Computing and digital systems

Authenticator

An authenticator is something a person knows, possesses, or is, such as a password or security key, used to prove identity to a digital system.

Authorization, often abbreviated AuthZ, is the process of deciding whether a user, program, or process is permitted to perform an action on a resource, granted only after authentication establishes identity.

Authors Guild v. OpenAI

Authors Guild v. OpenAI is a copyright class action filed in 2023 by the Authors Guild and 17 novelists against OpenAI over training GPT models on their books.

Autistici/Inventati

Autistici/Inventati, also known as Autistici.org, was an Italian volunteer collective providing no-logs email, web hosting, and other privacy services to activists from 2001 until it dissolved in September 2026 after a US terrorism designation.

Auto clicker

An auto clicker is a software tool that generates mouse clicks or screen taps automatically at set intervals, used for desktop work, accessibility, testing, and games.

AutoCAD

AutoCAD, also known as Autodesk AutoCAD, is a computer-aided design software application by Autodesk for 2D and 3D drafting and modeling, first released in 1982.

AutoCAD Civil 3D

AutoCAD Civil 3D is Autodesk's civil engineering design and documentation application that extends AutoCAD with intelligent objects so drawings and 3D models update dynamically when design inputs change.

Autocomplete

Autocomplete, also called word completion, is a user-interface feature that predicts the rest of a word, phrase, or search query while the user types, offering completions in a short list.

AutoDAN

AutoDAN, short for Automatically generating DAN-series-like jailbreak prompts, is a method that uses a genetic algorithm to produce readable jailbreak prompts against safety-aligned large language models, introduced in October 2023.

Autodesk

Autodesk, Inc. is an American software company headquartered in San Francisco, best known for AutoCAD, the first CAD program for personal computers, released in 1982.

Autodesk CFD

Autodesk CFD is fluid flow and heat transfer simulation software sold by Autodesk, based on CFdesign technology acquired in 2011 and used for electronics cooling, HVAC design, and machinery.

AutoDock

AutoDock is an open-source molecular docking suite developed at Scripps Research since 1989 that predicts how drug candidates bind to receptors, including AutoDock 4, Vina, and AutoDock-GPU.

Autoencoder

An autoencoder, also called an autoassociator, is a neural network trained to reconstruct its own input, learning compressed codes used for dimensionality reduction and anomaly detection.

AUTOEXEC.BAT

AUTOEXEC.BAT is a batch file of MS-DOS commands that runs automatically at startup from the root directory, setting paths and drivers; Windows NT kept only its environment variables.

Autoformalization

Autoformalization is the process of turning natural-language mathematical propositions into formal statements and proofs that proof assistants like Lean can verify, using large language models.

AutoGen

AutoGen is an open-source Microsoft framework, released in fall 2023, for building LLM applications from multiple conversing agents; rewritten in 2025, it entered maintenance mode in 2026.

AutoGLM

AutoGLM is a consumer software agent from Zhipu AI (Z.ai) that operates phone and computer interfaces on a user's behalf, launched in October 2024 as part of the ChatGLM family.

AutoGPT

AutoGPT is an open-source autonomous AI agent released on GitHub in March 2023 by Toran Bruce Richards of Significant Gravitas, letting GPT-4 pursue user-set goals without per-step prompting.

AutoHotkey

AutoHotkey is a free, open source automation utility for Windows, started in 2003 by Chris Mallett, whose scripting language defines keyboard shortcuts, text expansions, and graphical interfaces.

Automata learning

Automata learning is a machine learning technique that infers formal state-machine models, such as DFAs and Mealy machines, by actively querying a system, used for verification and testing.

Automated Ball-Strike System

The Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) is baseball's camera-based pitch-calling technology, approved by MLB in 2025 for use in all 2026 games as a challenge system.

Automated red-teaming

Automated red-teaming is an AI safety method in which an attacker model generates adversarial prompts against a target model at scale, used to evaluate and train it.

Automatic image annotation

Automatic image annotation is a machine learning method that assigns descriptive keywords to digital images without human effort, studied alongside tag refinement and tag-based image retrieval.

Automatic number-plate recognition

Automatic number-plate recognition, also called automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), is a surveillance technology that uses cameras and optical character recognition to read vehicle plates, invented in 1976 in the United Kingdom.

Automatic parallelization

Automatic parallelization is a compiler technique that converts sequential programs into parallel form without manual rewriting, analyzing loops for independent iterations and emitting threaded or annotated code.

Automatic Protection Switching

Automatic Protection Switching (APS) is a mechanism in SONET and SDH networks that switches traffic from a failed working path to a pre-provisioned protection path, targeting 50 milliseconds.

Automatic repeat request

Automatic repeat request (ARQ) is an error-control protocol in which a receiver detects transmission errors and asks the sender to retransmit lost or corrupted packets, using acknowledgments and timeouts.

Automatic summarization

Automatic summarization is a natural language processing method that condenses documents by selecting key sentences or generating new text, beginning with Luhn's 1958 auto-abstract and now dominated by large language models.

Automatic target recognition

Automatic target recognition (ATR) is a processing task that detects and classifies targets from sensor signatures, originally military and now applied to ship detection and sea-ice monitoring.