Technology that can mine the clinical patient data that already exists is finally available - now is the time to speculate to accumulate. The intersection of technology and health has thrown up almost as many questions as it has solutions. "Innovation through collaboration: Bringing disruption to the patient" was the title of the recent Financial Times Digital Health Summit Europe, which took place in London in June. Speaking at the event was ICON's Chief Information Officer, Tom O'Leary. Since its inception in 1990, ICON has been offering a range of drug development services to the pharmaceutical industry, running clinical trials worldwide across all therapeutic areas, diseases, and indications, on behalf of pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies.

There is a need for a new global platform to monitor, consider, and make recommendations about the implications of emerging technologies in general, and AI more specifically, for international security. The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish – like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies – it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then – don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way?

To both kick off and maintain relationships and also spark ideas I've found Charlie App to be useful, it does a lot of the googling for you if you are doing some research on a contact. My brother, Tristan, and our little sister's boyfriend, Will, and I set up our own company, Howdy Hub, to help build powerful connections. LinkedIn is a remarkable vault of human professional interconnectivity but it tends towards making a link only after a physical meeting. We complement LinkedIn to allow people to discover others around them at meetups and conferences or when joining a new community. Howdy is developing artificial intelligence to recommend who is a match for your professional needs.

Machine Learning is a very hot topic these days. Getting started can be fast and easy. In this video post, I walk through the steps to build a simple Universal Windows Application (UWP) that connects to the Microsoft Cognitive Services and the Emotion API. The Microsoft Cognitive Services are a set of APIs that enable your apps to leverage powerful algorithms using just a few lines of code. They work across lots of various devices and platforms such as iOS, Android, and Windows, keep improving and are easy to set up.

Turi, formerly Dato, today released the newest version of its GraphLab Create platform and several other features designed to make it easier to add machine learning features to applications. The new version of GraphLab Create includes a toolkit that allows sales, marketing and other teams to predict which potential clients are likely to take an action like subscribing to a service. The GraphLab update also includes a new object detection toolkit and a way to explore and evaluate models without writing more code. "Not everyone is comfortable putting a predictive model into production, not even data scientists," Carlos Guestrin, CEO of Turi, said in a statement. "Today we're addressing the need for trustworthy machine learning with new'views' that let our customers visualize the performance of their models before they're deployed."

On the vertical I've put the major categories of data along with the NoSQL DB types that most commonly corresponds, and on the horizontal an indication of whether the insights gained from this ML type are specific or simply directional.

Machine learning (ML) is getting a lot of attention at the moment. This is partly because a slew of new companies are emerging which are using it in innovative ways. And partly because it can get easily subsumed into the fuss and furore about AI and the rise of evil robot intelligence. Graph technology, on the other hand, is something which takes more of a back seat and yet, in a lot of ways, also sits at the forefront of the big data and analytics movement. "We firmly believe is that it's at the intersection of machine learning and graph technology where the next evolution lies and where new disruptive companies are emerging," says Ash Damle, Founder and CEO at Lumiata which helps healthcare organisations makes predictions.

Computer-aided algorithms are helping pathologists more efficiently and accurately identify cancer stages to deliver targeted treatment. Jacksonville-based advanced data analytics and machine learning solutions company NLP Logix continues to lead the way in the emerging field of computer vision, receiving recognition as the only United States team to deliver a top-winning solution in an international competition to develop a machine learning model that can help identify and treat cancer cells by stage level. NLP Logix recently earned a top-three finish position in the HER2 Challenge, an academic research competition sponsored by the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science. More than 100 data science teams worldwide competed in the challenge which asked applicants to create algorithms to automate "scoring" of large-file images of stained slides of breast cancer cells based on the aggressiveness of the cancer. The method is used to detect the presence of the gene for HER2, a transmembrane growth factor receptor which is found in about 20 percent of cases of invasive cancer.

Modern technology creates fantastic opportunities. It provides more space to do more interesting and exciting things with less time on tasks that are routine and repetitive. Sure, it poses a challenge for all of us to be relevant, but wasn't that true at any point in history? Or rather... what has changed already? It is a popular statement that now every firm is a software company.

FiveAI is a rather ambitious U.K. startup that's building AI-driven software to help accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles. The young company wants to apply the latest developments in computer vision and AI/machine learning to enable self-driving cars to do more of the heavy-lifting in regards to understanding and navigating their immediate environment. To enable FiveAI to continue building out its autonomous vehicle software stack and grow its team of AI/machine learning and other software engineers, the startup has raised 2.7 million in funding. The round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners with participation from Spring Partners and Notion Capital. Specifically, FiveAI wants to use AI/machine learning and computer vision to remove the need for highly detailed "prior 3D mapping" of environments, which I'm told is the predominant method used in autonomous vehicle navigation.