Finding Genius Podcast

The Reverse Logistics Association is a member-driven, global trade group for the returns and reverse logistics industry, offering information, research, solutions, and services for Manufacturers Branded, and Retail companies from Third Party Providers. Our goal is to educate and inform Reverse Logistics professionals around the world, and be the voice of the returns and reverse industry. The RLA focuses on all industries in the reverse logistics process, and our goal is to provide RL process knowledge. We want to educate everyone about the reverse logistics processes that are common to all industries.

Bloomio is working on redesigning the venture capital industry. Bloomio provides a crowdfunding platform, that connects early-stage startups with individual investors and venture funds. The platform allows startup founders to raise capital by tokenizing equity and gives investors a possibility to trade startup stakes through a secure blockchain-based marketplace. Traditional VC investors mainly focus on larger deal sizes of more than $100K, leaving small room for individual investors to enter the early stage startup market. Bloomio's vision is to disrupt the traditional fund-raising model for startups by enabling individual investors to tap into the venture capital arena with a small ticket size starting from just around a hundred dollars. To enter the platform, startups must either undergo a scoring process by 3rd party analysts or make specific disclosures so as to provide enough information to potential investors. Once listed on the Bloomio platform, a startup, instead of pitching VCs, can start its next investment round in just one mouse click, saving precious time and efforts for other tasks.

Marshall Greenwald - CEO at Craypay joins Future Tech Podcast. CrayPay is a mobile payment app that will soon allow you to earn and use cryptocurrency tokens, called CrayCoins, at more than 50,000 retail locations across the United States. CrayPay already pays a portion of each of your purchases, but you'll also be able to earn an additional 10% of the retail price back in CrayCoins. CrayCoins will be earned by spending within the CrayPay app, and it will be possible to use them for purchases in-store and online across 120+ national brand partners including AMC Theatres, American Eagle, Best Buy, Chili's, Domino's, GAP, Lowe's, Outback Steakhouse, and Sears.

Matteo Lai, Co-founder and CEO of Empatica (empatica.com), a medical technology startup, provides an insightful overview of the diagnostic and predictive capabilities of machine learning-based products. Specifically, Lai details the advances in tech for medical products that can allow individual patients or sufferers to get an early warning that a medical emergency or situation is beginning. Mr. Lai studied engineering and architecture and he holds dual masters in architecture and innovation management from the Alta Scuola Politecnica. Additionally, Lai co-founded Taaac, a design innovation startup, and has been intimately involved in sundry engineering, architecture, and design innovation projects internationally. Lai's company, Empatica, co-founded by Dr. Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, was conceived rather organically. Lai recounts how Picard's experimental research in autism provided a breakthrough that stimulated further research into epilepsy seizure detection. While working with autism sufferers attached to sensors, a particular individual experienced a seizure and the sensors reacted immediately, thus initiating Picard and Lai's continued research into the predictive technology behind Empatica's products. Empatica's "Embrace" product is a wearable band that uses advanced machine learning to recognize convulsive seizures and send appropriate alerts to responsible parties who can respond. Through the capture of specific information such as high frequency movement, heart rate, and sympathetic responses, Lai's sensors' algorithms can make the assessment, in real time, that a seizure is beginning. As their technology evolves, Lai expects that their products will allow sufferers to actually receive predictions of adverse reactions on the horizon. In regard to seizure detection, a user might be able to procure data from their Empatica product that predicts, via its machine learning, whether a seizure might occur within a certain future time frame. Much like a weather forecast, the Empatica product may be able to provide a user with a percentage of probability such that the user can make plans accordingly. Empatica's product is the smallest design of its kind and is the first medical grade, geolocation-enhanced, wearable product for epilepsy sufferers. The medical tech CEO discusses how his company is focused on challenging neurological diseases, conditions, and disorders, such as epilepsy and autism, stress and depression. By using sensors and predictive technology, sufferers, and their caregivers, can better prepare for events or medical emergencies, thus providing some peace of mind for all involved.

Monarch is an all-inclusive platform for the modern consumer, investor, and merchant! A simple to use and easy to understand fiat to the crypto solution right in the palm of your hand. You can pay your monthly recurring bills, buy and sell crypto at the best rates, keep track of all your passwords all from your phone. Monarch's security tokens are backed by physical silver as well to ensure real-world value. For people who buy the security tokens, the tokens get airdropped a utility token for free and receive weekly dividends, forever.

Shidan Gouran - CEO & President at Global Blockchain technology corps joins Future Tech Podcast. Global Blockchain is an investment company that provides investors access to a mixture of assets in the blockchain space, strategically chosen to balance stability and growth. Blue chip holdings such as Ethereum and Bitcoin are complemented by best-of-breed "smaller cap" crypto holdings, many of which are not yet available to other investors.

Niger Little-Poole, Director of Engineering at Sigma Ratings, delves into the thorny problem of financial security and explains how his company is working to deliver technology-based solutions to assess risk. Sigma Ratings is an international compliance and regulatory risk rating agency in New York City, New York whose focus is on the design and architecture of a powerful AI-based rating platform. Their mission is to properly assess risk utilizing domain expertise and computer science, to rate and generate risk evaluations and scores for thousands of companies across the globe. As our global economy has brought many financial companies and banks together for trading and services, security and trust are more important than ever. Niger Little-Poole explains how Sigma Ratings' software allows financial entities to get a better understanding of who they are working with and partnering within the business. With financial crimes, money laundering, and fraud, etc. on the rise, Sigma Ratings' proprietary software provides some comfort in turbulent times. And beyond searching for links to general crimes and infractions, Sigma Ratings' software can also detect links a bank may have to potentially nefarious groups or individuals, from oligarchs on a US government watch list to terrorists. Little-Poole states that Sigma also seeks to provide full transparency on banks, and eventually financial companies, by exposing who they are actually owned by, in cases where shell companies or holding companies may be the true owners. As connections are important, it is critical to know who or what owns a bank or company to ensure that all entities in the chain are reputable and operating legally. The director of engineering provides an overview of basic AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) initiatives in regard to compliance and regulation. Little-Poole states that regulations and protocols may be in place in 80% of a particular country's financial institutions while another country may have only 5% of their institutions under similar scrutiny. Little-Poole discusses the complex issue of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity, simply defined, is the protection of computer systems and related hardware, software and electronic data from potential damage, corruption, misdirection of services, or theft. Little-Poole explains how hackers can utilize their hack to infiltrate a bank's system, offering the hackers a direct access line to pull money from accounts and then push it through other banking institutions and illegally launder it. As financial crimes are rampant, the Sigma Ratings' director states that the solution must be technology-based, structured with machine learning, otherwise many financial crimes will continue to thrive, unseen by the watchful eye of regulators.

Joshua Scigala is the co-founder of the first real-time bitcoin/gold trading engine on the market. Vaultoro is backing bitcoin with physical gold that is vaulted for the customers in top-tier Swiss gold Vaults. The technology behind Vaultoro makes it the most transparent exchange on the market, both publicly and privately audited. Vaultoro enables billions of people to start using the bitcoin payment network without the volatility risk.

Opu Labs aims to become the leading digital solutions provider for skincare measurement, management, and monitoring. They are building an advanced ecosystem that combines a machine learning AI, a clinic, a marketplace, and a community. Underpinning all of these features is blockchain technology. Its use allows patient data to be decentralized and freely accessed at scale. It also incentivizes those involved to play an active role in our ecosystem: by rewarding them with our native ERC-223 tokens, OPU Coins. Opu Labs wants to give consumers better access to skincare expertise, provide skincare professionals with the technology needed to expand their capabilities, ease patient load, and reward those who make valuable contributions.

Dr. Joost Huizinga, a Ph.D. from the Evolving Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Wyoming, provides an informative overview of the advances and challenges in artificial intelligence (AI) learning and training. Dr. Huizinga's interest and expertise are primarily focused in the areas of evolutionary robotics and algorithms, neural networks, learning algorithms and other elements of artificial intelligence. A portion of Huizinga's work involves neural networks and the challenge to improve them and make them more similar to the human brain. As neural networks are trained to classify images according to different categories, and learning algorithms then take command, the information about the images is still, unfortunately, scattered all throughout the neural networks. In contrast, the human brain has specific areas for various functions such as the visual cortex and motor cortex, etc., which provides a solid structural organization. According to Dr. Huizinga, to have a fully connected neural network within the human brain, every neuron would need to be connected to every other neuron, which would necessitate a larger brain than normal in order to handle the vast network. Additionally, every connection would need the essential proteins that are required to build these types of connections. The Ph.D. explains one of his team's goals during their experimentation process—to have an evolutionary algorithm build the network itself, optimizing for not only performance, but also for a reduction in length, and number, of the connections within the network. As a result, these artificial neural networks approach a more modular state and begin to functionally specialize. Huizinga explains that this structured specialization allows for higher efficiency in learning and thus more closely approximates a human's neural network organization. In regard to these applications as they are applied to robotics, Dr. Huizinga hopes to push neural networks to create a more advanced hierarchical structure for improved robotic functionality. The AI Ph.D. provides an interesting comparative discussion on the similarities and differences between human brain processing and AI network processing, including how each response to external stimuli, processes the information and reacts to it. As Huizinga explains, when humans need to react quickly to external stimuli or an event or action, the human brain often accesses learned information from past events, which allows for more immediate, and appropriate, responses. Doctor Huizinga states that the future of AI will be heavily based in teaching the AI to develop its own structures and essentially acquire the information and processes it needs to teach itself how to learn. Further, Huizinga stresses the importance of using AI to influence and train networks to exercise caution before making decisions, as human brains do, before rushing confidently into an action. This subtle training will allow for greater safety as autonomous functional products and robotic entities become mainstream.