A fully autonomous ship tracing the journey of the Mayflower is being built by a UK-based team, with help from tech firm IBM. The Mayflower Autonomous Ship, or MAS, will launch from Plymouth in the UK in September 2020. Its voyage will mark the 400th anniversary of the pilgrim ship which brought European settlers to America in 1620. IBM is providing artificial intelligence systems for the ship. The vessel will make its own decisions on its course and collision avoidance, and will even make expensive satellite phone calls back to base if it deems it necessary.

"This is an interesting and positive step forward, but it is really important not to exaggerate it," said Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who explores similar techniques. A robot that can solve a Rubik's Cube is not new. Researchers previously designed machines specifically for the task -- devices that look nothing like a hand -- and they can solve the puzzle in less than a second. But building devices that work like a human hand is a painstaking process in which engineers spend months laying down rules that define each tiny movement. The OpenAI project was an achievement of sorts because its researchers did not program each movement into their robotic hand.

Healx, a company using artificial intelligence (AI) to discover new drug treatments for rare diseases, has raised $56 million in a series B round of funding led by Atomico, with participation from Intel Capital, Balderton Capital, Global Brain, Btov Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Cambridge Innovation Capital's Jonathan Milner. Founded out of Cambridge in 2014, Healx's core AI Platform -- Healnet -- applies a range of machine learning techniques to public and proprietary data sources, covering literature, clinical trials, patents, drug targets, chemical structures, symptoms, and more. Part of this process involves using natural language processing (NLP) to extract insights and knowledge from all the published sources around specific diseases. The culmination of all this data, Healx CEO and cofounder Dr. Tim Guilliams said, is a knowledge graph of rare diseases that could help pharmacologists or biologists unearth effective new treatments that would otherwise be much more difficult to spot. "We use a variety of machine learning algorithms to solve the many tasks necessary to predict drug treatments and translate them in the clinic effectively," Guilliams told VentureBeat.

Longtime Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Chief Information Officer Dr. John Halamka left that role six months ago after more than two decades – during which time he also became one of the most vocal health information technology champions and visible thought leaders during a pivotal time of IT uptake. Halamka has been traveling the world recently – more than 400,000 miles this year, he says – from Europe to Israel to Africa to China, back to his Sherborn, Massachusetts-based Unity Farm Sanctuary for a quick visit with Dudley, his shaggy Scottish Highland Bull, and then out again to explore the newest global trends in leading-edge digital health. Halamka will keynote the ConVerge2Xcelerate event in Boston on October 15, hosted by Blockchain in Healthcare Today – where he is editor-in-chief – and co-presented as part of the preconference activities of the Connected Health Conference. We caught up with him recently at another Boston event and asked him about what he's seeing on his travels. You were CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess for so long – twenty two years. How has your newish gig, as International Healthcare Innovation Professor, been going? A. That's my academic title, my Harvard Medical School title, and that was three years ago. But the official transition from CIO, a hospital based-title, was March 1, 2019. That's when the merger of Beth Israel and Lahey came together, and the CEO and I talked about: How do you create innovation? So what is next with healthcare innovation?

As part of the Immigrant Entrepreneur Video Interview Series, I go over what it meant to come to US as an immigrant to study for my PhD and found Neurala alongside my colleagues. Given 2/3 of Neurala's founders are immigrant, this is a main character of Neurala as a company. Being born in North Italy from a family of South Italian immigrant, I have been raised with deep familiarity with what it means to live in a place where you are'not from'. Since my early years, I have learned that immigrants start'a little behind the official starting line', whether at school, in job interviews, and in virtually any process or interaction where people are selected based on some personal criteria. This is how the human mind works (perhaps this is material for another post…) – and I have come to terms with it.

An artificial intelligence software platform is able to provide automated real-time screening for quick detection of diabetic retinopathy, without the help of an expert ophthalmologist. The AI platform, called EyeArt from vendor Eyenuk, was used to screen 893 patients with diabetes at 15 different medical locations as part of a new study. Results of the study, which compared EyeArt against experts using the gold standard for visual acuity testing, were presented on Tuesday at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. What researchers found was that the AI platform accurately detected diabetic retinopathy 95.5 percent of the time, using images of patients' undilated pupils. "The system doesn't require the input of an expert ophthalmologist, and it can provide a reading in 60 seconds, making real-time screening possible for primary care practices and diabetes centers," according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Artificial Intelligence has completely changed the marketing for the past few years and also it intends to revolutionize the marketing for the next few years. Email Marketing is one of the best forms of marketing has greatly benefited from artificial intelligence to deliver good business results. With the help of sophisticated AI algorithms, you can build a powerful email marketing campaign that can lead you to higher conversions, better personalization, increased customer satisfaction, and eventually a massive increase in customer retention. The subject line of your emails plays an important role in determining the success of your campaigns. An attractive subject line of interest motivates subscribers to open the email.

With named entity markup capabilities, Qknows is now set to move on fully into deeplearning via @TensorFlow!

Predicting where Ebola might strike next could become easier, thanks to a new computer model. The model tracks how changes in the environment and in human societies could affect the deadly virus's spread. It predicts that Ebola outbreaks could become as much as 60 percent more likely by 2070 if the world continues on a path toward a warmer climate and a cooling economy. Ebola, on average, kills half of all people who contract the virus. In previous outbreaks, the fatality rate has risen to as high as 90 percent.

Through Cotiviti's participation in BPC's AI work, Dr. Rizk will draw on his decades of analytics and leadership expertise to evaluate AI use cases and implications of policy across several areas in healthcare. "By fostering collaboration among providers, payers, policymakers, and other stakeholders, the Bipartisan Policy Center is providing a critical forum for leaders and innovators to work together and support the emergence of AI and other data-driven technologies to improve care," said Dr. Rizk. "BPC's work will provide great insights to help educate and inform federal policymakers on the role of artificial and augmented intelligence in healthcare."