CLEVER score

CLEVER score

The CLEVER (Cross Lipschitz Extreme Value for nEtwork Robustness) score is a way of measuring the robustness of an artificial neural network towards adversarial attacks. It was developed by a team at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in IBM Research and first presented at the 2018 International Conference on Learning Representations. It was mentioned and reviewed by Ian Goodfellow as well. It was adopted into an educational game Fool The Bank by Narendra Nath Joshi, Abhishek Bhandwaldar and Casey Dugan

Artificial intelligence controversies

The controversies surrounding artificial intelligence encompass a broad range of public, academic, and political debates regarding the societal effects of artificial intelligence (AI). These debates intensified particularly in the late 2010s and 2020s, coinciding with an accelerated period of development known as the AI boom. While advocates emphasize the technology's potential to solve complex problems and enhance human quality of life, detractors highlight a wide array of dangers and challenges. These include concerns over ethics, plagiarism and theft, fraud, safety and alignment, environmental impacts, technological unemployment, and the spread of misinformation. It also covers severe future or theoretical challenges, such as the emergence of artificial superintelligence and existential risks. == 2016 == === Microsoft Tay chatbot (2016) === On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released Tay, a chatbot designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl and learn from interactions with Twitter users. Soon after its launch, Tay began posting racist, sexist, and otherwise inflammatory tweets after Twitter users deliberately taught it offensive phrases and exploited its "repeat after me" capability. Examples of controversial outputs included Holocaust denial and calls for genocide using racial slurs. Within 16 hours of its release, Microsoft suspended the Twitter account, deleted the offensive tweets, and stated that Tay had suffered from a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" that "exploited a vulnerability." Tay was briefly and accidentally re-released on March 30 during testing, after which it was permanently shut down. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later stated that Tay "has had a great influence on how Microsoft is approaching AI" and taught the company the importance of taking accountability. == 2022 == === Voiceverse NFT plagiarism scandal (2022) === On January 14, 2022, voice actor Troy Baker announced a partnership with Voiceverse, a blockchain-based company that marketed proprietary AI voice cloning technology as non-fungible tokens (NFT), triggering immediate backlash over environmental concerns, fears that AI could displace human voice actors, and concerns about fraud. Later that same day, the pseudonymous creator of 15.ai—a free, non-commercial AI voice synthesis research project—revealed through server logs that Voiceverse had used 15.ai to generate voice samples, pitch-shifted them to make them unrecognizable, and falsely marketed them as their own proprietary technology before selling them as NFTs; the developer of 15.ai had previously stated that they had no interest in incorporating NFTs into their work. Voiceverse confessed within an hour and stated that their marketing team had used 15.ai without attribution while rushing to create a demo. News publications and AI watchdog groups universally characterized the incident as theft stemming from generative artificial intelligence. === Théâtre D'opéra Spatial (2022) === On August 29, 2022, Jason Michael Allen won first place in the "emerging artist" (non-professional) division of the "Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography" category of the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition with Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, a digital artwork created using the AI image generator Midjourney, Adobe Photoshop, and AI upscaling tools, becoming one of the first images made using generative AI to win such a prize. Allen disclosed his use of Midjourney when submitting, though the judges did not know it was an AI tool but stated they would have awarded him first place regardless. While there was little contention about the image at the fair, reactions to the win on social media were negative. On September 5, 2023, the United States Copyright Office ruled that the work was not eligible for copyright protection as the human creative input was de minimis and that copyright rules "exclude works produced by non-humans." == 2023 == === Statements on AI risk (2023) === On March 22, 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling on "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", citing risks such as AI-generated propaganda, extreme automation of jobs, human obsolescence, and a society-wide loss of control. The letter, published a week after the release of OpenAI's GPT-4, asserted that current large language models were "becoming human-competitive at general tasks". It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari. The letter was criticized for diverting attention from more immediate societal risks such as algorithmic biases, with Timnit Gebru and others arguing that it amplified "some futuristic, dystopian sci-fi scenario" instead of current problems with AI. On May 30, 2023, the Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement signed by hundreds of artificial intelligence experts and other notable figures: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Signatories included Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, as well as the scientific and executive leaders of several major AI companies, including Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Bill Gates. The statement prompted responses from political leaders, including UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who retweeted it with a statement that the UK government would look carefully into it, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who commented that AI "is one of the most powerful technologies that we see currently in our time." Skeptics, including from Human Rights Watch, argued that scientists should focus on known risks of AI instead of speculative future risks. === Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI (2023) === On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board of directors ousted co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman, stating that "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." The removal was precipitated by employee concerns about his handling of artificial intelligence safety and allegations of abusive behavior. Altman was reinstated on November 22 after pressure from employees and investors, including a letter signed by 745 of OpenAI's 770 employees threatening mass resignations if the board did not resign. The removal and subsequent reinstatement caused widespread reactions, including Microsoft's stock falling nearly three percent following the initial announcement and then rising over two percent to an all-time high after Altman was hired to lead a Microsoft AI research team before his reinstatement. The incident also prompted investigations from the Competition and Markets Authority and the Federal Trade Commission into Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI. == 2024 == === Taylor Swift deepfake pornography controversy (2024) === In late January 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake images of Taylor Swift were proliferated on X, with one post reported to have been seen over 47 million times before its removal. Disinformation research firm Graphika traced the images back to 4chan, while members of a Telegram group had discussed ways to circumvent censorship safeguards of AI image generators to create pornographic images of celebrities. The images prompted responses from anti-sexual assault advocacy groups, US politicians, and Swifties. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called the incident "alarming and terrible." X briefly blocked searches of Swift's name on January 27, 2024, and Microsoft enhanced its text-to-image model safeguards to prevent future abuse. On January 30, US senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar, and Josh Hawley introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow victims to sue individuals who produced or possessed "digital forgeries" with intent to distribute, or those who received the material knowing it was made without consent. === Google Gemini image generation controversy (2024) === In February 2024, social media users reported that Google's Gemini chatbot was generating images that featured people of color and women in historically inaccurate contexts—such as Vikings, Nazi soldiers, and the Founding Fathers—and refusing prompts to generate images of white people. The images were derided on social media, including by conservatives who cited them as evidence of Google's "wokeness", and criticized by Elon Musk, who denounced Google's products as biased and racist. In response, Google paused Gemini's ability to generate images of people. Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan released a statement explaining that Gemini had "overcompensate[d]" in its efforts to strive for diversity and acknowledging that the images were "embarrassing and wrong". Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the incident offensive and unacceptable in an internal memo, promising struc

Asymmetric follow

An asymmetric follow social network is one which allows many people to follow an individual or account without having to follow them back. It is also known as asynchronous follow or sometimes asymmetric friendship. Asymmetric follow is a common pattern on Twitter, where someone may have thousands of followers, but themselves follow few (or no) accounts. In September 2010 Facebook started experimenting with a similar feature, which Facebook calls "Subscribe To."

Packingham v. North Carolina

Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U.S. 98 (2017), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a North Carolina statute that prohibited registered sex offenders from using social media websites was unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects freedom of speech. In 2010, Lester Gerard Packingham, a registered sex offender, posted on Facebook under a pseudonym to comment favorably on a recent traffic court experience. Police then identified Packingham and charged him with violating North Carolina's law. Packingham moved to dismiss the charges, arguing that the state's law violated the First Amendment. The trial court dismissed this motion and ultimately convicted Packingham. A state appellate court initially reversed the trial court, holding that the law did violate the First Amendment, but the North Carolina Supreme Court, the state's highest court, disagreed and reinstated the conviction. In June 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the North Carolina Supreme Court's judgment. In the majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court held that social media—defined broadly to include Facebook, Amazon.com, The Washington Post, and WebMD, among many others—is a "protected space" under the First Amendment for lawful speech. The Court offered that North Carolina could protect children through less restrictive means, such as prohibiting "conduct that often presages a sexual crime, like contacting a minor or using a website to gather information about a minor". == Background == === North Carolina statute === In 2008, the state of North Carolina passed a law that made it a felony for a registered sex offender "to access a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender knows that the site permits minor children to become members or to create or maintain personal Web pages". The law defined a "commercial social networking Web site" using four criteria. Specifically, the website must: be "operated by a person who derives revenue from membership fees, advertising, or other sources related to the operation of the Web site". facilitate "the social introduction between two or more persons for the purposes of friendship, meeting other persons, or information exchanges". allow "users to create Web pages or personal profiles that contain information such as the name or nickname of the user, photographs placed on the personal Web page by the user, other personal information about the user, and links to other personal Web pages on the commercial social networking Web site of friends or associates of the user that may be accessed by other users or visitors to the Web site". provide "users or visitors... mechanisms to communicate with other users, such as a message board, chat room, electronic mail, or instant messenger". The law exempted websites that "Provid[e] only one of the following discrete services: photo-sharing, electronic mail, instant messenger, or chat room or message board platform", as well as websites that have as their primary purpose "the facilitation of commercial transactions involving goods or services between [their] members or visitors". === Facts of the case === In 2002, Lester Gerard Packingham was convicted of taking "indecent liberties with a child", a felony that required him to register as a sex offender. A North Carolina court sentenced him to 10–12 months in prison with 24 months of supervised release. He was given no other special instructions on his behavior outside of prison other than to "remain away from" the minor. In 2010, after a state court dismissed a traffic ticket against Packingham, he submitted a post on Facebook under the name "J. R. Gerrard", stating: "Man God is Good! How about I got so much favor they dismissed the ticket before court even started? No fine, no court cost, no nothing spent. . . . . .Praise be to GOD, WOW! Thanks JESUS!" The Durham Police Department identified Packingham as the author of the post after cross-checking the time of the post with recently dismissed traffic tickets, and a grand jury indicted him for violating the North Carolina statute. === Lower court proceedings === Initially, Packingham moved to dismiss his indictment, arguing that it violated the First Amendment. A North Carolina Superior Court judge denied this motion, and he was convicted of violating the North Carolina social media law. Packingham appealed his conviction to the North Carolina Court of Appeals, which reversed the trial court's decision in 2013. Applying intermediate scrutiny, the court of appeals determined that North Carolina's law violated the First Amendment because it was too broad, applying to all registered sex offenders regardless of whether the offender had committed a crime involving a minor or whether the offender was a continuing threat to minors. The appeals court also stated that the law had been defined broadly enough to prohibit a registered sex offender from conducting a wide array of Internet activity, such as "conducting a 'Google' search, purchasing items on Amazon.com, or accessing a plethora of Web sites unrelated to online communication with minors". In 2015, the North Carolina Supreme Court, the state's highest court, reversed the court of appeals, holding that the law was "constitutional in all respects". The North Carolina Supreme Court found that the statute was a "limitation on conduct" and did not impede any free speech. The state had a vested interest in “forestalling the illicit lurking and contact of minors” by registered sex offenders and potential future victims, and upheld Packingham's conviction. == Supreme Court ruling == Packingham filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States. The federal government also filed a brief recommending that the Supreme Court grant certiorari, arguing that the North Carolina Supreme Court incorrectly decided the case in favor of the state. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in October 2016. Amicus briefs in support of Packingham were filed by the libertarian Cato Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union. The North Carolina Supreme Court filed a brief supporting its prior decision, urging the importance of protecting minors from being stalked online. === Oral argument === The oral argument took place in February 2017. Packingham’s lawyer, David T. Goldberg, argued that the law banned “vast swaths of First Amendment activity”, went too far in restricting which Internet sites could be accessed, and forbade use of the Internet in general. The law targeted speech on some of the platforms that Americans use most often, Goldberg noted, and that under the law Packingham could not even use Twitter to read the myriad messages discussing his own case. He further noted that the law imposes punishment without regard to whether the offender actually did anything wrong. North Carolina’s senior deputy Attorney General, Robert C. Montgomery, argued for the state, and claimed that communication through social media sites is a “crucial channel”. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Montgomery to provide evidence as to the claim that by giving Packingham Internet privileges, he would commit another crime. Justice Stephen Breyer added that “It seems to be well-settled law that the state can’t (bar usage) unless there is a 'clear and present danger'." === Opinion of the Court === In June 2017 the Supreme Court delivered a judgment in favor of Packingham, unanimously voting to reverse the state court's ruling. Justice Anthony Kennedy authored the decision, joined by Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, Justice Sotomayor, and Justice Kagan. Kennedy explained the decision: "A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more." He continued that "By prohibiting sex offenders from using those websites, North Carolina with one broad stroke bars access to what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge." Citing Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition as a precedent, Kennedy also wrote: "It is well established that, as a general rule, the Government 'may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech'." === Concurring opinion === Justice Samuel Alito wrote an opinion concurring in the judgment, joined by John Roberts and Clarence Thomas. While Alito agreed that the state statute at issue violated the First Amendment, he noted that there are reasonable scenarios for which legal bans for sex offenders can be placed, such as for sites targeted at teenagers. Justice Gorsuch took no part in the decision of the case. == Impact == Packingham v. North Carolina was one of the first U.S. Supreme Court cases to ana

Mixvoip

Mixvoip S.A. is a Luxembourg-based telecommunications service provider founded in 2008. The company offers IP telephony, high-speed Internet connectivity, and IT solutions to businesses and individuals. == Company history == In November 2017, Mixvoip expanded its operations to Belgium and Germany. At the beginning of 2019, the company acquired the telecommunications provider Voipgate. In December 2019, Mixvoip was named Telecom Company of the Year at the Luxembourg ICT Awards 2019 organized by Farvest and IT One. A 2024 article in Duke described the company's transition during the 2010s from traditional telephony services to cloud-based communication platforms. In the end of 2024, the ILR published the statistics about electronic communications in Luxembourg, including Mixvoip in the fix telephony section. In July 2025, Mixvoip acquired Crossing Telecom. In 2026, Mixvoip acquired Nomado's portfolio.

Sprite (computer graphics)

In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional bitmap that is integrated into a larger scene, most often in a 2D video game. Originally, the term sprite referred to fixed-sized objects composited together, by hardware, with a background. Use of the term has since become more general. Systems with hardware sprites include arcade video games of the 1970s and 1980s; game consoles including as the Atari VCS (1977), ColecoVision (1982), Famicom (1983), Genesis/Mega Drive (1988); and home computers such as the TI-99/4 (1979), Atari 8-bit computers (1979), Commodore 64 (1982), MSX (1983), Amiga (1985), and X68000 (1987). Hardware varies in the number of sprites supported, the size and colors of each sprite, and special effects such as scaling or reporting pixel-precise overlap. Hardware composition of sprites occurs as each scan line is prepared for the video output device, such as a cathode-ray tube, without involvement of the main CPU and without the need for a full-screen frame buffer. Sprites can be positioned or altered by setting attributes used during the hardware composition process. The number of sprites which can be displayed per scan line is often lower than the total number of sprites a system supports. For example, the Texas Instruments TMS9918 chip supports 32 sprites, but only four can appear on the same scan line. The CPUs in modern computers, video game consoles, and mobile devices are fast enough that bitmaps can be drawn into a frame buffer without special hardware assistance. Beyond that, GPUs can render vast numbers of scaled, rotated, anti-aliased, partially translucent, very high resolution images in parallel with the CPU. == Etymology == According to Karl Guttag, one of two engineers for the 1979 Texas Instruments TMS9918 video display processor, this use of the word sprite came from David Ackley, a manager at TI. It was also used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s. The term was derived from the fact that sprites "float" on top of the background image without overwriting it, much like a ghost or mythological sprite. Some hardware manufacturers used different terms, especially before sprite became common: Player/Missile Graphics was a term used by Atari, Inc. for hardware sprites in the Atari 8-bit computers (1979) and Atari 5200 console (1982). The term reflects the use for both characters ("players") and smaller associated objects ("missiles") that share the same color. The earlier Atari Video Computer System and some Atari arcade games used player, missile, and ball. Stamp was used in some arcade hardware in the early 1980s, including Ms. Pac-Man. Movable Object Block, or MOB, was used in MOS Technology's graphics chip literature. Commodore, the main user of MOS chips and the owner of MOS for most of the chip maker's lifetime, instead used the term sprite for the Commodore 64. OBJs (short for objects) is used in the developer manuals for the NES, Super NES, and Game Boy. The region of video RAM used to store sprite attributes and coordinates is called OAM (Object Attribute Memory). This also applies to the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. == History == === Arcade video games === The use of sprites originated with arcade video games. Nolan Bushnell came up with the original concept when he developed the first arcade video game, Computer Space (1971). Technical limitations made it difficult to adapt the early mainframe game Spacewar! (1962), which performed an entire screen refresh for every little movement, so he came up with a solution to the problem: controlling each individual game element with a dedicated transistor. The rockets were essentially hardwired bitmaps that moved around the screen independently of the background, an important innovation for producing screen images more efficiently and providing the basis for sprite graphics. The earliest video games to represent player characters as human player sprites were arcade sports video games, beginning with Taito's TV Basketball, released in April 1974 and licensed to Midway Manufacturing for release in North America. Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, he wanted to move beyond simple Pong-style rectangles to character graphics, by rearranging the rectangle shapes into objects that look like basketball players and basketball hoops. Ramtek released another sports video game in October 1974, Baseball, which similarly displayed human-like characters. The Namco Galaxian arcade system board, for the 1979 arcade game Galaxian, displays animated, multi-colored sprites over a scrolling background. It became the basis for Nintendo's Radar Scope and Donkey Kong arcade hardware and home consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. According to Steve Golson from General Computer Corporation, the term "stamp" was used instead of "sprite" at the time. === Home systems === Signetics devised the first chips capable of generating sprite graphics (referred to as objects by Signetics) for home systems. The Signetics 2636 video processors were first used in the 1978 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System and later in the 1979 Elektor TV Games Computer. The Atari VCS, released in 1977, has a hardware sprite implementation where five graphical objects can be moved independently of the game playfield. The term sprite was not in use at the time. The VCS's sprites are called movable objects in the programming manual, further identified as two players, two missiles, and one ball. These each consist of a single row of pixels that are displayed on a scan line. To produce a two-dimensional shape, the sprite's single-row bitmap is altered by software from one scan line to the next. The 1979 Atari 400 and 800 home computers have similar, but more elaborate, circuitry capable of moving eight single-color objects per scan line: four 8-bit wide players and four 2-bit wide missiles. Each is the full height of the display—a long, thin strip. DMA from a table in memory automatically sets the graphics pattern registers for each scan line. Hardware registers control the horizontal position of each player and missile. Vertical motion is achieved by moving the bitmap data within a player or missile's strip. The feature was called player/missile graphics by Atari. Texas Instruments developed the TMS9918 chip with sprite support for its 1979 TI-99/4 home computer. An updated version is used in the 1981 TI-99/4A. === In 2.5D and 3D games === Sprites remained popular with the rise of 2.5D games (those which recreate a 3D game space from a 2D map) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A technique called billboarding allows 2.5D games to keep onscreen sprites rotated toward the player view at all times. Some 2.5D games, such as 1993's Doom, allow the same entity to be represented by different sprites depending on its rotation relative to the viewer, furthering the illusion of 3D. Fully 3D games usually present world objects as 3D models, but sprites are supported in some 3D game engines, such as GoldSrc and Unreal, and may be billboarded or locked to fixed orientations. Sprites remain useful for small details, particle effects, and other applications where the lack of a third dimension is not a major detriment. == Systems with hardware sprites == These are base hardware specs and do not include additional programming techniques, such as using raster interrupts to repurpose sprites mid-frame.

Digital image correlation for electronics

Digital image correlation analyses have applications in material property characterization, displacement measurement, and strain mapping. As such, DIC is becoming an increasingly popular tool when evaluating the thermo-mechanical behavior of electronic components and systems. == CTE measurements and glass transition temperature identification == The most common application of DIC in the electronics industry is the measurement of coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). Because it is a non-contact, full-field surface technique, DIC is ideal for measuring the effective CTE of printed circuit boards (PCB) and individual surfaces of electronic components. It is especially useful for characterizing the properties of complex integrated circuits, as the combined thermal expansion effects of the substrate, molding compound, and die make effective CTE difficult to estimate at the substrate surface with other experimental methods. DIC techniques can be used to calculate average in-plane strain as a function of temperature over an area of interest during a thermal profile. Linear curve-fitting and slope calculation can then be used to estimate an effective CTE for the observed area. Because the driving factor in solder fatigue is most often the CTE mismatch between a component and the PCB it is soldered to, accurate CTE measurements are vital for calculating printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) reliability metrics. DIC is also useful for characterizing the thermal properties of polymers. Polymers are often used in electronic assemblies as potting compounds, conformal coatings, adhesives, molding compounds, dielectrics, and underfills. Because the stiffness of such materials can vary widely, accurately determining their thermal characteristics with contact techniques that transfer load to the specimen, such as dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and thermomechanical analysis (TMA), is difficult to do with consistency. Accurate CTE measurements are important for these materials because, depending on the specific use case, expansion and contraction of these materials can drastically affect solder joint reliability. For example, if a stiff conformal coating or other polymeric encapsulation is allowed to flow under a QFN, its expansion and contraction during thermal cycling can add tensile stress to the solder joints and expedite fatigue failure. DIC techniques will also allow the detection of glass transition temperature (Tg). At a glass transition temperature, the strain vs. temperature plot will exhibit a change in slope. Determining the Tg is very important for polymeric materials that could have glass transition temperatures within the operating temperature range of the electronics assemblies and components on which they are used. For example, some potting materials can see the Elastic Modulus of the material change by a factor of 100 or more over the glass transition region. Such changes can have drastic effects on an electronic assembly's reliability if they are not planned for in the design process. == Out-of-plane component warpage == When 3D DIC techniques are employed, out-of-plane motion can be tracked in addition to in-plane motion. Out-of-plane warpage is especially of interest at the component level of electronics packaging for solder joint reliability quantification. Excessive warpage during reflow can contribute to defective solder joints by lifting the edges of the component away from the board and creating head-in-pillow defects in ball grid arrays (BGA). Warpage can also shorten the fatigue life of adequate joints by adding tensile stresses to edge joints during thermal cycling. == Thermo-mechanical strain mapping == When a PCBA is over-constrained, thermo-mechanical stress brought about during thermal expansion can cause board strains that could negatively affect individual component and overall assembly reliability. The full-field monitoring capabilities of an image correlation technique allow for the measurement of strain magnitude and location on the surface of a specimen during a displacement-causing event, such as PCBA during a thermal profile. These "strain maps" allow for the comparison of strain levels over full areas of interest. Many traditional discrete methods, like extensometers and strain gauges, only allow for localized measurements of strain, inhibiting their ability to efficiently measure strain across larger areas of interest. DIC techniques have also been used to generate strain maps from purely mechanical events, such as drop impact tests, on electronic assemblies.