Technology glossary

Acoustic Identification

A method of identifying animals, machines, events, or environmental conditions by analyzing distinctive sound patterns in recorded audio.

Acrylic Acid

An industrial chemical used to make polymers, coatings, adhesives, and absorbent materials.

Action Chunking

Action chunking is a robotics and machine-learning technique that represents multiple low-level control steps as a compact action sequence, reducing how often a model must generate new commands while balancing speed against precision.

Additive Manufacturing in Rocketry

Advanced Packaging

Techniques that combine multiple chips and high-speed connections into one package or system.

Agentic Computing

A computing approach in which AI systems plan and carry out multi-step actions across software, tools, and services.

AI Agent Sandbox

A restricted computing environment that limits an AI agent's access to files, networks, tools and credentials.

AI Infrastructure

The data centers, power systems, networks, chips, cooling equipment, and physical facilities required to develop and operate AI systems.

AI Shopping Assistant

A conversational or agentic system that helps consumers search, compare, evaluate or purchase products. Its answers may combine marketplace data, reviews, seller information and generative model output, so reliability depends on the quality of the underlying records and the platform’s verification rules.

Airborne Field Campaign

A coordinated research effort that uses instrumented aircraft, ground stations, satellites and models to observe an atmospheric event directly.

Airborne Pathogen

A disease-causing microorganism that can spread through air or suspended particles.

Algorithmic Coaching

Algorithmic Management

Alignment Tax

Anomaly Detection

Identifying data patterns or events that differ significantly from expected behavior.

Anticipatory Planning

Planning a system's next action before its current action has finished, using a prediction of the future state.

Aqueous Alteration

Artificial Skyglow

Assistive Dressing Device

Astronomical Light Pollution

Asynchronous Robot Control

Asynchronous robot control is a control approach in which sensing, computation, and physical motion overlap in time instead of occurring as a strictly sequential cycle, reducing idle pauses between actions.

Atmospheric Escape

The loss of atmospheric gases from a planet into space.

Atmospheric Spectroscopy

Attack Path

An attack path is the sequence of weaknesses, permissions, credentials, systems, and trust relationships an attacker can chain together to move from an initial foothold toward a target.

Automated Employment Decision

Automated Theorem Discovery

Autonomous Cyber Agent

An autonomous cyber agent is an AI-driven system that can plan and perform multi-step cybersecurity tasks, adapt to results, and continue pursuing an objective with limited human direction.

Autonomous Manipulation

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Bacterial Membrane Vesicle

A small membrane-bound particle released by bacteria that carries proteins, lipids and signaling molecules.