Technology and the built world

Spark (iFlytek model family)

Spark, also known as Spark Desk, is a family of large language models developed by the Chinese AI company iFlytek, first released in May 2023.

Spark arrestor

A spark arrestor is a device fitted to a chimney, flue, or exhaust pipe to stop sparks and burning fragments from escaping, required on engines in fire-prone country.

Spark ignition

Spark ignition (SI) is the method of initiating combustion in an internal combustion engine, where a spark plug fires into a compressed fuel-air mixture, the alternative to compression ignition.

Spark New Zealand

Spark New Zealand is New Zealand's largest telecommunications company, providing mobile, broadband, and digital services; it was formed as Telecom New Zealand in 1987 and renamed Spark in 2014.

Spark plasma sintering

Spark plasma sintering (SPS), also called field-assisted sintering technique, is a powder metallurgy method that consolidates powders into dense solids using pulsed electric current and pressure.

Spark plug

A spark plug, also called a sparking plug, is a device that delivers the high-voltage electric spark that ignites the air-fuel mixture in a spark-ignition engine.

Spark-gap transmitter

A spark-gap transmitter is a radio transmitter that generates damped radio waves by discharging a capacitor across a spark gap, dominating wireless telegraphy from the 1890s until the 1920s.

Oct 26, 2026

Spark: The Definitive Guide (Big Data Processing Made Simple) is a 2018 O'Reilly book on Apache Spark by Bill Chambers and Matei Zaharia, covering Spark 2.0's structured APIs, RDDs, streaming, and MLlib, with a Databricks GitHub code repository; no second edition exists.

SparkFun Electronics

SparkFun Electronics is an American retailer and designer of open source electronics components, development boards, and educational kits based in Boulder, Colorado, founded in 2003 by Nathan Seidle.

Sparki

Sparki is a small, pre-assembled two-wheeled Arduino-based educational robot by ArcBotics of California, funded on Kickstarter in 2013 and used at over 2,000 schools and universities including Stanford, MIT, and Northwestern.

Sparko

Sparko was a 65-pound mechanical dog built by Westinghouse Electric as a companion for the robot Elektro, first shown at the 1940 New York World's Fair; none survive.

Sparkplug (protocol)

Sparkplug is an open specification adding a standard topic namespace, binary protobuf payload, and session state management to MQTT, contributed to the Eclipse Foundation in 2019 and standardized as ISO/IEC 20237:2023.

SPARQL

SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is the W3C-standardized query language and associated HTTP protocol for querying RDF graph data, a W3C Recommendation since 2008 and the standard query language for Linked Data.

Sparrow search algorithm

The sparrow search algorithm (SSA) is a swarm intelligence metaheuristic introduced in 2020 that mimics sparrow flock foraging and anti-predation behavior to find global optima.

Sparse array design

Sparse array design selects nonuniform element positions and excitation weights for an antenna array, meeting beamforming or direction-finding goals with fewer elements than a filled uniform array.

Sparse autoencoder

A sparse autoencoder is an autoencoder whose training adds a sparsity penalty on the code layer, keeping few units active; it underlies unsupervised feature learning and language model interpretability.

Sparse autoencoders for interpretability

Sparse autoencoders are an unsupervised technique that decomposes a neural network's activations into sparse, interpretable features, introduced for language models in 2023 by Cunningham et al. and Anthropic.

Sparse Bayesian learning

Sparse Bayesian learning is a Bayesian machine learning method that fits regression and classification models by pruning irrelevant basis functions, producing sparse models with probabilistic outputs.

Sparse channel estimation

Sparse channel estimation is a wireless signal processing method that recovers radio channel parameters from far fewer pilot measurements than classical least-squares training, by exploiting channel sparsity with compressed sensing algorithms.

Sparse code multiple access

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is a code-domain non-orthogonal multiple access technique proposed at Huawei in 2013, letting several users share the same radio resources.

Sparse decomposition (signal processing)

Sparse decomposition is a signal processing method representing a signal as a linear combination of a few atoms from a redundant dictionary, used in compressed sensing and machine learning.

Sparse feature-based mapping

Sparse feature-based mapping is a robot mapping approach that represents the environment with a small set of landmarks instead of a dense grid or point cloud.

Sparse non-negative matrix factorization

Sparse non-negative matrix factorization (sparse NMF) decomposes a non-negative data matrix into two non-negative factors with user-set sparseness constraints, used in speech separation and hyperspectral unmixing.

Sparse optimization

Sparse optimization is a class of optimization methods that seek solutions with few nonzero variables, using sparsity-inducing penalties or constraints such as the lasso and basis pursuit.

Sparse Transformer

The Sparse Transformer is a neural network architecture introduced at OpenAI in April 2019, replacing quadratic self-attention with sparse patterns that cut cost from O(n²) to O(n√n).

Sparse upcycling

Sparse upcycling is a training technique for large language models that converts a trained dense model into a mixture-of-experts model, recovering performance with about 50% of the original pretraining cost.

SparseGPT

SparseGPT is a one-shot pruning method for large language models, introduced in 2023, that prunes GPT-family models to at least 50% sparsity in a single pass without retraining.

Spatial atomic layer deposition

Spatial atomic layer deposition (spatial ALD) is a thin-film deposition method that separates ALD's two half-reactions in space rather than time, raising throughput while keeping subnanometer thickness control.

Spatial database

A spatial database is a database management system extended with types, functions, and indexes for storing and querying geometric objects such as points, lines, and polygons.