This article explains how the U.S. military leverages artificial‑intelligence models for short‑term event forecasting, explores DARPA's Kairos system, and details emerging thermal‑imaging facial‑recognition technologies that boost battlefield awareness and rapid decision‑making.
Google's 2018 AI review highlights major advances across ethical AI principles, social‑impact projects, assistive technologies, quantum computing, natural‑language models like BERT, perception research, algorithms, TPU hardware, open‑source releases, robotics, healthcare applications, and plans for an even broader impact in 2019.
This article explores the rapid growth of the Internet of Things, its essential role in building smart cities, the boost provided by 5G networks, and showcases practical implementations in places like Singapore and Barcelona, while also discussing challenges and future directions.
This article outlines how to design and implement a large‑scale, AI‑driven operations platform—from defining goals with the 5W‑1H method, through data collection, storage, and processing, to building the three‑horse‑power components of monitoring, alerting, and CI/CD—targeted especially at small‑to‑mid‑size enterprises.
The article reviews the latest IoT and edge‑computing trends, outlines Tencent’s multi‑layer IoT platform, edge solutions, LoRa network deployment, and how AI‑driven data analysis will transform the fragmented IoT market into a smarter, more integrated ecosystem.
The article forecasts the major technology trends for 2019, highlighting the rise of artificial intelligence, the transition beyond smartphones to wearable interfaces, global 5G deployment, the surge of progressive web apps, expanding blockchain applications, low‑code development, cloud services growth, and the continued dominance of JavaScript and modern development practices.
This article traces the evolution of the Internet from a simple network to a brain‑like architecture, explores the rise of collective intelligence in nature and technology, and predicts how the convergence of human, machine, and cloud intelligence could create an unprecedented superintelligence in the coming years.
Wave Computing announced that the MIPS instruction set architecture and its latest R6 core will be released as open source in early 2019, sparking industry debate about the move’s impact on MIPS’s market position, licensing revenue, and competition with RISC‑V, especially in the AI and Chinese markets.
The article chronicles Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat’s partnership at Google, from the 2000 index failure that threatened the company, through their pioneering work on MapReduce and large‑scale infrastructure, to the creation of TensorFlow and the rise of Google AI, highlighting their unique collaborative style and lasting impact on modern computing.
The article surveys the nineteen leading AI technologies—from natural language generation and speech recognition to digital twins and marketing automation—detailing their core functions, common use cases such as customer service, security, content creation, and the key vendors delivering each solution.
The 7th China Small‑and‑Medium Bank Development Summit held in Guangzhou on November 29‑30 2018 gathered over 200 banking and fintech leaders to discuss the latest trends, challenges, and strategies in financial technology, digital transformation, risk control, and emerging technologies such as AI, big data, cloud and blockchain.
This article presents a linear‑network‑based speaker‑adaptation method for text‑to‑speech that achieves synthesis quality comparable to large‑scale training using only a few hundred target‑speaker utterances, and introduces a low‑rank‑plus‑diagonal compression to improve stability with scarce data.
This article outlines the ten most sought‑after technical skills for IT professionals in 2019, covering DevOps, Hadoop, Python/Django, data‑science tools, machine learning, AI, RPA, AWS, Tableau, and digital‑marketing analytics, with market trends and certification guidance.
This article outlines the ten most sought‑after technical competencies for 2019—including DevOps, Hadoop, Python/Django, data‑science tools, machine learning, AI, RPA, AWS, Tableau, and digital‑marketing analytics—explaining why each skill matters, key tools to learn, and the market demand behind them.
The article surveys ten leading open-source AI tools and frameworks—including TensorFlow, SystemML, Caffe, Apache Mahout, OpenNN, Torch, Neuroph, Deeplearning4j, Mycroft, and OpenCog—detailing their primary features, supported languages, hardware compatibility, and typical use cases for research and development.
At the World Internet Conference, Ant Group Vice President and Chief Data Scientist Qi Yuan emphasized that artificial intelligence can dramatically improve risk management, lower operational costs, and enhance user experience, citing examples such as the micro‑loan risk‑control model, the visual‑inspection tool ‘Dingsunbao’, and AI‑powered smart customer service.
Meituan’s AI platform leverages a massive “Meituan Brain” knowledge graph—combining a common‑sense graph and an encyclopedia‑scale graph of billions of reviews, millions of dishes and merchant tags—integrated with deep‑learning models to enable interpretable, cross‑scenario search, recommendation, sentiment analysis and AI‑driven dining assistance.
This article chronicles the strategic shifts of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent over the past decade, analyzing how Baidu’s late entry into cloud storage, its focus on AI, and its unique technical choices allowed it to outlast rivals in the fierce cloud‑storage battles that reshaped China’s internet landscape.
This article explains the distinction between discriminative and generative models, outlines the challenges of limited labeled data, introduces semi‑supervised learning principles, and describes GAN‑based semi‑supervised classification algorithms with illustrative diagrams.
At the 2018 China Computer Conference, Alibaba CTO Zhang Jianfeng highlighted how digitalization underpins AI innovations across smart city infrastructure, new manufacturing, and retail, emphasizing massive data utilization, cognitive graph research, and immersive 3D store experiences.
The article clarifies that artificial intelligence encompasses machine learning, which in turn includes deep learning, and uses real‑world examples—from fraud detection and customer clustering to image recognition and language translation—to illustrate how these data‑driven models learn patterns, make predictions, and transform many industries.
GitHub’s 2018 Octoverse report uncovers global developer habits, highlighting the most chatty nations, favorite emojis, peak activity hours, top programming languages, fastest‑growing topics like AI, and major platform updates such as GitHub Actions and Connect, offering a comprehensive snapshot of the open‑source ecosystem.
Blockchain’s decentralized, secure ledger can empower AI by enabling open data sharing, trustworthy model licensing, and auditable provenance, while AI contributes decision‑making and pattern recognition, together creating a decentralized operating system that enhances security, transparency, and scalability across sectors such as healthcare, finance, and beyond.
This article examines the relationships among six core data‑science concepts—big data, machine learning, data mining, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and data science itself—by reviewing definitions, trends, and a comparative Venn diagram to clarify how they fit together within the broader discipline.
Fei‑Fei Li, the pioneering AI researcher and former Google Cloud AI lead, rose from humble beginnings in China to create the ImageNet dataset, drive breakthroughs in computer vision, and now returns to Stanford, illustrating how curiosity and perseverance can transform both academia and industry.
The XSigma system combines AI‑driven demand forecasting, real‑time optimization, visual decision‑making and intelligent training to automatically schedule, scale, balance load and match customers with the best agents, dramatically improving resource utilization and user experience for Alibaba’s massive CCO operation.
The article explains that machine learning encompasses a range of algorithms such as decision trees and random forests, while deep learning—a specialized subset using multi‑layer neural networks—requires large data, powerful hardware, and longer training, yet offers superior performance in fields like computer vision, NLP, and medical diagnosis, and both are poised for expanding industrial and research adoption.
This article details the evolution, architecture, and practical applications of knowledge graphs at Beike Real Estate, covering their historical background, five‑view advantages, data pipelines, ontology construction, intelligent search, recommendation, and chatbot integration, while also discussing challenges and future directions.
The article explores how big data and artificial intelligence are reshaping finance through automated risk management, advanced customer data handling, personalized services, predictive analytics, and real‑time analysis, highlighting practical methods, benefits, and future trends for financial institutions.
The 2018 half‑year report of 360 Security reveals a 13.95% increase in revenue to 6.025 billion yuan, strong performance of its core security products, rapid growth in IoT hardware, a 24% rise in advertising revenue, and substantial R&D investment in AI, big data, and cloud technologies.
This article explains how cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence are interconnected, detailing the evolution from physical data centers to virtualized resources, the concepts of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and how these technologies enable flexible, scalable services for modern applications.
The article examines Lu Qi’s departure from Baidu, debunks rumors of his joining Bitmain, outlines his impressive career, and analyzes how his future choices reflect broader challenges in Chinese tech companies’ culture, governance, and global talent integration.
This article explains AIOps—Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations—its impact on traditional automation, and details how four key roles (Operations Engineer, Operations R&D Engineer, Platform R&D Engineer, and Operations AI Engineer) evolve in responsibilities and required skills within the AIOps era.
This paper presents GXN, a generative cross‑modal feature learning framework that enhances image‑text retrieval by incorporating both high‑level semantic similarity and fine‑grained local matching through a three‑step Look‑Imagine‑Match process, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on MSCOCO and Flickr30K.
At ACM SIGIR 2018, Didi presented AI‑driven intelligent‑transportation research—including a ride‑sharing preference prediction paper, keynote insights on smart dispatch, maps and traffic, collaborations with over twenty cities and numerous universities, open data initiatives, and plans for new thematic research programs.
The article examines the growing skepticism around deep learning, citing industry leaders, safety incidents, and expert opinions to argue that while AI hype may be waning, the field is entering a transitional phase rather than an outright winter, with diverse viewpoints from researchers, companies, and the broader community.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of the AAAI 2018 conference, including submission statistics, country rankings, popular research tracks, award-winning papers, detailed summaries of notable AI papers such as GraphGAN, HARP, PrivSR, and domain adaptation, as well as Ant Financial's own contributions like cw2vec and privacy‑preserving recommendation systems.
The article outlines how to build a credit‑based content management platform by describing the evolution of security practices, defining user‑generated, professional‑generated, and occupational content models, proposing a credit‑audit workflow with risk assessment, and presenting AI‑driven text classification and anti‑cheat methods to balance traffic, quality, and trust.
Accenture's 2018 Technology Vision outlines five pivotal trends—Citizen AI, Extended Reality, True Data, Large‑Scale Collaboration, and the Intelligent Internet—explaining how they reshape business models, customer relationships, and the underlying infrastructure needed for future growth.
The article provides a detailed technical breakdown of Google Duplex, explaining how its speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialogue management, and speech synthesis modules work together to produce task‑oriented, natural‑sounding conversations and discussing challenges such as handling refusals, conditional responses, context management, and future scalability and safety concerns.
The article details Ctrip's mature real‑time anti‑fraud platform, describing its big‑data parallel processing, AI‑driven models, device‑fingerprinting, CDNA service, and evolving architecture that together achieve sub‑150 ms decision latency while handling billions of daily transactions.
This article surveys Qihoo 360’s notable open‑source projects—including distributed system testing tools, high‑performance storage services, AI scheduling platforms, database alternatives, frontend frameworks, mobile plugin solutions, and development utilities—highlighting their purposes, key features, and public GitHub repositories.
This article explains how cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence are interrelated, describing the evolution from physical resource management to virtualized, elastic services, the roles of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how each technology benefits the others in modern applications.
This article summarizes Dr. Pei Dan's 2018 GOPS Shenzhen presentation on AIOps in traditional sectors, especially finance, covering industry outlook, AIOps concepts and value, practical deployment directions, common concerns, a recent challenge competition, and future prospects for autonomous IT operations.
Scientists suggest that mimicking the brain’s serotonin‑driven neuromodulation could give AI systems human‑like reasoning and emotional processing, while researchers at USC’s AI Lab are applying advanced machine‑learning patrol‑randomization and risk‑assessment algorithms, such as the ARMOR platform, to predict and prevent crimes like poaching.
This article curates a ranked list of twelve deep‑learning books, from beginner‑friendly guides to comprehensive textbooks, describing each title’s focus, strengths, and ideal audience, helping readers choose the right resource to start or deepen their AI knowledge.
In this keynote, Alibaba's chief scientist explains how voice AI serves as the natural interface for IoT, detailing the company's strategy to connect billions of devices through cloud infrastructure, AI-driven perception, and multimodal interaction across consumer and industrial applications.
Non‑technology companies are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence, driving a surge in AI‑related M&A and talent acquisition, while the FCC's unanimous approval of SpaceX's 4,425‑satellite Starlink project promises worldwide 1 Gbps broadband, albeit with challenges like space debris and spectrum interference.
In his Money 20/20 Asia keynote, Ant Group CTO Cheng Li outlines the company’s fintech roadmap, highlighting AI‑driven risk engines, blockchain‑based trust mechanisms, cloud‑native infrastructure, and innovative mobile payment solutions that aim to make financial services more inclusive and efficient.
This article explains the origins and goals of cloud computing, how virtualization adds flexibility in time and space, the evolution from physical servers to public and private clouds, the role of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how big data and artificial intelligence intertwine with cloud services to enable modern intelligent applications.
This article outlines the concept, goals, principles, capability levels, platform architecture, team roles, common scenarios, and practical implementation path of AIOps, showing how AI can enhance quality, cost efficiency, and automation in modern IT operations.
The article commemorates Stephen Hawking’s life, outlines his groundbreaking work in cosmology and black holes, and highlights his profound reflections on artificial intelligence, including his 2017 speech and numerous predictions about AI’s future impact on humanity.
At Money 20/20 Asia 2018, Ant Financial’s CTO Cheng Li highlighted how blockchain, artificial intelligence, security, IoT and computing underpin the company’s B.A.S.I.C strategy to expand mobile payments, reduce risk, and promote financial inclusion worldwide.
The article examines China’s push for big data sharing, highlighting Representative Zhang Jindong’s calls for a national open data platform, integration of AI and blockchain, and urgent legislation to address data fragmentation, security risks, and the need to empower SMEs against data monopolies.
The article explores how the integration of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence is reshaping enterprise data platforms, outlining a multi‑stage evolution from data unification to ecosystem building and forecasting the strategic importance of data in future business transformation.
This article compares Python, C++, Java, Lisp, and Prolog, outlining their strengths and weaknesses for artificial intelligence projects to help beginners decide which language to start with.
This article details JD's evolution from rule‑based recommendations to a multi‑screen, AI‑driven personalization platform, describing its system architecture, data pipelines, feature services, and key technologies that enable real‑time, user‑centric product suggestions across the e‑commerce ecosystem.
In an exclusive interview, UCloud’s R&D Director Ye Lideng shares how the company’s CBA strategy, AI‑first products, and innovative cloud services empower startups, drive industry adoption, and shape the future of artificial intelligence and cloud computing in China.
The JD Big Data R&D team announced that three of its research papers—covering cross‑domain human parsing, multi‑view outlier detection, and orthogonal weight normalization for deep neural networks—were accepted at the prestigious AAAI‑2018 conference, highlighting the department's contributions to computer vision, data mining, and deep learning.
The 2017 Chinese high school curriculum reform adds artificial intelligence, big‑data processing, algorithms, IoT and open‑hardware design to mandatory and elective information‑technology courses, expanding students' choices and emphasizing programming, data literacy, and security awareness.
The Ant Financial ATEC Conference in Silicon Valley showcased leading fintech experts discussing the company’s BASIC strategy—spanning Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Security, IoT, and Computing—while presenting new open‑source services and outlining future global technology outreach.
Natural Language Processing, a branch of AI, is traced from its Turing origins through early rule‑based methods, statistical and deep‑learning paradigms, covering lexical analysis, syntax, semantics, knowledge graphs, and current applications, highlighting historical shifts, challenges, and future research directions.
Analyzing 2017’s big data boom, the article explores how the 4V characteristics—volume, variety, velocity, and value—spurred innovations like distributed storage, NoSQL, real‑time stream processing, and AI integration, and predicts future hotspots such as SQL resurgence, cloud‑based platforms, and AI‑driven analytics.
The 2017 Python roundup highlights its surge as the leading language for AI, data science, and software development, covering its dominance in hiring, migration to GitHub, academic recognition, educational adoption, and major ecosystem updates such as Django 2.0 and the Tangent library.
The December 20 Knowledge Graph symposium in Hangzhou, organized by Alibaba and the Chinese Society of Computational Linguistics, gathered leading Chinese scholars who discussed the pivotal role of massive knowledge graphs in AI, natural language processing, knowledge engineering, reasoning, and data‑driven intelligence.
In this thought‑provoking talk, Alibaba’s chief architect Wang Jian explores the nature of real innovation, the role of confidence, and how data‑centric, distributed cloud architectures can empower AI, city‑brain initiatives, and the next generation of technology leaders.
The article examines how emerging AI and big‑data technologies are reshaping insurance by enabling differentiated pricing, automating claims and customer service, strengthening fraud detection, and improving personalized product recommendation and operational efficiency across the sector.
From foundational concepts to practical examples, this guide walks engineers through ten essential supervised and unsupervised machine‑learning algorithms—decision trees, Naïve Bayes, linear regression, logistic regression, SVM, ensemble methods, clustering, PCA, SVD, and ICA—explaining their theory, real‑world uses, and why they matter.
The O2O Machine Learning Applications Seminar, featuring experts from Meituan‑Dianping and Alibaba, explores real‑world ML implementations for online‑to‑offline services, including online learning for search, Alibaba’s Ali Xiaomi intelligent assistant, deep‑learning‑driven recommendation systems, and advertising algorithms such as CTR and CVR optimization, sharing practical insights and best practices.
In this reflective piece, a senior Alibaba iDST engineer shares three years of backend and big‑data platform experience, detailing project challenges, distributed rate‑limiting solutions, personal growth, and ongoing AI research, while offering insights on technical leadership and career choices.
Eric Schmidt warned that China is rapidly closing the AI gap with the United States, citing policy, talent, and investment challenges while highlighting Google's AI applications, recruitment efforts in China, and the need for coordinated national talent strategies.
Google’s AutoML system has begun generating machine‑learning code that outperforms the very researchers who created it, achieving record‑high accuracy on image‑recognition tasks and demonstrating a self‑replicating AI that challenges the notion of human superiority in programming.
Pornhub unveiled an AI model that uses computer‑vision techniques to automatically recognize and tag over ten thousand adult performers, allowing users to search more precisely while also involving human reviewers to verify and improve the system’s accuracy.
The article profiles Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, detailing his journey from founding MetaMind to advancing deep‑learning‑based natural language processing in Einstein AI, while highlighting his views on AI ethics, data bias, and the ongoing debate between humanist and AI‑extinction perspectives.
The 2017 GitHub Octoverse report reveals the platform’s massive growth and ranks the top fifteen programming languages, highlighting Python’s surge, JavaScript’s dominance, and the rising influence of AI‑related projects such as TensorFlow.
Alibaba’s newly launched DAMO Academy, announced at the 2017 Cloud Expo, brings together ten distinguished scientists—including three Chinese academicians and five U.S. Academy members—to spearhead groundbreaking research in AI, quantum computing, security, chip technology, and other frontier fields, aiming to outlast the company itself.
Former Tencent CTO Xiong Minghua shares his career journey, analyzes the three eras of the Internet, and argues that mastering vertical‑field service robots could create a hundred‑billion‑dollar company, while outlining his investment criteria for the next Internet 3.0 champion.
A recent ZeroFOX experiment showed an AI system sending malicious tweets far faster than humans, prompting Elon Musk to highlight the growing threat of AI‑driven hacking, while security experts at Black Hat predict widespread AI weaponization in the near future.
At the 2nd China Big Data International Summit 2017, JD’s chief architect presented how machine‑learning techniques are applied across e‑commerce to improve product data quality, ensure compliance, resolve image‑text mismatches, automate category identification, restructure titles, and build a multi‑dimensional product knowledge graph.
This article shares Tencent’s practical journey of simplifying, smartening, and deepening operations through the Cloud Operations Console, covering R&D structures, management modes, standardization, AI‑driven monitoring, and real‑world case studies that illustrate how modern DevOps can evolve in the era of AI and large‑scale services.
Professor Shi Yaoyun, now Alibaba Cloud’s chief quantum scientist, discusses his move from academia to industry, the company’s ambitious quantum computing and quantum cryptography initiatives, their integration with cloud services, potential impacts on AI and big data, and the broader challenges and future directions of quantum technology.
IBM applies cognitive computing to IT operations by continuously learning from massive data, modeling correct behaviors, and recommending automated actions, while leveraging big‑data processing, machine‑learning‑based predictive insights, and micro‑service automation to reduce incidents and operational costs.
This article surveys emerging technology trends—from AI‑generated art and audio interaction to smart buildings, autonomous vehicles, drones, and virtual‑reality experiences—highlighting how artificial intelligence is poised to reshape creativity, industry, and daily life in the coming years.
This article compiles over twenty‑seven curated cheat sheets covering machine learning algorithms, Python data‑science libraries, and essential mathematics such as probability, linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, providing concise reference images and source links for quick study.
This article presents Michael I. Jordan's keynote on artificial intelligence, covering his background, diverse AI perspectives, current research challenges across vision, speech, language and robotics, future ten‑year visions, ethical concerns, and highlights Berkeley RISELab's Ray platform for scalable AI workloads.
Kunpeng is a unique distributed platform that seamlessly integrates large‑scale system architecture with parallel optimization algorithms, delivering fault‑tolerant, high‑performance machine‑learning capabilities for billions of samples and features, and outperforming Spark, MPI, and XGBoost in real‑world Alibaba applications.
This week’s front‑end roundup covers Storybook 3.2’s Vue support, Webpack’s first‑class WebAssembly push, WebKit’s PWA plans, a browser‑based neural‑network framework, Coinbase’s $100 M raise, TensorFlow 1.3 updates, Netflix’s Vectorflow, Visual Studio 2017 preview, and Angular AOT memory limits.
The article chronicles Andrew Ng’s life—from his early education and family background to his pioneering roles at Google, Stanford, and Baidu—highlighting his AI breakthroughs, philosophy on learning, and the launch of deeplearning.ai courses that aim to build an AI‑driven society.
The article summarizes Dr. Qi Yuan’s presentation at CCAI 2017, detailing Ant Financial’s AI‑driven solutions for financial services—including risk control, intelligent assistants, large‑scale machine learning, reinforcement‑learning marketing, a model‑service platform, and a computer‑vision damage‑assessment system—while highlighting technical challenges, platform architecture, and the company’s open‑tech philosophy.
The article summarizes the 2017 China AI Conference’s Intelligent Finance forum, featuring Ant Group’s AI director Li Xiaolong’s presentation on AI‑driven financial services, academic perspectives on AI‑finance research, and detailed case studies of intelligent customer service, credit scoring, and AI architecture.
Former Amazon senior principal scientist Ren Xiaofeng joins Alibaba's iDST as chief scientist and vice dean, sharing his reasons for choosing Alibaba, the institute's AI ambitions, and how his computer‑vision expertise will drive Alibaba's future technologies.
Core ML is Apple’s on‑device machine‑learning framework that integrates deep‑learning, decision‑tree, SVM and linear models into iOS apps, leveraging Accelerate, BNNS and Metal Performance Shaders, and the article demonstrates its use with a ResNet‑50 model, Vision APIs, and complete Objective‑C code.
Cowen’s 2017 report reveals that 81% of IT leaders are investing in AI, highlights digital marketing, CRM and data analytics as the most mature AI/ML applications, forecasts explosive market growth, and underscores the rapid rise of AI startups and enterprise adoption of intelligent application stacks.
At the 15th China ECR Conference in Hangzhou, JD.com’s Vice President Ma Song highlighted the company’s technology‑driven twelve‑year roadmap, showcasing smart supply‑chain solutions powered by big data and artificial intelligence that improve forecasting, pricing, inventory, and collaboration while enhancing the retail experience.
This article introduces reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning, explains key algorithms such as DQN and policy gradients, discusses black‑box optimization and the cross‑entropy method, and provides resources and code examples for further study.
JD.com's JData Algorithm Competition concluded with record-breaking participation, awarding 600,000 yuan in prizes and offering special employment opportunities to top performers, while showcasing how AI and big data enhance e-commerce experiences.
This article chronicles Fei‑Fei Li’s inspiring personal journey from a modest immigrant background to becoming Stanford’s AI lab director, and then debunks ten common machine‑learning myths, highlighting the limits, misconceptions, and practical realities of AI today.
The ACM TURC 2017 conference in Shanghai gathered Turing Award laureates, leading Chinese scholars, and Alibaba executives, highlighting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, big data, streaming and graph computing, and showcasing AI-driven medical imaging diagnostics and collaborative research initiatives between industry and academia.
The JD Data Algorithm Competition aims to help shoppers overcome decision paralysis by using advanced algorithms to match users with products they'll love, featuring diverse participants from students to professionals competing for prizes and potential real-world implementation.
This article introduces deep learning architecture as a new style of machine‑learning systems, explains the concept of pattern language for describing complex solutions, and outlines the book’s structure covering theory, methods, canonical patterns, model and memory patterns, learning approaches, and practical applications.
