Details of Google's DeepMind data-sharing agreement with the UK NHS revealed that the AI system would have access to millions of patient records. The agreement, according to the NHS, is for direct clinical use only. Google's deal with the National Health Service (NHS) will allow artificial intelligence units to access as many as 1.6 million private patient records, a new report has revealed. The data-sharing agreement, according to New Scientist, which first unmasked its true nature, would give Google's DeepMind unrestricted access to sensitive data that the Royal Free NHS Trust has. As early as 2014, Google has partnered with several scientists to understand human health.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are capable of learning to identify shapes, so "we're on the right track in developing machines with a visual system and vocabulary as flexible and versatile as ours," say KU Leuven researchers. "For the first time, a dramatic increase in performance has been observed on object and scene categorization tasks, quickly reaching performance levels rivaling humans," they note in an open-access paper in PLOS Computational Biology. Categorization accuracy for models created by three DNNs (CaffeNet, VGG-19, and GoggLeNet) for three types of images (color, grayscaled, silhouette). For each type, mean human performance is indicated by a gray horizontal line, with the gray surrounding band depicting 95% confidence intervals. Error bars (vertical black lines) depict 95% confidence intervals.

April on /r/MachineLearning brings top posts in deep learning video tutorials and books, the TensorFlow Playground, deep conversation centered on an xkcd comic from 2014, Microsoft cognitive APIs, and a meta-conversation on the subreddit's direction. The Google Developer YouTube channel has launched a new video series, titled Machine Learning Recipes. There are 3 videos in the playlist, as of this writing. The series, hosted by Josh Gordon, consists of video topics such as "What Makes a Good Feature?" and "Visualizing a Decision Tree." This link is directly to the first of the videos.

The benefits of machine learning continue to trickle down to smartphones and gadgets, and chipmaker Qualcomm wants to help speed up the process. The company is launching a new software development kit for its "machine intelligence platform" Zeroth. This SDK will make it easier for companies to run deep learning programs directly on devices like smartphones and drones -- if they're powered by one of Qualcomm's chips, of course. Right now, you're probably using all sorts of deep learning programs you don't know about. Companies like Google and Facebook use this sort of software for things like image and voice recognition, but usually, this process happens in the cloud, with the results beamed to your phone.

The vendor's Neural Processing Engine SDK will run on smartphones and other devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 SoCs.

Qualcomm announced the deep learning software development kit (SDK) for the company's Snapdragon 820 SoC. Qualcomm's deep learning SDK is called the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, and it's powered by the company's Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform, with optimizations designed to take advantage of the heterogeneous compute capabilities of the Snapdragon SoC. Among other things, it may be able to more effectively block malware on mobile devices. Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK will give developers a "powerful, energy efficient platform" that will help them create mobile neural network tools that can be used for scene detection, text recognition, natural language processing and more. The idea is that OEMs can run their own neural network applications locally, on-device, and don't have to communicate with the cloud.

Elon Musk's AI research group has opened a "gym" for robots, to ensure that they can be properly tested. The new project is an attempt to bring together training for artificially intelligent machines, allowing them to be fairly compared with each other – and avoid any problem results. The gym has been launched as the first project from OpenAI, a research group that is funded by backers including Mr Musk as well as a range of other tech leaders. The project launched in December and aims to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return". Boston Dynamics describes itself as'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'.

Question answering has recieved more focus as large search engines have basically mastered general information retrieval and are starting to cover more edge cases. Question answering happens to be one of those edge cases, because it could involve a lot of syntatic nuance that doesn't get captured by standard information retrieval models, like LDA or LSI. Hypothetically, deep learning models would be better suited to this type of task because of their ability to capture higher-order syntax. Two papers, "Applying deep learning to answer selection: a study and an open task" (Feng et. Personally, I am a lot lazier than them, and I don't understand CNNs very well, so I would like to use an existing framework to build one of their models to see if I could get similar results. Keras is a really popular one that has support for everything we might need to put the model together. The Github repository for this project can be found here. See the instructions here on how to install Keras.

Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced at the Embedded Vision Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. The SDK, called the Qualcomm Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, is powered by the Qualcomm Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform and is optimized to utilize Snapdragon's heterogeneous compute capabilities to provide OEMs a powerful, energy efficient platform for delivering intuitive and engaging deep learning-driven experiences on device. This SDK is the latest software addition to Snapdragon 820 and demonstrates Qualcomm Technologies' continued leadership by adding value for our customers to the Snapdragon portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, with the introduction of the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, is the first mobile SOC provider to offer a deep learning toolkit optimized for mobile. This SDK will allow OEMs to run their own neural network models on Snapdragon 820 devices such as smart phones, security cameras, automobiles and drones, all without a connection to the cloud.