Computing and digital systems

Black-box testing

Black-box testing is a software testing method that examines an application's functionality without knowledge of its internal structures, using techniques such as equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis.

BlackBerry 10

BlackBerry 10, also known as BB OS 10, is a proprietary mobile operating system from BlackBerry, launched in 2013 on the Z10 and Q10 phones and terminated in 2022.

BlackBerry Limited

BlackBerry Limited, founded as Research In Motion in 1984, is a Canadian software company in Waterloo, Ontario, known for the BlackBerry smartphone and its QNX embedded software.

BlackBerry OS

BlackBerry OS, including version BlackBerry 6, is a Java-based mobile operating system developed by Research In Motion for BlackBerry smartphones, ending with the shutdown of its services in 2022.

Blackbird Interactive

Blackbird Interactive is an independent video game studio in Vancouver, Canada, founded in 2010 by Homeworld and Company of Heroes veterans, known for Hardspace: Shipbreaker and Minecraft co-development.

Blackboard Learn

Blackboard Learn, also known as the Blackboard Learning System, is a learning management system created by Blackboard in 1997 and used by about 9,300 educational institutions.

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.

Blackfin

Blackfin is a family of 16/32-bit fixed-point embedded processors from Analog Devices, introduced in 2000, that combines digital signal processing and microcontroller functions in a single architecture.

Blackhat (film)

Blackhat is Michael Mann's 2015 cybercrime thriller, written by Morgan Davis Foehl, starring Chris Hemsworth as furloughed hacker Nicholas Hathaway hunting a network behind a nuclear plant hack and soy futures manipulation; a $70 million film that grossed $7.8 million in the US.

Blacksky

Blacksky is a community-run ecosystem on the Bluesky social network, created by Rudy Fraser in 2023, combining a curated feed amplifying Black users with moderation services.

Blackwell (microarchitecture)

Blackwell, also known as Nvidia Blackwell, is a GPU microarchitecture announced by NVIDIA in March 2024 as the successor to Hopper for data center accelerators.

Blade server

A blade server, also called a computing blade, is a stripped-down server module that slides into a shared chassis, which supplies power, cooling, networking, and management for many blades.

Blaize

Blaize, formerly ThinCI, is an American edge AI computing company in El Dorado Hills, California, that designs the low-power Graph Streaming Processor for AI inference.

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.

Blazor

Blazor is a web framework from Microsoft, part of ASP.NET Core, for building interactive web user interfaces with C# and Razor syntax instead of JavaScript, first announced in February 2018.

Blend modes

A blend mode, also called a blending mode, is a formula for combining pixels of an image layer with those beneath, central to Photoshop and GIMP.

Blender (software)

Blender, also known as Blender 3D, is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics suite for modeling, animation, rendering, and visual effects, stewarded by the Blender Foundation in Amsterdam since 2002.

Bletchley Declaration

The Bletchley Declaration is a non-binding statement on artificial intelligence safety agreed on 1 November 2023 by 28 countries and the European Union at Bletchley Park, England.

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 carbon copy

Blind carbon copy, abbreviated Bcc, is an email header field listing recipients whose addresses are not revealed to other recipients; it has been standard since the 1970s.

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 detection

Blind detection is a signal processing method that estimates transmitted symbols or channel parameters directly from received data, without training sequences, saving the channel capacity that pilots consume.

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.

Blinding (cryptography)

Blinding is a cryptographic countermeasure that mixes a random factor into private-key computations like RSA decryption, so side-channel leakage no longer reveals the secret key.

Blink (browser engine)

Blink, also known as Google Blink, is the open-source rendering engine of Chromium, forked from WebKit in 2013, that turns HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into pages for Chrome, Edge, and Brave.

BLIP

BLIP (Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training) is a vision-language pre-training framework introduced by Salesforce AI Research in 2022 that unifies understanding and generation and cleans noisy web captions.