NEC Chairperson Davidetta Browne Lansanah said during a press conference that portable tablets with fingerprint scanners will be used to capture thumbprints for a biometric voter registry, The New Dawn Liberia reports. The biometrics could also be used for deduplication and the prevention of impersonation. Facial images will also be collected, and the NEC will attempt to reduce the volume of incorrect voter data in the system. Following deduplication, biometric voter registry cards will be issued from registration centers. A biometric voter registration initiative is slated to start on December 15, 2022, and conclude on March 17, 2023.

A piece of computer history and coveted collector's item with ties to Southern California fetched six figures at auction this week. An Apple-1 computer, hand-built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the 1970s, sold for $500,000 at auction Tuesday in Monrovia. The final bid for the unit was $400,000, with the buyer -- who wishes to remain anonymous -- paying an additional $100,000 premium, or commission, to John Moran Auctioneers. The Southern California-based auction house estimated that the unit, dubbed the "Chaffey College Apple-1" after its original owner was identified as a Chaffey professor, would sell for between $400,000 to $600,000. In 2014, Bonhams auction house sold an Apple-1 for more than $900,000.

Apple's new-model, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro laptop computer could set you back nearly $4,000 before taxes. But that will seem like a Black Friday steal when a 45-year-old Apple computer goes on sale this week in Monrovia, where it may fetch six figures or more. On Tuesday, John Moran Auctioneers will auction off a functioning Apple-1 computer hand-built by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and others in a Los Altos, Calif., garage in 1976. The system was the rock upon which the trillion-dollar Apple empire was built. In his 2011 biography "Steve Jobs," Walter Isaacson quotes Wozniak as saying of the Apple-1: "We were participating in the biggest revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it."

Apple's new-model, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro laptop computer could set you back nearly $4,000 before taxes. But that will seem like a Black Friday steal when a 45-year-old Apple computer goes on sale this week in Monrovia, where it may fetch six figures or more, even without a 16-inch, high-definition screen and the latest microprocessors. On Tuesday, John Moran Auctioneers will auction off a functioning Apple-1 computer hand-built by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and others in a Los Altos, Calif., garage in 1976. The system was the rock upon which the trillion-dollar Apple empire was built. In his 2011 biography "Steve Jobs," Walter Isaacson quotes Wozniak as saying of the Apple-1: "We were participating in the biggest revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it."

If you've ever used a customer support livechat service, you've probably experienced that vague, sneaking suspicion that the "person" you're chatting with might actually be a robot. Like the endearingly stiff robots we've seen in countless movies – tragic, pitiful machines tortured by their painfully restricted emotional range, futilely hoping to attain a greater degree of humanity – chatbots often sound almost human, but not quite. Their speech is awkward, the cadence somehow off. It's the online equivalent of the "Uncanny Valley," a mysterious region nestled somewhere between the natural and the synthetic that offers a disturbing glimpse at how humans are making machines that could eventually supplant humans, if only their designers could somehow make their robotic creations less nightmarish. Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay.

Shares of AeroVironment Inc., a drone manufacturer based in Monrovia, soared Wednesday after the company reported strong second-quarter earnings, boosted by a growth in sales of unmanned aircraft systems.

This article originally appeared in Buzz Business for TIME. Last October, the Mirai botnet took advantage of hacked IoT devices to take high profile websites, such as Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Airbnb--and, it was rumored (incorrectly), the entire nation of Liberia. How do you secure a world of dizzying interconnectivity? If innovation is generating this unprecedented security challenge, it's only fair for innovation to help solve it--AI to the rescue. Look to the evolution of our telephone system.

Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are already transforming modern life, from voice-activated personal assistants, to self-parking cars, to self-configuring conference rooms, to systems that help doctors diagnose disease. As more things become interconnected and AI-enabled, our world becomes smarter, more convenient and more productive. But it also becomes more vulnerable. As the number of connected devices grows--not just smart ones, but also single-purpose sensors capturing the data that fuels AI, like sound, temperature and movement--we vastly increase our exposure to attack. Last October, the Mirai botnet took advantage of hacked IoT devices to take high profile websites such as Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Airbnb--and, it was rumored (incorrectly), the entire nation of Liberia.

Liberia has lost access to the entire internet in apparent preparation for shutting down the entire internet. Repeated attacks are flooding the country's network with requests and taking it down entirely. That has intermittently knocked the entire web offline, meaning that people can't access any websites or web services. The attacks appear to be a way for hackers to test a variety of ways of attacking internet connections and taking offline. In that way they resemble the attacks launched recently, when hackers brought down many of the world's biggest websites.

This position paper presents an approach to computational narrative based in cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics accounts of conceptual blending, metaphor, and narrative, multimedia semantics, human-centered interface design, and digital media art practice. In particular, as a case study, we describe the Living Liberia Fabric, an AI-based interactive narrative system developed in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia to memorialize a fourteen-year civil war. The Living Liberia Fabric project is led by Fox Harrell and executed in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Laboratory at Georgia Tech. The system exemplifies a cultural computing approach (grounding computing practices in a wider range of specific cultural traditions and values than those that are privileged in computer science).