Technology and the built world

Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station

Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station, also known as Point Lepreau Nuclear Power Plant, is a nuclear power station in New Brunswick, Canada, operating since 1983.

Point Merge System

The Point Merge System is an air traffic method for sequencing arriving aircraft, developed by EUROCONTROL in 2006, first used in Oslo in 2011 and now deployed at 61 airports.

Point of no return

The point of no return (PNR) in aviation is the last point along a route from which an aircraft can still turn back with required fuel reserves intact.

Point of View (hardware company)

Point of View was a Dutch computer hardware company based in Amsterdam that made NVIDIA-based graphics cards and later Mobii tablets; its operating company went bankrupt in November 2016.

Point operation (image processing)

A point operation is an image processing method that computes each output pixel's value from only the corresponding input pixel, through mappings such as brightness, contrast, or gamma adjustment.

Point pair features are local geometric descriptors that encode the relative position and orientation of two oriented points, underpinning a widely used 2010 method for 6D pose estimation in robotic bin picking.

Point set registration

Point set registration, also known as scan matching, is a computational geometry method that aligns point sets by estimating a spatial transformation, fundamental in robotics and computer vision.

Point system (driving)

A point system for driving is a road-safety scheme where a driver's license record accumulates demerit points for traffic offenses, leading to suspension at a threshold.

Point Thomson Oil and Gas Field

Point Thomson is a gas-condensate field on Alaska's North Slope east of Prudhoe Bay, discovered in 1977, holding an estimated 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Point tracking

Point tracking is a computer vision method that follows individually specified points across video frames, estimating each point's full trajectory and occlusion status, as in the tracking any point (TAP) formulation.

Point-blank range

Point-blank range is the distance from which a projectile hits a target of a given size without holdover for bullet drop; colloquially, a distance too close to miss.

Oct 26, 2026

Point-in-time correctness

Point-in-time correctness: building ML training data with an AS OF join so each label row sees only feature values known at label time, preventing temporal data leakage that inflates offline scores; implemented in Feast, Tecton, Hopsworks, and native SQL ASOF joins.

Point-to-point (telecommunications)

A point-to-point connection is a dedicated telecommunications link joining exactly two endpoints, rather than a shared medium; its forms include leased lines, the PPP data link protocol, and point-to-point microwave radio.

Point-to-Point Protocol

The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is a Layer 2 data link protocol, defined in 1994, that carries multi-protocol datagrams over point-to-point links such as dial-up modem connections.

Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet

Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) is a network protocol that encapsulates PPP frames in Ethernet, letting providers authenticate DSL and fiber subscribers with a login.

Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol

The Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) is a networking protocol that tunnels PPP through IP networks to build VPNs; documented in 1999, it is now deprecated by NIST.

PointConv

PointConv is a convolution operation for 3D point clouds, introduced in 2018 by Wenxuan Wu, Zhongang Qi, and Li Fuxin at Oregon State University and published at CVPR 2019.

Pointer (computer programming)

A pointer, also called a data pointer or pointer variable, is a programming value that stores the memory address of data rather than the data itself.

Pointer analysis

Pointer analysis is a static program analysis that determines which memory objects each pointer may reference, with Andersen's and Steensgaard's algorithms as the classic approaches.

Pointer network

A pointer network is a neural network whose decoder points at input positions instead of a fixed vocabulary, introduced by Vinyals, Fortunato, and Jaitly at NeurIPS 2015.

Pointing stick

A pointing stick, best known by IBM's TrackPoint trademark, is a small rubber-tipped stud in a keyboard's center that moves the cursor with fingertip pressure.

PointNet

PointNet is a neural network architecture by Charles Qi and colleagues at Stanford, published in 2017, that consumes raw 3D point clouds directly for classification and segmentation.

PointNet++

PointNet++ is a hierarchical neural network for deep learning on point sets, introduced by Charles R. Qi and colleagues at Stanford University at NIPS in 2017 to capture local features.

PointPillars

PointPillars is a fast encoder for 3D object detection from lidar point clouds, introduced in 2018, that learns features on vertical pillars using only 2D convolutions.

PointRCNN

PointRCNN is a two-stage 3D object detector that generates 3D bounding box proposals directly from raw LiDAR point clouds, proposed by researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018 and accepted to CVPR 2019.

Poka-yoke (ポカヨケ)

Poka-yoke (ポカヨケ), or mistake proofing, is a Japanese quality method formalized by engineer Shigeo Shingo within the Toyota Production System in the 1960s, making errors impossible or immediately obvious.

Pokachevskoye Oil Field

The Pokachevskoye Oil Field is a mature oil field in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Western Siberia, Russia, discovered in 1970 and operated by LUKOIL, giving its name to the city of Pokachi.

Pokché Oil and Gas Field

The Pokché Oil and Gas Field is a shallow-water field in the Gulf of Mexico off Mexico, discovered in 2016 and producing since 2020 under state operator Pemex.

Poker Flat Research Range

Poker Flat Research Range is a sounding rocket launch facility about 30 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska, and the world's only university-owned scientific rocket range.