Web application

Web application

A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, in contrast to static web pages. Web applications are commonly distributed via a web server. There are several different tier systems that web applications use to communicate between the web browsers, the client interface, and server data. Each system has its own uses as they function in different ways. However, there are many security risks that developers must be aware of during development; proper measures to protect user data are vital. Web applications are often constructed with the use of a web application framework. Single-page applications (SPAs) and progressive web apps (PWAs) are two architectural approaches to creating web applications that provide a user experience similar to native apps, including features such as smooth navigation, offline support, and faster interactions. Web applications are often fully hosted on remote cloud services, can require a constant connection to them, and can replace conventional desktop applications for operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, thus facilitating the operation of software as a service as it grants the developer the power to tightly control billing based on use of the remote services as well as vendor lock-in by hosting data remotely. Modern browsers such as Chrome offer sandboxing for every browser tab which improves security and restricts access to local resources. No software installation is required as the app runs within the browser which reduces the need for managing software installations. With the use of remote cloud services, customers do not need to manage servers as that can be left to the developer and the cloud service and can use the software with a relatively low power, low-resource PC such as a thin client. The source code of the application can stay the same across operating systems and devices of users with the use of responsive web design, since it only needs to be compatible with web browsers which adhere to web standards, making the code highly portable and saving on development time. Numerous JavaScript frameworks and CSS frameworks facilitate development. == History == The concept of a "web application" was first introduced in the Java language in the Servlet Specification version 2.2, which was released in 1999. At that time, both JavaScript and XML had already been developed, but the XMLHttpRequest object had only been recently introduced on Internet Explorer 5 as an ActiveX object. Beginning around the early 2000s, applications such as "Myspace (2003), Gmail (2004), Digg (2004), [and] Google Maps (2005)," started to make their client sides more and more interactive. A web page script is able to contact the server for storing/retrieving data without downloading an entire web page. The practice became known as Ajax in 2005. Eventually this was replaced by web APIs using JSON, accessed via JavaScript asynchronously on the client side. In earlier computing models like client-server, the processing load for the application was shared between code on the server and code installed on each client locally. In other words, an application had its own pre-compiled client program which served as its user interface and had to be separately installed on each user's personal computer. An upgrade to the server-side code of the application would typically also require an upgrade to the client-side code installed on each user workstation, adding to the support cost and decreasing productivity. Additionally, both the client and server components of the application were bound tightly to a particular computer architecture and operating system, which made porting them to other systems prohibitively expensive for all but the largest applications. Later, in 1995, Netscape introduced the client-side scripting language called JavaScript, which allowed programmers to add dynamic elements to the user interface that ran on the client side. Essentially, instead of sending data to the server in order to generate an entire web page, the embedded scripts of the downloaded page can perform various tasks such as input validation or showing/hiding parts of the page. "Progressive web apps", the term coined by designer Frances Berriman and Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell in 2015, refers to apps taking advantage of new features supported by modern browsers, which initially run inside a web browser tab but later can run completely offline and can be launched without entering the app URL in the browser. == Structure == Traditional PC applications are typically single-tiered, residing solely on the client machine. In contrast, web applications inherently facilitate a multi-tiered architecture. Though many variations are possible, the most common structure is the three-tiered application. In its most common form, the three tiers are called presentation, application and storage. The first tier, presentation, refers to a web browser itself. The second tier refers to any engine using dynamic web content technology (such as ASP, CGI, ColdFusion, Dart, JSP/Java, Node.js, PHP, Python or Ruby on Rails). The third tier refers to a database that stores data and determines the structure of a user interface. Essentially, when using the three-tiered system, the web browser sends requests to the engine, which then services them by making queries and updates against the database and generates a user interface. The 3-tier solution may fall short when dealing with more complex applications, and may need to be replaced with the n-tiered approach; the greatest benefit of which is how business logic (which resides on the application tier) is broken down into a more fine-grained model. Another benefit would be to add an integration tier, which separates the data tier and provides an easy-to-use interface to access the data. For example, the client data would be accessed by calling a "list_clients()" function instead of making an SQL query directly against the client table on the database. This allows the underlying database to be replaced without making any change to the other tiers. There are some who view a web application as a two-tier architecture. This can be a "smart" client that performs all the work and queries a "dumb" server, or a "dumb" client that relies on a "smart" server. The client would handle the presentation tier, the server would have the database (storage tier), and the business logic (application tier) would be on one of them or on both. While this increases the scalability of the applications and separates the display and the database, it still does not allow for true specialization of layers, so most applications will outgrow this model. == Security == Security breaches on these kinds of applications are a major concern because it can involve both enterprise information and private customer data. Protecting these assets is an important part of any web application, and there are some key operational areas that must be included in the development process. This includes processes for authentication, authorization, asset handling, input, and logging and auditing. Building security into the applications from the beginning is sometimes more effective and less disruptive in the long run. == Development == Writing web applications is simplified with the use of web application frameworks. These frameworks facilitate rapid application development by allowing a development team to focus on the parts of their application which are unique to their goals without having to resolve common development issues such as user management. In addition, there is potential for the development of applications on Internet operating systems, although currently there are not many viable platforms that fit this model.

System requirements specification

A System Requirements Specification (SysRS) (abbreviated SysRS to be distinct from a software requirements specification (SRS)) is a structured collection of information that embodies the requirements of a system. A business analyst (BA), sometimes titled system analyst, is responsible for analyzing the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help identify business problems and propose solutions. Within the systems development life cycle domain, the BA typically performs a liaison function between the business side of an enterprise and the information technology department or external service providers.

Markovian discrimination

Markovian discrimination is a class of spam filtering methods used in CRM114 and other spam filters to filter based on statistical patterns of transition probabilities between words or other lexical tokens in spam messages that would not be captured using simple bag-of-words naive Bayes spam filtering. == Markovian Discrimination vs. Bag-of-Words Discrimination == A bag-of-words model contains only a dictionary of legal words and their relative probabilities in spam and genuine messages. A Markovian model additionally includes the relative transition probabilities between words in spam and in genuine messages, where the relative transition probability is the likelihood that a given word will be written next, based on what the current word is. Put another way, a bag-of-words filter discriminates based on relative probabilities of single words alone regardless of phrase structure, while a Markovian word-based filter discriminates based on relative probabilities of either pairs of words, or, more commonly, short sequences of words. This allows the Markovian filter greater sensitivity to phrase structure. Neither naive Bayes nor Markovian filters are limited to the word level for tokenizing messages. They may also process letters, partial words, or phrases as tokens. In such cases, specific bag-of-words methods would correspond to general bag-of-tokens methods. Modelers can parameterize Markovian spam filters based on the relative probabilities of any such tokens' transitions appearing in spam or in legitimate messages. == Visible and Hidden Markov Models == There are two primary classes of Markov models, visible Markov models and hidden Markov models, which differ in whether the Markov chain generating token sequences is assumed to have its states fully determined by each generated token (the visible Markov models) or might also have additional state (the hidden Markov models). With a visible Markov model, each current token is modeled as if it contains the complete information about previous tokens of the message relevant to the probability of future tokens, whereas a hidden Markov model allows for more obscure conditional relationships. Since those more obscure conditional relationships are more typical of natural language messages including both genuine messages and spam, hidden Markov models are generally preferred over visible Markov models for spam filtering. Due to storage constraints, the most commonly employed model is a specific type of hidden Markov model known as a Markov random field, typically with a 'sliding window' or clique size ranging between four and six tokens.

F-score

In statistical analysis of binary classification and information retrieval systems, the F-score or F-measure is a measure of predictive performance. It is calculated from the precision and recall of the test, where the precision is the number of true positive results divided by the number of all samples predicted to be positive, including those not identified correctly, and the recall is the number of true positive results divided by the number of all samples that should have been identified as positive. Precision is also known as positive predictive value, and recall is also known as sensitivity in diagnostic binary classification. The F1 score is the harmonic mean of the precision and recall. It thus symmetrically represents both precision and recall in one metric. The more generic F β {\displaystyle F_{\beta }} score applies additional weights, valuing one of precision or recall more than the other. The highest possible value of an F-score is 1.0, indicating perfect precision and recall, and the lowest possible value is 0, if the precision or the recall is zero. == Etymology == The name F-measure is believed to be named after a different F function in Van Rijsbergen's book, when introduced to the Fourth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-4, 1992). == Definition == The traditional F-measure or balanced F-score (F1 score) is the harmonic mean of precision and recall: F 1 = 2 r e c a l l − 1 + p r e c i s i o n − 1 = 2 p r e c i s i o n ⋅ r e c a l l p r e c i s i o n + r e c a l l = 2 T P 2 T P + F P + F N {\displaystyle F_{1}={\frac {2}{\mathrm {recall} ^{-1}+\mathrm {precision} ^{-1}}}=2{\frac {\mathrm {precision} \cdot \mathrm {recall} }{\mathrm {precision} +\mathrm {recall} }}={\frac {2\mathrm {TP} }{2\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {FP} +\mathrm {FN} }}} With precision = TP / (TP + FP) and recall = TP / (TP + FN), it follows that the numerator of F1 is the sum of their numerators and the denominator of F1 is the sum of their denominators. If FP=FN F 1 = 2 T P 2 T P + 2 F P = T P T P + F P {\displaystyle F_{1}={\frac {2\mathrm {TP} }{2\mathrm {TP} +2\mathrm {FP} }}={\frac {\mathrm {TP} }{\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {FP} }}} or F 1 = 2 T P 2 T P + 2 F N = T P T P + F N {\displaystyle F_{1}={\frac {2\mathrm {TP} }{2\mathrm {TP} +2\mathrm {FN} }}={\frac {\mathrm {TP} }{\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {FN} }}} So, F1 = precision = recall If TP=FP=FN F 1 = 2 T P 2 T P + 2 F P = 2 T P 4 T P = 1 2 = 0.5 {\displaystyle F_{1}={\frac {2\mathrm {TP} }{2\mathrm {TP} +2\mathrm {FP} }}={\frac {2\mathrm {TP} }{4\mathrm {TP} }}={\frac {1}{2}}=0.5} or F 1 = 2 T P 2 T P + 2 F N = 2 T P 4 T P = 1 2 = 0.5 {\displaystyle F_{1}={\frac {2\mathrm {TP} }{2\mathrm {TP} +2\mathrm {FN} }}={\frac {2\mathrm {TP} }{4\mathrm {TP} }}={\frac {1}{2}}=0.5} To see it as a harmonic mean, note that F 1 − 1 = 1 2 ( r e c a l l − 1 + p r e c i s i o n − 1 ) {\displaystyle F_{1}^{-1}={\frac {1}{2}}(\mathrm {recall} ^{-1}+\mathrm {precision} ^{-1})} . === Fβ score === A more general F score, F β {\displaystyle F_{\beta }} , that uses a positive real factor β {\displaystyle \beta } , where β {\displaystyle \beta } is chosen such that recall is considered β {\displaystyle \beta } times as important as precision, is: F β = β 2 + 1 ( β 2 ⋅ r e c a l l − 1 ) + p r e c i s i o n − 1 = ( 1 + β 2 ) ⋅ p r e c i s i o n ⋅ r e c a l l ( β 2 ⋅ p r e c i s i o n ) + r e c a l l {\displaystyle F_{\beta }={\frac {\beta ^{2}+1}{(\beta ^{2}\cdot \mathrm {recall} ^{-1})+\mathrm {precision} ^{-1}}}={\frac {(1+\beta ^{2})\cdot \mathrm {precision} \cdot \mathrm {recall} }{(\beta ^{2}\cdot \mathrm {precision} )+\mathrm {recall} }}} To see that as a weighted harmonic mean, note that F β − 1 = 1 β + β − 1 ( β ⋅ r e c a l l − 1 + β − 1 ⋅ p r e c i s i o n − 1 ) {\displaystyle F_{\beta }^{-1}={\frac {1}{\beta +\beta ^{-1}}}(\beta \cdot \mathrm {recall} ^{-1}+\beta ^{-1}\cdot \mathrm {precision} ^{-1})} . In terms of Type I and type II errors this becomes: F β = ( 1 + β 2 ) ⋅ T P ( 1 + β 2 ) ⋅ T P + β 2 ⋅ F N + F P = ( 1 + β 2 ) ⋅ T P ( T P + F N ) ⋅ β 2 + ( T P + F P ) {\displaystyle F_{\beta }={\frac {(1+\beta ^{2})\cdot \mathrm {TP} }{(1+\beta ^{2})\cdot \mathrm {TP} +\beta ^{2}\cdot \mathrm {FN} +\mathrm {FP} }}\,={\frac {(1+\beta ^{2})\cdot \mathrm {TP} }{(\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {FN} )\cdot \beta ^{2}+(\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {FP} )}}\,} Two commonly used values for β {\displaystyle \beta } are 2, which weighs recall higher than precision, and 1/2, which weighs recall lower than precision. The F-measure was derived so that F β {\displaystyle F_{\beta }} "measures the effectiveness of retrieval with respect to a user who attaches β {\displaystyle \beta } times as much importance to recall as precision". It is based on Van Rijsbergen's effectiveness measure E = 1 − ( α p + 1 − α r ) − 1 {\displaystyle E=1-\left({\frac {\alpha }{p}}+{\frac {1-\alpha }{r}}\right)^{-1}} Their relationship is: F β = 1 − E {\displaystyle F_{\beta }=1-E} where α = 1 1 + β 2 {\displaystyle \alpha ={\frac {1}{1+\beta ^{2}}}} == Diagnostic testing == This is related to the field of binary classification where recall is often termed "sensitivity". == Dependence of the F-score on class imbalance == Precision-recall curve, and thus the F β {\displaystyle F_{\beta }} score, explicitly depends on the ratio r {\displaystyle r} of positive to negative test cases. This means that comparison of the F-score across different problems with differing class ratios is problematic. One way to address this issue (see e.g., Siblini et al., 2020) is to use a standard class ratio r 0 {\displaystyle r_{0}} when making such comparisons. == Applications == The F-score is often used in the field of information retrieval for measuring search, document classification, and query classification performance. It is particularly relevant in applications which are primarily concerned with the positive class and where the positive class is rare relative to the negative class. Earlier works focused primarily on the F1 score, but with the proliferation of large scale search engines, performance goals changed to place more emphasis on either precision or recall and so F β {\displaystyle F_{\beta }} is seen in wide application. The F-score is also used in machine learning. However, the F-measures do not take true negatives into account, hence measures such as the Matthews correlation coefficient, Informedness or Cohen's kappa may be preferred to assess the performance of a binary classifier. The F-score has been widely used in the natural language processing literature, such as in the evaluation of named entity recognition and word segmentation. == Properties == The F1 score is the Dice coefficient of the set of retrieved items and the set of relevant items. The F1-score of a classifier which always predicts the positive class converges to 1 as the probability of the positive class increases. The F1-score of a classifier which always predicts the positive class is equal to 2 proportion_of_positive_class / ( 1 + proportion_of_positive_class ), since the recall is 1, and the precision is equal to the proportion of the positive class. If the scoring model is uninformative (cannot distinguish between the positive and negative class) then the optimal threshold is 0 so that the positive class is always predicted. F1 score is concave in the true positive rate. == Criticism == David Hand and others criticize the widespread use of the F1 score since it gives equal importance to precision and recall. In practice, different types of mis-classifications incur different costs. In other words, the relative importance of precision and recall is an aspect of the problem. According to Davide Chicco and Giuseppe Jurman, the F1 score is less truthful and informative than the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) in binary evaluation classification. David M W Powers has pointed out that F1 ignores the True Negatives and thus is misleading for unbalanced classes, while kappa and correlation measures are symmetric and assess both directions of predictability - the classifier predicting the true class and the true class predicting the classifier prediction, proposing separate multiclass measures Informedness and Markedness for the two directions, noting that their geometric mean is correlation. Another source of critique of F1 is its lack of symmetry. It means it may change its value when dataset labeling is changed - the "positive" samples are named "negative" and vice versa. This criticism is met by the P4 metric definition, which is sometimes indicated as a symmetrical extension of F1. Finally, Ferrer and Dyrland et al. argue that the expected cost (or its counterpart, the expected utility) is the only principled metric for evaluation of classification decisions, having various advantages over the F-score and the MCC. Both works show that the F-score can result in wrong conclusions about the absolute and relative quality of systems. == Difference from Fowlkes–Mallows index == While the F-measur

Phraselator

The Phraselator is a weatherproof handheld language translation device developed by Applied Data Systems and VoxTec, a former division of the military contractor Marine Acoustics, located in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. It was designed to serve as a handheld computer device that translates English into one of 40 different languages. == The device == The Phraselator is a small speech translation PDA-sized device designed to aid in interpretation. The device does not produce synthesized speech like that utilized by Stephen Hawking; instead, it plays pre-recorded foreign language MP3 files. Users can select the phrase they wish to convey from an English list on the screen or speak into the device. It then uses speech recognition technology called DynaSpeak, developed by SRI International, to play the proper sound file. The accuracy of the speech recognition software is over 70 percent according to software developer Jack Buchanan. The device can also record replies for translation later. Pre-recorded phrases are stored on Secure Digital flash memory cards. A 128 MB card can hold up to 12,000 phrases in four or five languages. Users can download phrase modules from the official website, which contained over 300,000 phrases as of March 2005. Users can also construct their own custom phrase modules. Earlier devices were known to have run on an SA-1110 Strong Arm 206 MHz CPU with 32MB SDRAM and 32MB onboard Flash RAM. A newer model, the P2, was released in 2004 and developed according to feedback from U.S. soldiers. It translates one way from English to approximately 60 other languages. It has a directional microphone, a larger library of phrases and a longer battery life. The 2004 release was created by and utilizes a computer board manufactured by InHand Electronics, Inc. In the future, the device will be able to display pictures so users can ask questions such as "Have you seen this person?" Developer Ace Sarich notes that the device is inferior to human interpreter. Conclusions derived from a Nepal field test conducted by U.S. and Nepal based NGO Himalayan Aid in 2004 seemed to confirm Sarich's comparisons: The very concept of using a machine as a communication point between individuals seemed to actually encourage a more limited form of interaction between tester and respondent. Usually, when limited language skills are present between parties, the genuine struggle and desire to communicate acts as a display of good will – we openly display our weakness in this regard – and the result is a more relaxed and human encounter. This was not necessarily present with the Phraselator as all parties abandoned learning about each other and instead focused on learning how to work with the device. As a tool for bridging any cultural differences or communicating effectively at any length, the Phraselator would not be recommended. This device, at least in the form tested, would best be used in large-scale operations where there is no time for language training and there is a need to communicate fixed ideas, quickly, over the greatest distance by employing large amounts of unskilled users. Large humanitarian or natural disasters in remote areas of third-world countries might be an effective example. == Origin == The original idea for the device came from Lee Morin, a Navy doctor in Operation Desert Storm. To communicate with patients, he played Arabic audio files from his laptop. He informed Ace Sarich, the vice president of VoxTec, about the idea. VoxTec won a DARPA Small Business Innovation Research grant in early 2001 to develop a military-grade handheld phrase translator. During its development, the Phraselator was tested and evaluated by scientists from the Army Research Laboratory. The device was first field tested in Afghanistan in 2001. By 2002, about 500 Phraselators were built for soldiers around the world with another 250 ordered by the U.S. Special Forces. The device cost $2000 to develop and could convert spoken English into one of 200,000 recorded commands and questions in 30 languages. However, the device could only translate one-way. At the time, the only existing two-way voice translator that could convert speech back and forth between languages was the Audio Voice Translation Guide System, or TONGUES, which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University for Lockheed Martin. As part of a DARPA program known as the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, SRI International has further developed two-way translation software for use in Iraq called IraqComm in 2006 which contains a vocabulary of 40,000 English words and 50,000 words in Iraqi Arabic. == Notable users == The handheld translator was recently used by U.S. troops while providing relief to tsunami victims in early 2005. About 500 prototypes of the device were provided to U.S. military forces in Operation Enduring Freedom. Units loaded with Haitian dialects have been provided to U.S. troops in Haiti. Army military police have used it in Kandahar to communicate with POWs. In late 2004, the U.S. Navy began to augment some ships with a version of the device attached to large speakers in order to broadcast clear voice instructions up to 400 yards (370 m) away. Corrections officers and law enforcement in Oneida County, New York, have tested the device. Hospital emergency rooms and health departments have also evaluated it. Several Native American tribes such as the Choctaw Nation, the Ponca, and the Comanche Nation have also used the device to preserve their dying languages. Various law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles Police Department, also use the phraselator in their patrol cars. == Awards == In March 2004, DARPA director Dr. Tony Tether presented the Small Business Innovative Research Award to the VoxTec division of Marine Acoustics at DARPATech 2004 in Anaheim, CA. The device was recently listed as one of "Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" in MIT's Technology Review. == Pop culture == Software developer Jack Buchanan believes that building a device similar to the fictional universal translator seen in Star Trek would be harder than building the Enterprise. The device was mentioned in a list of "Top 10 Star Trek Tech" on Space.com.

DAvE (Infineon)

DAVE, or Digital Application Virtual Engineer, is a software development and code generation tool for microcontroller applications created in C/C++. == Versions == === Version 4 (beta) === The successor of the Eclipse-based development environment for C/C++ and/or graphical user interface (GUI) based development using application software (apps). It generates code for the latest XMC1xxx and XMC4xxx microcontrollers using ARM Cortex-M processors. DAVE software development kit (SDK) is a free integrated development environment to set up its own apps for DAVE. === Version 3 === Automatic code generation is based on the use of case-oriented, configurable, and tested software (SW) components, called DAVE Apps. They are comparable to executable and configurable application notes that can be downloaded from the web. The environment is based on Eclipse. Ordinary program development using C/C++ is also available. The targets for this development are XMC1xxx and XMC4xxx microcontrollers that use Cortex-M processors. === Previous versions === This version targets 32-bit microcontroller units (MCUs) (Infineon TriCore AUDO family), 16-bit MCUs (C166, XC166, XE166, and XC2000 family), and 8-bit MCUs (XC800 family) from Infineon. After the initial setup, the configuration wizard appears and gives an overview of the hardware peripherals, control units, and modules. The microcontroller application can be created by selecting the desired functions. At this step, module-specific functions must be selected for module initializing and control. Finally, the application source files will be generated by DAVE and embedded in a project in the selected development environment, where the code can still be modified or added to an extant project. == DAVE-related software == Infineon also developed additional software that can be used in conjunction with DAVE for specific microcontroller families or additional hardware: DAVE Bench for XC800 is a platform providing free development tools for Infineon's 8-bit microcontroller family, based on the Open Source Eclipse architecture. DAVE Drive is a GUI-based software tool that allows application developers to create embedded software for the control of brushless synchronous three-phase motors. == Alternative software == The Infineon MCUs are directly supported by several commercial products, depending on the selected MCU target. An embedded programming library for MATLAB exists. As a free alternative to DAVE, the developer can use the Keil Microcontroller Development Kit (MDK) Version 5. Code for the XMX1000 series up to 128 kB can be developed this way without purchasing a license from Keil.

The Best Free AI Analytics Tool for Beginners

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