Latest news with #CostaMesa
National Post
2 days ago
- Business
- National Post
Independent Study Shows Experian Ascend Platform Offered 183% ROI for Global Banks and Lenders
Article content COSTA MESA, Calif. — The Experian Ascend Platform™ helps financial institutions improve credit and fraud decisions, offered a 183% return on investment (ROI) and paid for itself within 12 months, according to a recently commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study of Experian's global customers by Forrester. The firm's independent findings provide banks and lenders with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the platform on their organizations. Article content 'Experian Ascend Platform helps banks and lenders unlock the full potential of their data throughout the customer lifecycle, using advanced analytics and modeling for fraud and identity, and to explore new market opportunities,' said Keith Little, President of Experian Software Solutions. 'We believe Forrester's findings underscore the tremendous value that the platform delivers our customers in vital business drivers such as approval rate optimization, business growth acceleration and cost reductions. Article content Hosted in a secure, globally accessible hybrid-cloud environment, the Experian Ascend Platform offers customers worldwide a state-of-the-art technology platform that equips them with AI-powered insights for decisioning across the credit lifecycle. As a result, they can stay ahead of rapidly changing market conditions and evolving consumer behaviors to remain competitive, maximize profitability and optimize operational efficiency. Article content According to the study Article content , Experian's global customers said that prior to using the platform, their organizations used a mix of fragmented on-premises credit decisioning solutions that required manual-heavy interventions at different stages of the review and approval processes. As a result, the credit-decisioning process was lengthy, required staff to look at different data sources, and ultimately impacted response times. Also, the absence of a consistent decisioning system introduced increased exposure to fraud and default. Article content After the investment in Experian Ascend Platform, those global customers had a unified platform that provided up-to-date consumer and commercial data in one view along with robust analytics, automated decisioning and enhanced fraud prevention. Article content Key results from deploying the platform included accelerated business growth, improved conversion rates, enhanced operational efficiencies for credit-decisioning and marketing teams, reduced default costs, faster response times, and improved data quality and verification processes. Article content Other unquantified benefits from the study included: Article content Improved customer and broker experience through faster decisioning Reduced risk at origination Improved compliance and audit processes Reduced risk of regulatory fines Sustainability benefits through reduced physical documentation that lowered the customer's carbon footprint. Article content To access The Total Economic Impact ™ of Experian Ascend Platform please visit Article content Methodology Article content Forrester interviewed six decision-makers from organizations located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and South Africa with experience using Experian Ascend Platform. For the purposes of the study, Forrester aggregated the customers' experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a lending institution with regional operations and based on characteristics of the customers' organizations. Article content About Experian Article content Experian is a global data and technology company, powering opportunities for people and businesses around the world. We help to redefine lending practices, uncover and prevent fraud, simplify healthcare, deliver digital marketing solutions, and gain deeper insights into the automotive market, all using our unique combination of data, analytics and software. We also assist millions of people to realize their financial goals and help them to save time and money. Article content We operate across a range of markets, from financial services to healthcare, automotive, agrifinance, insurance, and many more industry segments. Article content We invest in talented people and new advanced technologies to unlock the power of data and to innovate. A FTSE 100 Index company listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN), we have a team of 23,300 people across 32 countries. Our corporate headquarters are in Dublin, Ireland. Learn more at Article content Article content Article content Article content Article content Contacts
CBS News
3 days ago
- General
- CBS News
Woman dies after shot on Costa Mesa sidewalk, police search for suspect
Costa Mesa police are searching for a suspect after finding a 20-year-old woman suffering from several gunshot wounds on the sidewalk late Monday night. Around 11:10 p.m., police responded to the 1500 block of Lukup Lane, a residential area, to a call of shots fired and found the wounded Huntington Beach woman. Costa Mesa Fire & Rescue transported the woman to the hospital where she died from her injuries. Police said it appears the victim and the suspect knew each other. The identification of the victim has not been released yet. Anyone with information regarding this active investigation can call Detective Stocking at (714) 754-5392 or Sergeant Jacobi at (714) 754-5352.
ABC News
3 days ago
- Business
- ABC News
The militarisation of immersive technology — where will it lead and at what societal cost? - ABC Religion & Ethics
Last week, American defence technology company Anduril announced a surprising new partnership: it will be working with Meta to develop virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets for the United States military. At first glance, the collaboration might seem an unlikely one. Anduril's founder, Palmer Luckey, was also the founder of Oculus — the VR company that Meta (then Facebook) acquired in 2014 for $2 billion. Luckey was later fired from Facebook and went on to establish Anduril, a company now known for its autonomous surveillance systems and AI-enabled drones (which it develops for militaries, including the United States and Australia). For Luckey, this partnership between Meta and the US military reflects a long-standing ambition: 'My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers', he wrote on X, 'and the products we are building with Meta do just that.' Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, during an interview at Anduril's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, on 14 December 2023. (Photographer: Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg via Getty Images) While the partnership is new, the use of VR and AR in military contexts is not. In fact, the roots of immersive tech are deeply entangled with the history of warfare. A history of violence The history of VR's development is closely linked with the militarised history of computing. During the Second World War, early computing efforts were shaped by the needs of aerial defence and ballistics, fields that demanded new ways to augment human perception and response time. Areas of wartime innovation — such as cybernetics — were concerned with understanding the relationship between human cognition and machines, and specifically with addressing the cognitive limits of humans in wartime situations. One of VR's early pioneers, Ivan Sutherland, developed 'The Ultimate Display' in the 1960s, a kind of proto-AR headset designed to be mounted in helicopters. Sutherland was connected to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the US military's advanced research arm, and his work on the Ultimate Display received funding from Bell Helicopter, which was a contractor for the US military during the Vietnam war. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, similar immersive display systems became central to Air Force training and simulation programs. Running parallel to these developments, early haptic technologies — tools to simulate physical touch, and the manipulation of objects through teleoperation — were also developed, including the teleoperator systems created at Argonne National Laboratory by Raymond Goertz in the postwar period. HoloLens 2, an AR headset designed by Microsoft, exhibited during the Mobile World Congress, on 28 February 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photographer: Joan Cros / NurPhoto via Getty Images) Military use remains one of the most well-funded and actively developed applications of immersive tech. In 2022, for example, Microsoft secured a US Army contract worth nearly $22 billion to supply 120,000 HoloLens AR headsets for battlefield use. The program was eventually scaled back and, in 2024, Microsoft announced that Anduril would take over the project. The US military has likewise experimented with VR for training purposes, such as its recent investment in what it calls a 'Synthetic Training Environment'. Unlike many of its peers in the so-called 'Magnificent Seven' — the largest US tech firms: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — Meta has thus far avoided working with the military. But its continued investment in immersive tech — more than US$45 billion since 2018, by some estimates — has failed to yield a clear consumer market. VR headsets remain a relatively small segment of the computing market, with some reports suggesting 20 million sales of all Quest headsets in the four years since their 2019 debut. Meta's smart glasses have gained more traction but currently lack full AR capabilities and raise ongoing safety and privacy concerns. Why the pivot to military applications? In the absence of mass-market adoption, tech firms often turn to institutional settings to create demand and legitimacy for a product. Defence is particularly attractive. Not only does work with militaries have the potential for access to large budgets that can subsidise research and development, but it is also a pathway to embed emerging technologies into critical infrastructure. Historically, this is how many now-ubiquitous technologies — like computing and the internet — got their start. Meta, like others before it, is likely trying to manufacture infrastructural necessity. If there's no widespread consumer demand, then the next best thing is to make the technology essential somewhere else — whether that's in the workplace, the classroom or the battlefield. What's at stake? For one, it's unclear whether Luckey's vision of AR- and VR-equipped 'technomancers' can ever truly materialise. Following Microsoft's military headset deployment, many soldiers reported symptoms like nausea, disorientation and eye strain. Beyond physiological effects, as we argue in our recent book Fantasies of Virtual Reality , questions remain about the reliability of embedded systems such as facial recognition or battlefield AI — technologies known for their bias, opacity and error-prone design. We should proceed with caution in implementing them into technologies like AR and VR. A member of the Saarland Parliament tries out a mobile extended reality system from HGXR for training security forces using AI-supported virtual reality, at the 28th European Police Congress in Berlin, Germany. (Photographer: Bernd von Jutrczenka / picture alliance via Getty Images) More broadly, there are concerns about the societal implications of militarised tech. As with many other technologies, military-developed tools have a tendency to spill over into civilian life. We already see these immersive technologies being adopted by police forces — from AR-equipped smart glasses to ostensibly better identify threat, to VR-based 'empathy training' in law enforcement. The geographer Stephen Graham calls this the 'militarisation of everyday life': a creeping process where technologies and logics of war — tracking, profiling, sorting — bleed into systems of civil governance. The very same immersive technologies being designed for combat may soon shape how cities are policed, how workers are trained, or how citizens are monitored. As we are exploring in our new Australian Research Council funded project — 'Governing Immersive Technology' — what we need now is evidence-based policy for the responsible development of immersive technologies, anticipating risks, preventing harm and supporting inclusive, ethical innovation. As Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth put it on X: 'The computing platform of the future will be built on AI and AR.' The question now is, whose future, and at what cost? Ben Egliston is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. Marcus Carter is Professor in Human–Computer Interaction at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. They are the authors of Fantasies of Virtual Reality: Untangling Fiction, Fact, and Threat.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Letters to the Editor: As July 4th approaches, Orange County preserve requires fire-preventing action
To the editor: The Randall Preserve is a decidedly mixed blessing to the community ('After 27 years fighting to change oil field into massive Orange County nature preserve, initial plans released,' May 23). The birds and four-legged neighbors are welcome, but the many illegal campers constitute a serious threat of wildfires. The overlapping jurisdictions of city, county and fire district complicate responsibility for public safety. Further, the Mountains Recreation Conservation Authority that now holds title to the property does not yet have control over it because Aera Energy, the oil company responsible for cleanup of the property, still controls it. Aera Energy is not evicting trespassers nor even stopping camping. The California fire marshal has now designated the area of the Randall Preserve, and the adjacent homes and businesses, a moderate fire risk. We anticipate increased homeowners' insurance costs. Within the past couple of weeks, a wildfire started on the Randall Preserve and spread to Orange County's Talbert Park area before it was put out. Fortunately, there was no wind to spread it to our homes. We are acutely aware that July 4th is just weeks away and that fireworks, as well as campfires, can trigger wildfires. I urge all parties, especially Aera Energy, to eject the campers and keep trespassers out before we suffer a real tragedy. Kenneth Smith, Costa Mesa This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Associated Press
19-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Ducommun to Participate in B. Riley Securities Annual Investor Conference
COSTA MESA, Calif., May 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ducommun Incorporated (NYSE: DCO) ('Ducommun' or the 'Company') announced today that Suman Mookerji, the Company's senior vice president and chief financial officer will participate in the upcoming B. Riley Securities Annual Investor Conference on May 22, 2025, with one-on-one investor meetings scheduled throughout the day. Institutional investors are welcome to contact B. Riley Securities to arrange one-on-one meetings with management. About Ducommun Incorporated Ducommun Incorporated delivers value-added innovative products and manufacturing solutions to customers in the aerospace, defense, and industrial markets. Founded in 1849, the Company specializes in two core areas - Electronic Systems and Structural Systems - to produce complex products and components for commercial aircraft platforms, mission-critical military and space programs, and sophisticated industrial applications. For more information, visit Contacts Suman Mookerji, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer 657.335.3665, [email protected]
