Google-owned DeepMind has expanded its collaboration with the UK's National Health Service (NHS), announcing a research partnership today with Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London -- its second publicly confirmed foray into working with the NHS. But this time the project is being explicitly badged as medical research, and DeepMind will be applying AI machine learning algorithms to the data -- so that's also a first. Although the company has been public about its ambitions to apply AI to health data before now. The Moorfields partnership is focused on two specific sight-loss causing conditions: diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which DeepMind notes collectively affect more than 625,000 people in the UK and more than 100 million people worldwide. The stated aim is to investigate whether machine learning algorithms can automate the analysis of the digital eye scans that are typically used to diagnose the two conditions.

Google on Wednesday announced a deal to buy Moodstocks, a French startup behind technology that helps smartphones recognize whatever they are aimed at. Moodstocks caught the US technology giant's eye for its work in computer vision and machine learning, as well for accomplishments in enabling smartphones or other mobile devices to recognize images and objects. Google is among Silicon Valley titans investing in ways to get computers to see and understand the world around them the way people do. Machine learning has been woven into an array of Google offerings, such as its free language translation and photo services. "There's a lot more to be done to improve machine vision," Google France tech site lead Vincent Simonet said in a blog post.

Moodstocks caught the US technology giant's eye for its work in computer vision and machine learning, as well for accomplishments in enabling smartphones or other mobile devices to recognise images and objects. Google is among Silicon Valley titans investing in ways to get computers to see and understand the world around them the way people do. Machine learning has been woven into an array of Google offerings, such as its free language translation and photo services. "There's a lot more to be done to improve machine vision," Google France tech site lead Vincent Simonet said in a blog post. "That's where Moodstocks comes in."

Google on Wednesday announced a deal to buy Moodstocks, a French startup behind technology that helps smartphones recognize whatever they are aimed at. Moodstocks caught the US technology giant's eye for its work in computer vision and machine learning, as well for accomplishments in enabling smartphones or other mobile devices to recognize images and objects. Google is among Silicon Valley titans investing in ways to get computers to see and understand the world around them the way people do. Machine learning has been woven into an array of Google offerings, such as its free language translation and photo services. "There's a lot more to be done to improve machine vision," Google France tech site lead Vincent Simonet said in a blog post.

The self-driving robots have already journeyed over 5,000 miles in tests across Greenwich, Milton Keynes and Glastonbury. The company says they have "met over 400,000 people without a single accident." When they're deployed by Just Eat and Pronto, the 4mph robots will operate as a "last-mile" solution, delivering food to customers within a 2-3 mile radius with help from its on-board GPS system and various sensors. When a robot arrives at its destination, customers simply need to type in a code that has been sent to them via the mobile app to open the lid and collect their food. "By launching partnerships with major companies we will enter the next phase in our development," says Ahti Heinla, co-founder, CEO and CTO of Starship Technologies.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

NHS eye hospital Moorfields has announced it is working with DeepMind -- an artificial intelligence research lab acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million -- in a bid to identify people who are likely to lose their sight as a result of an eye disease. Through the medical research partnership, Moorfields will investigate whether DeepMind's AI technology can be used to help spot early signs of eye conditions that human eye care experts might miss. In order to determine whether DeepMind's AI technology is useful for diagnosing eye conditions, Moorfields is applying the company's algorithms to one million anonymous OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) scans. The aim is to determine whether the algorithms can learn to spot early signs of age-related macular degeneration and sight loss that occurs as a result of diabetes. Mustafa Suleyman, Google DeepMind cofounder and head of DeepMind Health, told Business Insider that he wants DeepMind's AI to understand the structure and nature of eye scans "well enough to be able to try to predict in advance which ones indicate that a patient may be at risk to a particular kind of eye disease." The algorithms that DeepMind builds are known as machine learning algorithms because they have the ability to learn through training without being explicitly programmed.

Amazon is always on the lookout for new robotic technologies to improve efficiency in its warehouses, and this year deep learning appears to be leading the way. That's according to the results of the second annual Amazon Picking Challenge, which has been won by a joint team from the TU Delft Robotics Institute of the Netherlands and the company Delft Robotics. Amazon's 2016 event was held in conjunction with Robocup 2016 in Leipzig, Germany. Two parallel competitions took place: a Pick Task much like last year's, in which a mix of items has to be lifted from warehouse shelves and packed into a container; and a new "Stow Task," which involves taking items out of a tote and putting them onto the shelves. The Pick Task asked contestants to pick up and safely deposit 12 items from a mixed shelf into a container in the shortest possible time.

An artificial intelligence platform, called Rechtwijzer, could soon give lawyers in Australia a run for their money by being called on in legal battlegrounds like divorce, custody, employment and debt disputes. National Legal Aid and RMIT University are showcasing Dutch technology that could make time-consuming and expensive court conflict a thing of the past. The technology would be similar to eBay's dispute resolution service that helps people log on, rather than lawyer up. The dispute resolution robot was born in the Netherlands and can mediate everything from divorces, tenancy disputes, and employment, debt and consumer matters. For custody matters, for example, it will ask the ages of the children to be sensitive to their development needs.

For more than 40 years, no single director has more defined what we think of when we think of the movies than Steven Spielberg. To date, his feature films have grossed 4.3 billion in North America and 9.2 billion worldwide, more than any other filmmaker in history by a comfortable margin. His movies have been nominated for 128 Academy Awards and won 32, and Spielberg personally has been nominated for 16 Oscars, winning three (Best Director for Saving Private Ryan, and Best Director and Best Picture for Schindler's List). And if that's not enough, Spielberg has also presided over at least two of the most transformative changes of the last 50 years in the movie industry: the creation of the summer blockbuster (with Jaws) and the proliferation of computer-generated imagery in visual effects (with Jurassic Park). To be sure, Spielberg has not done any of this alone. With George Lucas and Harrison Ford, he helped create Indiana Jones. With Tom Hanks, he established an ongoing creative partnership (and lifelong friendship). His longtime producer Kathleen Kennedy -- the woman currently shepherding the revival of Star Wars -- got her start as Spielberg's secretary. Just about every one of his films have been tightly edited by Michael Kahn and majestically scored by John Williams. And he's collaborated with a small stable of top-flight screenwriters, including David Koepp, Richard Curtis, Eric Roth, Lawrence Kasdan, Steven Zaillian, Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Joel and Ethan Coen, and, on his newest film The BFG, Melissa Mathison. When we go to a Spielberg movie, we know we will see a film made with consummate craft and exhilarating visual style -- few directors know better how to harness the tools of pure cinema. But I would argue the artistic constant that has informed Spielberg's career and success more than any other has been his seemingly limitless capacity for empathy. "Movies are like a machine that generates empathy," the late Roger Ebert once said. "It lets you understand a bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us." Ebert might as well have been describing Spielberg's entire career, and I know that because, like a crazy person, I screened all 29 of Spielberg's theatrical feature films in chronological order, and then ranked them from worst to best. I also skipped 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie, since Spielberg directed just one of five segments in the film.) By my count, only three of Spielberg's movies are irredeemably bad.