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Computing and digital systems

13,604 articles

General

Diamond transistor

A diamond transistor is a field-effect transistor whose channel is made of synthetic diamond, an ultra-wide-bandgap semiconductor suited to high power, high temperatures, and radiation; it remains at the research and early-commercialization stage.

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Dice (ticketing company)

DICE is a London-based mobile ticketing and event discovery platform for live music, founded in 2014 by Phil Hutcheon and ustwo, and acquired by Fever in 2025.

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Dictionary attack

A dictionary attack is a password-guessing method that hashes each candidate from a list of likely passwords, such as breached ones, and compares them against captured hashes.

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Dictionary learning

Dictionary learning is a machine learning method that learns basis elements, called atoms, so each signal can be represented sparsely as a combination of a few atoms.

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Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com is a free, advertising-supported online English dictionary launched in 1995 by Brian Kariger and Daniel Fierro, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary and serving over 40 million users monthly.

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Didaktik

Didaktik was a series of 8-bit home computers made by a cooperative in Skalica, Czechoslovakia, beginning in 1986 with ZX Spectrum clones like the Gama and M.

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Diebold Nixdorf

Diebold Nixdorf is an American financial and retail technology company in North Canton, Ohio, producing ATMs, point-of-sale systems, and self-checkout hardware for banks and retailers.

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Diella (AI system)

Diella, also known as Diella AI, is an Albanian government AI system on the e-Albania portal, appointed "Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence" in September 2025 to fight corruption.

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Diem (digital currency)

Diem, announced in 2019 as Libra, was a Facebook-backed stablecoin payment system that was renamed in 2020 and never launched, its assets sold to Silvergate Capital in 2022.

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Dietmar Hopp

Dietmar Hopp is a German entrepreneur who co-founded SAP in 1972, led it after its 1988 listing, and finances the football club TSG 1899 Hoffenheim.

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Diff

Diff is a Unix utility that compares two files line by line and outputs the changes needed to convert one into the other, often called a patch.

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DiffDock

DiffDock is a diffusion generative model developed at MIT that predicts the binding pose of a small-molecule ligand to a protein, a task known as molecular docking.

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Difference engine

A difference engine, or difference machine, is a mechanical calculating machine that computes and prints polynomial tables using only repeated addition, designed by Charles Babbage from 1821.

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Differentiable architecture search

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) is a neural architecture search method, described in 2018, that relaxes discrete architecture choices into a continuous form optimizable by gradient descent, cutting search cost to a few GPU days.

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Differentiable optimization

Differentiable optimization embeds an optimization problem as a neural network layer: the forward pass solves it, and implicit differentiation of the optimality conditions supplies gradients for end-to-end training.

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Differentiable programming

Differentiable programming is a programming paradigm in which programs are written so automatic differentiation, which applies the chain rule, computes exact gradients, allowing whole programs to be optimized end to end.

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Differentiable simulation

Differentiable simulation is an approach to physics simulation in which the simulator is built from differentiable operations, supplying gradients for system identification, controller design, and policy learning.

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Differential analyser

The differential analyser, or Bush differential analyzer, is a mechanical analog computer for solving differential equations, first built by Vannevar Bush at MIT in 1931.

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Differential coding

Differential coding is a data compression technique that stores values as differences from a reference or previous value, so correlated data becomes smaller and easier to compress.

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Differential cryptanalysis

Differential cryptanalysis is a chosen-plaintext attack introduced by Eli Biham and Adi Shamir in 1991, the first published attack to break the full 16-round DES.

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Differential evolution

Differential evolution (DE) is a population-based, gradient-free optimization algorithm introduced by Rainer Storn and Kenneth Price in 1995 and published in 1997, widely used for nonlinear and non-differentiable functions.

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Differential pair

A differential pair is an amplifier stage in which two matched transistors share a single tail current and respond to the difference between their input voltages.

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Differential privacy

Differential privacy is a mathematical definition of privacy for data analysis, formalized in 2006, guaranteeing that results barely change whether or not any one person's data is included.

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Differential privacy SGD

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a privacy-preserving variant of stochastic gradient descent, introduced by Abadi et al. in 2016 and the standard method for private neural network training.

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Differential testing

Differential testing is a software testing method that feeds the same inputs to two or more comparable implementations, flagging any disagreement in their results as a possible bug.

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Differentially private learning

Differentially private learning trains machine learning models while mathematically limiting how much any single individual's data can influence the model, by adding calibrated noise during optimization.

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Differentially private stochastic gradient descent

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a training algorithm that clips each example's gradient and adds Gaussian noise, giving deep neural networks a formal differential privacy guarantee.

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Differentiated services

Differentiated services, or Diffserv, is an IETF architecture for scalable quality of service in IP networks, standardized in December 1998 as RFC 2474 and RFC 2475.

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Diffie–Hellman key exchange

Diffie–Hellman key exchange, also called key agreement, is a cryptographic protocol letting two parties establish a shared secret over a public channel, published in 1976.

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Diffractive neural network

A diffractive neural network, or diffractive deep neural network, performs machine learning inference through light passing through trained diffractive layers, introduced by UCLA researchers in 2018.