Computer Sciences

An AI system for training dogs

A team of researchers at Colorado State University has designed an AI system to train a dog to obey certain oral commands without human assistance. In their paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, the researchers describe ...

Computer Sciences

New module for OpenAI GPT-3 creates unique images from text

A team of researchers at OpenAI, a San Francisco artificial intelligence development company, has added a new module to its GPT-3 autoregressive language model. Called DALL·E, the module excerpts text with multiple characteristics, ...

Robotics

Making rad maps with robot dogs

In 2013, researchers carried a Microsoft Kinect camera through houses in Japan's Fukushima Prefecture. The device's infrared light traced the contours of the buildings, making a rough 3D map. On top of this, the team layered ...

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Dog

The dog (Canis lupus familiaris, pronounced /ˈkeɪ.nis ˈluːpəs fʌˈmɪliɛəris/) is a domesticated subspecies of the Gray Wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The domestic dog has been one of the most widely kept working and companion animals in human history. Amongst canine enthusiasts, the word "dog" may also mean the male of a canine species, as opposed to the word "bitch."

The dog quickly became ubiquitous across culture in all parts of the world, and was extremely valuable to early human settlements. For instance, it is believed that the successful emigration across the Bering Strait might not have been possible without sled dogs. Dogs perform many roles for people, such as hunting, herding, protection, and, more recently, assisting handicapped individuals. Currently, there are estimated to be 400 million dogs in the world.

Over the 15,000 year span that the dog had been domesticated, it diverged into only a handful of landraces, groups of similar animals whose morphology and behavior have been shaped by environmental factors and functional roles. As the modern understanding of genetics developed, humans began to intentionally breed dogs for a wide range of specific traits. Through this process, the dog has developed into hundreds of varied breeds, and shows more behavioral and morphological variation than any other land mammal. For example, height measured to the withers ranges from a few inches in the Chihuahua to a few feet in the Irish Wolfhound; color varies from white through grays (usually called "blue'") to black, and browns from light (tan) to dark ("red" or "chocolate") in a wide variation of patterns; coats can be short or long, coarse-haired to wool-like, straight, curly, or smooth. It is common for most breeds to shed this coat, but non-shedding breeds are also popular.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA