Viaweb was a web-based application that allowed users to build and host their own online stores with little technical expertise using a web browser. The company was started in July 1995 by Paul Graham, Robert Morris (using the pseudonym "John McArtyem"), and Trevor Blackwell. Graham claims Viaweb was the first application service provider. Viaweb was also unusual for being partially written in the Lisp programming language. The software was originally called Webgen, but another company was using the same name, so the company renamed it to Viaweb, "because it worked via the Web". In 1998, Yahoo! Inc. bought Viaweb for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! capital stock, valued at about $49 million, and renamed it Yahoo! Store. Viaweb's example has been influential in Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial culture, largely due to Graham's widely read essays and his subsequent career as a successful venture capitalist.
Resisting AI
Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence is a book on artificial intelligence (AI) by Dan McQuillan, published in 2022 by Bristol University Press. == Content == Resisting AI takes the form of an extended essay, which contrasts optimistic visions about AI's potential by arguing that AI may best be seen as a continuation and reinforcement of bureaucratic forms of discrimination and violence, ultimately fostering authoritarian outcomes. For McQuillan, AI's promise of objective calculability is antithetical to an egalitarian and just society. McQuillan uses the expression "AI violence" to describe how – based on opaque algorithms – various actors can discriminate against categories of people in accessing jobs, loans, medical care, and other benefits. The book suggests that AI has a political resonance with soft eugenic approaches to the valuation of life by modern welfare states, and that AI exhibits eugenic features in its underlying logic, as well as in its technical operations. The parallel is with historical eugenicists achieving saving to the state by sterilizing defectives so the state would not have to care for their offspring. The analysis of McQuillan goes beyond the known critique of AI systems fostering precarious labour markets, addressing "necropolitics", the politics of who is entitled to live, and who to die. Although McQuillan offers a brief history of machine learning at the beginning of the book – with its need for "hidden and undercompensated labour", he is concerned more with the social impacts of AI rather than with its technical aspects. McQuillan sees AI as the continuation of existing bureaucratic systems that already marginalize vulnerable groups – aggravated by the fact that AI systems trained on existing data are likely to reinforce existing discriminations, e.g. in attempting to optimize welfare distribution based on existing data patterns, ultimately creating a system of "self-reinforcing social profiling". In elaborating on the continuation between existing bureaucratic violence and AI, McQuillan connects to Hannah Arendt's concept of the thoughtless bureaucrat in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which now becomes the algorithm that, lacking intent, cannot be accountable, and is thus endowed with an "algorithmic thoughtlessness". McQuillan defends the "fascist" in the title of the work by arguing that while not all AI is fascist, this emerging technology of control may end up being deployed by fascist or authoritarian regimes. For McQuillan, AI can support the diffusion of states of exception, as a technology impossible to properly regulate and a mechanism for multiplying exceptions more widely. An example of a scenario where AI systems of surveillance could bring discrimination to a new high is the initiative to create LGBT-free zones in Poland. Skeptical of ethical regulations to control the technology, McQuillan suggests people's councils and workers' councils, and other forms of citizens' agency to resist AI. A chapter titled "Post-Machine Learning" makes an appeal for resistance via currents of thought from feminist science (standpoint theory), post-normal science (extended peer communities), and new materialism; McQuillan encourages the reader to question the meaning of "objectivity" and calls for the necessity of alternative ways of knowing. Among the virtuous examples of resistance – possibly to be adopted by the AI workers themselves – McQuillan notes the Lucas Plan of the workers of Lucas Aerospace Corporation, in which a workforce declared redundant took control, reorienting the enterprise toward useful products. McQuillan advocates for what he calls decomputing, an opposition to the sweeping application and expansion of artificial intelligence. Similar to degrowth, the approach criticizes AI as an outgrowth of the systemic issues within capitalist systems. McQuillan argues that a different future is possible, in which distance between people is reduced rather than increased through AI intermediaries. The work of McQuillan warns against "watered-down forms of engagement" with AI, such as citizen juries, which superficially look like democratic deliberation but may actually obscure important decisions about AI that are outside the purview of the engagement situation (McQuillan 2022, 128). In an interview about the book, McQuillan describes himself as an "AI abolitionist". == Reception == The book has been praised for how it "masterfully disassembles AI as an epistemological, social, and political paradigm". On the critical side, a review in the academic journal Justice, Power and Resistance took exception to the "nightmarish visions of Big Brother" offered by McQuillan, and argued that while many elements of AI may pose concern, a critique should not be based on a caricature of what AI is, concluding that McQuillan's work is "less of a theory and more of a Manifesto". Another review notes "a disconnect between the technical aspects of AI and the socio-political analysis McQuillan provides." Although the book was published before the ChatGPT and large language model debate heated up, the book has not lost relevance to the AI discussion. It is noted for suggesting a link between beliefs in artificial intelligence and beliefs in a racialised and gendered visions of intelligence overall, whereby a certain type of rational, measurable intelligence is privileged, leading to "historical notions of hierarchies of being". The blog Reboot praised McQuillan for offering a theory of harm of AI (why AI could end up hurting people and society) that does not just encourage tackling in isolation specific predicted problems with AI-centric systems: bias, non-inclusiveness, exploitativeness, environmental destructiveness, opacity, and non-contestability. For educational policies could also look at AI following the reading of McQuillan: In his book Resisting AI, Dan McQuillan argues that "When we're thinking about the actuality of AI, we can't separate the calculations in the code from the social context of its application" .... McQuillan's particular concern is how many contemporary applications of AI are amplifying existing inequalities and injustices as well as deepening social divisions and instabilities. His book makes a powerful case for anticipating these effects and actively resisting them for the good of societies. Videos and podcasts with an interest in AI and emerging technology have discussed the book.
Computational heuristic intelligence
Computational heuristic intelligence (CHI) refers to specialized programming techniques in computational intelligence (also called artificial intelligence, or AI). These techniques have the express goal of avoiding complexity issues, also called NP-hard problems, by using human-like techniques. They are best summarized as the use of exemplar-based methods (heuristics), rather than rule-based methods (algorithms). Hence the term is distinct from the more conventional computational algorithmic intelligence, or symbolic AI. An example of a CHI technique is the encoding specificity principle of Tulving and Thompson. In general, CHI principles are problem solving techniques used by people, rather than programmed into machines. It is by drawing attention to this key distinction that the use of this term is justified in a field already replete with confusing neologisms. Note that the legal systems of all modern human societies employ both heuristics (generalisations of cases) from individual trial records as well as legislated statutes (rules) as regulatory guides. Another recent approach to the avoidance of complexity issues is to employ feedback control rather than feedforward modeling as a problem-solving paradigm. This approach has been called computational cybernetics, because (a) the term 'computational' is associated with conventional computer programming techniques which represent a strategic, compiled, or feedforward model of the problem, and (b) the term 'cybernetic' is associated with conventional system operation techniques which represent a tactical, interpreted, or feedback model of the problem. Of course, real programs and real problems both contain both feedforward and feedback components. A real example which illustrates this point is that of human cognition, which clearly involves both perceptual (bottom-up, feedback, sensor-oriented) and conceptual (top-down, feedforward, motor-oriented) information flows and hierarchies. The AI engineer must choose between mathematical and cybernetic problem solution and machine design paradigms. This is not a coding (program language) issue, but relates to understanding the relationship between the declarative and procedural programming paradigms. The vast majority of STEM professionals never get the opportunity to design or implement pure cybernetic solutions. When pushed, most responders will dismiss the importance of any difference by saying that all code can be reduced to a mathematical model anyway. Unfortunately, not only is this belief false, it fails most spectacularly in many AI scenarios. Mathematical models are not time agnostic, but by their very nature are pre-computed, i.e. feedforward. Dyer [2012] and Feldman [2004] have independently investigated the simplest of all somatic governance paradigms, namely control of a simple jointed limb by a single flexor muscle. They found that it is impossible to determine forces from limb positions- therefore, the problem cannot have a pre-computed (feedforward) mathematical solution. Instead, a top-down command bias signal changes the threshold feedback level in the sensorimotor loop, e.g. the loop formed by the afferent and efferent nerves, thus changing the so-called ‘equilibrium point’ of the flexor muscle/ elbow joint system. An overview of the arrangement reveals that global postures and limb position are commanded in feedforward terms, using global displacements (common coding), with the forces needed being computed locally by feedback loops. This method of sensorimotor unit governance, which is based upon what Anatol Feldman calls the ‘equilibrium Point’ theory, is formally equivalent to a servomechanism such as a car's ‘cruise control’.
Toy problem
In scientific disciplines, a toy problem or a puzzlelike problem is a problem that is not of immediate scientific interest, yet is used as an expository device to illustrate a trait that may be shared by other, more complicated, instances of the problem, or as a way to explain a particular, more general, problem solving technique. A toy problem is useful to test and demonstrate methodologies. Researchers can use toy problems to compare the performance of different algorithms. They are also good for game designing. For instance, while engineering a large system, the large problem is often broken down into many smaller toy problems which have been well understood in detail. Often these problems distill a few important aspects of complicated problems so that they can be studied in isolation. Toy problems are thus often very useful in providing intuition about specific phenomena in more complicated problems. As an example, in the field of artificial intelligence, classical puzzles, games and problems are often used as toy problems. These include sliding-block puzzles, N-Queens problem, missionaries and cannibals problem, tic-tac-toe, chess, Tower of Hanoi and others.
Attention (machine learning)
In machine learning, attention is a method that determines the importance of each component in a sequence relative to the other components in that sequence. In natural language processing, importance is represented by "soft" weights assigned to each word in a sentence. More generally, attention encodes vectors called token embeddings across a fixed-width sequence that can range from tens to millions of tokens in size. Unlike "hard" weights, which are computed during the backwards training pass, "soft" weights exist only in the forward pass and therefore change with every step of the input. Earlier designs implemented the attention mechanism in a serial recurrent neural network (RNN) language translation system, but a more recent design, namely the transformer, removed the slower sequential RNN and relied more heavily on the faster parallel attention scheme. Inspired by ideas about attention in humans, the attention mechanism was developed to address the weaknesses of using information from the hidden layers of recurrent neural networks. Recurrent neural networks favor information contained in words at the end of a sentence and thus deemed more recent, thereby tending to attenuate the significance and associated predictive weight assigned to information earlier in the sentence. Attention allows a token equal access to any part of a sentence directly, rather than only through the previous state. == History == Additional surveys of the attention mechanism in deep learning are provided by Niu et al. and Soydaner. The major breakthrough came with self-attention, where each element in the input sequence attends to all others, enabling the model to capture global dependencies. This idea was central to the Transformer architecture, which replaced recurrence with attention mechanisms. As a result, Transformers became the foundation for models like BERT, T5 and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT). == Overview == The modern era of machine attention was revitalized by grafting an attention mechanism (Fig 1. orange) to an Encoder-Decoder. Figure 2 shows the internal step-by-step operation of the attention block (A) in Fig 1. === Interpreting attention weights === In translating between languages, alignment is the process of matching words from the source sentence to words of the translated sentence. Networks that perform verbatim translation without regard to word order would show the highest scores along the (dominant) diagonal of the matrix. The off-diagonal dominance shows that the attention mechanism is more nuanced. Consider an example of translating I love you to French. On the first pass through the decoder, 94% of the attention weight is on the first English word I, so the network offers the word je. On the second pass of the decoder, 88% of the attention weight is on the third English word you, so it offers t'. On the last pass, 95% of the attention weight is on the second English word love, so it offers aime. In the I love you example, the second word love is aligned with the third word aime. Stacking soft row vectors together for je, t', and aime yields an alignment matrix: Sometimes, alignment can be multiple-to-multiple. For example, the English phrase look it up corresponds to cherchez-le. Thus, "soft" attention weights work better than "hard" attention weights (setting one attention weight to 1, and the others to 0), as we would like the model to make a context vector consisting of a weighted sum of the hidden vectors, rather than "the best one", as there may not be a best hidden vector. == Variants == Many variants of attention implement soft weights, such as fast weight programmers, or fast weight controllers (1992). A "slow" neural network outputs the "fast" weights of another neural network through outer products. The slow network learns by gradient descent. It was later renamed as "linearized self-attention". Bahdanau-style attention, also referred to as additive attention, Luong-style attention, which is known as multiplicative attention, Early attention mechanisms similar to modern self-attention were proposed using recurrent neural networks. However, the highly parallelizable self-attention was introduced in 2017 and successfully used in the Transformer model, positional attention and factorized positional attention. For convolutional neural networks, attention mechanisms can be distinguished by the dimension on which they operate, namely: spatial attention, channel attention, or combinations. These variants recombine the encoder-side inputs to redistribute those effects to each target output. Often, a correlation-style matrix of dot products provides the re-weighting coefficients. In the figures below, W is the matrix of context attention weights, similar to the formula in Overview section above. == Optimizations == === Flash attention === The size of the attention matrix is proportional to the square of the number of input tokens. Therefore, when the input is long, calculating the attention matrix requires a lot of GPU memory. Flash attention is an implementation that reduces the memory needs and increases efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. It achieves this by partitioning the attention computation into smaller blocks that fit into the GPU's faster on-chip memory, reducing the need to store large intermediate matrices and thus lowering memory usage while increasing computational efficiency. === FlexAttention === FlexAttention is an attention kernel developed by Meta that allows users to modify attention scores prior to softmax and dynamically chooses the optimal attention algorithm. == Applications == Attention is widely used in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition. In NLP, it improves context understanding in tasks like question answering and summarization. In vision, visual attention helps models focus on relevant image regions, enhancing object detection and image captioning. === Attention maps as explanations for vision transformers === From the original paper on vision transformers (ViT), visualizing attention scores as a heat map (called saliency maps or attention maps) has become an important and routine way to inspect the decision making process of ViT models. One can compute the attention maps with respect to any attention head at any layer, while the deeper layers tend to show more semantically meaningful visualization. Attention rollout is a recursive algorithm to combine attention scores across all layers, by computing the dot product of successive attention maps. Because vision transformers are typically trained in a self-supervised manner, attention maps are generally not class-sensitive. When a classification head is attached to the ViT backbone, class-discriminative attention maps (CDAM) combines attention maps and gradients with respect to the class [CLS] token. Some class-sensitive interpretability methods originally developed for convolutional neural networks can be also applied to ViT, such as GradCAM, which back-propagates the gradients to the outputs of the final attention layer. Using attention as basis of explanation for the transformers in language and vision is not without debate. While some pioneering papers analyzed and framed attention scores as explanations, higher attention scores do not always correlate with greater impact on model performances. == Mathematical representation == === Standard scaled dot-product attention === For matrices: Q ∈ R m × d k , K ∈ R n × d k {\displaystyle Q\in \mathbb {R} ^{m\times d_{k}},K\in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times d_{k}}} and V ∈ R n × d v {\displaystyle V\in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times d_{v}}} , the scaled dot-product, or QKV attention, is defined as: Attention ( Q , K , V ) = softmax ( Q K T d k ) V ∈ R m × d v {\displaystyle {\text{Attention}}(Q,K,V)={\text{softmax}}\left({\frac {QK^{T}}{\sqrt {d_{k}}}}\right)V\in \mathbb {R} ^{m\times d_{v}}} where T {\displaystyle {}^{T}} denotes transpose and the softmax function is applied independently to every row of its argument. The matrix Q {\displaystyle Q} contains m {\displaystyle m} queries, while matrices K , V {\displaystyle K,V} jointly contain an unordered set of n {\displaystyle n} key-value pairs. Value vectors in matrix V {\displaystyle V} are weighted using the weights resulting from the softmax operation, so that the rows of the m {\displaystyle m} -by- d v {\displaystyle d_{v}} output matrix are confined to the convex hull of the points in R d v {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{d_{v}}} given by the rows of V {\displaystyle V} . To understand the permutation invariance and permutation equivariance properties of QKV attention, let A ∈ R m × m {\displaystyle A\in \mathbb {R} ^{m\times m}} and B ∈ R n × n {\displaystyle B\in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times n}} be permutation matrices; and D ∈ R m × n {\displaystyle D\in \mathbb {R} ^{m\times n}} an arbitrary matrix. The softmax function is permutation equivariant in the sense that: softmax ( A D B ) = A softmax ( D ) B {\displays
Cyclodisparity
In vision science, cyclodisparity is the difference in the rotation angle of an object or scene viewed by the left and right eyes. Cyclodisparity can result from the eyes' torsional rotation (cyclorotation) or can be created artificially by presenting to the eyes two images that need to be rotated relative to each other for binocular fusion to take place. == Human and animal vision == The eyes and visual system can compensate for cyclodisparity up to a certain point; if the cyclodisparity is larger than a threshold, the images cannot be fused, resulting stereoblindness, and in double vision in subjects who otherwise have full stereo vision. When a human subject is presented with images that have artificial cyclodisparity, cyclovergence is evoked, that is, a motor response of the eye muscles that rotates the two eyes in opposite directions, thereby reducing cyclodisparity. Visually-induced cyclovergence of up to 8 degrees has been observed in normal subjects. Furthermore, up to about 8 degrees can usually be compensated by purely sensory means, that is, without physical eye rotation. This means that the normal human observer can achieve binocular image fusion in presence of cyclodisparity of up to approximately 16 degrees. Cyclodisparity due to images having been rotated inward can be compensated better when the gaze is directed downwards, and cyclodisparity due to an outward rotation can be compensated better when the gaze is directed upwards. A proposed explanation for this phenomenon is that the motor system is coordinated in such a way that the eyes perform a torsional movement to reduce the size of the search zones and thus the computational load required for solving the correspondence problem. The resulting cyclovergence at near gaze is smaller than the cyclovergence predicted by Listing's law. == Video processing and computer vision == Active camera torsion can be used in machine and computer vision for several purposes. For instance, camera torsion can be used to make improved use of the search range over which matching detectors or stereo matching algorithms operate, or to make a 3D slanted surface appear frontoparallel for further stereo processing. For image compression purposes, images with cyclodisparity are advantageously encoded using global motion compensation using a rotational motion model.
Emergent algorithm
An emergent algorithm is an algorithm that exhibits emergent behavior. In essence an emergent algorithm implements a set of simple building block behaviors that when combined exhibit more complex behaviors. One example of this is the implementation of fuzzy motion controllers used to adapt robot movement in response to environmental obstacles. An emergent algorithm has the following characteristics: it achieves predictable global effects it does not require global visibility it does not assume any kind of centralized control it is self-stabilizing Other examples of emergent algorithms and models include cellular automata, artificial neural networks and swarm intelligence systems (ant colony optimization, bees algorithm, etc.).