EICAR test file

The EICAR test file (official name: EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test File) is a file, developed by the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research, to test the response of computer antivirus (AV) programs. The rationale behind it is to allow people, companies, and AV programmers to test their software without having to use a real computer virus that could cause actual damage should the AV not respond correctly. EICAR likens the use of a live virus to test AV software to setting a fire in a trashcan to test a fire alarm, and promotes the EICAR test file as a safe alternative.

A compliant virus scanner, when detecting the file, will respond in exactly the same manner as if it found genuinely harmful code. Its use can be more versatile than straightforward detection - for example, a file containing the EICAR test string can be compressed or archived, and then the antivirus software can be run to see whether it can detect the test string in the compressed file.

BlackBerry

BlackBerry uses wireless Mail User Agent devices and a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) attached to a traditional e-mail system. The BES monitors the e-mail server, and when it sees new e-mail for a BlackBerry user, it retrieves (pulls) a copy and then pushes it to the BlackBerry handheld device over the wireless network.

BlackBerry became very popular, in part because it offers remote users "instant" e-mail experience; new e-mails appear on the device as soon as they arrive, without the need for any user intervention. The handheld becomes a mobile, dynamically updating, copy of the user's mailbox. As a result of the success of BlackBerry, other manufacturers have developed push e-mail systems for other handheld devices, such as Symbian based mobile phones.

Evolutionary robotics

Evolutionary Robotics (ER) is a methodology that uses evolutionary computation to develop controllers for autonomous robots. Algorithms in ER frequently operate on populations of candidate controllers, initially selected from some distribution. This population is then repeatedly modified according to a fitness function. In the case of genetic algorithms (or "GAs"), a common method in evolutionary computation, the population of candidate controllers is repeatedly grown according to crossover, mutation and other GA operators and then culled according to the fitness function. The candidate controllers used in ER applications may be drawn from some subset of the set of artificial neural networks, although some applications (including SAMUEL, developed at the Naval Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence) use collections of "IF THEN ELSE" rules as the constituent parts of an individual controller. It is theoretically possible to use any set of symbolic formulations of a control laws (sometimes called a policies in the machine learning community) as the space of possible candidate controllers. It is worth noting that artificial neural networks can also be used for robot learning outside of the context of evolutionary robotics. In particular, other forms of reinforcement learning can be used for learning robot controllers.

Robot kit

A robot kit is a special construction kit for building robots, especially autonomous mobile robots.

Toy robot kits are also supplied by several companies. They are mostly made of plastics elements like Lego Mindstorms and the Robotis Bioloid, or aluminium elements like Lynxmotion's Servo Erector Set and the qfix kit.

The kits can consist of: structural elements, mechanical elements, motors (or other actuators), sensors and a controller board to control the inputs and outputs of the robot. In some cases, the kits can be available without electronics as well, to provide the user the opportunity to use his or her own.