Radioplayer is a radio technology platform, owned by UK radio broadcasters and operated under licence in some other countries. It operates an internet radio web tuner, a set of mobile phone apps, an in-car adaptor, and a growing range of integrations with other connected devices and platforms. Radioplayer is operated by UK Radioplayer Ltd which is a not-for-profit organisation owned by UK radio broadcasters. Initial shareholders were the BBC, Global Radio, GMG Radio, Absolute Radio and RadioCentre. After consolidation in the radio market, current shareholders are the BBC, Global Radio, Bauer Media Group and RadioCentre. == History == Launched in the UK on 31 March 2011, Radioplayer set out to offer a simple and accessible way to listen to radio via the internet. It contained 157 stations at launch. Initially working internally at the BBC for Tim Davie, then Director of BBC Audio & Music, Michael Hill led the project since March 2009; he was made Managing Director of UK Radioplayer Ltd on 28 July 2010. At launch, Radioplayer was a simple and straightforward Flash-based radio player, linked-to by radio stations on their own website. The player included searching and bookmarking across all of UK radio station content. On 5 October 2012, Radioplayer launched a mobile app on iOS phones with an Android version following shortly afterwards. The apps are unavailable for download outside the United Kingdom. This was followed by a tablet app on 25 September 2013. The apps also support Android Wear, Android Auto, Smart Device Link, Apple Watch and Apple CarPlay. They are also compatible with Chromecast and Airplay. In September 2016, Radioplayer announced it had been chosen by Amazon to integrate with their new voice-controlled 'Echo' device, ahead of its UK launch. In July 2017, Radioplayer integrated with the Sonos and Bose multi-room speaker platforms. UK Radioplayer currently contains around 500 UK stations, from Ofcom-licensed broadcasters. Online-only 'sister-stations' can also be added, but only by broadcasters with Ofcom licences which have been on the platform for over a year. == Radioplayer Car == Radioplayer Car was announced in September 2014 as a hybrid radio receiver that switches between FM, DAB and streaming to find the strongest signal. Speaking in Oslo in June 2015, Michael Hill said that he hoped to launch the product in the UK and Norway during the summer of 2015. In February 2017, Radioplayer Car was launched. It was marketed as the world’s first voice-controlled hybrid radio adaptor for car stereos. A small box, fitted behind the dashboard, links to the auxiliary input on an existing car radio. It connects wirelessly via Bluetooth to the driver’s smartphone by an app. The adaptor enabled drivers to listen to their own smartphone music collections using Bluetooth, take hands-free calls, listen to inbound text messages and receive instant audio travel news, customised by GPS to their location and direction of travel. The hardware was manufactured under licence by car audio interfaces supplier Connects2, and Hyde Park Corner was promoted as the preferred installer of the audio equipment. There were several spin-off benefits of the Radioplayer Car project, including the creation of the hybrid radio metadata API for cars, known as the 'WRAPI' (Worldwide Radioplayer API). == International == Through a separate company called Radioplayer Worldwide, Radioplayer technology is licensed to a number of different territories.
Database dump
A database dump contains a record of the table structure and/or the data from a database and is usually in the form of a list of SQL statements ("SQL dump"). A database dump is most often used for backing up a database so that its contents can be restored in the event of data loss. Corrupted databases can often be recovered by analysis of the dump. Database dumps are often published by free content projects, to facilitate reuse, forking, offline use, and long-term digital preservation. Dumps can be transported into environments with Internet blackouts or otherwise restricted Internet access, as well as facilitate local searching of the database using sophisticated tools such as grep.
Hindsight optimization
Hindsight optimisation (HOP) is a computer science technique used in artificial intelligence for analysis of actions which have stochastic results. HOP is used in combination with a deterministic planner. By creating sample results for each of the possible actions from the given state (i.e. determinising the actions), and using the deterministic planner to analyse those sample results, HOP allows an estimate of the actual action.
SmartAction
SmartAction Company LLC is a U.S.-based software company that develops artificial intelligence–driven virtual agents for customer service applications, including voice-based interactive voice response (IVR) systems, chat, and SMS. The company was founded in 2009 by inventor and entrepreneur Peter Voss and is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. == History == In 2001, Peter Voss founded Adaptive AI, Inc., a research and development company focused on artificial intelligence concepts. In 2009, Voss founded SmartAction Company, LLC to commercialize customer-service automation software derived from this work. The company’s initial products focused on automating inbound and outbound calls for contact center environments. In November 2022, Kyle Johnson was appointed chief executive officer, succeeding Gary Davis, who had served as CEO since 2020. In 2024, SmartAction was acquired by Capacity, an AI-powered customer support automation company based in St. Louis, Missouri. == Technology == SmartAction develops cloud-based voice automation software that integrates speech recognition and natural language processing to support automated customer interactions in contact center environments. The platform supports automated handling of common customer service tasks and is designed to integrate with enterprise systems.
Recraft
Recraft is a generative artificial intelligence program and service developed by the London-based startup Recraft, Inc. The company also offers Recraft Studio, a web-based workspace that lets users create and edit images, vectors, and mockups using various text-to-image models. Like models such as Midjourney and DALL-E, the Recraft model generates digital images from natural language prompts, and is specifically tailored for creative workflows, with features that emphasize brand consistency, text fidelity, and layout control. == History and background == Recraft, Inc. was founded in 2022 by machine learning scientist Anna Veronika Dorogush, best known for co-creating the CatBoost machine learning library at Yandex. The company emerged from stealth on May 31, 2023, with a public release of its vector graphics generation capability on Product Hunt. On January 17, 2024, TechCrunch profiled Recraft’s foundational model for graphic design, noting its emphasis on addressing copyright and ethical concerns associated with AI-generated imagery. On October 28, 2024, TechCrunch reported that Recraft's third major model, V3, had topped a crowdsourced benchmark, surpassing Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E in overall image quality. On May 5, 2025, Recraft announced a $30 million Series B funding round led by Accel, reporting more than four million registered users at the time of the announcement. == Models == Recraft has developed multiple generations of its text-to-image models since 2022. Each generation reflects improvements in fidelity, controllability, and support for both raster and vector outputs. The models are proprietary and accessible through the Recraft API, Recraft Studio. Recraft models are also hosted as an image generation API on fal, Replicate, Prodia, and others. === Recraft V2 === Recraft V2 was released in March 2024 and was the company’s first model trained from scratch. It contained roughly 20 billion parameters and introduced native vector image generation, brand-color conditioning, and improved stylistic consistency for icons and illustrations. === Recraft V3 === Recraft V3 was released in October 2024 and achieved first place on the Artificial Analysis benchmark hosted on Hugging Face. The model introduced advances in photorealism, improved rendering of multi-word text, and increased responsiveness to detailed descriptive prompts. It also added the “Artistic” parameter, which allowed users to adjust stylistic intensity within generated images. === Recraft V4 === Recraft V4 was released in February 2026. According to Recraft, V4 is a “ground-up rebuild” aimed at improving prompt accuracy and output quality for design workflows, with the company emphasizing “design taste” and art-directed results. Recraft states that V4 is available in two versions: V4 for faster iteration and V4 Pro for higher-resolution, print-ready assets; the API documentation describes V4 as 1-megapixel output and V4 Pro as 4-megapixel output, with vector variants available for each. === Features === Vectorization: Recraft’s models can generate and convert images into native vector formats, producing scalable graphics composed of editable paths rather than fixed pixels. Style reference: The models support the use of reference images to guide stylistic characteristics such as color palette, line quality, composition, or visual tone. Style mixing: Recraft models can combine multiple stylistic inputs within a single generation. By blending attributes from different references or stylistic instructions, the system produces images that reflect hybrid visual characteristics while maintaining internal consistency. Inpainting editing: The models support localized image modification through inpainting, enabling users to regenerate selected regions of an image while preserving surrounding content. === Model capabilities === Recraft’s models generate raster and vector images from natural-language prompts and are designed to interpret detailed descriptions with attention to composition, style, and text placement. The models support controlled stylistic variation through preset or reference-based guidance and can maintain coherent line, color, or layout structure across multiple outputs. They produce scalable vector graphics alongside high-resolution raster images, and include features for localized image modification through inpainting or outpainting operations. === Technology === Recraft has not publicly disclosed the detailed technical architecture of its models. However, third-party reviews and benchmarks have noted that its performance resembles diffusion models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The model is designed for creative workflows requiring visual consistency and flexible output formats. Reviewers have noted its ability to generate legible multi-line text, produce high-resolution imagery at various canvas sizes, and to maintain alignment with user-defined brand palettes and design themes. Though not open-source, Recraft's models are accessible through a web interface and commercial API. Advanced features such as style settings and positioning control differentiate it from general-purpose text-to-image models. == Recraft Studio == Recraft Studio is a web-based workspace for generating and editing images using Recraft’s image models and selected external models. The infinite canvas interface provides access to a range of creation and refinement tools within a single environment. Raster and vector generation with styles: Recraft Studio supports the generation of both raster and vector images. Users can apply predefined or reference-based styles during generation, allowing for visual consistency across multiple outputs. Mockups: The studio includes mockup tools that allow generated designs to be placed onto predefined surfaces or templates for visualization and presentation purposes. Vectorization: Recraft Studio provides vectorization tools that convert raster images into editable vector graphics, enabling further modification of shapes, colors, and layout. Image upscaling: The workspace includes image upscaling functionality for increasing resolution while preserving visual detail. Editing tools and natural-language editing: Recraft Studio offers a set of editing tools for modifying images within the canvas, including localized adjustments and natural-language–based editing commands that allow users to describe changes using text. === Supported models === Recraft Studio provides access to Recraft’s proprietary image models as well as other external frontier image models such as Nano Banana, GPT 4-o, Imagen, Flux, and others. == Business model == Recraft develops proprietary image models that are accessible through Recraft Studio and the Recraft API. Recraft Studio operates on a freemium model, offering a free tier with limited daily credits and paid subscriptions for access to additional features. The API follows a credit-based system in which units are purchased separately for programmatic image generation. A team plan supports collaborative use, and the API enables organizations and developers to integrate Recraft’s image generation and editing capabilities into their own systems and workflows.
Physicalization
Physicalization of computer hardware (the opposite of virtualization), is a way to place multiple physical machines in a rack unit. It can be a way to reduce hardware costs, since in some cases, server processors cost more per core than energy efficient laptop processors, which may make up for added cost of board level integration. While Moore's law makes increasing integration less expensive, some jobs require much I/O bandwidth, which may be less expensive to provide using many less-integrated processors. Applications and services that are I/O bound are likely to benefit from such physicalized environments. This ensures that each operating system instance is running on a processor that has its own network interface card, host bus and I/O sub-system unlike in the case of a multi-core servers where a single I/O sub-system is shared between all the cores / VMs.
Hyperion Cantos
The Hyperion Cantos is a series of science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The title was originally used for the collection of the first pair of books in the series, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and later came to refer to the overall storyline, including Endymion, The Rise of Endymion, and a number of short stories. More narrowly, inside the fictional storyline, after the first volume, the Hyperion Cantos is an epic poem written by the character Martin Silenus covering in verse form the events of the first two books. Of the four novels, Hyperion received the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1990; The Fall of Hyperion won the Locus and British Science Fiction Association Awards in 1991; and The Rise of Endymion received the Locus Award in 1998. All four novels were also nominated for various science fiction awards. == Works == === Hyperion (1989) === First published in 1989, Hyperion has the structure of a frame story, similar to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. The story weaves the interlocking tales of a diverse group of travelers sent on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs on Hyperion. The travelers have been sent by the Hegemony (the government of the human star systems), the All Thing, and the Church of the Final Atonement, alternately known as the Shrike Church, to make a request of the Shrike. As they progress in their journey, each of the pilgrims tells their tale. === The Fall of Hyperion (1990) === This book concludes the story begun in Hyperion. It abandons the storytelling frame structure of the first novel, and is instead presented primarily as a series of dreams by John Keats. === Endymion (1996) === The story commences 274 years after the events in the previous novel. Few main characters from the first two books are present in the later two. The main character is Raul Endymion, an ex-soldier who receives a death sentence after an unfair trial. He is rescued by Martin Silenus and asked to perform a series of rather extraordinarily difficult tasks. The main task is to rescue and protect the daughter of Brawne Lamia (one of the main characters of Hyperion), Aenea, a messiah coming from the time period just after the first books via time travel. The Catholic Church has become a dominant force in the human universe and views Aenea as a potential threat to their power. The group of Aenea, Endymion, and A. Bettik (an android) evades the Church's forces on several worlds through use of the Consul's spaceship, ending the story on Earth. === The Rise of Endymion (1997) === This final novel in the series finishes the story begun in Endymion, expanding on the themes in Endymion, as Raul and Aenea battle the Church and meet their respective destinies. === Short stories === The series also includes three short stories: "Remembering Siri" (1983, included almost verbatim in Hyperion) "The Death of the Centaur" (1990) "Orphans of the Helix" (1999) == Development == The Hyperion universe originated when Simmons was an elementary school teacher, as an extended tale he told at intervals to his young students; this is recorded in "The Death of the Centaur", and its introduction. It then inspired his short story "Remembering Siri", which eventually became the nucleus around which Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion formed. After the quartet was published came the short story "Orphans of the Helix". "Orphans" is currently the final work in the Cantos, both chronologically and internally. The original Hyperion Cantos has been described as a novel published in two volumes, published separately at first for reasons of length. In his introduction to "Orphans of the Helix", Simmons elaborates: Some readers may know that I've written four novels set in the "Hyperion Universe"—Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. A perceptive subset of those readers—perhaps the majority—know that this so-called epic actually consists of two long and mutually dependent tales, the two Hyperion stories combined and the two Endymion stories combined, broken into four books because of the realities of publishing. == Influences == Much of the appeal of the series stems from its extensive use of references and allusions from a wide array of thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, John Muir, Norbert Wiener, and to the poetry of John Keats, the famous 19th-century English Romantic poet, Norse mythology, and the monk Ummon. A large number of technological elements are acknowledged by Simmons to be inspired by elements of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. The Hyperion series has many echoes of Jack Vance, explicitly acknowledged in one of the later books. The title of the first novel, "Hyperion", is taken from one of Keats's poems, the unfinished epic Hyperion. Similarly, the title of the third novel is from Keats' poem Endymion. Quotes from actual Keats poems and the fictional Cantos of Martin Silenus are interspersed throughout the novels. Simmons goes so far as to have two artificial reincarnations of John Keats ("cybrids": artificial intelligences in human bodies) play a major role in the series. == Setting == Much of the action in the series takes place on the planet Hyperion. It is described as having one-fifth less gravity than Earth standard. Hyperion has a number of peculiar indigenous flora and fauna, notably Tesla trees, which are essentially large electricity-spewing trees. It is also a "labyrinthine" planet, which means that it is home to ancient subterranean labyrinths of unknown purpose. Most importantly, Hyperion is the location of the Time Tombs, large artifacts surrounded by "anti-entropic" fields that allow them to move backward through time. In the fictional universe of the Hyperion Cantos, the Hegemony of Man encompasses over 200 planets. Faster than light communications technology, Fatlines, are said to operate through tachyon bursts. However, in later books it is revealed that they operate through the Void Which Binds. The Farcaster network was given to humanity by the TechnoCore and again it was another use of the Void Which Binds that allowed this instantaneous travel between worlds. The Hawking Drive was developed by human scientists, allowing the faster than light travel which led to the Hegira (from the Arabic word هجرة Hijra, meaning 'migration'). The Gideon drive, a Core-provided starship drive, allows for near-instantaneous travel between any two points in human-occupied space. The drive's use kills any human on board a Gideon-propelled starship; thus, the technology is only of use with remote probes or when used in conjunction with the Pax's resurrection technology. The resurrection creche can regenerate someone carrying a cruciform from their remains. Treeships are living trees that are propelled by ergs (spider-like solid-state alien being that emits force fields) through space. === The Shrike === The region of the Tombs is also the home of the Shrike, a menacing half-mechanical, half-organic four-armed creature that features prominently in the series. It appears in all four Hyperion Cantos books and is an enigma in the initial two; its purpose is not revealed until the second book, but is still left nebulous. The Shrike appears to act both autonomously and as a servant of some unknown force or entity. In the first two Hyperion books, it exists solely in the area around the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. Its portrayal is changed significantly in the last two books, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. In these novels, the Shrike appears effectively unfettered and protects the heroine Aenea against assassins of the opposing TechnoCore. Surrounded in mystery, the object of fear, hatred, and even worship by members of the Church of the Final Atonement (the Shrike Cult), the Shrike's origins are described as uncertain. It is portrayed as composed of razorwire, thorns, blades, and cutting edges, having fingers like scalpels and long, curved toe blades. It has the ability to control the flow of time, and may thus appear to travel infinitely fast. The Shrike may kill victims in a flash or it may transport them to an eternity of impalement upon an enormous artificial 'Tree of Thorns,' or 'Tree of Pain' in Hyperion's distant future. The Tree of Thorns is described as an unimaginably large, metallic tree, alive with the agonized writhing of countless human victims of all ages and races. It is also hinted in the second book that the Tree of Thorns is actually a simulation generated by a mystical interface which connects to human brains via a strong and pulsing (as if it were alive) cord. The name Shrike seems a reference to birds of the shrike family, a family of birds that impales their victims on thorns, spines, or twigs. === Worlds and Systems === In the fictional universe of the Hyperion Cantos, the Hegemony of Man encompasses over 200 planets. The following planets appear or are specifically mentioned in the Hyperion Cantos. Planets of