Computing and digital systems

Control unit

The control unit (CU) is the part of a CPU that decodes instructions and generates control signals to direct the processor's operation, implemented in hardwired or microprogrammed form.

Control-Alt-Delete, often abbreviated Ctrl-Alt-Del, is a three-key keyboard combination devised by IBM engineer David Bradley around 1980 as a reboot shortcut, now Windows' secure logon and task-management sequence.

Control-flow analysis

Control-flow analysis (CFA) is a static analysis technique that determines, without running a program, which functions may be called at each call site, serving compilers.

Control-flow integrity

Control-flow integrity (CFI) is a computer security technique that detects runtime attacks by checking that a program's execution follows a control-flow graph determined ahead of time.

ControlNet

ControlNet is a neural network architecture that adds spatial controls, such as edge maps, depth maps, and pose skeletons, to pretrained text-to-image diffusion models without retraining them.

Controversy over fake artists on Spotify

The controversy over fake artists on Spotify concerns allegations that it seeded playlists with stock music by pseudonymous ghost artists to lower royalties, which Spotify denies.

Convection scheme

A convection scheme is the numerical discretization used to approximate the advection term of a transport equation on a discrete grid, balancing accuracy, stability, and boundedness.

Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data

The Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, known as Convention 108, is the first binding international data protection treaty, opened for signature in 1981.

Conventional Commits

Conventional Commits is a 2017 specification structuring Git commit messages as type: description, mapping fix and feat commits onto Semantic Versioning so tools can automate versioning, changelogs, and releases.

CONVERGE CFD

CONVERGE CFD is a commercial computational fluid dynamics software package developed by Convergent Science of Madison, Wisconsin, known for generating its computational mesh automatically at run time.

Convex optimization

Convex optimization, also called convex programming, is the branch of mathematical optimization that minimizes convex functions over convex sets, so every local minimum is global.

ConvNeXt

ConvNeXt is a family of pure convolutional neural networks for image recognition, introduced in 2022 by Facebook AI Research and UC Berkeley in the paper A ConvNet for the 2020s.

Convolutional neural network

A convolutional neural network (CNN), also called ConvNet, is a neural network that uses convolution to process grid-like data such as images, dominating computer vision in the 2010s.

Conway's law

Conway's law, also called the mirroring hypothesis, is the software engineering observation, stated by Melvin Conway in 1968, that a system's design mirrors the communication structure of the organization that produced it.

Cookie jar (computing)

A cookie jar, also called a cookie store, is the data structure in an HTTP client that stores cookies from servers, decides which to send with each request, and persists them to disk.

Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm

The Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm is a divide-and-conquer method published by James Cooley and John Tukey in 1965 that computes the discrete Fourier transform in O(N log N) operations instead of O(N²).

Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence

The Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) is a NATO-accredited international cyber defense hub in Tallinn, Estonia, known for the Tallinn Manual and Locked Shields.

Cooperative optimization

Cooperative optimization is a global optimization method that decomposes a hard energy function into coupled subproblems, formulated by Xiaofei Huang in 2004 for computer vision labeling.

Copilot Cowork

Copilot Cowork is an agentic work mode in Microsoft 365 Copilot, built on Anthropic's Claude Cowork technology, that executes multi-step work like sending email and scheduling meetings.

Copilot in Windows

Copilot in Windows, also known as Windows Copilot, is Microsoft's AI assistant built into Windows 11, first shipped in preview in 2023 and expanded through 2025.

Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio is a low-code Microsoft platform for building conversational AI agents, announced in 2023 as the successor to Power Virtual Agents within the Power Platform.

Copilot Vision

Copilot Vision is a Microsoft Copilot mode that lets the assistant view a shared app window or mobile camera feed and answer questions by voice, launched on Windows in June 2025.

Copilot+ PC

Copilot+ PC is a Microsoft brand for Windows 11 computers with a neural processing unit of at least 40 TOPS, announced in May 2024 with exclusive on-device AI features.

copper switch-off

Copper switch-off is the decommissioning of legacy copper telephone networks as customers migrate to fiber, cable, and mobile services, with the UK's switch-off due by 2029.

Copy Fail

Copy Fail, the common name of CVE-2026-31431, is a Linux kernel privilege escalation flaw disclosed in 2026 that let unprivileged local users gain root access on distributions shipped since 2017.

Copy-move forgery detection

Copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) is a digital image forensics method that finds regions copied and pasted within the same image to hide or duplicate content.

Copy-on-write

Copy-on-write, also called implicit sharing, is a resource-management technique that shares data cheaply and copies it only when first modified, used in memory, file systems, and snapshots.

Copyleft

Copyleft is a licensing method that uses copyright law to keep a work free, requiring all modified versions to be distributed under the same free terms, as with the GNU GPL.

Copyright Directive (EU)

The Copyright Directive, also known as the InfoSoc Directive, is a European Union directive adopted in 2001 to harmonize copyright in the information society and implement the WIPO Internet Treaties.