Technology and the built world

Multi-purpose End-to-end Robotic Operation Network

The Multi-purpose End-to-end Robotic Operation Network (METERON) is a European Space Agency project testing how astronauts could control robots on the Moon or Mars from orbit.

Multi-query attention

Multi-query attention (MQA) is a variant of Transformer attention in which all heads share one key and value head, proposed by Noam Shazeer at Google in 2019.

Multi-robot area coverage

Multi-robot area coverage is the problem of planning paths for a robot team so that together they cover every point of a target area while avoiding obstacles.

Multi-robot SLAM, also called Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (C-SLAM), is the problem of robot teams jointly localizing and building a shared map of unknown, often GPS-denied environments.

Multi-robot task allocation

Multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) is the problem of deciding which robots should execute which tasks so a fleet of autonomous robots coordinates efficiently, from warehouses to search and rescue.

Multi-robot vehicle routing

Multi-robot vehicle routing is the problem of computing routes for teams of mobile robots that visit distributed locations for delivery, pickup, or monitoring, related to the vehicle routing problem and NP-hard in practice.

Multi-role strike ship

The multi-role strike ship (MRSS), originally the Multi-Role Support Ship, was a planned Royal Navy amphibious warship class announced in 2024 and canceled in 2026 before construction.

Multi-stage flash distillation

Multi-stage flash distillation (MSF) is a thermal desalination process in which heated seawater flashes into vapor across low-pressure chambers, condensing as freshwater; dominant in the Arabian Gulf since 1960.

Multi-stage frontier post-training pipelines

A multi-stage frontier post-training pipeline is the ordered sequence of training stages, typically six to ten, that turns a pretrained large language model into an assistant.

Multi-state constraint Kalman filter

The multi-state constraint Kalman filter (MSCKF) is an EKF-based algorithm for real-time vision-aided inertial navigation, introduced by Mourikis and Roumeliotis of the University of Minnesota at ICRA 2007.

Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center

The Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) is the United States hub for cyber threat information sharing among state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, founded in 2003.

Multi-task learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a machine learning approach that trains a single model on several related tasks at once over a shared representation, formalized by Richard Caruana in 1993.

Multi-token prediction

Multi-token prediction (MTP) is a language model training objective in which the model predicts several future tokens at each position, introduced by Meta AI in 2024.

Multi-Use Radio Service

The Multi-Use Radio Service (MURS) is an American license-free two-way radio service created by the FCC in 2000, operating on five shared VHF channels with a 2-watt power limit.

Multi-user MIMO

Multi-user MIMO, or MU-MIMO, is a wireless communication technique where a multi-antenna base station or Wi-Fi access point serves several users at once, boosting throughput from 802.11ac through Wi-Fi 7.

Multi-valve

Multi-valve describes an internal combustion engine cylinder head with more than two valves per cylinder, most often four, enlarging flow area to raise volumetric efficiency, power, and combustion control.

Multi-verse optimizer

The multi-verse optimizer (MVO) is a population-based metaheuristic for global optimization, introduced by Seyedali Mirjalili and colleagues in 2015, using white holes, black holes, and wormholes as search operators.

Multi-view clustering

Multi-view clustering is an unsupervised machine learning method that groups objects using several feature representations, or views, of the same data, seeking clusterings consistent across views.

Multi-view contrastive learning

Multi-view contrastive learning is a self-supervised machine learning method that pulls different views of the same sample, like two image augmentations, close together in an embedding space.

Multi-view learning

Multi-view learning is a machine learning approach that trains models on several distinct representations, or views, of the same instances, combining them for greater accuracy.

Multi-view reconstruction

Multi-view reconstruction is a computer vision method that recovers 3D geometry from overlapping photographs: structure from motion estimates camera poses, and multi-view stereo computes dense point clouds.

Multi-view subspace clustering

Multi-view subspace clustering (MVSC) is an unsupervised machine learning method that groups data described by several views by learning a shared low-dimensional subspace and clustering samples jointly.

Oct 22, 2026

Multibeam mask writing

Multibeam mask writing is a photomask fabrication technique using hundreds of thousands of parallel electron beams, pioneered by IMS Nanofabrication and standard for EUV masks since 2016.

Multibody simulation

Multibody simulation (MBS) is a computational engineering method that models the motion and forces of interconnected rigid or flexible bodies, used for vehicle suspensions, aircraft mechanisms, and robot arms.

Multibus

Multibus is a backplane bus architecture for microcomputer systems, introduced by Intel in 1975, that let boards from different manufacturers share one chassis; it became IEEE 796.

Multicarrier code-division multiple access

Multicarrier code-division multiple access, also known as OFDM-CDMA, is a wireless technique combining OFDM with CDMA, spreading each user's data symbol across many subcarriers so multiple users share the spectrum.

Multicarrier DS-CDMA

Multicarrier DS-CDMA (MC-DS-CDMA) is a wireless multiple-access scheme that combines direct-sequence spreading with multicarrier modulation, with time-domain spreading on each subcarrier, introduced by Kondo and Milstein in 1993.

Multicast

Multicast, also called multicasting, is a one-to-many IP communication method in which one packet sent to a group address reaches all its members, contrasting with unicast and broadcast.

Multicast address

A multicast address is an IP destination address that identifies a group of hosts rather than a single interface, defined by Steve Deering in RFC 1112 in 1989.