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

This robot employment agency is taking over human jobs McKenzie Stratigopoulos Producer Yahoo Finance January 24, 2020   An Israeli robotics company and a Japanese Honda Motor ( HMC ) affiliate are teaming up to roll out AI-controlled robots that companies can hire by the hour. And the robotics entrepreneur behind the endeavor says technology is advancing so rapidly, these devices can take over some complicated tasks from workers. “The big leapfrog here is that our robots have some intelligence, which means they can actually do a job that is more versatile, and in a much closer way to a human,” Ran Poliakine, SixAI Founder & Chairman, told Yahoo Finance’s “ The Ticker.”  The joint venture is called  MusashiAI  and the tech manufacturing companies are releasing forklift and visual-inspection robots that can work in factories by using self-taught machine learning. The model allows companies to hire robot labor by the hour or pay a salary based ...

Why Google thinks we need to regulate AI Companies cannot just build new technology and let market forces decide how it will be used Sundar Pichai JANUARY 19 2020 The writer is chief executive of Alphabet and Google Growing up in India, I was fascinated by technology. Each new invention changed my family’s life in meaningful ways. The telephone saved us long trips to the hospital for test results. The refrigerator meant we could spend less time preparing meals, and television allowed us to see the world news and cricket matches we had only imagined while listening to the short-wave radio. Now, it is my privilege to help to shape new technologies that we hope will be life-changing for people everywhere. One of the most promising is artificial intelligence: just this month there have been three concrete examples of how Alphabet and Google are tapping AI’s potential. Nature published our research showing that an AI model can help doctors spot breast cancer in mammograms ...

Ransomware attacks are causing more downtime than ever before The average number of days it takes for organisations infected with ransomware to restore networks is now up to over 16 days. ·         By  Danny Palmer   |  January 23, 2020 -- 17:25 GMT (09:25 PST)   ·           Ransomware attacks are becoming more disruptive, with the amount of downtime for organisations which fall victim to network-encrypting malware campaigns on the rise. According to figures in the new   Ransomware Marketplace report  from cybersecurity company Covewar, the average number of days a ransomware incident lasts is now 16.2 days – up from 12.1 days in the third quarter of 2019. The increased downtime has been driven by a rise in attacks against large organisations, which often need to spend many weeks remediating and restoring their systems. "Enterprises must understand the magnitude ...

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It in   News ,  Tech January 18, 2020      Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of oth...

Schools Took Away Students’ Phones. Now They’re Treating Separation Anxiety Compromises include letting young people see their devices from afar or hold them in a locked pouch The 'phoney pack' made by a high school teacher to hold students’ cellphones during class. By   Sarah Krouse Jan. 20, 2020 1:40 pm ET Before class each day, a high-school teacher in Indianapolis grabs a clear plastic bag and fastens it to her waist with a ribbon. The homemade pouch is a repository for phones that are either confiscated or handed over voluntarily by students who don’t want to be tempted to tap or swipe during class. Now you see it. She calls it the “phoney pack,” and the magic of the makeshift vault isn’t that it keeps devices out of reach. It’s that it lowers students’ anxiety by keeping their phones in view. Smartphones have long been a scourge for teachers and administrators, who have employed a range of strict measures to keep them out of the classroom. But it t...