So the data deal between Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and DeepMind "failed to comply with" the law. So says the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK regulator charged with upholding data protection rules. The deal, the ICO said, erred in several ways. Royal Free should have notified its patients before handing their data to DeepMind, giving them a chance to opt out.

A British hospital trust misused patient data when it shared information with Google for work on a smartphone app, a British data protection watchdog said on Monday. The Royal Free NHS Trust did not comply with the Data Protection Act when it passed on personal information of around 1.6 million patients to Google's DeepMind. DeepMind, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is the company's artificial intelligence and machine learning branch. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it found'a number of shortcomings' in the way the data was handled, including that patients were not adequately informed their data would be used as part of the test. A British hospital trust misused patient data when it shared information with Google's DeepMind for work on a smartphone app, a British data protection watchdog has found.

A British regulatory organization has found that the National Health Service violated data privacy laws when it shared patient records with Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence startup. In a statement announcing its findings, the Information Commissioner's Office said the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust did not comply with the Data Protection Act when it provided partial records for more than 1.6 million patients to DeepMind. The data was originally provided to help bolster DeepMind's Streams app and improve detection of acute kidney injury and other medical problems. However, the Information Commissioner's Office found that the Foundation Trust should have taken additional measures to inform patients about the data use. In its release, commissioner Elizabeth Denham said Streams and DeepMind's work had clear benefits, but the Trust should have been clearer about the amount of data it needed and the reasons it wanted patient data.

An NHS Trust broke the law by sharing sensitive patient records with Google's DeepMind division, the UK's data watchdog has ruled. The long-awaited decision falls in line with the conclusion drawn by Dame Fiona Caldicott, the UK's National Data Guardian in May. The pair's agreement "failed to comply" with the Data Protection Act 1998, according to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), because patients weren't informed that their information was being used. The ICO also took issue with the size of the dataset -- 1.6 million partial patient records -- leveraged by DeepMind to test Streams, an app for detecting acute kidney injury. In April 2016, New Scientist revealed that DeepMind and Royal Free London NHS Trust were working together on a medical project. As the ICO notes in its letter to the Trust, their agreement was actually formalised in September 2015, with Royal Free serving as the data controller (owner) and DeepMind as the data processor (partner).

We believe that Artificial Intelligence will be one of the most important and widely beneficial scientific advances ever made, helping humanity tackle some of its greatest challenges, from climate change to delivering advanced healthcare. But for AI to deliver on this promise, we know that the technology must be built in a responsible manner and that we must consider all potential challenges and risks. That is why DeepMind co-founded initiatives like the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society and why we have a team dedicated to technical AI Safety. Research in this field needs to be open and collaborative to ensure that best practices are adopted as widely as possible, which is why we are also collaborating with OpenAI on research in technical AI Safety. One of the central questions in this field is how we allow humans to tell a system what we want it to do and - importantly - what we don't want it to do.

DeepMind's AlphaGo artificial intelligence shut out the world's best Go player, 19-year-old Ke Jie, ending their series at 3-0 in late May. Shortly afterward, the Google-owned company announced that AlphaGo was retiring from active competition, having beaten the very best around. It makes sense for AlphaGo to bow out while it's ahead. But by digging deeper into this decision, and looking at historical context, we can see where DeepMind plans to head next. And the future looks very healthy indeed.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming entire industries because of higher performance and faster time to market. Part of the success is due to researchers creating and open sourcing datasets, frameworks, and algorithms (e.g., ImageNet, Caffe). Current leaders are following suit by opening up their own developments (e.g., DeepMind Lab and Sonnet, OpenAI Gym and Universe). Despite this generosity, operating and developing on these components still requires large amounts of expertise, vast computational resources, and lots of money to obtain and maintain. Jack Clark of OpenAI believes that this situation seems to benefit large-scale cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) subsidiary Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind Health has signed an agreement with a hospital that is part of the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) network to deploy Streams, an app that monitors critical indicators of a patient's health and alerts doctors. This is the second such deal signed by DeepMind this year. Earlier, the company signed a similar agreement for patient data with three hospitals that operate under the NHS umbrella. As part of the agreements, DeepMind receives access to important patient data and medical histories. News reports have alleged that DeepMind obtained the data without explicit consent from the affected patients.

DeepMind's Streams app will help diagnose kidney disorders in patients. Google's DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence firm behind the human-besting AlphaGo software, launched a healthcare platform in partnership with the U.K.'s Moorfields Eye Hospital and Royal Free London in 2015. Since then, it applied computer smarts to eye diagnoses, cancer screening, and electronic patient record management. On Wednesday, DeepMind broadened its efforts to Musgrove Park Hospital. Starting this month, doctors and nurses at Musgrove Park will get DeepMind's Streams app for iPhone, which helps spot early signs of acute kidney injury. DeepMind stresses that it is intended to aid, not replace, practitioners -- the app will allow clinical staff to view "results of X-rays, scans or blood tests, in one place at the touch of a button."

Abstract: We are increasingly surrounded by artificially intelligent technology that takes decisions and executes actions on our behalf. This creates a pressing need for general means to communicate with, instruct and guide artificial agents, with human language the most compelling means for such communication. To achieve this in a scalable fashion, agents must be able to relate language to the world and to actions; that is, their understanding of language must be grounded and embodied. However, learning grounded language is a notoriously challenging problem in artificial intelligence research. Here we present an agent that learns to interpret language in a simulated 3D environment where it is rewarded for the successful execution of written instructions.