Acronyms
I use this page to keep acronyms readable across the site. When I use one in a blog post for the first time, I link back here so you do not have to guess what it means.
CMMC
Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. A U.S. Department of Defense program used to verify that defense contractors have implemented required cybersecurity practices.
NIST
National Institute of Standards and Technology. A U.S. standards body that publishes widely used cybersecurity guidance, including the SP 800 series.
CUI
Controlled Unclassified Information. Sensitive information that is not classified but still requires safeguarding under U.S. government rules.
DFARS
Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. The Department of Defense supplement to the federal acquisition rules used in defense contracting.
DoD
Department of Defense. The U.S. federal department responsible for national defense and the owner of the CMMC program.
FCI
Federal Contract Information. Information provided by or generated for the government under contract that is not intended for public release.
MFA
Multifactor authentication. Login protection that requires more than one factor, such as a password plus a code or security key.
IAM
Identity and access management. The systems and policies used to define who can access what and under which conditions.
CSRC
Computer Security Resource Center. NIST’s security publication portal where many of the referenced standards and guidance documents are published.
iOS
iPhone Operating System. Apple’s mobile operating system for the iPhone, with native APIs for camera capture, graphics, and on-device machine vision.
OCR
Optical character recognition. The process of detecting text in an image and turning it into machine-readable characters.
ROI
Region of interest. The part of an image or frame that a vision system should prioritise instead of scanning everything.
AVFoundation
Audio Video Foundation. Apple’s framework for camera capture, media pipelines, and working with live video on iPhone and iPad.
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data. A processor technique where one instruction operates on several values at once, often useful in numeric loops, physics, graphics, and image processing.
AWS
Amazon Web Services. I use AWS to mean Amazon’s cloud platform for compute, storage, networking, databases, deployment, and managed infrastructure services.
API
Application programming interface. I use API to mean a defined software boundary that lets one system call or integrate with another system.
CDN
Content delivery network. I use CDN to mean globally distributed edge infrastructure that caches and serves content closer to users.
IaC
Infrastructure as code. I use IaC to mean defining cloud resources in reviewable files instead of relying only on manual console changes.
S3
Simple Storage Service. I use S3 to mean Amazon’s object storage service, often used for static assets, uploads, backups, and deployment artifacts.
AI
Artificial intelligence. I use AI to mean software systems that can generate, classify, reason over, or transform information from prompts and data.
MVP
Minimum viable product. I use MVP to mean the smallest useful product version that can test whether the idea has real demand.
CDK
Cloud Development Kit. I use CDK to mean defining cloud infrastructure in a programming language instead of only using hand-written templates or console changes.
SES
Simple Email Service. I use SES to mean Amazon’s managed email sending service.
RDS
Relational Database Service. I use RDS to mean Amazon’s managed relational database service, including managed PostgreSQL deployments.