Technology and the built world

Scavenging (engine)

Scavenging is the gas-exchange process in a two-stroke engine, where fresh air expels burned gases and refills the cylinder between strokes. Its main layouts are cross, loop, and uniflow scavenging.

Scenario reduction

Scenario reduction is a computational method in stochastic optimization that replaces a large sample of scenarios with a smaller subset of the original scenarios carrying adjusted probabilities.

Scenario testing

Scenario testing is a software testing method that evaluates a system against realistic, end-to-end stories of user goals instead of probing one feature at a time.

Scenario-based testing

Scenario-based testing is a method for verifying automated driving systems by exposing vehicles to defined traffic situations in simulation, on test tracks, or on public roads.

Scene flow estimation

Scene flow estimation is a computer vision method that predicts a dense 3D motion field, a displacement vector for each point, between consecutive frames of a dynamic scene.

Scene graph generation

Scene graph generation is a computer vision task that converts an image into a graph where nodes are detected objects and edges are relationships, output as triplets such as "man riding horse".

Scenic overlook

A scenic overlook, also known as a viewpoint, vista point, or lookout, is a designated roadside pull-off where motorists stop safely to view and photograph the surrounding landscape.

Scenic World, Katoomba: Blue Mountains attraction since 1945, Hammon family owned, home of the world's steepest passenger railway (52°), Scenic Skyway, Cableway, and rainforest Walkway; over a million visitors a year.

scGPT

scGPT is a generative pretrained transformer foundation model for single-cell biology, pretrained on over 33 million human cells and published in Nature Methods in 2024, supporting tasks like cell type annotation and perturbation prediction.

Schaeffler Group

Schaeffler Group, also known as Schaeffler AG, is a German motion technology company founded in 1946, known for INA, FAG, and LuK bearings and drivetrain components.

Schahfer Generating Station

The R.M. Schahfer Generating Station is a coal-fired power plant in Wheatfield, Indiana, owned by NIPSCO, with its last two coal units built in 1983 and 1986.

Scharnhorst-class battleship

The Scharnhorst class was a pair of German battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, built in the mid-1930s and armed with nine 28 cm guns; both were out of action by 1943.

Scheduling (computing)

Scheduling, also called process or task scheduling, is the activity of deciding which runnable process or thread uses a shared resource such as the CPU next.

Scheduling (production processes)

Scheduling (production processes), also called production scheduling, is the allocation of machines, labor, and other resources to jobs over time, studied in operations research since the mid-1950s.

Schema (genetic algorithms)

In genetic algorithms, a schema (plural schemata) is a template over {0, 1, } describing a set of candidate solutions, central to John Holland's 1975 schema theorem.

Schema drift

Schema drift is the unannounced change of a data source's structure, columns added, removed, renamed, retyped, or redefined, relative to the schema a pipeline expects. Covers five drift types, fingerprinting and statistical detection, quarantine versus review policies, and registry compatibility modes.

Schema evolution

Schema evolution: adapting a database, data format, or vocabulary schema to structural changes (added, renamed, dropped columns, type widening) without losing existing data; distinct from schema versioning, with limited DBMS support and compatibility modes in formats like Avro.

Schema matching

Schema matching is a data integration technique that takes two schemas and produces a mapping between their semantically corresponding elements, central to schema integration, data warehousing, and e-commerce.

Schema registry

Schema registry: a centralized service storing and validating serialization schemas (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema) for Kafka, with schema IDs, subjects, versions, and backward/forward/full compatibility modes; Confluent Schema Registry is the reference implementation.