Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence team, alongside researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has trained AI machines to interact with objects in order to evaluate their properties without any prior awareness of physical laws. The research project drew inspiration from child development and sought to train AI to mirror human capacity to interact with physical objects and infer properties such as mass, friction, and malleability. The study, entitled Learning to perform physics experiments via deep reinforcement learning, explained that while recent advances in AI have achieved'superhuman performance' in complex control problems and other processing tasks, the machines still lack a common sense understanding of our physical world – 'it is not clear that these systems can rival the scientific intuition of even a young child.' Lead researcher Misha Denil and his team set about various trials in different virtual environments in which the AI was faced with a series of blocks and tasked with assessing their properties. In the first simulation, called Which is Heavier, the AI was given a set of four blocks which were the same size but varied in mass.

Microsoft is furthering its mission to democratize artificial intelligence. The company is teaming up with the AI research organization OpenAI to advance the acceleration of the technology. "We've made major strides in artificial intelligence just in the past five years, achieving milestones many people who have devoted their lives to the field wouldn't have thought possible," wrote Harry Shum executive vice president of Microsoft's artificial intelligence and research group, in a post. "Now we have the opportunity to help our partners and customers use these breakthroughs to achieve their goals." OpenAI will utilize Microsoft's Azure cloud service to conduct its large-scale AI and deep learning experiments.

For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet -- dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like -- in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing. In recent years, though, our species has created new forms of intelligence, able to outperform us in other ways. One of the most famous of these forms of artificial intelligence(A.I.) is AlphaGo, developed by Deepmind. In just a few years, it has learned to play the 4,000-year-old strategy game, Go, beating two of the world's strongest players. Other software developed by Deepmind has learned to play classic eight-bit video games, notably Breakout, in which players must use a bat to hit a ball at a wall, knocking bricks out of it.

A London hospital trust has entered a partnership with an artificial intelligence (AI) company to develop new digital solutions for healthcare, with the first step being the launch of a mobile clinical application for detecting acute kidney injury (AKI). The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust has announced a five-year deal with DeepMind, which became established as one of the leaders in the field when it was acquired by Google in 2014. It follows on from a year-long partnership between the two organisations, in which they have developed the Streams app, which processes new and historic patient data to support clinicians in making diagnoses. It has now been registered with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and will be deployed to the foundation's clinicians from early next year. David Sloman, chief executive of the Royal Free London, said: "We are hugely excited by the opportunity this partnership presents to patients and staff.

DeepMind, Google's UK-based AI subsidiary, has signed a new agreement with the NHS after the pair's February deal was scrutinized over the amount and type of patient data Google would have access to. An investigative report by the New Scientist revealed that Google would have access to a huge trove of patient data without the patients' express consent, a potential violation of NHS information governance principles. With the new announcement, DeepMind is taking care to avoid a repeat of that situation with a host of new data protections. The new agreement is a five-year partnership with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. It will be a deployment of DeepMind's Streams app, which helps doctors get information about their acute kidney failure patients – including blood tests– faster, which will enable faster diagnostics in situations where time is of the essence. Once the app gets through the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (similar to the United States' FDA), DeepMind plans to roll it out to NHS hospitals in early 2017.

Reuters – OpenAI, the non-profit artificial intelligence research firm backed by Tesla Motors Inc's Elon Musk and other prominent tech executives, has signed an agreement to run most of its large-scale experiments on Microsoft Corp's flagship cloud service, Azure. OpenAI will use Azure for its experiments in deep learning and AI, and Microsoft will collaborate with the company on advancing research and creating new tools and technologies. Musk, along with venture capitalist Sam Altman, co-chairs OpenAI, whose backers apart from Musk include Amazon Web Services and tech investor Peter Thiel and LinkedIn Corp co-founder Reid Hoffman. OpenAI is an early adopter of Microsoft's Azure N-Series Virtual Machines service, which will be generally available from December. These cloud-computing services, which are powered by Nvidia Corp graphics chips, are designed for the most intensive computing workloads, including deep learning and simulations.

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.

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.

Google may have found a way to use machine learning technology to help millions of deaf and hearing-impaired people better understand what people are saying to them. Researchers from Google Inc.'s DeepMind artificial intelligence project, which built the boardgame-playing AlphaGo that managed to successfully defeat one of the top Go players in the world, have teamed up with peers at the Oxford University to create an AI system that's able to outperform professional lip-readers after training itself on thousands of hours of BBC videos. New Scientist reports that in tests, a human lip-reader who provides services for the U.K. courts was able to correctly decipher only about a quarter of words spoken when shown a random sample from 200 BBC video broadcasts. However, DeepMind's AI system was able to decipher almost half of the words from the same sample videos. In addition, the AI was able to annotate 46 percent of the words without error, compared with just 12 percent by the human lip-reader.

Google has agreed a five-year deal with one of the largest NHS trusts to handle the medical records of up to 1.6million people. The tech giant's secretive DeepMind health business will use the data to help develop a mobile app they claim could save 10,000 lives a year. In 2017 it will launch a warning system for acute kidney problems and blood poisoning at three London hospitals, although its'Streams' app will also include test results, medical history and an instant messaging service. But it is hugely controversial because the Royal Free London NHS Trust has agreed that DeepMind needs to be given all patient data to make it work. This is believed to include patients' names, ages, and complete medical histories, including whether they had been diagnosed with HIV, depression, suffered from drug or alcohol addiction, or had an abortion.