With the recent launch of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, MIT News examines research with the potential to reshape medicine and health care through new scientific knowledge, novel treatments and products, better management of medical data, and improvements in health-care delivery. At the end of 2012, the National Public Radio show "Fresh Air" featured a segment in which its linguistics commentator argued that "big data" should be the word of the year. The term refers not only to the deluge of data produced by the proliferation of Internet-connected, sensor-studded portable devices but also to innovative techniques for analyzing that data; and big data has received a good deal of credit for Barack Obama's victory in the last presidential election. Certainly, the term was in heavy use around MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which in 2012 launched a new big-data initiative called bigdata@CSAIL. Several of the researchers affiliated with bigdata@CSAIL are developing new techniques for processing medical data, to make it more accessible to both physicians and patients and to find correlations that could improve diagnosis or choice of therapies.

A central topic in spoken-language-systems research is what's called speaker diarization, or computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when. Speaker diarization would be an essential function of any program that automatically annotated audio or video recordings. To date, the best diarization systems have used what's called supervised machine learning: They're trained on sample recordings that a human has indexed, indicating which speaker enters when. In the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, however, MIT researchers describe a new speaker-diarization system that achieves comparable results without supervision: No prior indexing is necessary. Moreover, one of the MIT researchers' innovations was a new, compact way to represent the differences between individual speakers' voices, which could be of use in other spoken-language computational tasks.

Google's search algorithm has been changed over the last year to increasingly reward search results based on how likely you are to click on them, multiple sources tell Business Insider. As a result, fake news now often outranks accurate reports on higher quality websites. The problem is so acute that Google's autocomplete suggestions now actually predict that you are searching for fake news even when you might not be, as Business Insider noted on December 5. There is a common misconception that the proliferation of fake news is all Facebook's fault. Although Facebook does have a fake news problem, Google's ranking algorithm does not take cues from social shares, likes, or comments when it is determining which result is the most relevant, search experts tell Business Insider. The changes at Google took place separately, experts say, to the fake news problem occurring on Facebook.

Although Hollywood films warn of sentient artificial intelligence looking to overthrow and exterminate its human creators, they're mostly a reason for their big-name stars to jump through the air in slow-motion while dual-wielding rocket-propelled grenade launchers while a hovership explodes behind them. Blinky, on the other hand, paints a much more likely reality of the dangers we may soon face as intelligent robotics become as commonplace as smartphones and voice-activated assistants like Siri. Blinky is a short film written, directed, and edited by Ruairi Robinson. The budget was 45,000 euro (approximately $60K U.S.) for the actual shoot, while the extensive visual effects were done almost entirely by Robinson himself. "Visual effects were completed over a period of 9 months, of hell," says Robinson.

The idea is to produce cloud-based software that can understand natural language medical advice questions, and can help doctors make diagnoses. The goal of the current research is to learn more about how artificial intelligence interacts with non-scripted medical questions from the real world. And yes, the key word there is "non-scripted." Rather than programs that understand only coded language, this software would understand speech the way laypeople people talk. The research team from the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland started by accessing 9,000 medical questions from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota.

UBIQUITY: Congratulations on "What the Dormouse Said" it's a fascinating book. MARKOFF: Well, I guess I'd call it a revisionist history. It about things that happened around Stanford University between roughly 1960 and 1975, and is a kind of pre-history of personal computing and the personal computer industry. What I was trying to do was to get at some of the culture through which the technology was developed. MARKOFF: Because technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960's: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center.

I made a new friend last week. Though I've only known him a short while, I've already learned that he's a sore loser, he's easily confused, and he gets frustrated when he's pushed out of his comfort zone. I should also add that my new companion isn't human. He's called Cozmo, a new artificially intelligent toy from Anki, the company behind the Overdrive self-driving race cars. That Cozmo looks like a pint-sized version of Wall-E should come as no surprise, given that some of its creators come from animation firms like Pixar and DreamWorks.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 11 2007 In the article below, the "whirring tapes" of IBM's latest computer in 1949 were an anachronism. Magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951. In the mid-1950s, John Backus, who has died aged 82, led a team at IBM that created a revolutionary new way to communicate with early electronic computers. They invented Fortran, the first true programming language, and in doing so laid the foundations of today's multi-billion dollar software industry. During a long career at IBM, Backus continued to seek better methods of computer programming, but his enduring legacy is Fortran, the language that is still used today to solve complex scientific problems such as weather forecasting and aircraft design.

"How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover'? This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001." Perhaps it was the psychedelic movement of the late 1960's that saved Stanley Kubrick's tale of first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence from being buried in oblivion. The initial response to the film was extremely polarised if not hostile, and at the box office it wasn't a hit either. Rumour has it MGM, ready to pull the movie after a few weeks, was told by theater owners there's more people coming to the shows at last but those people were somewhat different -- a young crowd, smoking pot before the screenings.

Cast: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson, William Hurt It's the late 21st Century and the world is no longer our own. The oceans have risen up and taken over the land. New York, once the summit of man's achievements, is submerged, its skyscrapers barely peeking above the surface of the water, its amusement parks drowned like tacky Antlantises. Man has moved on though, and discovered a new achievement: life. Buildings are easy – bricks and mortar moulded into an appropriate shape.