After the US election, many people feel we're on the verge of an apocalypse. What might not be obvious is that it's an artificial intelligence apocalypse, like the ones in The Terminator and The Matrix. The fact is the machines have taken over, enslaved us, and may now destroy us. Here's what an AI apocalypse looks like in broad brushstrokes: Unfortunately, the unintended consequence is the downfall of humanity. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard reports that nearly half of all Americans get their news from Facebook.

Computers could not only act like brains, but respond as quickly.

DeepMind Health's inaugural collaboration with the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS), initially focused on building an app for helping early detection of Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), was relaunched earlier today -- under a new information-sharing agreement with the Royal Free NHS Trust, and a broader scope for the collaboration. Under the arrangement, patient identifiable data (PID, aka people's medical records) continues to be shared across a wide range of data types for some 1.6 million individuals who are being treated or have been treated at the Royal Free's three London hospitals (five years of historical in-patient data is also made accessible under the arrangement). The types of data being shared under ISA 1 and 2 (aka the legal contracts that set out how the data can be used) are described as "similar" by DeepMind -- and a spokesman confirmed that patient data shared under the original arrangement has therefore not been deleted (given that they view it as a continuation of the same arrangement). The relevant section of ISA 2, detailing the data types being shared, can be found at the bottom of this post. There are some notable additions to the project at this point -- such as a plan to create a technical audit infrastructure to track and log individual access to patient data, and an explicit commitment in the ISA that Google will not use the PID for any other purpose, nor combine it with other data, nor sell data to third parties.

Just Eat, the world's leading marketplace for online food delivery, today gave a sneak peek into the future, bringing together exciting technologies in the fields of Virtual and Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, self-driving delivery robots and other innovations aimed at transforming how people discover, order and enjoy food. At an event in the Village Underground in Shoreditch, London titled "The Future Now – Redefining Food Discovery", Just Eat showcased the future of online food technology. Just Eat's dedicated product development team provided guests with a hands-on experience of the innovations that will help improve food experiences for both customers and restaurants in the decades to come. David Buttress, chief executive of Just Eat, said: "Technology is at the heart of everything we do at Just Eat. We are always seeking ways to help our restaurant partners grow and ensure new and existing customers have a reliable, convenient and, increasingly, fun experience when they order from us. Technology innovation helps us bring the greatest breadth of choice to consumers while giving our fantastic restaurant partners the tools and resources to further their own ambitions."

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, announced yesterday that the MXNet deep learning framework would become "[Amazon's] deep learning framework of choice." Amazon Web Services is expected to announce a new version of its PostgreSQL database for its cloud customers during its AWS re:Invent conference next week, according to a Fortune report. Democratizing Machine Learning has always been BigML's founding mission, so we are continually searching for new opportunities. As such, when a company is interested in our technology and is willing to help us further our cause of "Machine Learning for everyone", we feel the urge to collaborate. This is exactly what happened with our new education partner.

First of all it might be useful to explain what OpenAI Gym actually does: OpenAI Gym aims to provide an easy environment to develop and test reinforcement learning algorithms. To be clear, OpenAI Gym doesn't power any algorithms itself, leaving it up to more specialised packages like TensorFlow or Theano. So what makes this the ultimate geek toy for AI-researchers? Well, this is because of the many environments OpenAI Gym provides, one of them being the'atari' environment. That's right, you can test the performance of your reinforcement learning algorithms on a variety of different atari games and what's more, you can automatically upload the performance of your algorithms and compare them to other people's approaches.

Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a Salt Lake City, UT-based drug discovery company, closed an additional $2.15M in Series A funding. The additional funding, which brought the total amount raised in the round to $15.05M, came from several individual investors and Felicis Ventures. They joined Lux Capital, Obvious Ventures, Epic Ventures, Data Collective, AME Cloud Ventures, Wild Basin Investments, and other angel investors. The company intends to use the funds to extend its drug and target discovery technology into new indication areas, such as aging, inflammation, infectious disease, oncology and diagnostics. Led by Chris Gibson, Ph.D., CEO, Recursion uses a novel drug screening platform which combines experimental biology and bioinformatics to identify treatments for multiple rare genetic diseases.

'Data is not about insights, it's about generating money,' says Rubikloud's chief product officer Ever since the financial crash of 2008, businesses around the world have struggled to grow at the same levels they once enjoyed – but big data and machine learning could help turn things around, and help companies reconnect with customers. "The reality now is this plateaued, zero-growth type of world, where you're in the 0.5-1 per cent [range]," Ayoub said, speaking at WIRED Retail 2016. There's a lot of companies that do more small scale retail that are seeing enormous amounts of growth but in general, this is the kind of climate we're living in." Ayoub isn't concerned so much with why this is happening, but rather how retailers are reacting to the change. One way businesses have tried to keep their costs down is by consolidating, then leveraging greater purchasing power to buy stock at lower prices. "Big fish buy big fish, then bigger fish buy them," said Ayoub. "That allows them to pressure vendors to push down prices.

Network Mind facilitates the management of millions of network elements with millisecond response time and automatic adaptation and optimization based on service changes. Network Mind is therefore capable of helping telecom operators and enterprises achieve differentiated, self-adaptive control of complex services in ultra-large networks. The amount of network elements, data traffic, and types of service in communication networks is soaring as new technologies continue to emerge, including 5G, the Internet of Things, Software-Defined Networking, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. This results in a level of network complexity that is impossible to manually control through defined rules. How automatic modeling can be used to realize intelligent network control and management is a major topic of study at many research institutions.

IBM recently announced an experimental new platform called Project Intu, which will allow the Internet of Things (IoT) and other developers to embed IBM Watson functionality into their devices. The experimental release hopes to see developers create new form factors for Watson's speech, language, vision and empathy capabilities. Project Intu is platform-agnostic and can run on many operating systems, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi and more. It aims to provide developers with a ready-made environment to build cognitive experiences, allowing for simplified integration of Watson services such as conversation, language and visual recognition. IBM offers the following example of what a developer can do with Project Intu: "Instead of needing to program each individual movement of a device or avatar, Project Intu makes it easy to combine movements that are appropriate for performing specific tasks, like assisting a customer in a retail setting or greeting a visitor in a hotel in a way that is natural for the end user."