The International Business Communication Standards (IBCS or IBCS Standards) are practical proposals for the design of reports and presentations, meaning, in most cases, the proper conceptual, perceptual and semantic design of charts and tables.

SpaceX and Tesla Motors boss Elon Musk has open-sourced OpenAI Gym, which is a kind of training gym for artificial intelligence programs. The virtual gym is created to help computer programmers improve their AI systems. The gym is under Musk's OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization supported by over 1 billion in commitments. OpenAI is Elon Musk's nonprofit dedicated to releasing cutting-edge AI research for free. It is also backed by other Silicon Valley heavies, including LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Y-Combinator founders Jessica Livingston and Sam Altman, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Stripe's Greg Brockman.

The UK's AI scene is the talk of the town at the moment, with a number of significant startup exits happening over the last few years. Evi was acquired by Amazon for a reported 18 million in 2013, DeepMind was bought by Google for around 400 million in 2014, VocalIQ was acquired by Apple for an unknown amount in 2015, and SwiftKey was bought by Microsoft for 175 million in 2016. Saul Klein, a venture capitalist at London-based LocalGlobe, believes there are a number of factors that have led to a general surge in AI. "Clearly this [AI] has been decades in the making," said Klein during an interview with Business Insider at LocalGlobe's office in King's Cross. "There are conditions that exist now that make mainstream AI and the application of AI possible. In terms of what makes the UK so special, Klein believes the Oxbridge-London triangle is playing an important role in the creation of the UK's best AI companies. Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, and UCL all have deep expertise in applied mathematics, computer science, and machine learning, according to a blog post by two AI investors. As a result, several of Britain's best-known AI companies started off as research projects within these institutions before being spun out. Evi and VolalIQ began at Cambridge, for example, while DeepMind has close ties to all four institutions. There are also a number of organisations in the UK that incubate AI startups in their early days. Entrepreneur First in London, for example, helps deeply technical people to find cofounders to launch a tech startup with; at least half of their last cohort focused on applying machine learning to different challenges. LocalGlobe, which Klein founded with his father Robin, is using its 45 million fund to make a number of investments into UK AI startups, as are VCs like Playfair Capital and White Star Capital. "There are really amazing AI-driven businesses that are emerging and some of the companies that we will announce investments in are squarely focused in and around that," said Klein. In terms of whether AI could one day pose a threat to humanity, as famous scientist Stephen Hawking predicts, Klein said: "I guess the way I would look at it is that there are lots of technologies that we have created over time, including nuclear weapons, that have existential risk.

Google has been given access to huge swatches of confidential patient information in the UK, raising fears yet again over how NHS managers view and handle data under their control. In an agreement uncovered by the New Scientist, Google and its DeepMind artificial intelligence wing have been granted access to current and historic patient data at three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, covering 1.6 million individuals. That would include any chronic illness people may be suffering from and the circumstances over why they were admitted – for example, if they have suffered a drug overdose. The agreement provides Google with access to data going back five years and is far more expansive than expected. Google and DeepMind previously said they were working with the NHS on a product called "Streams" that would "present timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury." The agreement however provides access to all patient data, covering issues far beyond just kidney functioning.

Google has been given access to huge swatches of confidential patient information in the UK, raising fears yet again over how NHS managers view and handle data under their control. In an agreement uncovered by the New Scientist, Google and its DeepMind artificial intelligence wing have been granted access to current and historic patient data at three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, covering 1.6 million individuals. That would include any chronic illness people may be suffering from and the circumstances over why they were admitted – for example, if they have suffered a drug overdose. The agreement provides Google with access to data going back five years and is far more expansive than expected. Google and DeepMind previously said they were working with the NHS on a product called "Streams" that would "present timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury." The agreement however provides access to all patient data, covering issues far beyond just kidney functioning.

Earlier this week, OpenAI, the nonprofit research group with billion-dollar backing from Elon Musk and other tech luminaries, launched its first program. It's called OpenAI Gym, and it's meant to be used as a benchmarking tool for artificial intelligence programs. Musk once said he thought truly artificial intelligent agents could be more harmful to the human race than nuclear weapons. When OpenAI was launched in December, its stated goal was 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." Which sounds a lot like an AI version of Google's long-held mantra: "Don't be evil."

High-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has launched an open-source training "gym" for artificial-intelligence programmers. It's an interesting move for a man who in 2014 said artificial intelligence, or A.I., will pose a threat to the human race. "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence," Musk said about a year and a half ago during an MIT symposium. "If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that... with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories with the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he's sure he can control the demon. Today, Musk is moving to help programmers use A.I. and machine learning to build smart robots and smart devices. "We're releasing the public beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms," wrote Greg Brockman, OpenAI's CTO, and John Schulman, a scientist working with OpenAI, in a blog post . "We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research.

Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) research group today announced that for all future research it will use TensorFlow, a machine learning library that Google open-sourced last year, instead of Torch, an older framework. The move suggests that some of Google's brightest AI minds are convinced of the promise of Google's own open source software; TensorFlow is now good enough for DeepMind. "We believe that TensorFlow will enable us to execute our ambitious research goals at much larger scale and an even faster pace, providing us with a unique opportunity to further accelerate our research programme," Koray Kavukcuoglu, a research scientist at Google DeepMind and one of Torch's core contributors, wrote in a blog post. This is important because of DeepMind's considerable capabilities -- earlier this year its AlphaGo AI player of the ancient Chinese board game Go beat top-ranked Go player Lee Sedol. To be sure, DeepMind is not Google's only AI research unit.

It's no secret that Google has broad ambitions in healthcare. But a document obtained by New Scientist reveals that the tech giant's collaboration with the UK's National Health Service goes far beyond what has been publicly announced. The document – a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust – gives the clearest picture yet of what the company is doing and what sensitive data it now has access to. The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – each year. This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions. The agreement also includes access to patient data from the last five years.

The firm says it launched this is because progress made in reinforcement learning lags for a few reasons. Firstly, OpenAI notes that existing, open-source testing environments lack diversity and are difficult to set up and use. What's more, there's a dearth of standardization, which makes reproducing the tests -- key for any sort of academic research -- between different projects in an apples to apples way pretty hard to do.