agile: Able to move quickly (and pivot as needed) with skill and little apparent effort. Sometimes the term is applied to thinking and project management as well as to athletic pursuits.
artificial intelligence: A type of knowledge-based decision-making exhibited by machines or computers. The term also refers to the field of study in which scientists try to create machines or computer software capable of intelligent behavior.
colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.
data: Facts and/or statistics collected together for analysis but not necessarily organized in a way that gives them meaning. For digital information (the type stored by computers), those data typically are numbers stored in a binary code, portrayed as strings of zeros and ones.
digital: (in computer science and engineering) An adjective indicating that something has been developed numerically on a computer or on some other electronic device, based on a binary system (where all numbers are displayed using a series of only zeros and ones).
dynamic: An adjective that signifies something is active, changing or moving. (noun) The change or range of variability seen or measured within something.
environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).
friction: The resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over or through another material (such as a fluid or a gas). Friction generally causes a heating, which can damage a surface of some material as it rubs against another.
large language model: (in computing) Language models are a type of machine learning. They attempt to predict upcoming words (in text or speech) and then present those predictions using words that almost anyone should understand. The models learn to do this by reviewing large quantities of text or speech. As their name would imply, large language models train using enormous troves of data. They organize and make sense of those data using “neural nets” — a scheme patterned a bit off of the pathways of nerves in the human brain. Large language models don’t just learn words, but also phrases made of many words. They can even learn from the context in which a new phrase and idea is worded (meaning the words that accompany those phrases or in which those phrases have been embedded).
motor skills: Ability to make controlled movements, especially with the hands or limbs.
navigate: To find one’s way through a landscape using visual cues, sensory information (like scents), magnetic information (like an internal compass) or other techniques.
novel: Something that is clever or unusual and new, as in never seen before.
parkour: A term, from the French, for a type of gymnastics-like activity where people soar through an environment by jumping, leaping and scrambling up, around and between walls and other obstacles. Movements tend to be very rapid and fluid. Some may involve vaulting or flipping over railings, stairs or other structures. People may even climb up walls or leap from one wall or fence to some other structure.
physical: (adj.) A term for things that exist in the real world, as opposed to in memories or the imagination. It can also refer to properties of materials that are due to their size and non-chemical interactions (such as when one block slams with force into another).
reinforcement: Some consequence that guides the future behavior of an animal or person. If a rat presses a lever and receives a food pellet, that food pellet becomes a reinforcement of lever-pushing — it’s the reward that will teach the rat to press the lever again.
reinforcement learning: An approach to teaching in which an animal or a person learns to perform a specific task to achieve a desired reward.
resilience: The ability to recover quickly from a setback.
robot: A machine that can sense its environment, process information and respond with specific actions. Some robots can act without any human input, while others are guided by a human.
roboticist: Someone who designs or builds robots.
slope: (in geology) The steeply pitched side of a cliff, hill or mountain.
software: The mathematical instructions that direct a computer’s hardware, including its processor, to perform certain operations.
steer: To guide the movement of something (a vehicle, a person or an idea) in some particular direction.
system: A network of parts that together work to achieve some function. For instance, the blood, vessels and heart are primary components of the human body’s circulatory system. Similarly, trains, platforms, tracks, roadway signals and overpasses are among the potential components of a nation’s railway system. System can even be applied to the processes or ideas that are part of some method or ordered set of procedures for getting a task done.
terrain: The land in a particular area and whatever covers it. The term might refer to anything from a smooth, flat and dry landscape to a mountainous region covered with boulders, bogs and forest cover.
tool: An object that a person or other animal makes or obtains and then uses to carry out some purpose such as reaching food, defending itself or grooming.
transformational: (adj.) From the root word transform, which means to change, this term refers to something’s ability to adapt in a big way or bring about a major improvement in some situation.
virtual: Being almost like something. An object or concept that is virtually real would be almost true or real — but not quite. The term often is used to refer to something that has been modeled by (or accomplished by) a computer using numbers, not by using real-world parts. So a virtual motor would be one that could be seen on a computer screen and tested by computer programming (but it wouldn’t be a three-dimensional device made from metal). (in computing) Things that are performed in or through digital processing and/or the internet. For instance, a virtual conference may be where people attended by watching it over the internet.