GE Healthcare and the corporate parent of two of Harvard University's teaching hospitals will spend the next ten years working on ways to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to every aspect of a hospital visit, the companies announced today. The Center for Clinical Data Science will include teams from both companies and will develop, test and deploy AI software at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Boston Globe reported. GE, which moved its corporate headquarters to Boston last year, is working to transform itself from an industrial company to one that develops software that powers equipment from MRI machines to jet engines, among other innovations, the article noted. AI -- sometimes called deep learning technology -- refers to computers that can sift through vast amounts of data and learn to become more accurate and efficient over time. Executives from GE, one of the nation's largest corporations, and Partners Healthcare (which owns MGH and Brigham and Women's Hospital), said integrating the technology into healthcare could help patients receive better care.

Last month, I discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) and "deep learning" algorithms could have a profound impact on the practice of medicine. This month, I'd like to cover three questions that patients, doctors, and policymakers might wish to ask as we approach the era of AI-guided health care. One of the potential promises of AI in medicine is the ability to comb through thousands (or millions) of patient records to detect clinically significant patterns not yet discovered by human researchers. A UK study showed AIs could more reliably predict who might be at risk for future heart attacks and strokes than models based on the best human guidelines from the American Heart Association. The AI project "Deep Patient" showed similar promise in predicting who might develop "severe diabetes, schizophrenia, and various cancers."

It's man vs machine this week as Google's artificial intelligence programme AlphaGo faces the world's top-ranked Go player in a contest expected to end in another victory for the machine. Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo took on the Chinese world number one of the ancient board game today in the first of three planned games, beating its human opponent by a narrow margin. It is the second time the AI has gone head-to-head with a master Go player in a public showdown, after stunning the world last year by trouncing South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol four games to one. Google's artificial intelligence programme AlphaGo (right screen) will face the world's top-ranked Go player, China's 19-year-old Ke Jie (left), in a contest expected to end in another victory for rapid advances in AI. AlphaGo, part of Google's DeepMind project, competed against Ke Jie, currently ranked as the top player in the world, at an event held in the eastern Chinese water town of Wuzhen.

The world's best player of what might be humankind's most complicated board game was defeated on Tuesday by a Google computer program. Adding insult to potentially deep existential injury, he was defeated at Go -- a game that claims centuries of play by humans -- in China, where the game was invented. The human contender, a 19-year-old Chinese national named Ke Jie, and the computer still have two more matches to play this week. And the matchup does little to prove that software can mollify an angry co-worker, write a decent poem, raise a well-adjusted child or perform any number of mundane yet distinctly human tasks. But the victory by software called AlphaGo showed yet another way that computers can be developed to perform better than humans in highly complex tasks, and it offered a glimpse of the promise of new technologies that mimic the way the brain functions.

In March last year, Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence completed an historic victory. Its AlphaGo system beat world Go champion Lee Sedol in a five-game contest of the famously complex board game. Not content with defeating one of the world's best players four games to one, in one of the most challenging board games to exist, the firm can now add another victory to its tally. Ke, who has been the top-ranked Go player for the past two years claimed last year he would never lose to a "cold machine." The night before the event, Ke wrote on Weibo that "the advancement of AI has far exceeded our imagination" but added he would never play it again after this week and said he "cannot feel its passion and longing for the game of Go".

Google's AI AlphaGo has done it again: it's defeated Ke Jie, the world's number one Go player, in the first game of a three-part match. And its defeat of Ke shows that it was only getting started. "I think everyone recognises that Ke Jie is the strongest human player," 9th-dan professional and commentator Michael Redmond said before the match. And despite defeat, Ke's strategy suggested that the 19-year-old Chinese prodigy has actually learned from AlphaGo's often unorthodox approach. "This is Master's move," said Redmond of one of Ke's earliest plays, referring to the pseudonym that AlphaGo used for a recent series of online matches in which it racked up a 60-game winning streak.

Google's AI star, AlphaGo, wins again. It bested Ke Jie, the world's best Go player, by just half a point -- the closest margin possible. After the match, Google's DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis explained that this was how AlphaGo was programmed: to maximise its winning chances, rather than the winning margin. This latest iteration of the AI player, nicknamed Master, apparently uses 10 times less computational power than its predecessor that beat Lee Sedol, working from a single PC connected to Google's cloud server. We've embedded the entire match here, but for those not completely up to speed with Go, the AI player picked up a 10-15 point lead early on, which limited the possibilities for Jie to respond.

Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, machine learning -- whatever you're doing if you don't understand it -- learn it. Because otherwise you're going to be a dinosaur within 3 years. This statement from Mark Cuban might sound drastic – but its message is spot on! We are in middle of a revolution – a revolution caused by Big Huge data and a ton of computational power. For a minute, think how a person would feel in early 20th century if he / she did not understand electricity. You would have been used to doing things in a particular manner for ages and all of a sudden things around you started changing.

Distilling a generally-accepted definition of what qualifies as artificial intelligence (AI) has become a revived topic of debate in recent times. Some have rebranded AI as "cognitive computing" or "machine intelligence", while others incorrectly interchange AI with "machine learning". This is in part because AI is not one technology. It is in fact a broad field constituted of many disciplines, ranging from robotics to machine learning. The ultimate goal of AI, most of us affirm, is to build machines capable of performing tasks and cognitive functions that are otherwise only within the scope of human intelligence.

In the first game of his match with AlphaGo--the Go-playing machine built by researchers at Google's DeepMind lab--Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie opened with a move lifted straight from the arsenal of this artificially intelligent machine. He aimed to beat AlphaGo with its own unusual style of play. But the ploy didn't quite work as the 19-year-old grandmaster planned. After a four hours and fifteen minutes of play, Ke Jie resigned, and AlphaGo grabbed a 1-0 lead in this best-of-three match. Last year, in South Korea, AlphaGo topped the Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, becoming the first machine to beat a professional Go player--a feat that most AI researchers believed was still years away, given the extreme complexity of the ancient Eastern game. Now, AlphaGo is challenging Ke Jie, the current world number one, and according to Demis Hassabis, the CEO and founder of DeepMind, the machine is underpinned by a new and more powerful architecture suited to not just to Go but a wide range of real-world applications.