| Term | Definition | | Immunosupression | A condition in which the immune system is unable to protect the body from disease. This condition can be caused by diseases such as HIV infection or cancer or by certain drugs, such as steroids or those used in chemotherapy. Individuals whose immune systems are compromised should not receive live, attenuated vaccines. |
| Inactivated Vaccine | A vaccine made from viruses and bacteria that have been killed through physical or chemical processes, or contain parts proteins of the infectious agents. These killed organisms cannot cause disease. |
| Independence | When one factor does not exert influence on another. For example, what one study participant does should not influence what another participant does. They make decisions independently. Independence is critical for a meaningful statistical analysis. |
| Infectious | Capable of spreading from one person to another or from one living being to another, communicable. |
| Infrared Radiation | Infrared radiation consists of light whose wavelength is longer than the red color in the visible part of the spectrum, but shorter than microwave radiation. |
| Intelligent Design | The belief that at least some aspects of nature show evidence of intelligent, often supernatural, design. |
| Interpretability | Interpretability is the degree to which humans can understand why an AI system produced a given output. |
| Laws | Scientific laws describe what happens in nature under specific conditions, often using mathematical formulas, while scientific theories explain why or how these phenomena occur. |
| Live Vaccine | A vaccine in which live virus is weakened (attenuated) through chemical or physical processes in order to produce an immune response without causing the severe effects of the disease. Live vaccines currently licensed in the United States include measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, rotavirus, yellow fever, smallpox, and some formulations of influenza, shingles, and typhoid vaccines. Also known as an attenuated vaccine. |
| LLM | A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on massive amounts of text so it can predict the most appropriate next token (output). LLMs can be prompted, fine-tuned, or used as tool-calling agents, and they power many of the most popular AI tools you'll encounter, like chatbots and AI assistants. |
