(1) A broad category of business processes that are modeled as objects. A business object can be as large as an entire order processing system or a small process within an information system. See object-oriented programming.

(2) (Business Objects) A San Jose-based company acquired by SAP in 2007 for its leadership in business intelligence and decision support tools. Business Objects was founded in France in 1990 by Bernard Liautaud and Denis Payre and was the first to integrate query, reporting and OLAP into one product that shields users from the complexities of making a query. In this context, the word "objects" does not refer to object-oriented programming as in definition #1 above, but to "business items." See SAP.

BusinessObjects (One Word)

Business Objects' products were always branded as one word and fall under the SAP BusinessObjects umbrella. Its flagship software is a suite of query, reporting and analysis tools that runs under Windows and Unix. It provides access to a wide variety of databases, including Oracle, INFORMIX and DB2. As data are extracted from the database, they are stored as multidimensional OLAP cubes that can be easily sliced and diced into different views. See OLAP.

The Semantic Layer

BusinessObjects uses a patented semantic layer that shields users from the complexities of table names and relationships. Once the semantic layer has been defined, users work with familiar "business objects" such as product, customer and revenue.

An object’s volume is a measure of its total thee-dimensional space. Volumes for cubes, cuboids, prisms and pyramids can be found using formulae. Volumes of composite objects can be found by breaking them down into simpler objects and adding the volumes together.

BusinessObjects was acquired by SAP in 2007 for $6 billion. BusinessObjects was acquired by SAP in 2009 for $78 billion, its largest acquisition to date. Initially, BusinessObjects operated independently, but in 2009 became a SAP division, and its products became SAP BusinessObjects.

With the right credentials, you can advance your career in the marketing industry. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of certifications for marketing professionals. We compiled this guide of reputable marketing certifications to make it easier for you to Strengthen your skills and advance your career. We’ll explore the highest-regarded universities offering marketing certificates, free paths for learning how to obtain today’s critical digital marketing skills and the most-trusted professional marketing organizations.

What is the purpose of a marketing certificate?

A marketing certificate can be valuable if you feel you need more formal training in marketing skills, including:

Marketing certificate courses can also help you understand marketing tools, including social media platforms, Google Ads, Hootsuite, HubSpot and other web analytics tools. Certificate courses cater to longtime professional marketers and total newcomers alike. You can take marketing certificate courses through: 

• Universities
• Specialized online institutions like Hootsuite Academy
• Leading marketing associations

Which certifications are in demand?

The most in-demand certifications are in digital marketing and include the following: 

• HubSpot email and inbound marketing
• Google Ads and Google Analytics
• Social media marketing 

We’ll discuss these certifications in more detail below.

Tip: To develop specific skills to become a digital marketing expert, consider focused training on individual tools. Consider a more comprehensive certificate program if you’re building your skill set as a new college graduate.

Should you obtain a certification in digital marketing?

Consider the following when deciding whether to obtain a digital marketing certification: 

• Are you planning to expand your online presence? If you plan to expand your business’s online presence, a digital marketing certification will likely be relevant to your work. 
• Do you need to learn specific marketing tools? If you must learn specific digital marketing tools like Hootsuite, Google Ads and HubSpot email marketing, pursuing a digital marketing certification can help to familiarize you with these platforms on your own schedule, often for far less money than undergraduate college courses. 

However, if your business requires minimal or just basic use of internet platforms for marketing purposes, a certification in digital marketing might not be for you.

How do you become a certified marketing professional?

You don’t need a certification to work in marketing. However, if you want one, there are many ways to become a certified marketing professional. You can:

• Take a series of courses at a university
• Take online programs through marketing platforms and companies 
• Take special in-person classes hosted by industry organizations and associations of longtime professional marketers

Learn more about each of these certification types below.

Certifications from accredited universities

Marketing certifications are in high demand, and many accredited universities and colleges are responding to that demand. Some university certifications are intended for seasoned marketing professionals, while others are meant for accurate college graduates entering the workforce or as a stepping stone for people changing careers. 

Whether you’re a longtime marketer or transitioning into the field, a well-regarded university’s name on your resume can boost your professional standing. Here are some universities that offer marketing certifications: 

Other colleges with reputable marketing certifications include:

Programs vary widely in price, duration, medium (online or in person) and focus. Most certification programs cost $2,000 to $5,000, but some go up to $15,000.

Before enrolling in a certification program at an accredited university, ensure you understand what you’re purchasing. Some programs are a week or less long and don’t offer college credits, while others in the same price range span months and do count for college credit.

Did you know? Digital marketing certification courses cover increasing brand awareness online and effectively sharing your brand’s story.

Certifications for specific digital marketing skills

Certifications for specific programs or services can bolster your resume and help keep you current in the constantly evolving world of digital marketing. Many specific-skill certificates are free or low cost. Some are through the company that created the tool, such as Google or HubSpot, while others are through third-party online training companies.

The certification that will be most valuable for your career depends largely on your agency or company’s marketing niche. Here are some of the most popular and reputable skill-based certifications for marketing professionals:

Certifications from industry organizations and associations

It pays to be discerning about certifications from independent marketing associations. Many organizations that offer certificates are for-profit education companies that don’t operate as industry touchstones. Others are legitimate professional organizations that offer valuable certifications. 

Marketers who keep up with industry affairs will take note if you’ve obtained a certification from the below organizations.  

American Marketing Association

The American Marketing Association (AMA) is one of the country’s most established professional marketing organizations. In addition to hosting educational networking events and disseminating industry information through its publications and partnerships, it offers the American Marketing Association Professional Certified Marketer program.

The AMA’s certification program has four tracks: Digital Marketing, Marketing Management, Sales Management and Content Marketing. All programs begin with an overview of the skills required for the certification and a free practice exam.

• Digital Marketing: The AMA has two options here. 
  • Digital Marketing Pro: The Digital Marketing Pro program is done in cooperation with the Digital Marketing Institute and includes two certificates: a PCM Digital Marketing and a Certified Digital Marketing Professional. The course encompasses 30 hours of online learning on social media, PPC, email marketing, SEO, content marketing and digital marketing strategy. When you finish the course on your own timeline, you’ll schedule an exam with a local testing center. At the time of this writing, the cost for this track is $1,368, a discount from the regular price of $1,955.
  • Digital Marketing Expert: For a more comprehensive training, you can take the Digital Marketing Expert track, which includes 120 hours of learning. Marketers who complete this training successfully earn two credentials: PCM Advanced Digital Marketing and Certified Digital Marketing Expert. Instead of a test at the end, students are required to write two 5,000-word assignments, a digital marketing research paper and a digital marketing strategy document. Both documents will comprise a complete digital marketing campaign from start to finish. The Digital Marketing Expert program costs $5,870 (check for discounts).
• Marketing Management: The marketing management track comes with a free handbook and the AMA Marketing Management Study Package ($249 for members, $349 for nonmembers). The certification exam costs an additional $99 for members or $299 for nonmembers.
• Sales Management: Through the AMA website, you can review the syllabus you need to know to pass the Sales Management track’s free practice exam. The certification costs $249 for AMA members and $349 for nonmembers.
• Content Marketing: As with the Sales Management track, you can access all the syllabus you need to know for this course on the AMA website and then take a free practice exam. The prices are the same: $249 for AMA members and $349 for nonmembers.

To maintain your certification in any area of study, the AMA requires you to earn 30 continuing education units (CEUs) every three years, with a minimum of 10 units per year, and to recertify every three years. CEUs are determined by the AMA and may include attending events, webcasts, virtual conferences or training sessions. 

Did you know? According to Robert Half’s 2023 Salary Guide, an entry-level marketing manager with no certifications earns, on average, $72,250, while an experienced marketing manager earns around $92,250. Location factors into salary as well.

Interactive Advertising Bureau

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) counts more than 650 media and technology companies among its members and offers four certification programs: 

• Digital Media Sales
• Digital Video
• Data 360
• Digital Media Buying and Planning

Members and nonmembers may pursue certification through IAB, but fees are higher for nonmembers.

IAB requires certified marketing professionals to recertify within nine to 24 months of their initial certification. Staying certified may entail logging CEUs or retaking the certification exam. Most of IAB’s exam and training packages cost $299 for members and $399 for nonmembers. However, some have specific eligibility requirements, so read the guidelines carefully before choosing a program.

4A’s

Founded in 1917, 4A’s is one of the oldest and largest professional marketing organizations in the U.S. It serves 740 member agencies across 1,400 offices, and its Benefits division insures more than 164,000 marketing agency professionals. 4A’s offers various learning and development programs, including webinars, workshops, lectures and multiday networking events. 

4A’s offers four certification trainings:

• Team Leadership Certification for Managers ($1,400)
• Media Essentials: From Chaos to Clarity ($499)
• Mentalk Workplace Mental Health Certificate for HR Professionals ($1,000)
• Agency Fundamentals ($299)

4A members get a 20 percent discount on these prices.

Jennifer Dublino contributed to the reporting and writing in this article.

© 2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

When completing missions and tasks in the real-world, robots should ideally be able to effectively grasp objects of various shapes and compositions. So far, however, most robots can only grasp specific types of objects.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University have recently developed a new machine learning model that could help to enhance the grasping abilities of robots. This model, presented in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, is specifically designed to predict grasps for objects in a robot's surroundings, so that they can devise optimal strategies for grasping these objects.

"In real-world applications, such as intelligent manufacturing, human-machine interaction and domestic services, robotic grasping is becoming more and more essential," Junzhi Yu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. "Grasp detection, a critical step of robotic grasping, entails finding the best grasp for a target object. Mainstream encoder-decoder grasp detection solutions are attractive in terms of accuracy and efficiency, yet they are still limited, due to the checkerboard artifacts from uneven overlap of convolution results in the decoder. Moreover, feature representation is often insufficient."

The key objective of the accurate work by Yu and his colleagues was develop a model that would overcome the limitations of existing grasp detection frameworks. To do this, they created a pixel-wise grasp detection method based on twin deconvolution and multi-dimensional attention, two established techniques often used for computer vision applications.

Their method was designed to eliminate so-called "checkerboard artifacts," strange checkerboard-like patterns that are often observed in images generated by artificial neural networks. In addition, the researchers strengthened their model's ability to refine specific features in images.

"The proposed pixel-wise grasp detection network is composed of an encoder, a multi-dimensional attention bottleneck, and a twin deconvolution-based decoder," Yu explained. "Given an input image, feature extraction is performed through the encoder and the obtained feature map is further refined through our bottleneck module, which integrates residual multi-head self-attention (R-MHSA), cross-amplitude attention (CAA), and raw compensation to better focus on the regions of interest."

The three components of the team's bottleneck module result in three different outputs that are concatenated in channel and further adjusted to Strengthen the representation of features. The resulting, refined "feature map" is then fed to the model's decoder (i.e., a model that up-samples the feature map into a desirable output). This decoder ultimately predicts the grasps that correspond to the input image, by performing three so-called cascaded twin deconvolutions (processes to up-sample the feature map).

"Through our bottleneck module, the intrinsic relationship between features is mined and features are effectively fine-tuned from the dimensions of spatial and channel," Yu said. "Particularly, the introduction of twin deconvolution provides better up-sampling by adding a twin branch upon original transposed convolution branch. As a result, the challenge of checkerboard artifacts is solved."

A notable advantage of the method developed by the researchers is its use of twin deconvolutions, through which a twin branch is introduced to the original transposed convolution branch, improving the model's original output. This approach allows the model to remove undesirable checkerboard patterns from outputs.

"It should be noted that the checkerboard artifacts originate from the uneven overlap of convolution results at different positions," Yu said. "Herein, a twin branch is introduced in parallel upon the original transposed convolution branch to measure the uneven overlap. More specifically, the twin branch computes the relative overlap differences among positions and the resultant overlap degree matrix is utilized to re-weight the feature map of original transposed convolution."

In initial tests, the new pixel-wise grasp detection method achieved very promising results, as it was found to smoothen the model's original output and eliminate checkerboard artifacts. It thus achieved a high grasp detection accuracy.

As part of their study, Yu and his colleagues were also able to extend their approach to other task that entail pixel-wise detection. In addition to potentially enhancing the grasping skills of both existing and newly developed robots, their model could thus soon be applied to other computer vision problems.

"In our next works, we plan to combine the proposed method with instance segmentation in genuine robot systems for better grasp prediction," Yu added. "For example, instance segmentation can be used to generate valuable information about object profile and position, which is fed into twin deconvolutions of the decoder to further Strengthen the network performance."

© 2023 Science X Network

In July 1945, the US Army conducted the first ever nuclear bomb test in New Mexico, called "Trinity." The prototype weapon of mass destruction, known as "Gadget," exploded and released energy equivalent to about 21 kilotons of TNT.

In the 1980s, scientists discovered that the nuclear explosion inadvertently created an entirely new material. Surrounding sand, a 90 foot tower, and copper transmission lines were fused together to form a glass-like material called trinitite.

Inside this trinitite, scientists discovered a rare form of matter called a "quasicrystal." Rather than the atoms being arranged in a pattern that repeats itself in all three dimensions, as is the case in ordinary crystals found in nature, quasicrystals have atoms that aren't arranged in a periodic pattern.

Some of the trinitite that was formed in the 1945 explosion has a 5-fold rotational symmetry, meaning that atoms are arranged to form the shape of a 20-sided solid called an icosahedron.

This highly unusual symmetry, which is not possible in nature, was outlined in a new paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The research could shed light on what exactly unfurls during nuclear bomb detonations and how they affect the natural surroundings.

"Here, we report the discovery, in a trial of red trinitite, of a hitherto unknown composition of icosahedral quasicrystal, Si₆₁Cu₃₀Ca₇Fe_2," the international team of researchers wrote in their paper. "It represents the oldest extant anthropogenic quasicrystal currently known, with the distinctive property that its precise time of creation is indelibly etched in history."

"Quasicrystals are formed in extreme environments that rarely exist on Earth,” said Terry Wallace, director emeritus of Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of the paper, in a statement.

"They require a traumatic event with extreme shock, temperature, and pressure," he added. "We don’t typically see that, except in something as dramatic as a nuclear explosion."

The only comparable material found in nature, the researchers say, is a meteorite that dates back at least hundreds of millions of years.

"This quasicrystal is magnificent in its complexity — but nobody can yet tell us why it was formed in this way," Wallace explained.

"But someday, a scientist or engineer is going to figure that out and the scales will be lifted from our eyes and we will have a thermodynamic explanation for its creation," he added. "Then, I hope, we can use that knowledge to better understand nuclear explosions and ultimately lead to a more complete picture of what a nuclear test represents."

READ MORE: Discovery of new material could someday aid in nuclear nonproliferation [Los Alamos National Laboratory]

More on nuclear bombs: An Underground Tank Is Leaking Massive Amounts of Radioactive Waste

Fortnite’s second part of the Oathbound questline has kicked off with the introduction of Rift Warden Stellan, a mysterious figure who asks that players build a rift gate on the island. However, as other characters have become suspicious of the warden, you will need to do some investigating by first collecting specific objects for testing on the island. This guide will breakdown where you can locate all of the quest’s objects in the battle royale.

Unlike previous challenges in the questline, you will be required to find all of its test vessel objects in a single match, as dying will reset your progress completely. Luckily, there are only three items in total, and each are placed in the top-left corner of the map. These are spread out from west of The Citadel to even the snowy region, so it is highly recommended you bring one of the game’s vehicles in order to collect them all before the end of a match. You can find all of the object locations marked and detailed below.

• Test vessel object location #1: This item is a shell that is located southwest of The Citadel and is sitting on a beach left of the Western Watch landmark’s bridge.
• Test vessel object location #2: The next object is a taco which spawns near the food stands in the center of Anvil Square.
• Test vessel object location #3: Lastly, you can head to Crankshot’s Cabin northeast of Anvil Square to discover the last object, a stuffed Cuddle Team Leader bear.

Related: Best landing spots in Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1

Additionally, players struggling to discover the items may want to pick up the Falcon Scout in order to fly over their areas and ping their location. If you are panic there may be enemies near them, the device can also scan and tag enemies for a short time. Once these objects are found, you will be granted an extra 20,000 XP, and Amie will then ask for you to visit one of her Hologram Braziers.