Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Meet the futuristic robot that mimics humans Meet Bina48, the robot who can tell jokes, recite poetry and mimic humans.  Written by Aleesha Matharu | New Delhi |   Published on:March 24, 2015 1:20 pm      Would you want your consciousness to live on, long after your physical body is exhausted? Or have a ‘mind clone’ sit in on meetings as you take the day off? Is that even possible? Meet Bina48, the robot who can tell jokes, recite poetry and mimic humans. One of the most sophisticated robots ever built, capable of independent thought, emotion, Bina48 is modelled on Bina Aspen, wife of Martine Rothblatt — the CEO of biotech outfit United Therapeutics. A vision of a future where we all have such “mind clones” is what futurist 60-year-old Rothblatt shared on March 15 with several thousand attendees during the third day of the annual tech festival South by Southwest (SXSW 2015) in Austin, Texas. How do you create a cyber-human? ...

Stealing Data From Computers Using Heat By Kim Zetter  Security  03.23.15 7:30 am Air-gapped systems, which are isolated from the Internet and are not connected to other systems that are connected to the Internet, are used in situations that demand high security because they make siphoning data from them difficult. Air-gapped systems are used in classified military networks, the payment networks that process credit and debit card transactions for retailers, and in industrial control systems that operate critical infrastructure. Even journalists use them to prevent intruders from remotely accessing sensitive data. To siphon data from an air-gapped system generally requires physical access to the machine, using removable media like a USB flash drive or a firewire cable to connect the air-gapped system directly to another computer. But security researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel have found a way to retrieve data from an air-gapped computer using o...

Internet Providers Sue to Kill Net Neutrality The first legal shots have been fired in the battle over Internet regulation. By Brendan Sasso March 23, 2015 Telecom companies filed a pair of lawsuits Monday in an attempt to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's new net neutrality rules. The suits are expected to be the opening shots in a long legal war against the controversial regulations. USTelecom, which represents AT&T, Verizon, and other companies, filed its lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, while Alamo Broadband, a small Texas-based wireless Internet provider, filed its suit in the U.S. appeals court based in New Orleans. "The focus of our legal appeal will be on the FCC's decision to reclassify broadband Internet access service as a public utility service after a decade of amazing innovation and investment under the FCC's previous light-touch approach," Jon Banks, the senior vice president for U...

Now Algorithms Are Deciding Whom To Hire, Based On Voice March 23, 2015 4:40 PM ET By Aarti Shahani If you're trying out for a job in sales, the person who judges your pitch may not be a person — it could be a computer. Job recruitment is the newest frontier in automated labor, where algorithms are choosing who's the right fit to sell fast food or handle angry cable customers, by sizing up the human candidates' voices. Let's take a voice you know: Al Pacino. Think back to how he sounds in The Godfather, Devil's Advocate, Scarface or this recent interview on Charlie Rose. The actor speaks with different accents, different emotions, different ages — and his range is stunning. But in every version, Pacino's voice has a biological, inescapable fact. "His tone of voice generates engagement, emotional engagement with audiences," says Luis Salazar, CEO of Jobaline. "It doesn't matter if you're screaming or not. That v...

NFL will broadcast a game on digital platform for first time ever By Frank Schwab 5 hours ago The NFL's experiment of having an early start for one of its London games worked out so well, now it's doubling down with another experiment for one of those early London games this season. And this one could be pretty big. For the first time the NFL will have a regular-season game on a digital platform to be streamed worldwide, when the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars face off in London on Oct. 25 at 9:30 a.m. ET. The game will still be available on television in the Buffalo and Jacksonville markets, the Florida Times-Union said. But most of the world will be watching it online. Details such as which Internet site the game will be streamed on haven't been determined yet, but it's an interesting move for the NFL. The Wall Street Journal said the game will not be on DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket, like its other out-of-market games. If the live stream is...

Robots to replace almost half of jobs over next 20 years: expert Date March 23, 2015 - 5:00PM  208 reading now By Jorge Branco Forty-seven per cent of jobs in the US will be overtaken by computers in the next decade or two, according to research. Robots and computer programs could almost wipe out human workers in jobs from cooks to truck drivers, a visiting researcher has warned. Driverless cars and even burger-flipping robots are among the technological advancements gunning for low-skilled jobs across dozens of industries. University of Oxford Associate Professor in machine learning Michael Osborne has examined the characteristics of 702 occupations in the US, predicting 47 per cent will be overtaken by computers in the next decade or two. Those most at-risk jobs are in accommodation and food services (87 per cent of workers at high risk of being replaced), transportation and warehousing (75 per cent) and real estate (67 per cent). By contrast, o...

Robo-advisor' growth hits Wall Street money managers AFP – Sun, Mar 22, 2015 9:34 AM SGT When it comes to investment advice, would you trust a financial professional or a robot? A growing number of people are choosing the latter, on the belief that algorithms can provide rational and dispassionate advice at a cost well below that of traditional advisors. A handful of automated investment startups created in the past few years now have more than $4 billion in assets under management, according to Forrester Research. It's a small segment of a trillion-dollar wealth management industry but growing at a red-hot pace, Forrester analyst Bill Doyle said. "This is a more meaningful crop of disruptors than we've seen for many years, really since the Internet brokerages emerged," he told AFP. Doyle said the digital investment services appeal to young adults who lack the minimum -- often $100,000 to $1 million -- for traditional wealth managers, bu...