Lifeboat Foundation

Millions of children log into chat rooms every day to talk with other children. One of these “children” could well be a man pretending to be a 12-year-old girl with far more sinister intentions than having a chat about “My Little Pony” episodes.

Inventor and NTNU professor Patrick Bours at AiBA is working to prevent just this type of predatory behavior. AiBA, an AI-digital moderator that Bours helped found, can offer a tool based on behavioral biometrics and algorithms that detect sexual abusers in online chats with children.

And now, as recently reported by Dagens Næringsliv, a national financial newspaper, the company has raised capital of NOK 7.5. million, with investors including Firda and Wiski Capital, two Norwegian-based firms.

If the combination of Covid-19 and remote work technologies like Zoom have undercut the role of cities in economic life, what might an even more robust technology like the metaverse do? Will it finally be the big upheaval that obliterates the role of cities and density? To paraphrase Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: The place to be was Silicon Valley. It feels like now the place to be is the internet.

The simple answer is no, and for a basic reason. Wave after wave of technological innovation — the telegraph, the streetcar, the telephone, the car, the airplane, the internet, and more — have brought predictions of the demise of physical location and the death of cities.

Remote work has become commonplace since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the focus on daily remote work arrangements may miss a larger opportunity that the pandemic has unearthed: the possibility of a substantially increased labor pool for digital economy work. To measure interest in digital economy jobs, defined as jobs within the business, finance, art, science, information technology, and architecture and engineering sectors, the authors conducted extensive analyses of job searches on the Bing search engine, which accounts for more than a quarter of all desktop searches in the U.S. They found that, not only did searches for digital economy jobs increase since the beginning of the pandemic, but those searches also became less geographically concentrated. The single biggest societal consequence of the dual trends of corporate acceptance of remote work and people’s increased interest in digital economy jobs is the potential geographic spread of opportunity.

Continue reading “Who Gets to Work in the Digital Economy?” »

Neuralink, a company co-founded by Elon Musk, has been working on an implantable brain-machine interface since 2016. While it previously demonstrated its progress by showing a Macaque monkey controlling the cursor.

It’s unclear what kind of deal Musk has offered — whether it’s a collaboration or a financial investment —since none of the players responded or confirmed the report with the news organization.

Elon Musk’s last update on Neuralink — his company that is working on technology that will connect the human brain directly to a computer — featured a pig with one of its chips implanted in its brain. Now Neuralink is demonstrating its progress by showing a Macaque with one of the Link chips playing Pong. At first using “Pager” is shown using a joystick, and then eventually, according to the narration, using only its mind via the wireless connection.

Continue reading “Neuralink’s brain-computer interface demo shows a monkey playing Pong” »

Russia calculated that the Chinese side had sufficient financial resources and manufacturing capabilities, compensating for the Russian civil aviation industry’s financial problems. Moreover, the Russian side intended to use its advantage in engine technology to dominate production and thereby enter the huge Chinese civil aviation aircraft market. The Russians thought they had a strong selling point with the Central Aerodynamics Institute, known as TsAGI, which has more than a century of experience. Chinese technicians, however, did not share President Xi’s political calculations, and they did not think highly of Russia’s technological prowess. They believed that the Russian era of developing wide-body aircraft was part of a bygone Soviet legacy and that the real developers had already retired.

But a more fundamental problem is that Beijing’s motivation to cooperate with Russia was one-sided. China had hoped that money would entice Russia to share its engine technology, but Beijing had no intention of sharing its giant market with Moscow. With these conflicting interests from the start, it was only a matter of time before serious troubles began derailing the project.

The Russians originally wanted to use their own IL-96 aircraft as a blueprint for development. The Chinese, on the other hand, insisted on using the Boeing 787,777 and Airbus A350 as benchmarks for the development of jets with a two-aisle cabin layout, a range of 12,000 kilometers and 280 seats.

Quantum Information Science / Quantum Computing (QIS / QC) continues to make substantial progress into 2023 with commercial applications coming where difficult practical problems can be solved significantly faster using QC (quantum advantage) and QC solving seemingly impossible problems and test cases (not practical problems) that for classical computers such as supercomputers would take thousands of years or beyond classical computing capabilities (quantum supremacy). Often the two terms are interchanged. Claims of quantum advantage or quantum supremacy, at times, are able to be challenged through new algorithms on classical computers.

The potential is for hybrid systems with quantum computers and classical computers such as supercomputers (and perhaps analog computing in the future) could operate in the thousands and potentially millions of times faster in lending more understanding into intractable challenges and problems. Imagine the possibilities and the implications for the benefit of Earth’s ecosystems and humankind significantly impacting in dozens of areas of computational science such as big data analytics, weather forecasting, aerospace and novel transportation engineering, novel new energy paradigms such as renewable energy, healthcare and drug discovery, omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomic), economics, AI, large-scale simulations, financial services, new materials, optimization challenges, … endless.

The stakes are so high in competitive and strategic advantage that top corporations and governments are investing in and working with QIS / QC. (See my Forbes article: Government Deep Tech 2022 Top Funding Focus Explainable AI, Photonics, Quantum—they (BDC Deep Tech Fund) invested in QC company Xanadu). For the US, in 2018, there is the USD $1.2 billion National Quantum Initiative Act and related U.S. Department of Energy providing USD $625 million over five years for five quantum information research hubs led by national laboratories: Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermi, Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge. In August 2022, the US CHIPS and Science Act providing hundreds of millions in funding as well. Coverage includes: accelerating the discovery of quantum applications; growing a diverse and domestic quantum workforce; development of critical infrastructure and standardization of cutting-edge R&D.

Researchers discover a new variant of the SOVA Android banking trojan with upgraded capabilities.

China, which face population collapse due to low fertility rate, is starting to take steps to encourage more births.

China’s fertility rate is 1.1 children per woman. Replacement level to maintain a stable population size is 2.1 children per woman.

A total of 17 Chinese government departments on Tuesday jointly released a guideline on support policies in finance, tax, housing, employment, education and other fields to create a fertility-friendly society and encourage families to have more children, as the country faces growing pressure from falling birth rates.

Continue reading “17 Chinese govt departments issue guideline to boost population growth amid falling birth rate” »

AgeX Therapeutics, a preclinical biotech looking to turn back the clock on aging, may have to wind down, announcing “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as money runs dry and debts mount.

The California biotech made $12,000 in revenue for the second quarter and recorded $1.6 million in operating expenses over the same period, according to financial results posted August 12.

During the first quarter, the biotech borrowed the final half million of credit available under a 2020 agreement with Juvenescence—a separate anti-aging biotech—and entered a new deal in which Juvenescence will provide $13.2 million in credit for a year. AgeX drew an initial $8.2 million of the line of credit and used $7.2 million to refinance the principal and the loan origination fees under a 2019 loan agreement with Juvenescence.

Revival of pig tissue could pave the way for salvaging more human organs for transplant, and even bringing people back to life hours after death.