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Tektronix Technology: Pioneering the Future with AI Solutions
In an era where technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, reshaping industries and revolutionizing the way we live and work. AI solutions are no longer confined to science fiction; they have become an integral part of our daily lives, offering innovative solutions to complex problems. In this blog, we'll delve into the world of artificial intelligence solutions, exploring their diverse applications and the impact they are having across various sectors.
The Power of AI Solutions
Artificial intelligence is more than just a buzzword; it's a game-changer. With its ability to process vast amounts of data, learn from patterns, and make informed decisions, AI solutions are driving advancements across domains.
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swissforextrading · 2 months
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Engineers bring efficient optical neural networks into focus
06.08.24 - EPFL researchers have published a programmable framework that overcomes a key computational bottleneck of optics-based artificial intelligence systems. In a series of image classification experiments, they used scattered light from a low-power laser to perform accurate, scalable computations using a fraction of the energy of electronics. As digital artificial intelligence systems grow in size and impact, so does the energy required to train and deploy them – not to mention the associated carbon emissions. Recent research suggests that if current AI server production continues at its current pace, their annual energy consumption could outstrip that of a small country by 2027. Deep neural networks, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, are especially power-hungry due to the millions or even billions of connections between multiple layers of neuron-like processors. To counteract this mushrooming energy demand, researchers have doubled down on efforts to implement optical computing systems, which have existed experimentally since the 1980s. These systems rely on photons to process data, and although light can theoretically be used to perform computations much faster and more efficiently than electrons, a key challenge has hindered optical systems’ ability to surpass the electronic state-of-the art. Our method is up to 1,000 times more power-efficient than state-of-the-art deep digital networks, making it a promising platform for realizing optical neural networks. Demetri Psaltis, Optics Laboratory “In order to classify data in a neural network, each node, or ‘neuron’, must make a ‘decision’ to fire or not based on weighted input data. This decision leads to what is known as a nonlinear transformation of the data, meaning the output is not directly proportional to the input,” says Christophe Moser, head of the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices in EPFL’s School of Engineering. Postdoctoral researcher Niyazi Ulas Dinc and PhD student Mustafa Yildrim © Alain Herzog Moser explains that while digital neural networks can easily perform nonlinear transformations with transistors, in optical systems, this step requires very powerful lasers. Moser worked with students Mustafa Yildirim, Niyazi Ulas Dinc, and Ilker Oguz, as well as Optics Laboratory head Demetri Psaltis, to develop an energy-efficient method for performing these nonlinear computations optically. Their new approach involves encoding data, like the pixels of an image, in the spatial modulation of a low-power laser beam. The beam reflects back on itself several times, leading to a nonlinear multiplication of the pixels. "Our image classification experiments on three different datasets showed that our method is scalable, and up to 1,000 times more power-efficient than state-of-the-art deep digital networks, making it a promising platform for realizing optical neural networks,” says Psaltis. The research, supported by a Sinergia grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, has recently been published in Nature Photonics. A simple structural solution In nature, photons do not directly interact with each other the way charged electrons do. To achieve nonlinear transformations in optical systems, scientists have therefore had to ‘force’ photons to interact indirectly, for example by using a light intense enough to modify the optical properties of the glass or other material it passes through. The system was tested in a series of image classification experiments © Alain Herzog/Jih-Liang Hsieh The scientists worked around this need for a high-power laser with an elegantly simple solution: they encoded the pixels of an image spatially on the surface of a low-power laser beam. By performing this encoding twice, via adjustment of the trajectory of the beam in the encoder, the pixels are multiplied by themselves, i.e., squared. Since squaring is a non-linear transformation, this structural modification achieves the… http://actu.epfl.ch/news/engineers-bring-efficient-optical-neural-network-2 (Source of the original content)
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encryptedcoldwallet · 3 years
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New to The Street Newsmax TV Announces 9 Interviews
Mr. Pablo Diaz, President, and Mr. Troy Cylmer, COO return to New to the Street for their NASDAQ in-studio interviews with Anchor Jane King. Both Pablo and Troy give updates on the extraordinary growth at SIRC in becoming a nationally recognized conglomerate in roofing, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles (E.V.s). Pablo provides his projections as revenues continue to move upwardly, and he explains the synergies amongst their subsidiaries which created new products and services. Troy talks about the Company finally completing its condensed consolidated financial audit statements for the fiscal year-end, allowing it to file a FORM 10 US SEC 1934 Exchange Act Registration Statement to become a US SEC fully reporting issuer. He looks forward to up-listing the Company’s stock onto the NASDAQ Market in the future. Because SIRC continues to attract talented individuals, including their newly appointed CEO, David Matthew Massey, the ecosystem at SIRC allows innovations to prosper. The Company did approximately $25.5M last quarter, which was more revenue than all last year.
This week, New to The Street T.V. Anchor Jane King welcomes Mr. Vincent Risalvato, CEO of Pennexx Foods, Inc. (OTC: PNNX), for his in-studio NASDAQ interview. Talking to viewers, Mr. Risalvato explains the Company’s businesses in social media, prepaid debit cards, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, targeted marketing, and consumer rewards. The Company’s web platform YourSocialOffers.com (YSO), provides unique, cost-effective award programs for consumers and targeted merchant offerings. Vincent explains how easily the program works for both customers and merchants while utilizing the power of social media. YSO allows everyone to participate in a program offering, prospering in the deals and rewards that everyone finds, earns, uses, and shares. Soon, YSO expects to launch an awards program based on Bitcoin, whereas opt-in subscribers can earn cryptocurrency from a merchant. He sees an extraordinary opportunity to build engagements that benefit merchants and consumers alike.
Mr. Alain Ghiai, CEO at GlobeX Data, Ltd. (OTCQB: SWISF) (CSE: SWIS) (FRA: GDT), talks to New to Street T.V. Anchor Jane King about the Company’s Sekur® solutions to prevent hacks from emails and text messages. Alain provides his opinion on what might have happened to an online mobile stock trading app, Robinhood. Hackers focused on getting their data because of the high-profile media exposure of Robinhood as a next-generation stock trading application. Robinhood says no social security numbers appear not hacked on approximately 7M users. Still, other relevant information, like email accounts, home addresses, cell numbers, and other information  Encrypted cold Wallet probably hacked. Alain says that ALL entities who collect personal data need to ensure the safety of their users’ data. Using GlobeX Data Ltd Sekur® with its proprietary HeliX technology and other encryption solutions can eliminate hacks. With no request for phone numbers, no open-source platform, no Microsoft Office 360, no shared servers, never selling or mining data, GlobeX Data, Ltd. can offer cybersecurity solutions for a monthly fee. As an added protection to subscribers, GlobeX Data Ltd operates its internet platforms and security businesses under the country of Switzerland’s very tough privacy laws.
New to The Street T.V. Anchor Jane King, interviews with Ms. Meris Kott, CEO, Global Wellness Strategies, Inc., (OTCQB: PNNRF) (CSE: GWS). Ms. Kott passionately talks about the Company’s focus and growth in solving the puzzle of chronic pain with MDMA-based medicines, utilizing clinical trials for novel drug developments. Meris updates the recent stock symbol change on its primary stock exchange, the Canadian Stock Exchange; the new stock symbol, GWS, better represents the Company’s business model. Shanti Therapeutics, a GWS investment, operates in Australia, and Meris provides viewers with the challenges of doing business remotely during COVID. Informatively, Meris discusses the differences in the current approaches in the marketplace using psychedelics, comparing other companies’ studies in mental disorders, but Global Wellness concentrates on pain. With a biotech system on pain using psychedelic-based compounds, Meris remains confident in getting a must-needed pharmaceutical-grade psychedelic solution to solve the medical needs of those with chronic, post and pre-operational pains and discomforts.
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tektron · 4 years
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TEKTRON Non-Contact Human Temperature Detection Solution is based on the “Face Recognition + Infrared / Visible dual-sensor system”, powered by our industry-leading Deep Learning AI platform.
Based on the artificial intelligence platform, TEKTRON the infrared temperature measurement results are bundled and calibrated with the human face through the dual-light deep fusion technology and an alarm is triggered when a suspected fever person is found.
Using Tektron’s proprietary light-weight, low power consumption, high performance CNN algorithm model – Shuffle Net has the capability to empower high accuracy AI algorithm model on edge analytics devices. The system can be deployed in a very short period of time at public places, realizing temperature screening in a non-contact manner through our AI technology Face recognition system is made on face recognition algorithm and infrared temperature measurement algorithm. Its functions include living face recognition function, temperature display function, ultrasonic dynamic distance measurement function, and fever temperature alarm function. Forming a replacement “face comparison + temperature detection” bio metric testing solution, which meets a spread of application scenarios. The device opens the interface to the customer for secondary development, which helps to satisfy different needs and to fight for the Corona-Virus and various fever and disease!
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thermal imaging camera , thermal camera , thermal camera abu dhabi  , thermal camera alain , thermal camera in abu dhabi 
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codeeu · 4 years
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6th EU Code Week webinar encouraged coding at home and offered a French online course on AI, unplugged activities from Greece and ultimate fun with Micro:bit
Participants had a chance to meet Alain Thillay from the French Ministry of education and youth, and Bastien Masse from the University of Nantes who presented a successful open online course on Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Greek leading teacher Vasiliki Psarithou showed how she uses concepts of computer science to teach in a minority school and Pauline Maas - leading teacher from the Netherlands - showed some great examples of how to learn and have fun with Micro:bit. The recording is available on the EU Code Week Youtube Channel
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The first presentation by Alain Thillay and Bastien Masse was about the Class’Code project. It is an open participative solution to help teachers and educators to introduce computer science and computer thinking to children. The project started in 2015 and 70 organisations contribute. This project is about empowering teachers and giving them the right tools to help kids from 7 to 17 year old get the needed digital skills. Already more than 80.000 teachers were trained through the online courses. The latest one is Class’Code IAI which introduces basic concepts of artificial intelligence. The course runs for free (in French) since April 2020 and its principles are: 1/ Question yourself, 2/ Experiment, 3/ Discover and 4/ Discuss. The course helped already more than 10.000 people to understand the principles of machine learning explore the grounds of AI.
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The next presentation was by the Greek leading teacher Vasiliki Psarithou (check out her slides) who lives and works in a rural region close to the Greek/Turkish border. Her primary school students speak mainly Turkish and she needed to find a way how to teach them Greek language. She organised an activity called “Make your own rocket” and offered it to 10-year old kids. She developed a simple e-book in Greek where she used concepts from mathematics, computer science and art to explain the process. Students had to follow the instructions step-by-step and build a rocket. Vasiliki also involved parents and the results look amazing. All students were thrilled, some of them shared their creations in videos and over 90% of them participated.
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The last part of the webinar proved that coding can be really fun. Pauline Maas (presentation), the leading teacher from the Netherlands, shared the whole variety of creations that one can do with micro:bit. These are small micro computers with LED lights, A/B buttons, light and temperature sensors or a compass. They can also “see each other” which brings a great element of interaction in every activity. 
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You can code micro:bit in various programming languages. But to start with, Pauline recommended to use the dedicated makecode micro:bit environment where anyone can easily command the device. Teachers can also benefit from a micro:bit classroom where they can manage lessons with their students, see their progress, results and help them when they get stuck. Pauline also manages the microbit101 website where she offers more cool tips on how to use these devices. To start with micro:bit, Pauline suggest all teachers to watch her dedicated EU Code Week learning bit where she explains the basics, provides tips and also offers some ready-to-use activities and lesson plans.
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randybenedict · 6 years
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HydroCision names Tranchemontagne as CEO | Personnel Moves – March 12, 2019
HydroCision said early this month that it tapped former Smith & Nephew (NYSE:SNN) exec Alain Tranchemontagne as its new chief executive officer.
Prior to joining Boston-based HydroCision, Tranchemontagne held a position as U.S. business commercial development senior VP at Smith & Nephew. Before joining Smith & Nephew, Tranchemontagne also held positions at Covidien in senior marketing roles in the patient care division.
“We are delighted to have Alain spearhead the next growth chapter in HydroCision’s future. The board was impressed with Alain’s proven track record at major medical device companies, his leadership and market development experience, as well as his passion and energy to broaden the use of our patented, proprietary technology,” board chair John Schulte said in a press release.
“I’m incredibly honored to be joining HydroCision, and I look forward to working closely with the dedicated HydroCision employees and the Board to deliver on the enormous opportunity that lies ahead. I’m also eager to quickly accelerate HydroCision’s growth trajectory, particularly leveraging our unique and differentiated technology into new surgical applications,” Tranchemontagne said in a prepared statement.
 Senseonics taps Kaufman as chief medical officer
Senseonics (NYSE:SENS) said this month it named Dr. Francine Kaufman as its new chief medical officer, effective immediately.
Kaufman previously served as a director at the Comprehensive Childhood Diabetes Center and head of the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles’ Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Germantown, Md.-based Senseonics said.
“We are pleased to have Fran join the executive leadership team at Senseonics. As chief medical officer, she will be instrumental in helping drive forward our innovation platform and the clinical value proposition of the Eversense system. Fran is one of the world’s leading endocrinologists and her deep understanding of the global medical, research, and clinical diabetes community coupled with her track record of applying novel technologies to advance diabetes care for patients make her ideally suited for the role. We are confident that with her leadership, we will further transform and elevate the Eversense platform and bolster our US commercialization efforts at this critical point,” prez & CEO Tim Goodnow said in a press release.
“I am very excited to join the Senseonics team, especially at this point where I feel I have an opportunity to help lay the foundation for the first long-term implantable continuous glucose monitoring system. I have spent my career exploring the treatment and management of diabetes to improve outcomes for patients. I believe in the clinical value the Eversense system provides and am eager to help patients and providers realize its benefits,” Kaufman said in a prepared statement.
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 Camber Spine Tech appoints Dickinson as sales & new biz dev VP
Camber Spine Technologies said last week that it appointed Ryan Dickinson as its new sales and new business dev VP.
Prior to joining King of Prussia, Penn.-based Camber Spine, Dickinson has held positions with Verticor Spine and Invictus Medical, which he helped found.
“After leaving corporate America in 2017 and moving to West Palm Beach I vowed never to return to it again. It only took a few interactions with the founders of Camber Spine to see that they had something truly special brewing. Once I saw the efficacy and revolutionary technology of their implants I was hooked. That coupled with the testimonials of my own doctors using their products, I wanted in, I needed to be a part of what they were doing.  There’s a sense of magic in their implants, a magic that is going to catapult them to limitless heights. I am very excited to join the Camber Spine team. I believe the potential for growth is tremendous given the smart and passionate people that I have already met in the company and a very strong brand portfolio including their two very exciting proprietary technology platforms Spira and Enza,” Dickinson said in a prepared statement.
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 Qure.ai taps former GE Health exec Singh as CCO
Qure.ai said last week that it named former GE Healthcare exec Chiranjiv Singh as its new chief commercial officer.
Prior to joining Qure.ai, Singh served in a number of marketing and sales roles with GE Healthcare including X-ray division chief marketing officer, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company said.
“Chiranjiv’s track record of delivering growth in diverse geographies combined with his recent experience of leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to deliver improved patient outcomes, is aligned to Qure.ai’s key objectives. Over the last 3 years, we have been on a mission to deploy our solutions in the emerging markets, including a strong focus on Tuberculosis, the leading infectious cause of mortality worldwide. Chiranjiv’s global experience will help us reach new markets and drive adoption globally,” co-founcer & CEO Prashant Warier said in a press release.
“I’m proud to join a team that has recently published its 5th peer reviewed journal publication in the last year, including the first AI publication in The Lancet. The data science teams from Qure.ai have also presented more than 20 scientific abstracts at leading Radiology conferences such as RSNA and ECR. While there are many companies building algorithms, the fact that we are one of the few AI healthcare companies that is backing up the technology with both academic and industry validations is proof of the quality of our solutions. I see a huge opportunity for market creation and growth by understanding clinical needs and embedding Qure.ai solutions into user workflows to deliver maximum impact. I’m excited to be part of this journey to deliver value to patients and our healthcare system,” Singh said in a prepared statement.
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 Aethlon Medical names Boswell as quality systems, regulatory affairs director
Aethlon Medical (NSDQ:AEMD) said last week that it appointed Lisa Boswell as its quality systems and regulatory affairs director.
Prior to joining San Diego-based Aethlon Medical, Boswell held positions in quality assurance and regulatory affairs at Zoll Data Systems as well as positions in quality control at GlobeImmune.
“Lisa’s leadership will be critical as we move the Hemopurifier through the next stages of development.  Given the recent designation of the Hemopurifier as a Breakthrough Device by the FDA, it is extremely important that robust Quality Systems and Manufacturing processes are in place to support ongoing development and planned clinical trials,” interim CEO Dr. Timothy Rodell said in a press release.
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Syncardia promotes Webber to CEO
Humacyte names Fang as chief medical officer
IRRAS adds Podichetty as clinical affairs VP
J&J medical devices CFO Simonelli jumps ship for Realogy
Virta Health adds two to exec roster
MediWounds lifts CFO Malka to corner office
V-Wave taps Abraham as chief med officer
The post HydroCision names Tranchemontagne as CEO | Personnel Moves – March 12, 2019 appeared first on MassDevice.
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ratusalim · 7 years
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Early milestones in AI
The first AI programs
The earliest successful AI program was written in 1951 by Christopher Strachey, later director of the Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford. Strachey’s checkers (draughts) program ran on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester, England. By the summer of 1952 this program could play a complete game of checkers at a reasonable speed.
Information about the earliest successful demonstration of machine learning was published in 1952. Shopper, written by Anthony Oettinger at the University of Cambridge, ran on the EDSAC computer. Shopper’s simulated world was a mall of eight shops. When instructed to purchase an item, Shopper would search for it, visiting shops at random until the item was found. While searching, Shopper would memorize a few of the items stocked in each shop visited (just as a human shopper might). The next time Shopper was sent out for the same item, or for some other item that it had already located, it would go to the right shop straight away. This simple form of learning, as is pointed out in the introductory section What is intelligence?, is called rote learning.
The first AI program to run in the United States also was a checkers program, written in 1952 by Arthur Samuel for the prototype of the IBM 701. Samuel took over the essentials of Strachey’s checkers program and over a period of years considerably extended it. In 1955 he added features that enabled the program to learn from experience. Samuel included mechanisms for both rote learning and generalization, enhancements that eventually led to his program’s winning one game against a former Connecticut checkers champion in 1962.
Evolutionary computing
Samuel’s checkers program was also notable for being one of the first efforts at evolutionary computing. (His program “evolved” by pitting a modified copy against the current best version of his program, with the winner becoming the new standard.) Evolutionary computing typically involves the use of some automatic method of generating and evaluating successive “generations” of a program, until a highly proficient solution evolves.
A leading proponent of evolutionary computing, John Holland, also wrote test software for the prototype of the IBM 701 computer. In particular, he helped design a neural-network “virtual” rat that could be trained to navigate through a maze. This work convinced Holland of the efficacy of the bottom-up approach. While continuing to consult for IBM, Holland moved to the University of Michigan in 1952 to pursue a doctorate in mathematics. He soon switched, however, to a new interdisciplinary program in computers and information processing (later known as communications science) created by Arthur Burks, one of the builders of ENIAC and its successor EDVAC. In his 1959 dissertation, for most likely the world’s first computer science Ph.D., Holland proposed a new type of computer—a multiprocessor computer—that would assign each artificial neuron in a network to a separate processor. (In 1985 Daniel Hillis solved the engineering difficulties to build the first such computer, the 65,536-processor Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer.)
Holland joined the faculty at Michigan after graduation and over the next four decades directed much of the research into methods of automating evolutionary computing, a process now known by the term genetic algorithms. Systems implemented in Holland’s laboratory included a chess program, models of single-cell biological organisms, and a classifier system for controlling a simulated gas-pipeline network. Genetic algorithms are no longer restricted to “academic” demonstrations, however; in one important practical application, a genetic algorithm cooperates with a witness to a crime in order to generate a portrait of the criminal.
Logical reasoning and problem solving
The ability to reason logically is an important aspect of intelligence and has always been a major focus of AI research. An important landmark in this area was a theorem-proving program written in 1955–56 by Allen Newell and J. Clifford Shaw of the RAND Corporation and Herbert Simon of the Carnegie Mellon University. The Logic Theorist, as the program became known, was designed to prove theorems from Principia Mathematica (1910–13), a three-volume work by the British philosopher-mathematicians Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. In one instance, a proof devised by the program was more elegant than the proof given in the books.
Newell, Simon, and Shaw went on to write a more powerful program, the General Problem Solver, or GPS. The first version of GPS ran in 1957, and work continued on the project for about a decade. GPS could solve an impressive variety of puzzles using a trial and error approach. However, one criticism of GPS, and similar programs that lack any learning capability, is that the program’s intelligence is entirely secondhand, coming from whatever information the programmer explicitly includes.
English dialogue
Two of the best-known early AI programs, Eliza and Parry, gave an eerie semblance of intelligent conversation. (Details of both were first published in 1966.) Eliza, written by Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT’s AI Laboratory, simulated a human therapist. Parry, written by Stanford University psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, simulated a human paranoiac. Psychiatrists who were asked to decide whether they were communicating with Parry or a human paranoiac were often unable to tell. Nevertheless, neither Parry nor Eliza could reasonably be described as intelligent. Parry’s contributions to the conversation were canned—constructed in advance by the programmer and stored away in the computer’s memory. Eliza, too, relied on canned sentences and simple programming tricks.
AI programming languages
In the course of their work on the Logic Theorist and GPS, Newell, Simon, and Shaw developed their Information Processing Language (IPL), a computer language tailored for AI programming. At the heart of IPL was a highly flexible data structure that they called a list. A list is simply an ordered sequence of items of data. Some or all of the items in a list may themselves be lists. This scheme leads to richly branching structures.
In 1960 John McCarthy combined elements of IPL with the lambda calculus (a formal mathematical-logical system) to produce the programming language LISP (List Processor), which remains the principal language for AI work in the United States. (The lambda calculus itself was invented in 1936 by the Princeton logician Alonzo Church while he was investigating the abstract Entscheidungsproblem, or “decision problem,” for predicate logic—the same problem that Turing had been attacking when he invented the universal Turing machine.)
The logic programming language PROLOG (Programmation en Logique) was conceived by Alain Colmerauer at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, where the language was first implemented in 1973. PROLOG was further developed by the logician Robert Kowalski, a member of the AI group at the University of Edinburgh. This language makes use of a powerful theorem-proving technique known as resolution, invented in 1963 at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois by the British logician Alan Robinson. PROLOG can determine whether or not a given statement follows logically from other given statements. For example, given the statements “All logicians are rational” and “Robinson is a logician,” a PROLOG program responds in the affirmative to the query “Robinson is rational?” PROLOG is widely used for AI work, especially in Europe and Japan.
Researchers at the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology in Tokyo have used PROLOG as the basis for sophisticated logic programming languages. Known as fifth-generation languages, these are in use on nonnumerical parallel computers developed at the Institute.
Other recent work includes the development of languages for reasoning about time-dependent data such as “the account was paid yesterday.” These languages are based on tense logic, which permits statements to be located in the flow of time. (Tense logic was invented in 1953 by the philosopher Arthur Prior at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.)
Microworld programs
To cope with the bewildering complexity of the real world, scientists often ignore less relevant details; for instance, physicists often ignore friction and elasticity in their models. In 1970 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert of the MIT AI Laboratory proposed that likewise AI research should focus on developing programs capable of intelligent behaviour in simpler artificial environments known as microworlds. Much research has focused on the so-called blocks world, which consists of coloured blocks of various shapes and sizes arrayed on a flat surface.
An early success of the microworld approach was SHRDLU, written by Terry Winograd of MIT. (Details of the program were published in 1972.) SHRDLU controlled a robot arm that operated above a flat surface strewn with play blocks. Both the arm and the blocks were virtual. SHRDLU would respond to commands typed in natural English, such as “Will you please stack up both of the red blocks and either a green cube or a pyramid.” The program could also answer questions about its own actions.Although SHRDLU was initially hailed as a major breakthrough, Winograd soon announced that the program was, in fact, a dead end. The techniques pioneered in the program proved unsuitable for application in wider, more interesting worlds. Moreover, the appearance that SHRDLU gave of understanding the blocks microworld, and English statements concerning it, was in fact an illusion. SHRDLU had no idea what a green block was.
Another product of the microworld approach was Shakey, a mobile robot developed at the Stanford Research Institute by Bertram Raphael, Nils Nilsson, and others during the period 1968–72. The robot occupied a specially built microworld consisting of walls, doorways, and a few simply shaped wooden blocks. Each wall had a carefully painted baseboard to enable the robot to “see” where the wall met the floor (a simplification of reality that is typical of the microworld approach). Shakey had about a dozen basic abilities, such as TURN, PUSH, and CLIMB-RAMP.
Critics pointed out the highly simplified nature of Shakey’s environment and emphasized that, despite these simplifications, Shakey operated excruciatingly slowly; a series of actions that a human could plan out and execute in minutes took Shakey days.
The greatest success of the microworld approach is a type of program known as an expert system, described in the next section.
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utopiedujour · 7 years
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Compte-rendu de Paul Jorion, Principes des systèmes intelligents, par Arthur Mary et Jimmy Baraglia
Dans un billet publié hier sur son propre site et ici, Alexis Toulet a l’amabilité de mentionner le rôle pionnier qu’a pu jouer mon livre Principes des systèmes intelligents dans l’Intelligence Artificielle francophone. Il a mis en lien un compte-rendu de ce livre que je reproduis ci-dessous ; sa publication originale se trouve ici.
L’ouvrage de Paul Jorion constitue une introduction rigoureuse et préalable à une réflexion et à un travail dans le champ de l’intelligence artificielle ‑ c’est à ce titre que nous le recommanderions comme lecture introductive à des étudiants en robotique. Il a le mérite de poser les problèmes d’ordre logique, psychologique et dans une moindre mesure anthropologique qui travaillent ce champ disciplinaire (mobilisant à ce titre une vaste érudition). La lecture des Principes des systèmes intelligents, presque vingt-cinq ans après leur première publication 1, fait apparaître au moins deux choses : la première, que ces réflexions ne semblent pas avoir (encore) été véritablement considérées par la communauté des chercheurs en intelligence artificielle (et tout particulièrement le recours à la métapsychologie freudo-lacanienne) ‑ à l’exception toutefois de quelques équipes de recherche s’inscrivant dans le courant de la robotique développementale cognitive qui explore le champ des systèmes s’auto-organisant par apprentissage en prenant au sérieux le rôle que joue le langage dans l’appareil psychique humain 2. La seconde, que la culture dans laquelle sont pris les locuteurs humains a évolué, si bien que l’utilisateur d’un système artificiellement intelligent au début des années 1990, n’est peut-être plus tout à fait le même que l’utilisateur des années 2010. En effet, les individus de nos sociétés tendent à se concevoir toujours plus sur le modèle de l’ordinateur, voire comme des systèmes algorithmiques de prise de décision 3. Le succès relatif de la psychologie cognitive dans la culture a bien dû participer à la diffusion d’un modèle de l’humain ; or, il vaut la peine de noter que cette psychologie repose sur le paradigme computationnel, soit ce qui affirme que l’esprit humain est comparable à un ordinateur traitant des informations, répondant (output) à des stimulations (input). D’un côté donc, une psychologie puisant dans les recherches en informatique ; de l’autre, des recherches en intelligence artificielle ou en robotique puisant (principalement) dans la psychologie des opérations cognitives 4. Ce n’est pas le moindre intérêt de l’ouvrage de Jorion que d’offrir une perspective faisant apparaître la complexité de l’intelligence humaine ou artificielle en soulignant l’hétérogénéité des lois du langage à tout substrat (organique ou informatique) 5.
2. Paul Jorion pose assez rapidement qu’un enjeu de la conception de systèmes artificiellement intelligents réside dans la rencontre de ces systèmes avec l’être humain. Et notamment, des enjeux que nous nommerions volontiers éthiques : la façon que l’utilisateur aura de se rapporter à la machine. Lui fait-il « confiance » ? Est-elle « crédible » ? Comment s’adresse-t-on à un interlocuteur artificiellement intelligent ? Jusqu’à quel point accepte-t-on l’idée d’une créativité artificielle ? Et en effet, on ne parle pas de la même façon selon qu’on s’adresse à un adulte, à un enfant, à un animal domestique ou à un robot 6 ; à croire que toute interlocution véhicule implicitement une théorie sur l’interlocuteur (voire le diagnostic tacite de sa forme de vie) 7. En tout cas, les Principes des systèmes intelligents ne visent pas expressément la simulation de l’humain, mais « se cantonne[nt] à l’exploration des capacités auto-organisantes d’un univers de mots » (p. 73).
3. Plusieurs idées importantes occupent le déploiement de la réflexion de l’auteur et retiennent particulièrement notre attention. Jorion discute en effet du concept d’intention (et l’exigence qu’un système intelligent puisse entendre l’intention au-delà d’une demande 8), des capacités logiques émergeant de systèmes mnésiques langagiers, des propriétés que doit avoir un système mnésique artificiel afin de s’engager dans un discours, négocier son savoir et énoncer le vrai (les précisions sur les différentes acceptions et statuts de la vérité sont précieuses 9). On apprend aussi que le « renforcement hebbien » (1949) avait été déjà pensé par Freud en 1895 (mais publié à titre posthume en 1950) sous le nom de « frayage », notion qu’il avait lui-même reprise à Exner (1894).
4. Une objection mérite néanmoins d’être formulée : la conception d’un système intelligent sur la base des principes énoncés par Jorion produirait-elle ou non un locuteur susceptible de s’étonner de ce qu’il dit (à l’occasion d’un lapsus par exemple 10) et susceptible de ce que Lacan a nommé « Acte », soit une manifestation sous-déterminée du sujet du langage faisant évènement dans le régime des pensées et de la parole et entrainant des effets de discours ? Pour le dire autrement, l’Acte est-il possible dans le cadre d’un tel système de contraintes logiques – qui certes génèrent des phénomènes sémantiques émergents. On pourrait se demander, non sans provocation, si l’acte suicidaire d’une intelligence artificielle (dont Lacan affirme qu’il est le seul acte qui réussisse) est rendu possible ? Peut-être interrogeons-nous ainsi simplement l’inclusion ou non du système artificiellement intelligent dans l’ordre des « êtres parlants tragiques », c’est-à-dire des êtres posant la question du sens de leur existence, s’interrogeant sur leur origine et sur leur fin 11 ‑ ce qui exigerait un système capable d’énoncer un discours véritablement sui-référentiel (condition préalable à tout acte suicidaire non-réflexe). Autre limite : concernant le statut de la croyance, il nous semble que le livre de Jorion manque peut-être de finesse et aurait gagné à recourir plus franchement à des auteurs néanmoins régulièrement mobilisés (Wittgenstein et Lacan, notamment), mais il s’agit, répétons-le, d’une étude largement exploratoire, portant sur des grands principes et sur des orientations encore peu considérées par la recherche en intelligence artificielle.
5. Nous nous sommes finalement demandé ce que serait la recension d’un ouvrage faite par une intelligence artificielle ‑ et les auteurs du présent compte-rendu revendiquent leur authentique humanité ! Il faudrait un système capable de lire l’ouvrage de Jorion et capable de le comprendre (et d’entendre ce qui excède ce livre), de le situer et de se situer dans un discours, dans une forme d’interlocution asymétrique (un auteur d’ouvrage, d’un côté, un lecteur-auteur de recension, de l’autre) 12. Un auteur artificiel de compte-rendu qui serait inspiré par les Principes de Jorion, mobiliserait le réseau mnésique de ses précédentes lectures pour alimenter un discours, tandis que sa mémoire grossirait des apports de chaque nouvel ouvrage soumis à son attention. Ainsi, répondrait-il à un texte et répondrait-il d’un acte de lecture original.
=======================
1  La première édition (chez Masson) date de [1989].
2  Cf. par exemple la récente étude de Katsushi Miura et col. (« Vowel Acquisition based on an Auto-Mirroring Bias with a Less Imitative Caregiver », Advanced Robotics, vol. 26, n° 1-2, pp. 23-44, 2012) interrogeant les capacités phonétiques auto-organisatrices d’un système apprenant de nouvelles voyelles. Ajoutons que Jorion n’était pas le seul avoir tenté des rapprochements entre Intelligence Artificielle et psychanalyse : cf. par exemple Sherry Turkle, « Artificial Intelligence and Psychoanalysis: A New Alliance », Daedalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 117, n° 1 : « Artificial Intelligence », 1988.
3  Cf. la chronique de Didier Pourquery sur l’expression « Ou pas… », Le Monde, 2 mars 2013, p. 24. L’ironie de la situation voudrait qu’un locuteur artificiellement intelligent devra peut-être, à l’avenir, pour être convaincant, être un locuteur se prenant (artificiellement) pour un ordinateur !
4  Dans sa conclusion, Jorion affirme une idée très similaire : « La recherche en intelligence artificielle est trop souvent intellectuellement incestueuse : elle cherche les solutions à ses problèmes dans sa propre littérature à l’exclusion de toute autre. » (p. 241).
5  On se souvient que la question voisine de l’hétérogénéité des mathématiques au substrat cérébral avait été discutée par Jean-Pierre Changeux et Alain Connes (Matière à pensée, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2008).
6  Pour le dire à la manière d’Emmanuel Levinas : quelle forme prend la mise en question de ma spontanéité par la présence d’une intelligence artificielle, ainsi que la mise en question d’une « spontanéité artificielle » par la présence d’un interlocuteur humain ? Toujours est-il qu’une équipe japonaise a mis en évidence le fait que des nourrissons de dix mois s’emblent s’attendre à ce qu’un adulte adresse la parole à un robot humanoïde : cf. Akiko Arita et alii, « Can we talk to robots? Ten-month-old infants expected interactive humanoid robots to be talked to by persons »,Cognition, vol. 95, n 3, 2005.
7  On lira avec intérêt l’interview de Kate Darling, chercheuse au MIT, concernant la « torture » des robots : « Donnons des droits aux robots », Le Monde Science et Techno, 14 février 2013 ; ou encore l’expérience de Peter Kahn et col. (« Do People Hold a Humanoid Robot Morally Accountable for the Harm it Causes? », Session: Attitudes and Responses to Social Robots, 5-8 mars 2012, Boston) qui ont mis en place un dispositif expérimental dans lequel les participants étaient amenés à accuser un robot de mauvaise volonté, de mensonge (c’est donc qu’implicitement le robot était digne de ces accusations).
8  Pour reprendre un exemple d’Austin : à la question « pouvez-vous me passer le sel ? », il serait malheureux (unhappy) de répondre : « oui, je le peux ».
9  Jorion emprunte ces nuances principalement à la logique de la Chine ancienne, à Aristote, à la scolastique médiévale, à Austin et à Lacan.
10  Le chapitre sur l’autoréférence répond partiellement à cette objection.
11  À notre connaissance, ce questionnement n’a été traité de façon satisfaisante que par la (science-)fiction (soit précisément le phénomène sémantique complexe qu’est le fantasme).
12  On renverra ici au test de Turing (cf. Alan Turing, Jean-Yves Gérard, La machine de Turing, Paris, Seuil, 1999 ; Paul Jorion, « Turing, ou la tentation de comprendre », L’Homme, n° 153, 2000), ainsi qu’au cycle de nouvelles d’Asimov sur les robots.
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mariaajamesol · 7 years
Text
5 questions: Alain Schlesser – WordPress Core Contributor
Alain Schlesser – aka Schlessera – is a prolific WordPress Core Contributor and he is on a mission: “I want to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it”. Yoast supports him in reaching those goals. Find out more about Alain and his work in the WordPress community.
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A couple of weeks ago, Yoast hired you as a freelancer to expand the work you do on WordPress core. Can you explain this move and what it enables you to do? And what do you hope to get out of it personally?
For some time now, I have been working on WordPress core in my spare time. I have also invested a lot of time into creating educational material like blog posts and WordCamp talks. I had to do all this besides the client work I am getting paid for. As a freelancer, this causes a constant struggle where you’re trying to balance the work you think is important with the work that pays the bills. It causes a lot of stress, and you even miss many important opportunities because the financial pressure grows too big.
I was always able to produce a lot of open source work as a side-effect of my client work. However, working on the important issues of WordPress core is a different beast. I didn’t find a way to integrate these concerns into any client projects.
Being paid for working on WordPress core means that I can afford to spend the time on critical topics. I can now seize opportunities as they come. It means I can work on the areas of the core that do not provide an immediate ROI, but are necessary for a long-term improvement.
One of my overarching personal goals is to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it.
You are a very active member of the WordPress community and even a core-contributor to the latest couple of releases. What is it that attracts you to this community and how did you start off?
When I started delving more deeply into WordPress, I quickly noticed that the code did not exactly follow common best practices. Some parts of the code were well-built, but very generally, it all seemed as though people were constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of reading up on accepted solutions for their problems.
That led me to frequently share best practices and tips whenever I found an opportunity to do so. A lot of the jobs and the traction I initially got came directly or indirectly from freely sharing my own knowledge and experience. But I was mostly working in isolation, except for the few Slack teams I was a member of.
This all changed after I attended my first WordCamp. It was WordCamp Europe in Vienna, and it was a wonderful experience. I was already wondering for a few months whether WordPress was the right platform for me. It felt like making several steps backwards as a developer, instead of progressing. But the first WordCamp changed everything for me.
Although I went to Vienna for professional reasons, it enriched my personal life as well. It made me aware of how much I truly appreciate the community that has gathered around the WordPress project. All of a sudden, all the technical drawbacks of the WordPress platform were secondary to the feeling of personal growth in the welcoming and inspiring community.
That’s why I now work hard on helping make WordPress the best platform it can be (… according to my own benchmarks and agenda, of course). I always try to be as positive and constructive as I can manage. There’s more than enough people that are more than willing to tell you all that is bad about the WordPress codebase. However, not many will be able to point you towards a possible path to improvement that will still meet all given requirements of such an old project. I, however, am working on moving from the former to the latter group.
Could you tell us a bit about the work that’s going on in WordPress at the moment? What key issues need to be worked on?
A lot of the effort is currently being focused on Gutenberg. This is the new editing experience that should launch with WordPress 5.0. However, there are many smaller groups still working fervently on other areas of the core that are just as important.
Right now, I am mostly focusing on the PHP/backend side of things. I want to work on the architectural problems that are plaguing WordPress. I also started a feature project to analyze and redesign the bootstrap process. In addition, I am helping prepare a bump of the minimum PHP version and try to fix the major performance issues of a normal request.
More generally, I think that WordPress needs more experienced developers with outside experience, that can help teach and enforce better practices. That’s why I also want to work on eliminating the hurdles that these developers face.
We need helping hands if we want to improve WordPress, right? Basically, anyone working with or on WordPress could make major or minor contributions to improve the CMS. Let’s say someone is interested in taking part in the project, what steps should he/she take?
An obvious first step is to head over to make.wordpress.org and read through the list of teams to see whether something catches your interest. There’s lots of documentation for most teams that take you through the initial steps of contributing for the first time.
Apart from that, just meet other people at the next Meetup or WordCamp in your region. Most WordCamps have a “Contributor Day” that is ideal for getting a feel for the project. There are also team leads present that will help you with the initial onboarding.
Finally, for the people who don’t know you yet, could you give us a little background on yourself and your work?
I started dabbling in software development as a child on a Commodore C-64. I learned to develop in Basic, and mostly tried to build text adventures, which was an early form of natural language processing. Later on, I moved through several other languages, covering C, C++, Assembler, Pascal and a lot of more obscure dialects.
I always saw game development as the most interesting area for myself. In this area, you not only needed to make everything work, it also needed to work as fast as possible. You always try to get around the then very crippling performance limits. This led me down several rabbit holes at once, learning about data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, graphics and sound driver development, etc.
When I later thought about what professional path to follow, I always tried to avoid the IT space though, as I associated it with frustrating technical support work, more than anything else. That’s why I ended up working as a government agent in the administration of a prison.
I ended up dealing a lot with IT anyway. Since then, I worked on a very diverse set of projects. I even accumulated some certifications along the way, such as for Oracle PL/SQL or Microsoft Sharepoint development.
As I was never truly satisfied with the work I did for the government (mostly because of the long delays and the nonsensical budget allocations), I read a lot about freelancing, remote work, and lifestyle design.
Then, about three years ago, my wife and I made the jump. We both quit our jobs, moved from Luxembourg to Germany and started a new life. I opted to freelance as a PHP and WordPress developer, as these made up the biggest part of the market. I just assumed it would be easy to find work for that reason.
Read more: ‘Why there’s only one model: the open source model’ »
http://ift.tt/2vXVPJH
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samiaedithg · 7 years
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5 questions: Alain Schlesser – WordPress Core Contributor
Alain Schlesser – aka Schlessera – is a prolific WordPress Core Contributor and he is on a mission: “I want to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it”. Yoast supports him in reaching those goals. Find out more about Alain and his work in the WordPress community.
Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »
$89 - Buy now »
Info
A couple of weeks ago, Yoast hired you as a freelancer to expand the work you do on WordPress core. Can you explain this move and what it enables you to do? And what do you hope to get out of it personally?
For some time now, I have been working on WordPress core in my spare time. I have also invested a lot of time into creating educational material like blog posts and WordCamp talks. I had to do all this besides the client work I am getting paid for. As a freelancer, this causes a constant struggle where you’re trying to balance the work you think is important with the work that pays the bills. It causes a lot of stress, and you even miss many important opportunities because the financial pressure grows too big.
I was always able to produce a lot of open source work as a side-effect of my client work. However, working on the important issues of WordPress core is a different beast. I didn’t find a way to integrate these concerns into any client projects.
Being paid for working on WordPress core means that I can afford to spend the time on critical topics. I can now seize opportunities as they come. It means I can work on the areas of the core that do not provide an immediate ROI, but are necessary for a long-term improvement.
One of my overarching personal goals is to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it.
You are a very active member of the WordPress community and even a core-contributor to the latest couple of releases. What is it that attracts you to this community and how did you start off?
When I started delving more deeply into WordPress, I quickly noticed that the code did not exactly follow common best practices. Some parts of the code were well-built, but very generally, it all seemed as though people were constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of reading up on accepted solutions for their problems.
That led me to frequently share best practices and tips whenever I found an opportunity to do so. A lot of the jobs and the traction I initially got came directly or indirectly from freely sharing my own knowledge and experience. But I was mostly working in isolation, except for the few Slack teams I was a member of.
This all changed after I attended my first WordCamp. It was WordCamp Europe in Vienna, and it was a wonderful experience. I was already wondering for a few months whether WordPress was the right platform for me. It felt like making several steps backwards as a developer, instead of progressing. But the first WordCamp changed everything for me.
Although I went to Vienna for professional reasons, it enriched my personal life as well. It made me aware of how much I truly appreciate the community that has gathered around the WordPress project. All of a sudden, all the technical drawbacks of the WordPress platform were secondary to the feeling of personal growth in the welcoming and inspiring community.
That’s why I now work hard on helping make WordPress the best platform it can be (… according to my own benchmarks and agenda, of course). I always try to be as positive and constructive as I can manage. There’s more than enough people that are more than willing to tell you all that is bad about the WordPress codebase. However, not many will be able to point you towards a possible path to improvement that will still meet all given requirements of such an old project. I, however, am working on moving from the former to the latter group.
Could you tell us a bit about the work that’s going on in WordPress at the moment? What key issues need to be worked on?
A lot of the effort is currently being focused on Gutenberg. This is the new editing experience that should launch with WordPress 5.0. However, there are many smaller groups still working fervently on other areas of the core that are just as important.
Right now, I am mostly focusing on the PHP/backend side of things. I want to work on the architectural problems that are plaguing WordPress. I also started a feature project to analyze and redesign the bootstrap process. In addition, I am helping prepare a bump of the minimum PHP version and try to fix the major performance issues of a normal request.
More generally, I think that WordPress needs more experienced developers with outside experience, that can help teach and enforce better practices. That’s why I also want to work on eliminating the hurdles that these developers face.
We need helping hands if we want to improve WordPress, right? Basically, anyone working with or on WordPress could make major or minor contributions to improve the CMS. Let’s say someone is interested in taking part in the project, what steps should he/she take?
An obvious first step is to head over to make.wordpress.org and read through the list of teams to see whether something catches your interest. There’s lots of documentation for most teams that take you through the initial steps of contributing for the first time.
Apart from that, just meet other people at the next Meetup or WordCamp in your region. Most WordCamps have a “Contributor Day” that is ideal for getting a feel for the project. There are also team leads present that will help you with the initial onboarding.
Finally, for the people who don’t know you yet, could you give us a little background on yourself and your work?
I started dabbling in software development as a child on a Commodore C-64. I learned to develop in Basic, and mostly tried to build text adventures, which was an early form of natural language processing. Later on, I moved through several other languages, covering C, C++, Assembler, Pascal and a lot of more obscure dialects.
I always saw game development as the most interesting area for myself. In this area, you not only needed to make everything work, it also needed to work as fast as possible. You always try to get around the then very crippling performance limits. This led me down several rabbit holes at once, learning about data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, graphics and sound driver development, etc.
When I later thought about what professional path to follow, I always tried to avoid the IT space though, as I associated it with frustrating technical support work, more than anything else. That’s why I ended up working as a government agent in the administration of a prison.
I ended up dealing a lot with IT anyway. Since then, I worked on a very diverse set of projects. I even accumulated some certifications along the way, such as for Oracle PL/SQL or Microsoft Sharepoint development.
As I was never truly satisfied with the work I did for the government (mostly because of the long delays and the nonsensical budget allocations), I read a lot about freelancing, remote work, and lifestyle design.
Then, about three years ago, my wife and I made the jump. We both quit our jobs, moved from Luxembourg to Germany and started a new life. I opted to freelance as a PHP and WordPress developer, as these made up the biggest part of the market. I just assumed it would be easy to find work for that reason.
Read more: ‘Why there’s only one model: the open source model’ »
http://ift.tt/2vXVPJH
0 notes
lindasharonbn · 7 years
Text
5 questions: Alain Schlesser – WordPress Core Contributor
Alain Schlesser – aka Schlessera – is a prolific WordPress Core Contributor and he is on a mission: “I want to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it”. Yoast supports him in reaching those goals. Find out more about Alain and his work in the WordPress community.
Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »
$89 - Buy now »
Info
A couple of weeks ago, Yoast hired you as a freelancer to expand the work you do on WordPress core. Can you explain this move and what it enables you to do? And what do you hope to get out of it personally?
For some time now, I have been working on WordPress core in my spare time. I have also invested a lot of time into creating educational material like blog posts and WordCamp talks. I had to do all this besides the client work I am getting paid for. As a freelancer, this causes a constant struggle where you’re trying to balance the work you think is important with the work that pays the bills. It causes a lot of stress, and you even miss many important opportunities because the financial pressure grows too big.
I was always able to produce a lot of open source work as a side-effect of my client work. However, working on the important issues of WordPress core is a different beast. I didn’t find a way to integrate these concerns into any client projects.
Being paid for working on WordPress core means that I can afford to spend the time on critical topics. I can now seize opportunities as they come. It means I can work on the areas of the core that do not provide an immediate ROI, but are necessary for a long-term improvement.
One of my overarching personal goals is to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it.
You are a very active member of the WordPress community and even a core-contributor to the latest couple of releases. What is it that attracts you to this community and how did you start off?
When I started delving more deeply into WordPress, I quickly noticed that the code did not exactly follow common best practices. Some parts of the code were well-built, but very generally, it all seemed as though people were constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of reading up on accepted solutions for their problems.
That led me to frequently share best practices and tips whenever I found an opportunity to do so. A lot of the jobs and the traction I initially got came directly or indirectly from freely sharing my own knowledge and experience. But I was mostly working in isolation, except for the few Slack teams I was a member of.
This all changed after I attended my first WordCamp. It was WordCamp Europe in Vienna, and it was a wonderful experience. I was already wondering for a few months whether WordPress was the right platform for me. It felt like making several steps backwards as a developer, instead of progressing. But the first WordCamp changed everything for me.
Although I went to Vienna for professional reasons, it enriched my personal life as well. It made me aware of how much I truly appreciate the community that has gathered around the WordPress project. All of a sudden, all the technical drawbacks of the WordPress platform were secondary to the feeling of personal growth in the welcoming and inspiring community.
That’s why I now work hard on helping make WordPress the best platform it can be (… according to my own benchmarks and agenda, of course). I always try to be as positive and constructive as I can manage. There’s more than enough people that are more than willing to tell you all that is bad about the WordPress codebase. However, not many will be able to point you towards a possible path to improvement that will still meet all given requirements of such an old project. I, however, am working on moving from the former to the latter group.
Could you tell us a bit about the work that’s going on in WordPress at the moment? What key issues need to be worked on?
A lot of the effort is currently being focused on Gutenberg. This is the new editing experience that should launch with WordPress 5.0. However, there are many smaller groups still working fervently on other areas of the core that are just as important.
Right now, I am mostly focusing on the PHP/backend side of things. I want to work on the architectural problems that are plaguing WordPress. I also started a feature project to analyze and redesign the bootstrap process. In addition, I am helping prepare a bump of the minimum PHP version and try to fix the major performance issues of a normal request.
More generally, I think that WordPress needs more experienced developers with outside experience, that can help teach and enforce better practices. That’s why I also want to work on eliminating the hurdles that these developers face.
We need helping hands if we want to improve WordPress, right? Basically, anyone working with or on WordPress could make major or minor contributions to improve the CMS. Let’s say someone is interested in taking part in the project, what steps should he/she take?
An obvious first step is to head over to make.wordpress.org and read through the list of teams to see whether something catches your interest. There’s lots of documentation for most teams that take you through the initial steps of contributing for the first time.
Apart from that, just meet other people at the next Meetup or WordCamp in your region. Most WordCamps have a “Contributor Day” that is ideal for getting a feel for the project. There are also team leads present that will help you with the initial onboarding.
Finally, for the people who don’t know you yet, could you give us a little background on yourself and your work?
I started dabbling in software development as a child on a Commodore C-64. I learned to develop in Basic, and mostly tried to build text adventures, which was an early form of natural language processing. Later on, I moved through several other languages, covering C, C++, Assembler, Pascal and a lot of more obscure dialects.
I always saw game development as the most interesting area for myself. In this area, you not only needed to make everything work, it also needed to work as fast as possible. You always try to get around the then very crippling performance limits. This led me down several rabbit holes at once, learning about data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, graphics and sound driver development, etc.
When I later thought about what professional path to follow, I always tried to avoid the IT space though, as I associated it with frustrating technical support work, more than anything else. That’s why I ended up working as a government agent in the administration of a prison.
I ended up dealing a lot with IT anyway. Since then, I worked on a very diverse set of projects. I even accumulated some certifications along the way, such as for Oracle PL/SQL or Microsoft Sharepoint development.
As I was never truly satisfied with the work I did for the government (mostly because of the long delays and the nonsensical budget allocations), I read a lot about freelancing, remote work, and lifestyle design.
Then, about three years ago, my wife and I made the jump. We both quit our jobs, moved from Luxembourg to Germany and started a new life. I opted to freelance as a PHP and WordPress developer, as these made up the biggest part of the market. I just assumed it would be easy to find work for that reason.
Read more: ‘Why there’s only one model: the open source model’ »
http://ift.tt/2vXVPJH
0 notes
miettawilliemk · 7 years
Text
5 questions: Alain Schlesser – WordPress Core Contributor
Alain Schlesser – aka Schlessera – is a prolific WordPress Core Contributor and he is on a mission: “I want to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it”. Yoast supports him in reaching those goals. Find out more about Alain and his work in the WordPress community.
Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »
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Info
A couple of weeks ago, Yoast hired you as a freelancer to expand the work you do on WordPress core. Can you explain this move and what it enables you to do? And what do you hope to get out of it personally?
For some time now, I have been working on WordPress core in my spare time. I have also invested a lot of time into creating educational material like blog posts and WordCamp talks. I had to do all this besides the client work I am getting paid for. As a freelancer, this causes a constant struggle where you’re trying to balance the work you think is important with the work that pays the bills. It causes a lot of stress, and you even miss many important opportunities because the financial pressure grows too big.
I was always able to produce a lot of open source work as a side-effect of my client work. However, working on the important issues of WordPress core is a different beast. I didn’t find a way to integrate these concerns into any client projects.
Being paid for working on WordPress core means that I can afford to spend the time on critical topics. I can now seize opportunities as they come. It means I can work on the areas of the core that do not provide an immediate ROI, but are necessary for a long-term improvement.
One of my overarching personal goals is to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it.
You are a very active member of the WordPress community and even a core-contributor to the latest couple of releases. What is it that attracts you to this community and how did you start off?
When I started delving more deeply into WordPress, I quickly noticed that the code did not exactly follow common best practices. Some parts of the code were well-built, but very generally, it all seemed as though people were constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of reading up on accepted solutions for their problems.
That led me to frequently share best practices and tips whenever I found an opportunity to do so. A lot of the jobs and the traction I initially got came directly or indirectly from freely sharing my own knowledge and experience. But I was mostly working in isolation, except for the few Slack teams I was a member of.
This all changed after I attended my first WordCamp. It was WordCamp Europe in Vienna, and it was a wonderful experience. I was already wondering for a few months whether WordPress was the right platform for me. It felt like making several steps backwards as a developer, instead of progressing. But the first WordCamp changed everything for me.
Although I went to Vienna for professional reasons, it enriched my personal life as well. It made me aware of how much I truly appreciate the community that has gathered around the WordPress project. All of a sudden, all the technical drawbacks of the WordPress platform were secondary to the feeling of personal growth in the welcoming and inspiring community.
That’s why I now work hard on helping make WordPress the best platform it can be (… according to my own benchmarks and agenda, of course). I always try to be as positive and constructive as I can manage. There’s more than enough people that are more than willing to tell you all that is bad about the WordPress codebase. However, not many will be able to point you towards a possible path to improvement that will still meet all given requirements of such an old project. I, however, am working on moving from the former to the latter group.
Could you tell us a bit about the work that’s going on in WordPress at the moment? What key issues need to be worked on?
A lot of the effort is currently being focused on Gutenberg. This is the new editing experience that should launch with WordPress 5.0. However, there are many smaller groups still working fervently on other areas of the core that are just as important.
Right now, I am mostly focusing on the PHP/backend side of things. I want to work on the architectural problems that are plaguing WordPress. I also started a feature project to analyze and redesign the bootstrap process. In addition, I am helping prepare a bump of the minimum PHP version and try to fix the major performance issues of a normal request.
More generally, I think that WordPress needs more experienced developers with outside experience, that can help teach and enforce better practices. That’s why I also want to work on eliminating the hurdles that these developers face.
We need helping hands if we want to improve WordPress, right? Basically, anyone working with or on WordPress could make major or minor contributions to improve the CMS. Let’s say someone is interested in taking part in the project, what steps should he/she take?
An obvious first step is to head over to make.wordpress.org and read through the list of teams to see whether something catches your interest. There’s lots of documentation for most teams that take you through the initial steps of contributing for the first time.
Apart from that, just meet other people at the next Meetup or WordCamp in your region. Most WordCamps have a “Contributor Day” that is ideal for getting a feel for the project. There are also team leads present that will help you with the initial onboarding.
Finally, for the people who don’t know you yet, could you give us a little background on yourself and your work?
I started dabbling in software development as a child on a Commodore C-64. I learned to develop in Basic, and mostly tried to build text adventures, which was an early form of natural language processing. Later on, I moved through several other languages, covering C, C++, Assembler, Pascal and a lot of more obscure dialects.
I always saw game development as the most interesting area for myself. In this area, you not only needed to make everything work, it also needed to work as fast as possible. You always try to get around the then very crippling performance limits. This led me down several rabbit holes at once, learning about data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, graphics and sound driver development, etc.
When I later thought about what professional path to follow, I always tried to avoid the IT space though, as I associated it with frustrating technical support work, more than anything else. That’s why I ended up working as a government agent in the administration of a prison.
I ended up dealing a lot with IT anyway. Since then, I worked on a very diverse set of projects. I even accumulated some certifications along the way, such as for Oracle PL/SQL or Microsoft Sharepoint development.
As I was never truly satisfied with the work I did for the government (mostly because of the long delays and the nonsensical budget allocations), I read a lot about freelancing, remote work, and lifestyle design.
Then, about three years ago, my wife and I made the jump. We both quit our jobs, moved from Luxembourg to Germany and started a new life. I opted to freelance as a PHP and WordPress developer, as these made up the biggest part of the market. I just assumed it would be easy to find work for that reason.
Read more: ‘Why there’s only one model: the open source model’ »
http://ift.tt/2vXVPJH
0 notes
mariaajameso · 7 years
Text
5 questions: Alain Schlesser – WordPress Core Contributor
Alain Schlesser – aka Schlessera – is a prolific WordPress Core Contributor and he is on a mission: “I want to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it”. Yoast supports him in reaching those goals. Find out more about Alain and his work in the WordPress community.
Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »
$89 - Buy now »
Info
A couple of weeks ago, Yoast hired you as a freelancer to expand the work you do on WordPress core. Can you explain this move and what it enables you to do? And what do you hope to get out of it personally?
For some time now, I have been working on WordPress core in my spare time. I have also invested a lot of time into creating educational material like blog posts and WordCamp talks. I had to do all this besides the client work I am getting paid for. As a freelancer, this causes a constant struggle where you’re trying to balance the work you think is important with the work that pays the bills. It causes a lot of stress, and you even miss many important opportunities because the financial pressure grows too big.
I was always able to produce a lot of open source work as a side-effect of my client work. However, working on the important issues of WordPress core is a different beast. I didn’t find a way to integrate these concerns into any client projects.
Being paid for working on WordPress core means that I can afford to spend the time on critical topics. I can now seize opportunities as they come. It means I can work on the areas of the core that do not provide an immediate ROI, but are necessary for a long-term improvement.
One of my overarching personal goals is to make WordPress future-proof enough to withstand the next few online revolutions without drowning in technical debt, and as a direct consequence, ensure the longevity of the community that’s surrounding it.
You are a very active member of the WordPress community and even a core-contributor to the latest couple of releases. What is it that attracts you to this community and how did you start off?
When I started delving more deeply into WordPress, I quickly noticed that the code did not exactly follow common best practices. Some parts of the code were well-built, but very generally, it all seemed as though people were constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of reading up on accepted solutions for their problems.
That led me to frequently share best practices and tips whenever I found an opportunity to do so. A lot of the jobs and the traction I initially got came directly or indirectly from freely sharing my own knowledge and experience. But I was mostly working in isolation, except for the few Slack teams I was a member of.
This all changed after I attended my first WordCamp. It was WordCamp Europe in Vienna, and it was a wonderful experience. I was already wondering for a few months whether WordPress was the right platform for me. It felt like making several steps backwards as a developer, instead of progressing. But the first WordCamp changed everything for me.
Although I went to Vienna for professional reasons, it enriched my personal life as well. It made me aware of how much I truly appreciate the community that has gathered around the WordPress project. All of a sudden, all the technical drawbacks of the WordPress platform were secondary to the feeling of personal growth in the welcoming and inspiring community.
That’s why I now work hard on helping make WordPress the best platform it can be (… according to my own benchmarks and agenda, of course). I always try to be as positive and constructive as I can manage. There’s more than enough people that are more than willing to tell you all that is bad about the WordPress codebase. However, not many will be able to point you towards a possible path to improvement that will still meet all given requirements of such an old project. I, however, am working on moving from the former to the latter group.
Could you tell us a bit about the work that’s going on in WordPress at the moment? What key issues need to be worked on?
A lot of the effort is currently being focused on Gutenberg. This is the new editing experience that should launch with WordPress 5.0. However, there are many smaller groups still working fervently on other areas of the core that are just as important.
Right now, I am mostly focusing on the PHP/backend side of things. I want to work on the architectural problems that are plaguing WordPress. I also started a feature project to analyze and redesign the bootstrap process. In addition, I am helping prepare a bump of the minimum PHP version and try to fix the major performance issues of a normal request.
More generally, I think that WordPress needs more experienced developers with outside experience, that can help teach and enforce better practices. That’s why I also want to work on eliminating the hurdles that these developers face.
We need helping hands if we want to improve WordPress, right? Basically, anyone working with or on WordPress could make major or minor contributions to improve the CMS. Let’s say someone is interested in taking part in the project, what steps should he/she take?
An obvious first step is to head over to make.wordpress.org and read through the list of teams to see whether something catches your interest. There’s lots of documentation for most teams that take you through the initial steps of contributing for the first time.
Apart from that, just meet other people at the next Meetup or WordCamp in your region. Most WordCamps have a “Contributor Day” that is ideal for getting a feel for the project. There are also team leads present that will help you with the initial onboarding.
Finally, for the people who don’t know you yet, could you give us a little background on yourself and your work?
I started dabbling in software development as a child on a Commodore C-64. I learned to develop in Basic, and mostly tried to build text adventures, which was an early form of natural language processing. Later on, I moved through several other languages, covering C, C++, Assembler, Pascal and a lot of more obscure dialects.
I always saw game development as the most interesting area for myself. In this area, you not only needed to make everything work, it also needed to work as fast as possible. You always try to get around the then very crippling performance limits. This led me down several rabbit holes at once, learning about data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, graphics and sound driver development, etc.
When I later thought about what professional path to follow, I always tried to avoid the IT space though, as I associated it with frustrating technical support work, more than anything else. That’s why I ended up working as a government agent in the administration of a prison.
I ended up dealing a lot with IT anyway. Since then, I worked on a very diverse set of projects. I even accumulated some certifications along the way, such as for Oracle PL/SQL or Microsoft Sharepoint development.
As I was never truly satisfied with the work I did for the government (mostly because of the long delays and the nonsensical budget allocations), I read a lot about freelancing, remote work, and lifestyle design.
Then, about three years ago, my wife and I made the jump. We both quit our jobs, moved from Luxembourg to Germany and started a new life. I opted to freelance as a PHP and WordPress developer, as these made up the biggest part of the market. I just assumed it would be easy to find work for that reason.
Read more: ‘Why there’s only one model: the open source model’ »
http://ift.tt/2vXVPJH
0 notes