Artificial intelligence and data

Binary space partitioning

Binary space partitioning, also known as a BSP tree, is a data structure that recursively splits space by planes, introduced in 1980 for hidden-surface removal in computer graphics.

A binary tree is a hierarchical data structure in which each node has at most two children, the left and right child. It underlies binary search trees, heaps, and balanced variants like red-black trees.

Binding Corporate Rules

Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) are internal data protection rules that let a multinational group legally transfer personal data within itself, approved by EU authorities under GDPR Article 47.

BioBERT

BioBERT is a language representation model for biomedical text mining, introduced in 2019 by further pre-training Google's BERT on PubMed abstracts and PubMed Central full-text articles.

Biogeography-based optimization

Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is a population-based evolutionary algorithm for global optimization, introduced by Dan Simon in 2008, which mimics species migration, speciation, and extinction between habitats.

BioGRID

BioGRID (Biological General Repository for Interaction Datasets) is a public database of manually curated protein, genetic, and chemical interactions from model organisms and humans, with over 3 million interactions from ~88,800 publications, evidence codes, and PSI/MITAB downloads.

Biometric passport

A biometric passport, also called an ePassport or eMRTD, is a passport containing a chip that stores the holder's data and facial image, standardized by ICAO's Doc 9303.

Birth certificate

A birth certificate, also called a certification of live birth, is an official document certifying a person's birth details and serving as a first legal proof of identity.

Birthday attack

The birthday attack is a generic cryptographic attack that exploits the birthday paradox to find two inputs with the same hash output in about 2^(n/2) trials.

Bit array

A bit array, also called a bit vector or bitmap, is a data structure that packs a sequence of 0s and 1s at one bit per element.

GeneralOct 26, 2026

Bitemporal modeling

Bitemporal modeling tracks data along two time axes: valid time (when a fact is true in the real world) and transaction time (when the database recorded it), enabling audit, retrospective correction, and time-travel queries; formalized in TSQL2 and later SQL:2011, used in finance and auditing.

Bitmap

A bitmap, also called a bitset or bit vector, is a data structure representing a set of integers as an array of bits, with constant-time membership, insertion, and deletion.

Bitmap index

A bitmap index is a database index storing one bit per row for each distinct column value, so queries answer compound conditions with fast Boolean operations on the bits.

Bitonic sorter

The bitonic sorter, also called bitonic merge sort, is a sorting network devised by Kenneth Batcher in 1968 that sorts arbitrary inputs in O(log²n) parallel time.

Black box model

A black box model is a model built and used only through its inputs and outputs, without knowledge of its internal workings; neural networks are canonical examples.

Black-box optimization

Black-box optimization, also called derivative-free or zeroth-order optimization, is a class of numerical methods that optimizes functions known only through sampled values, using methods like Bayesian optimization and CMA-ES.

Blackboard system

A blackboard system is an AI architecture where specialized knowledge sources cooperate by writing to a shared data structure, first used in the Hearsay-II speech system.

Blackbox (planner)

Blackbox is a classical AI planning system released in 1998 by Henry Kautz and Bart Selman that converts STRIPS planning problems into SAT problems and solves them with SAT engines.

Blazegraph

Blazegraph, formerly Bigdata, is an open-source RDF and graph database developed by SYSTAP, LLC since 2006, best known as the storage engine behind the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikidata Query Service.

BLEU

BLEU (bilingual evaluation understudy) is an automatic metric for machine translation quality, proposed by Kishore Papineni and colleagues at IBM Research in 2002, that counts n-gram overlap with human reference translations.

BLEURT

BLEURT (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy with Representations from Transformers) is an automatic evaluation metric from Google Research that scores generated text against a reference using a fine-tuned pre-trained Transformer.

Blind deconvolution

Blind deconvolution is a signal and image processing method that recovers both an unknown sharp image and the unknown blur that degraded it, using only the observed blurred data.

Blind signature

A blind signature is a digital signature scheme, introduced by David Chaum in 1982, that lets a user obtain a signature on a message the signer never sees.

Blind source separation

Blind source separation (BSS) is a family of signal processing methods that recover unknown source signals from observed mixtures, as in the cocktail party problem.

Blob analysis

Blob analysis is a computer vision technique that detects and measures connected pixel regions, called blobs, in segmented images, extracting properties such as area, perimeter, and centroid.

Block code

A block code is an error-control method that maps fixed-length k-bit message blocks to longer n-bit codewords so a receiver can detect or correct transmission errors, with rate k/n.

Block encoding

Block encoding is a quantum algorithm technique that embeds a matrix as a block of a larger unitary, enabling non-unitary linear algebra on quantum computers.

Block floating point

Block floating point (BFP) is a number representation where a block of numbers shares a single exponent, saving storage and offering more stability than fixed point.

Bloom filter

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure invented by Burton H. Bloom in 1970 that tests set membership, sometimes giving false positives but never false negatives.