Statistical shape analysis is an analysis of the geometrical properties of some given set of shapes by statistical methods. For instance, it could be used to quantify differences between male and female gorilla skull shapes, normal and pathological bone shapes, leaf outlines with and without herbivory by insects, etc. Important aspects of shape analysis are to obtain a measure of distance between shapes, to estimate mean shapes from (possibly random) samples, to estimate shape variability within samples, to perform clustering and to test for differences between shapes. One of the main methods used is principal component analysis (PCA). Statistical shape analysis has applications in various fields, including medical imaging, computer vision, computational anatomy, sensor measurement, and geographical profiling. == Landmark-based techniques == In the point distribution model, a shape is determined by a finite set of coordinate points, known as landmark points. These landmark points often correspond to important identifiable features such as the corners of the eyes. Once the points are collected some form of registration is undertaken. This can be a baseline methods used by Fred Bookstein for geometric morphometrics in anthropology. Or an approach like Procrustes analysis which finds an average shape. David George Kendall investigated the statistical distribution of the shape of triangles, and represented each triangle by a point on a sphere. He used this distribution on the sphere to investigate ley lines and whether three stones were more likely to be co-linear than might be expected. Statistical distribution like the Kent distribution can be used to analyse the distribution of such spaces. Alternatively, shapes can be represented by curves or surfaces representing their contours, by the spatial region they occupy. == Shape deformations == Differences between shapes can be quantified by investigating deformations transforming one shape into another. In particular a diffeomorphism preserves smoothness in the deformation. This was pioneered in D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form before the advent of computers. Deformations can be interpreted as resulting from a force applied to the shape. Mathematically, a deformation is defined as a mapping from a shape x to a shape y by a transformation function Φ {\displaystyle \Phi } , i.e., y = Φ ( x ) {\displaystyle y=\Phi (x)} . Given a notion of size of deformations, the distance between two shapes can be defined as the size of the smallest deformation between these shapes. Diffeomorphometry is the focus on comparison of shapes and forms with a metric structure based on diffeomorphisms, and is central to the field of Computational anatomy. Diffeomorphic registration, introduced in the 90's, is now an important player with existing codes bases organized around ANTS, DARTEL, DEMONS, LDDMM, StationaryLDDMM, and FastLDDMM are examples of actively used computational codes for constructing correspondences between coordinate systems based on sparse features and dense images. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is an important technology built on many of these principles. Methods based on diffeomorphic flows are also used. For example, deformations could be diffeomorphisms of the ambient space, resulting in the LDDMM (Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping) framework for shape comparison.
Token maxxing
Token Maxxing or Token Maxing is a metric used in an attempt to track productivity in the workplace especially for those using Artificial Intelligence (AI) based services. AI services charge for each token which represent units of effort expended by an AI service to solve a problem. Some believe that token consumption equates to productivity and thus can be used as a metric to monitor an employee's work. Supporters believe that higher token usage indicates higher productivity and higher utilization of powerful AI services. This also suggests that those not consuming enough tokens may be less productive and underutilizing powerful AI services. This belief might lead to an environment that incentivizes higher token usage to predict increased productivity. Critics of token maxxing as a metric claim that prudent workers will maximize any metric that management wants increased to gain a workplace advantage. For example: Engineers in the tech industries pressed to consume as many tokens as possible might run several AI agents in tandem, enter longer input prompts, or automate their tasks to maximize their token consumption. To management, this higher token usage may indicate potential productivity, but in reality may cause additional token costs, worker burnout, or actually create more bloated code of lower quality. Another claim is AI service companies potentially benefit from such an emphasis on token consumption and actively encourage the trend. Some developers have publicly advocated the practice. Developer Sigrid Jin, who said he used 50 billion tokens in a single year, has argued that maximizing token consumption is the best way to understand the value of AI, advising others to spend as much on AI usage as they pay in rent to obtain a return on investment. == See Also == Goodhart's law Perverse incentive Jevons Paradox
Automatic1111
AUTOMATIC1111 Stable Diffusion Web UI (SD WebUI, A1111, or Automatic1111) is an open source generative artificial intelligence program that allows users to generate images from a text prompt. It uses Stable Diffusion as the base model for its image capabilities together with a large set of extensions and features to customize its output. == History == SD WebUI was released on GitHub on August 22, 2022, by AUTOMATIC1111, 1 month after the initial release of Stable Diffusion. At the time, Stable Diffusion could only be run via the command line. SD WebUI quickly rose in popularity and has been described as "the most popular tool for running diffusion models locally." SD WebUI is one of the most popular user interfaces for Stable Diffusion, together with ComfyUI. In February 2024, a book was published by ja:Gijutsu Hyoronsha on using Stable Diffusion with SD WebUI in Japanese. As of July 2024, the project had 136,000 stars on GitHub. == Features == SD WebUI uses Gradio for its user interface. Each parameter in the Stable Diffusion program is exposed via a UI interface within SD WebUI. SD WebUI contains additional parameters not included in Stable Diffusion itself, such as support for Low-rank adaptations, ControlNet and custom variational autoencoders. SD WebUI supports prompt weighting, image-to-image based generation, inpainting, outpainting and image scaling. It supports over 20 samplers including DDIM, Euler, Euler a, DPM++ 2M Karras, and UniPC. It is also used for its various optimizations over the base Stable Diffusion. == Stable Diffusion WebUI Forge == Stable Diffusion WebUI Forge (Forge) is a notable fork of SD WebUI started by Lvmin Zhang, who is also the creator of ControlNet and Fooocus. The initial goal of Forge was to improve the performance and features of SD WebUI with the intention to upstream changes back to SD WebUI. One of Forge's optimizations allowed users with low VRAM to generate images faster on some versions of Stable Diffusion. It improved generation speed for users with 8GB and 6GB VRAM by 30-45% and 60-75%, respectively. Forge also includes extra features such as support for more samplers than standard SD WebUI. Some of Forge's optimizations were borrowed from ComfyUI, and others were developed by the Forge team. In August 2024, Forge added support for the Flux diffusion model developed by Black Forest Labs, which is not yet supported by SD WebUI.
Jensen Huang
Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang (Chinese: 黃仁勳; Wade–Giles: Huáng Jén-hsūn; Tâi-lô: N̂g Jîn-hun; born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese and American business executive and electrical engineer who is the founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia, the world's most valuable company. As of 2026, Forbes estimates his net worth at over US$200 billion, making him the seventh-wealthiest individual in the world. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Huang spent his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand before moving to the United States, where he was a student in Kentucky and Oregon. After earning a master's degree from Stanford University, Huang launched Nvidia in 1993 from a Denny's restaurant in San Jose, California, at age 30 and has remained its president and CEO ever since. He led the company out of near-bankruptcy during the 1990s and oversaw its expansion into GPU production, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). Under Huang, Nvidia experienced rapid growth during the AI boom, becoming the first company to reach a market capitalization of over $5 trillion in October 2025. In 2021 and 2024, Time magazine included Huang in their list of the most influential people. In 2025, he was named as one of the "Architects of AI" for Time's Person of the Year. == Early life and education == Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1963, and moved to the southern city of Tainan as a child. He is the younger of two sons of Huang Hsing-tai, a chemical engineer at an oil refinery, and Lo Tsai-hsiu, a schoolteacher. They were a middle-class Taiwanese family that relocated often, and were native speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien. Each day, Jensen's mother randomly selected 10 words from the dictionary to teach her sons English. When he was five years old, Huang's family moved to Thailand to support his father's refinery career and remained there for approximately four years. He attended Ruamrudee International School while in Bangkok. In the late 1960s, Hsing-tai traveled from Taiwan to New York City to train under an air conditioning company and, after returning home, resolved to send his sons to the United States. At age nine, Jensen, despite not yet being able to speak English fluently, was sent by his parents to live in the United States. He and his older brother moved in 1973 to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, escaping widespread social unrest in Thailand. Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth, mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. In order to afford the academy's tuition, Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions. When he was 10 years old, Huang lived with his older brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory. Each student was expected to work every day, and his brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm. Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English" and was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets every day, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. In 2002, Huang said he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other". Two years after Huang arrived in Oneida, his parents moved to the United States and settled in Beaverton, Oregon, after which the brothers withdrew from school in Kentucky to live back with them. As a teenager, Huang attended Aloha High School in Aloha, Oregon, where he excelled academically. He skipped two grades, graduated at age 16, and became a nationally ranked table-tennis player in addition to being a member of its mathematics, computer, and science clubs. In 1977, the school purchased an Apple II computer. Huang used the machine to play Super Star Trek, a text-based game, and to program in BASIC, creating his own version of Snake. Beginning at age 15, Huang got his first job working the graveyard shift at a local Denny's restaurant as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter from 1978 to 1983. After high school, he chose to enroll at Oregon State University due to its low in-state tuition. He studied electrical engineering and graduated in 1984 with a bachelor's degree with highest honors. Huang later recalled, "I was the youngest kid in school, in class" and the only student who "looked like a child". Years later, while working as a microchip designer in Silicon Valley, he concurrently pursued graduate night classes at Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1992. == AMD and LSI Logic == After graduating from college, Huang was a microchip designer in Silicon Valley. He was recruited for positions at Texas Instruments, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and LSI Logic, ultimately choosing the California-based AMD due to already being familiar with the company. Huang designed AMD microprocessors while simultaneously attending Stanford and raising his two children. However, when he heard of new chip design processes at LSI Logic, Huang left AMD to assume a role as a technical officer at the LSI Corporation, working under a startup company, Sun Microsystems, where he met engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. LSI was in contract with Sun Microsystems and had introduced Huang to Malachowsky and Priem, who were working on a new graphics accelerator card. While the three produced the card's manufacturing process, the relationship between Malachowsky and Priem became strained as the two disputed the chip's design, leading to infighting; according to Malachowsky, they "broke every tool that LSI Logic had in their standard portfolio". In 1989, Huang, Malachowsky, and Priem finalized the accelerator, which they called the "GX graphics engine". GX was a widespread financial success; the sales of the graphics engine contributed to Sun Microsystem's revenue increasing from $262 million in 1987 to $656 million in 1990, and Huang was promoted to be the director of LSI's CoreWare, a division that manufactured chips for hardware vendors. == Nvidia == === Founding (1993) === When business began to slow for Sun Microsystems after 1990, Huang, along with Priem and Malachowsky, each resigned their jobs to pursue a venture together in making graphics chips for PC games. They initially named their new company "NVision" until Huang suggested that the company be named "Nvidia" based on the Latin word invidia, as Priem wanted competitors to turn "green with envy". They eventually dropped the "i" to honor the NV1 chip that they were then developing. The three met frequently in 1992 at a Denny's roadside diner in East San Jose to formulate a business plan. Huang chose for them to meet at Denny's due to his prior work experience at the restaurant chain and because it was "quieter than home and had cheap coffee". The three founded the company during one meeting at a breakfast booth at the diner. To formally incorporate the company, Huang found a lawyer, James Gaither of Cooley Godward, who demanded the $200 in cash in Huang's pockets to capitalize the company. After that meeting, Huang went back to Priem and Malachowsky to ask each of them for $200 for their respective shares of the company, which meant that Nvidia's initial capital was $600. On April 5, 1993, Huang personally signed Nvidia's original articles of incorporation into effect. Although he left LSI, Huang remained in good standing with the company and was able to secure funding for Nvidia from LSI's CEO, Wilfred Corrigan, who introduced Huang to venture capitalist Don Valentine. An account cited how Huang's presentation pitch went badly. Valentine, the leader of Sequoia Capital, chose to invest in Nvidia through Corrigan's support, as did Sutter Hill Ventures. The funding enabled Nvidia to begin development efforts toward its first chip and to begin paying wages for its employees. By the first day of operation, Huang was made Nvidia's president and CEO. Even though Huang, at age 30, was younger than Priem and Malachowsky, both Priem and Malachowsky believed that he was prepared to be CEO. According to Priem, "we basically deferred to Jensen on day one" and told Huang, "you're in charge of running the company—all the stuff Chris and I don't know how to do". === President and CEO (1993–present) === As of 2024, Huang has been Nvidia's chief executive for over three decades, a tenure described by The Wall Street Journal as "almost unheard of in fast-moving Silicon Valley". He owns 3.6% of Nvidia's stock, which went public in 1999. He earned US$24.6 million as CEO i
Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had completed an early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation. == History == By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI. Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitor Anthropic. In January 2026, it was reported that Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, departed the startup to return to OpenAI. Other former OpenAI employees who have been hired include Jonathan Lachman and Andrew Tulloch (although Tulloch departed after getting recruited for Meta Superintelligence Labs). Thinking Machines Lab's advisers include Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI's chief research officer, and Alec Radford, who was a lead researcher for OpenAI. On October 1, 2025, it announced Tinker, an API for fine-tuning language models. Users would submit jobs through the API for fine-tuning one of the various open-weight models supported. The Lab would run the jobs on its internal clusters and training infrastructure. == Business structure == Thinking Machines Lab grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders. In July 2025, Andreessen Horowitz was reported to have led the company's initial funding round, raising "about $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion". The government of Albania (Murati's country of origin) was also included in this round, making a $10 million investment which required an amendment to the country's 2025 budget. == Partnership == In March 2026, Thinking Machines Lab announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA involving an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity.
Snap (computer graphics)
In computer graphics, snapping allows an object to be easily positioned in alignment with grid lines, guide lines or another object, by causing it to automatically jump to an exact position when the user drags it to the proximity of the desired location. Some CAD software provides a "Snap" pull-down menu with diverse options as preferences for the practice of the operation. In Windows, with the "snap windows" option enabled, snapping a window against the top (or side) edge of the screen causes it to change into full screen (or half-screen for multitasking). Software snapping is analogous to hardware detents which serve to indicate discrete values or steps of an input device.
IRCF360
Infrared Control Freak 360 (IRCF360) is a 360-degree proximity sensor and a motion sensing devices, developed by ROBOTmaker. The sensor is in BETA developers release as a low cost (software configurable) sensor for use within research, technical and hobby projects. == Overview == The 360-degree sensor was originally designed as a short range micro robot proximity sensor and mainly intended for Swarm robotics, Ant robotics, Swarm intelligence, autonomous Qaudcopter, Drone, UAV, multi-robot simulations e.g. Jasmine Project where 360 proximity sensing is required to avoid collision with other robots and for simple IR inter-robot communications. To overcome certain limitation with Infra-red (IR) proximity sensing (e.g. detection of dark surfaces) the sensing module includes ambient light sensing and basic tactile sensing functionality during forward movement sensing/probing providing photovore and photophobe robot swarm behaviours and characteristics. A project named Sensorium Project was started aimed at broadening the Sensors audience beyond its typical robot sensor usage. To demonstrate the sensor's functionality, opensource Java based Integrated Development Environments (IDE) are used, such as Arduino and Processing (programming language).