The world's leading drug companies are turning to artificial intelligence to improve the hit-and-miss business of finding new medicines, with GlaxoSmithKline unveiling a new USD 43 million deal in the field on Sunday. Other pharmaceutical giants including Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are also exploring the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help streamline the drug discovery process. The aim is to harness modern supercomputers and machine learning systems to predict how molecules will behave and how likely they are to make a useful drug, thereby saving time and money on unnecessary tests. AI systems already play a central role in other high-tech areas such as the development of driverless cars and facial recognition software. "Many large pharma companies are starting to realise the potential of this approach and how it can help improve efficiencies," said Andrew Hopkins, chief executive of privately owned Exscientia, which announced the new tie-up with GSK. Hopkins, who used to work at Pfizer, said Exscientia's AI system could deliver drug candidates in roughly one-quarter of the time and at one-quarter of the cost of traditional approaches.

A UK hospital did not do enough to protect the privacy of patients when it shared data with Google, the UK's Information Commission (ICO) has ruled. The ICO censured the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust about data handed over during trials of a novel way to detect kidney injuries. Among other failings, the ICO said the hospital did not tell patients enough about the way their data was used. The trust said it would tackle "shortcomings" in its data-handling. Details on about 1.6 million patients was provided to Google's DeepMind division during the early stages of the medical trial last year.

The world's leading drug companies are turning to artificial intelligence to improve the hit-and-miss business of finding new medicines, with GlaxoSmithKline PLC unveiling a new $43-million (U.S.) deal in the field on Sunday. Other pharmaceutical giants including Merck & Co. Inc.,Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are also exploring the potential of artificial intelligence to help streamline the drug discovery process. The aim is to harness modern supercomputers and machine learning systems to predict how molecules will behave and how likely they are to make a useful drug, thereby saving time and money on unnecessary tests. AI systems already play a central role in other high-tech areas such as the development of driverless cars and facial-recognition software. "Many large pharma companies are starting to realize the potential of this approach and how it can help improve efficiencies," said Andrew Hopkins, chief executive of privately owned Exscientia, which announced the new tie-up with GSK. Mr. Hopkins, who used to work at Pfizer, said Exscientia's AI system could deliver drug candidates in roughly one-quarter of the time and at one-quarter of the cost of traditional approaches.

It might resemble something out of Star Wars, but this is the prototype for a combat suit that Russia hopes will give its soldiers the edge on the battlefields of the future. The high-tech item includes an exo-skeleton, or outer layer, designed to boost strength and stamina and a layer of body armour to shield the wearer from bullets. The all-black kit also has a Stormtrooper-style helmet with a tinted glass visor and a mini task light poking out of the side. The high-tech item includes an exo-skeleton, or outer layer, designed to boost strength and stamina. It was put on display on Thursday at the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule that brought supplies to the International Space Station has splashed down as planned in the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX announced on Twitter that the Dragon hit the water off the California coast shortly after 5 a.m. After being released by the space station's robotic arm, the capsule completed a 5½-hour journey back to Earth. SpaceX will recover the spacecraft and take it back to California. Cargo from the space station will be sent to NASA for analysis.

Theresa May's plans for an internet crackdown are like a Chinese dictator, according to her own policy watchdog. The government's plans to fine technology companies if they fail to remove extremist material are a challenge to democracy, according to Max Hill, QC – the new independent reviewer of counterterrorism legislation. The fines are just one part of the Conservatives' wide-ranging plans to regulate and censor the internet, which they claim will help reduce terror. Those plans were laid out in the party's manifesto before the election, and the prime minister has committed to push forward with them despite not winning a majority in the election. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

You don't need to have been victimized by the WannaCry ransomware--or worried about hack attacks on presidential elections--to understand that cybersecurity is the most pressing technology problem of our time and may soon become the biggest problem, period. Fending off the onslaught of attacks is a nearly insurmountable task for security professionals. But it's a perfect job for machines that can parse thousands of logs a second and identify potential threats a human might not even see. That's why artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key weapon in the fight against cyber crooks, rogue hackers, and aggressive nation states. But experts also warn that AI is not a magic fix.

But increasingly, they can do things only humans were able to do. It is now possible to automate tasks that require human perceptual skills, such as recognizing handwriting or identifying faces, and those that require cognitive skills, such as planning, reasoning from partial or uncertain information, and learning. Technologies able to perform tasks such as these, traditionally assumed to require human intelligence, are known as cognitive technologies.1 Want to learn more about cognitive technologies? A product of the field of research known as artificial intelligence, cognitive technologies have been evolving over decades. Businesses are taking a new look at them because some have improved dramatically in recent years, with impressive gains in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, among other areas. Because cognitive technologies extend the power of information technology to tasks traditionally performed by humans, they have the potential to enable organizations to break prevailing tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality. We know this first hand: The authors of this article have been aggressively experimenting with cognitive technologies in our own business and deploying multiple solutions based on them with great effect. And our colleagues are working with numerous clients to apply these technologies to diverse business challenges. Over the next five years we expect the impact of cognitive technologies on organizations to grow substantially.

Stephen Hawking predicted the Earth would turn into a hothouse planet like Venus as a result of President Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate change agreement. In an interview with BBC on Sunday, the Cambridge University professor and physicist said Trump's action could lead to irreversible climate change, pushing "Earth over the brink." "We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible," Hawking told BBC News. "Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees, and raining sulphuric acid." The world's most famous scientist said the best hope of survival for mankind was to live on other planets.

Despite the massively larger size of the Google Home speaker, the winner of "who can actually hear a user" is the Echo Dot, which was able to hear me from farther away and without me having to look at it. After seeing the poor feedback of Watson in Bridge Crew, I decided to take my four digital assistants for a spin. After 21 questions across four assistants, I learned that Alexa cannot give basic information about Amazon Prime videos, none of them can properly understand which movie you're looking for information for, and none of them can actually recommend stuff. Also, Google still needs to learn how to round up. I also learned I'm going to need a bigger set of questions. First, the purpose of this test is to test the assistants on the one skill that is a must-have for a disembodied speaker: Information retrieval and processing. This is not a comprehensive test, but is indicative of the types of questions that one might ask based on conversation, i.e. two or more people are having a conversation and they reach a question that needs an answer. To begin with, I summarise the results, mostly for fun. After that, you can browse what I found the most interesting 40 questions, and the varied (or non-varied) answers offered by each assistant for those. This piece is not intended to be illustrative on who is the "best" assistant.