Technology and the built world

ConTeXt

ConTeXt is a TeX macro package, or document engineering system, for typesetting documents, first released in 1994 and developed by Hans Hagen of PRAGMA ADE.

Context engineering

Context engineering is the discipline of curating everything entering a large language model's context window, including retrieved documents, tool outputs, and memory, rather than just the prompt.

Context mixing

Context mixing is a lossless data compression technique that combines the probability estimates of many statistical models, introduced by Matthew Mahoney in PAQ1 in 2002.

Context parallelism (CP) is a parallelization scheme that splits transformer input sequences and activations across GPUs along the sequence dimension, reducing memory for long-context language model training.

Context switch

A context switch, also called a process switch, is the operating system procedure of saving one task's execution state so another task can run on the processor.

Context window

A context window is the amount of text, measured in tokens, that a language model can take into account at once when generating a response, acting as its working memory.

Contextual bandit

A contextual bandit is a sequential decision-making method in machine learning where an algorithm observes context, chooses an action, and learns from only that action's reward, used in recommendation and advertising.

Contextual design

Contextual design is a user-centered design method in human-computer interaction, published by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt in 1997, built on observing users at work.

Contextual inquiry

Contextual inquiry is a user research method in human–computer interaction in which a researcher observes and interviews a person while they work in their real work environment.

Conti (ransomware group)

Conti was a Russian-speaking ransomware-as-a-service operation, first detected in 2020, that became the highest-grossing ransomware group of 2021 before collapsing after internal leaks in 2022.

Contiki

Contiki is an open-source operating system for memory-constrained networked embedded devices such as wireless sensor nodes, created at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and first presented in 2004.

Continental Aerospace Technologies

Continental Aerospace Technologies, formerly Teledyne Continental Motors, is an American piston aircraft engine maker headquartered in Mobile, Alabama since 1966, founded in 1905 in Michigan.

Continental AG

Continental AG is a German stock corporation headquartered in Hanover. It is transforming into a pure-play tire manufacturer after spinning off its automotive electronics and selling its industrial group.

Continental Airlines

Continental Airlines was a major US airline founded in 1934 that filed landmark Chapter 11 bankruptcies in 1983 and 1990 before merging into United Airlines in 2010.

Continental Airlines Flight 1713

Continental Airlines Flight 1713 was a flight that crashed on takeoff in a snowstorm at Denver's Stapleton Airport on November 15, 1987, killing 26 of the 82 people aboard.

Contingency analysis (power systems)

Contingency analysis is the systematic simulation of outages such as transmission lines, generators, and transformers on a power system model to find limit violations and support the N-1 reliability criterion.

Contingent resources

Contingent resources are quantities of petroleum estimated to be potentially recoverable from known accumulations, but not yet commercially developable because contingencies remain unresolved, per the SPE PRMS.

Continual pre-training

Continual pre-training is the practice of resuming a language model's pre-training on new corpora, such as a new domain, language, or more recent data, instead of training from scratch.

Continual reinforcement learning

Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) is the machine learning setting where an agent learns a sequence of related tasks over time while retaining earlier skills, fighting catastrophic forgetting.

Continuation

A continuation is a data structure or procedure representing the rest of a computation from a given point; Scheme captures them as first-class values with call/cc.

Continuation-passing style

Continuation-passing style, or CPS, is a programming style in which every function takes an extra continuation argument representing the rest of the computation, used in compilers and language theory.

Continuing airworthiness

Continuing airworthiness is the set of regulatory processes that keep an aircraft compliant with its type certification basis and in a condition for safe operation throughout its life.

Continuing professional development in civil engineering

Continuing professional development (CPD) in civil engineering is recorded learning activity that keeps UK engineers competent, mandatory for all Engineering Council registrants with no minimum hours.

Continuous batching

Continuous batching is an LLM inference scheduling method that re-forms the batch at every generation step, introduced by Orca in 2022 and now default in vLLM, TGI, and TensorRT-LLM.

Continuous carbon fiber printing

Continuous carbon fiber printing is a family of additive manufacturing processes embedding continuous carbon fiber tow in polymer parts, used to replace machined aluminum parts.

Continuous casting

Continuous casting, or slab continuous casting, is a metal manufacturing process that pours molten steel into a water-cooled mold and solidifies it into a strand cut into slabs, billets, and blooms.

Continuous climb operations

Continuous climb operations (CCO) are an aircraft departure technique, guided by ICAO, in which aircraft climb without intermediate level-offs using optimum thrust, saving fuel and emissions.

Continuous collision detection

Continuous collision detection (CCD) is a family of algorithms that check whether moving objects collide anywhere along their trajectory and report the first time of contact.

Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery (CD) is the practice of keeping software releasable on demand at any time, implemented through an automated pipeline that builds, tests, and moves each change toward production.