Lifeboat Foundation

She can’t get sick or be late to the set, and her hair and makeup needs are minimal: Her name is Erica, and Hollywood is hoping that a sophisticated robot can be its next big star. The synthetic actor has been cast in “b,” a $70 million science-fiction movie which producer Sam Khoze describes as “a James Bond meets Mission Impossible story with heart.”

Scribe Tarek Zohdy (“1st Born”), says, the story is about scientists who create an AI robot named Erica who quickly realize the danger of this top-secret program that is trying to perfect a human through a non-human form.

Variety caught up with the filmmakers Zohdy and Khoze to discuss “b” the $70 million film that plans to finish shooting next year, after a director and human star have been brought on.

Continue reading “Hollywood Is Banking That a Robot Named Erica Can Be the Next Movie Star” »

Cynet, a cybersecurity startup that leverages AI and machine learning to detect threats, has raised $18 million in venture capital.

However, the situation has been improving as Chinese tech giants including e-commerce company Alibaba, search engine Baidu, on-demand delivery company Meituan Dianping, ride-hailing operator Didi Chuxing and smartphone maker Xiaomi now offer more affordable health care plans via mutual aid platforms, which operate as a collective claim-sharing mechanism.

China’s online mutual aid platforms are disrupting old school insurance companies by leveraging big data and internet finance technologies to offer low cost medical coverage.

Continue reading “How Chinese tech giants are disrupting insurance industry with pooled funds” »

Pagaya, an AI-driven institutional asset manager that focuses on fixed income and consumer credit markets, today announced it raised $102 million in equity financing. CEO Gal Krubiner said the infusion will enable Pagaya to grow its data science team, accelerate R&D, and continue its pursuit of new asset classes including real estate, auto loans, mortgages, and corporate credit.

Pagaya applies machine intelligence to securitization — the conversion of an asset (usually a loan) into marketable securities (e.g., mortgage-backed securities) that are sold to other investors — and loan collateralization. It eschews the traditional method of securitizing pools of previously assembled asset-backed securities (ABS) for a more bespoke approach, employing algorithms to compile discretionary funds for institutional investors such as pension funds, insurance companies, and banks. Pagaya selects and buys individual loans by analyzing emerging alternative asset classes, after which it assesses their risk and draws on “millions” of signals to predict their returns.

Pagaya’s data scientists can build algorithms to track activities, such as auto loans made to residents in cities and even specific neighborhoods, for instance. The company is only limited by the amount of data publicly available; on average, Pagaya looks at decades of information on borrowers and evaluates thousands of variables.

Tunde Ajaja Former Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has said in all the positions she has occupied, serving as Nigeria’s Minister of Finance remains one of her toughest jobs so far. O…

A bug in a protocol used by virtually all Internet of Things devices exposes millions of users to potential attack, a researcher reported Monday. The fault centers on the Universal Plug and Play protocol, a 12-year-old implementation that simplifies connections among network devices such as computers, printers, mobile devices and Wi-Fi access points.

Billions of devices are theoretically vulnerable, the report stated, but only those with UPnP activated currently face risk of attack.

Turkish security engineer Yunus Çadirci uncovered the UPnP bug, named CallStranger, that could be exploited to gain access to any smart device such as security cameras, printers and routers that are connected to the Internet. Once access is gained, malicious code can be sent through network firewalls and other security defenses and reach internal data banks.

A pair of new security threats to Intel-based computer systems have been revealed. The beleaguered semiconductor chip manufacturer has faced a seemingly endless series of vulnerabilities over the past two years.

Although no known attacks have occurred, two teams of researchers have confirmed vulnerabilities in what is supposed to be the safest neighborhood within Intel processor architecture.

One attack, dubbed SGAxe, can gain entry into Intel’s Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) services that were specifically designed to protect critical data in the event of massive assault elsewhere in a system. A hacker theoretically can steal cryptographic keys stored in SGX and use them to break security measures protecting sensitive data such as financial records, copyrighted content or passwords.

On Friday, I reported on the data released from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, indicating that 2.5 million jobs were added in May. This was followed by an enthusiastic take on how the United States may be turning the corner. Despite all of the negatives, it seemed the U.S. was seeing rays of hope. The stock market, which has shot up since the initial shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic, bolted up after the report, gaining over 700 points and referred to other positive developments.

Unfortunately, after delving into the footnotes of the numbers, it now looks like the jobs report has been inaccurate for the last two months. BLS has admitted that government household survey takers mistakenly counted about 4.9 million people as employed, although they were unemployed.

Continue reading “There’s A Glaring, Misleading Error In The May Jobs Report: U.S. May Be At 20% Unemployment” »

WASHINGTON — For the second time in less than 18 months, SpaceX has abandoned plans to build a manufacturing facility at the Port of Los Angeles for its next-generation Starship launch vehicle.

In a March 27 letter obtained by SpaceNews, SpaceX notified the Port of Los Angeles that it was terminating a lease approved just a month earlier for a parcel of land at the port. News of the lease termination was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

The letter, signed by Bret Johnsen, SpaceX’s chief financial officer, served as a 45-day notice of SpaceX’s intent to terminate the lease, making the effective end date of the lease May 11. The letter did not explain why the company was terminating the lease.