used in brickfilming.
Scripped
Scripped was an online screenplay services company offering three services: script writing, script registration, and script coverage. Scripped did not facilitate collaboration among screenwriters. It combined with Zhura in 2010. According to Techcrunch, Scripped had more than 60,000 writers as of March 2010. Scripped was administered by Sunil Rajaraman, Ryan Buckley and Zak Freer. Actor, writer, and director Edward Burns and screenwriter Steven E. de Souza joined Scripped's Board of Advisers in May 2008. In 2008, the company formed a partnership with Write Brothers, makers of Movie Magic Screenwriter software. On March 29, 2010, Scripped announced that it closed $250,000 in private investment and merged with competitor Zhura. Scripped's CEO, Sunil Rajaraman, remains the merged company's Chief Executive Officer. On April 1, 2015, citing a serious technical failure, Scripped shuttered its service. As part of the announcement, it was disclosed that their backup servers had failed as well, losing all of its users' stored scripts. The website URL currently redirects to WriterDuet's website, another online scriptwriting service; Scripped had advertised WriterDuet in Scripped's shutdown open letter. == Features == The Scripped Writer provided a built-in screenplay template which formatted the document to a standard for scripts as recommended by the AMPAS. The screenplay document was composed of seven elements: scene, action, character, dialog, parenthetical, transition and general. Each element had a specific style to which the Scripped Writer conformed as text was entered. Like other client-side screenplay software, Scripped offered Tab-Enter toggling between screenplay elements, making the writing process much faster. Text files could be imported into the Scripped Writer and automatically conformed to the screenplay template. Completed scripts could be exported as PDF files. In May 2011 the administrators of Scripped launched Scripted.com - a sister site focused on freelance writing jobs. Subsequent to the service's launch, the company was renamed to Scripted, Inc.
Yorba (software)
Yorba is a web-based personal information management platform for finding, monitoring, or deleting online accounts and subscriptions. Yorba is a participating member of Consumer Reports’ Data Rights Protocol (DRP) consortium that develops open technical standards for exercising consumer data rights under laws including the California Consumer Privacy Act. == History == Yorba began as a research project around 2021. It was founded by Chris Zeunstrom (CEO), Nolan Cabeje (CDO) and David Schmudde (CTO). Zeunstrom says he began developing Yorba after growing frustrated with managing numerous email accounts, noting overloaded inboxes create distraction and potential security vulnerabilities. Yorba’s early development was also influenced by security issues he encountered at a previous company, which had been affected by data breaches at a time when such incidents were becoming increasingly common. In 2023, Yorba launched a private beta as a public benefit corporation funded through a give-back model operated by Zeunstrom's New York-based design firm, Ruca. In January 2024, Yorba entered public beta and reported over 1,000 users, including 160 premium subscribers. At the time of the public beta launch, Yorba integrated with Gmail and announced plans to expand compatibility to other online services and cloud storage providers. In September 2024, Yorba completed conformance testing under the Data Rights Protocol, an initiative developed by Consumer Reports, to establish a standard and open-source framework for securely transmitting consumer data rights requests under laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act. Yorba was named among twelve participating companies that implemented the protocol alongside OneTrust and Consumer Reports’ own Permission Slip app. Yorba was one of nine startups selected as 2025 finalist in the Santander X Global Awards international entrepreneurship competition. == Features == Yorba scans user inbox history data to identify online accounts, mailing lists, and possible data breaches. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to identify a user's accounts, services, and subscriptions. The platform prompts password resets for compromised accounts and locates unused accounts. The platform also supports mailing list management by identifying and helping users unsubscribe from newsletters. Paid subscribers can locate and cancel recurring charges. Yorba links with financial institutions in the U.S., Canada, and EU via Plaid Inc. to detect recurring charges and delete unwanted subscriptions. == Privacy and Ethics == Yorba's founder has openly criticized dark patterns that make canceling services difficult, citing personal frustration with inbox clutter as part of his inspiration for Yorba. Yorba offers privacy policy analysis in partnership with Amsterdam-based nonprofit Terms of Service; Didn’t Read, assigning grades based on invasiveness or ethical concerns. As of 2024, the company described its pricing as designed to cover operational costs and sustain the platform without outside investment.
Mobile cloud computing
Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing and mobile computing to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications on a plethora of mobile devices, with a rich user experience. MCC provides business opportunities for mobile network operators as well as cloud providers. More comprehensively, MCC can be defined as "a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility to serve a multitude of mobile devices anywhere, anytime through the channel of Ethernet or Internet regardless of heterogeneous environments and platforms based on the pay-as-you-use principle." == Architecture == MCC uses computational augmentation approaches (computations are executed remotely instead of on the device) by which resource-constraint mobile devices can utilize computational resources of varied cloud-based resources. In MCC, there are four types of cloud-based resources, namely distant immobile clouds, proximate immobile computing entities, proximate mobile computing entities, and hybrid (combination of the other three model). Giant clouds such as Amazon EC2 are in the distant immobile groups whereas cloudlet or surrogates are member of proximate immobile computing entities. Smartphones, tablets, handheld devices, and wearable computing devices are part of the third group of cloud-based resources which is proximate mobile computing entities. Vodafone, Orange and Verizon have started to offer cloud computing services for companies. == Challenges == In the MCC landscape, an amalgam of mobile computing, cloud computing, and communication networks (to augment smartphones) creates several complex challenges such as Mobile Computation Offloading, Seamless Connectivity, Long WAN Latency, Mobility Management, Context-Processing, Energy Constraint, Vendor/data Lock-in, Security and Privacy, Elasticity that hinder MCC success and adoption. === Open research issues === Although significant research and development in MCC is available in the literature, efforts in the following domains is still lacking: Architectural issues: A reference architecture for heterogeneous MCC environment is a crucial requirement for unleashing the power of mobile computing towards unrestricted ubiquitous computing. Energy-efficient transmission: MCC requires frequent transmissions between cloud platform and mobile devices, due to the stochastic nature of wireless networks, the transmission protocol should be carefully designed. Context-awareness issues: Context-aware and socially-aware computing are inseparable traits of contemporary handheld computers. To achieve the vision of mobile computing among heterogeneous converged networks and computing devices, designing resource-efficient environment-aware applications is an essential need. Live VM migration issues: Executing resource-intensive mobile application via Virtual Machine (VM) migration-based application offloading involves encapsulation of application in VM instance and migrating it to the cloud, which is a challenging task due to additional overhead of deploying and managing VM on mobile devices. Mobile communication congestion issues: Mobile data traffic is tremendously hiking by ever increasing mobile user demands for exploiting cloud resources which impact on mobile network operators and demand future efforts to enable smooth communication between mobile and cloud endpoints. Trust, security, and privacy issues: Trust is an essential factor for the success of the burgeoning MCC paradigm. It is because the data along with code/component/application/complete VM is offloaded to the cloud for execution. Moreover, just like software and mobile application piracy, the MCC application development models are also affected by the piracy issue. Pirax is known to be the first specialized framework for controlling application piracy in MCC requirements == MCC research groups and activities == Several academic and industrial research groups in MCC have been emerging since last few years. Some of the MCC research groups in academia with large number of researchers and publications include: MDC, Mobile and Distributed Computing research group is at Faculty of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University. MDC research group focuses on architectures, platforms, and protocols for mobile and distributed computing. The group has developed algorithms, tools, and technologies which offer energy efficient, fault tolerant, scalable, secure, and high performance computing on mobile devices. MobCC lab, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University Malaya. The lab was established in 2010 under the High Impact Research Grant, Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia. It has 17 researchers and has track of 22 published articles in international conference and peer-reviewed CS journals. ICCLAB, Zürich University of Applied Sciences has a segment working on MCC. The InIT Cloud Computing Lab is a research lab within the Institute of Applied Information Technology (InIT) of Zürich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). It covers topic areas across the entire cloud computing technology stack. Mobile & Cloud Lab, Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu. Mobile & Cloud Lab conducts research and teaching in the mobile computing and cloud computing domains. The research topics of the group include cloud computing, mobile application development, mobile cloud, mobile web services and migrating scientific computing and enterprise applications to the cloud. SmartLab, Data Management Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus. SmartLab is a first-of-a-kind open cloud of smartphones that enables a new line of systems-oriented mobile computing research. Mobile Cloud Networking: Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) was an EU FP7 Large-scale Integrating Project (IP, 15m Euro) funded by the European Commission. The MCN project was launched in November 2012 for the period of 36 month. The project was coordinated by SAP Research and the ICCLab at the Zurich University of Applied Science. In total 19 partners from industry and academia established the first vision of Mobile Cloud Computing. The project was primarily motivated by an ongoing transformation that drives the convergence between the Mobile Communications and Cloud Computing industry enabled by the Internet and is considered the first pioneer in the area of Network Function Virtualization.
Textual case-based reasoning
Textual case-based reasoning (TCBR) is a subtopic of case-based reasoning, in short CBR, a popular area in artificial intelligence. CBR suggests the ways to use past experiences to solve future similar problems, requiring that past experiences be structured in a form similar to attribute-value pairs. This leads to the investigation of textual descriptions for knowledge exploration whose output will be, in turn, used to solve similar problems. == Subareas == Textual case-base reasoning research has focused on: measuring similarity between textual cases mapping texts into structured case representations adapting textual cases for reuse automatically generating representations.
Crucible (software)
Crucible is a collaborative code review application by Australian software company Atlassian. Like other Atlassian products, Crucible is a Web-based application primarily aimed at enterprise, and certain features that enable peer review of a codebase may be considered enterprise social software. Crucible is particularly tailored to remote workers, and facilitates asynchronous review and commenting on code. Crucible also integrates with popular source control tools, such as Git and Subversion. Crucible is not open source, but customers are allowed to view and modify the code for their own use.