Google has been given access to huge swatches of confidential patient information in the UK, raising fears yet again over how NHS managers view and handle data under their control. In an agreement uncovered by the New Scientist, Google and its DeepMind artificial intelligence wing have been granted access to current and historic patient data at three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, covering 1.6 million individuals. That would include any chronic illness people may be suffering from and the circumstances over why they were admitted – for example, if they have suffered a drug overdose. The agreement provides Google with access to data going back five years and is far more expansive than expected. Google and DeepMind previously said they were working with the NHS on a product called "Streams" that would "present timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury." The agreement however provides access to all patient data, covering issues far beyond just kidney functioning.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has written his first "Founder's Letter" that talks about his future vision of the company's future. He said that the company is working towards creating a smart assistant that can follow you anywhere. Talking about Search, Pichai said that is the "very core of the company". It's easy to take Search for granted after so many years, but it's amazing to think just how far it has come and still has to go. I still remember the days when 10 bare blue links on a desktop page helped you navigate to different parts of the Internet.

Tom Goodwin is senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media. We've fallen in love with apps. It's hard to see something so popular fading into the past, but what if that happened? What if apps were simply an iteration of the mobile web, before something better came along? With the flurry of announcements that occurred around Facebook's F8 conference, perhaps that time has finally come.

Ph.D. student Mikhail Jacob demonstrates the technology by dancing with a virtual character. A new project from the Georgia Institute of Technology allows people to get jiggy with a computer-controlled dancer, which "watches" the person and improvises its own moves based on prior experiences. When the human responds, the computerized figure or "virtual character" reacts again, creating an impromptu dance couple based on artificial intelligence (AI). The LuminAI project is housed inside a 15-foot-tall geodesic dome, designed and constructed by Georgia Tech digital media master's student Jessica Anderson, and lined with custom-made projection panels for dome projection mapping. The surfaces allow people to watch their own shadowy avatar as it struts with a virtual character named VAI, which learns how to dance by paying attention to which moves the current user (and everyone before them) is doing and when.

Machine learning-powered artificial intelligence will match and exceed human capabilities in the areas of computer vision and speech recognition within five to 10 years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted this week. Like most of the Web giants, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) uses machine learning technology to leverage its massive data set and deliver better services to its customers. Algorithms work behind the scenes at Facebook to do things like recommend new connections to Facebook users, to present content that matches a user's interest, and to block spam. But the company is starting to use machine learning is more advanced ways, such as for facial recognition on pictures posted to the site. After identifying a person in a photo, the new Moments app can even recommend to a user that she share it with that person.

Taking a break from the tradition where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin shared the company's progress and vision every year, this time it was Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai who updated the world with some of Google's achievements and key highlights. In a letter posted on official Google blog on Friday, Pichai reiterated "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Touching upon artificial intelligence (AI), powerful computing platforms and cloud, he stressed that mobile phone has become the remote control for daily lives and people are communicating, consuming, educating and entertaining themselves on smartphones "in ways unimaginable just a few years ago". "Search -- the very core of Google, comes from mobile and an increasing number of them via voice. The company made this easy and via Google Now, user can get information like the weather in your upcoming vacation spot," he posted.

The platform is called Mana and aims to drive automation and bring in innovation amongst businesses, the company said at its annual conference in San Fracisco. Mana, with the Infosys Aikido service offerings, lowers the cost of maintenance for both physical and digital assets; captures the knowledge and know-how of people in an organisation; simplifies core business processes and enables businesses to bring new user experiences leveraging technology, the company said in a statement. "We can automate the repetitive, mechanisable tasks; we can capture the knowledge and know-how across people and long-lived systems and bring this knowledge back inside the systems to drive more value; and in doing these things we can free people to put all of our creativity, passion, and imagination into thinking about the bigger opportunities ahead of us," he added. This initiative will be to simplify and automate migration of systems to Microsoft's products, to accelerate Microsoft Azure-based and other digital transformations for clients.

Infosys has launched a machine learning platform and strengthened its partnerships with Microsoft. The platform is called Mana and aims to drive automation and bring in innovation amongst businesses, the company said at its annual conference in San Fracisco. Mana, with the Infosys Aikido service offerings, lowers the cost of maintenance for both physical and digital assets; captures the knowledge and know-how of people in an organisation; simplifies core business processes and enables businesses to bring new user experiences leveraging technology, the company said in a statement. Addressing the gathering, Vishal Sikka, CEO & Managing Director, Infosys, said that purposeful AI is about leveraging technology to amplify people. "We can automate the repetitive, mechanisable tasks; we can capture the knowledge and know-how across people and long-lived systems and bring this knowledge back inside the systems to drive more value; and in doing these things we can free people to put all of our creativity, passion, and imagination into thinking about the bigger opportunities ahead of us," he added.

Disclaimer: This post is a bit cynical in tone. In all honesty, I support deep learning research, I support the findings, and I believe that by researching deep learning we can only further improve our classification approaches and develop better methods. We all know that research is iterative. And sometimes we even explore methods decades old, applying only a slightly different twist, yielding significantly different results -- and thus a new research area is born. That's the way machine learning research works, as it should.

Have you ever thought about how you could master the hot topic of machine learning? "If people new how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all" – Michelangelo I was inspired to write this article after reading the book "Mastery" by Robert Greene. It has to be one of my favorite books now and has taught me many things about the people who achieve mastery of their craft/area within their lifetimes such as Mozart, Faraday and Darwin. Many would say you can't become a master of its ever-changing nature. You don't see a guitar changing its amount of strings every few years, but I still don't think it is impossible to master a topic like this since even though it has been around for a while, advancements in it have been slow up until now.