Summary: Here's an easy to understand example of how predictive analytics can reduce cost while increasing efficacy of disease management programs. Healthcare providers have made major breakthroughs over the last two decades by creating and implementing increasingly sophisticated disease management programs (DMPs). At their core there are always two motives, improve the human condition by preventing lesser symptomologies from becoming more severe diseases, and secondly to reduce total systems cost by using less expensive DMPs to prevent or delay the onset of a disease more costly to treat. In the last few years, the most advanced and analytic of healthcare providers have discovered that DMPs themselves can be optimized using the rapidly spreading techniques of predictive modeling. This is a hypothetical example of how a DMP can be optimized in this way.

A long-lost portrait of a historic computer – built in 1951 and now the oldest working digital computer in the world – has resurfaced on a cafe bar wall in Manchester. The artist John Yeadon first saw the Witch (the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell) in 1982 in the Museum of Science and Industry in Birmingham. He was fascinated, even though it had become a sad ghost of its former glory at the cutting edge of computing technology. He tried to capture its character – which he described as a "diabolical contraption, a dusty hunk of electric and mechanical hardware that reminded me of the disturbing 1950's Quatermass science fiction television series" – in a near-lifesize two metre by three metre Portrait of a Dead Witch, which he also intended as a joke about the contemporary craze for computer-generated art. He described it as a portrait rather than a still life: "I think I had some idea that the painting brought the computer back to life, or at least to another life."

Once upon a time, there was a little black mouse. When he was nine months old, he died. After that, some men and women scooped out his tiny brain and sliced it into slices thinner than a whisker. Over the next few years, the men and women looked at all the slices very, very closely. Some of the parts, they realized, connected to other parts.

Rakuten, just like Amazon, is experimenting with drones that can quickly deliver goods to its customers. Unlike Jeff Bezos' company, however, the e-commerce giant is starting small with a service designed for golfers. From May, players at a specific course in Japan's Chiba prefecture will be able to take out their phone and request some new golf balls or refreshments. A Mini Surveyor drone developed by the Autonomous Control Systems Laboratory -- a company from Chiba which Rakuten has now invested in -- will then fly them over from a base station near the course's clubhouse.

When MGA Entertainment, the world's largest private toy company, premiered its newest kids' show about a teen-girl team of super spies, it skipped Saturday morning TV and staged a splashy premiere on Netflix -- replete with a matching toy line, a few dozen dolls and play sets like the "lip balm lab activity kit." And Netflix, the world's largest streaming service, was more than happy to fold the show, "Project Mc2," into its exploding empire of kids' entertainment. Much of the 5 billion Netflix is spending this year on movies and TV shows will be spent on fare for the playground set. The big-business battle for kids' distracted attention spans has never been more competitive -- or eye-poppingly lucrative -- and Netflix has aggressively angled to use its data-driven insights to make programs kids don't want to turn off. About half of Netflix's 75 million members regularly watch kids' movies or TV shows, executives say, but the potential for long-term profits runs much deeper. If the site is able to win over viewers when they're young, executives said, they may be able to secure their loyalty for life.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

In 2014, Joon Yun, founder of the Palo Alto Institute in California, announced the 1 million Palo Alto Longevity Prize. Its goal: to "hack the code" of aging. The first half will go to the first group to restore homeostatic capacity--the body's ability to stabilize after experiencing stress. "Until midlife, it is so pervasively effective that we don't realize we have homeostatic capacity until we start losing it," Yun says. The hitch is, no one knows how to measure it, and so the prize will use proxies such as heart-rate variability, and award whichever team can get an aging animal's heart pumping like it's young again.

There's a new kind of software that claims to help law enforcement agencies reduce crime, by using algorithms to predict where crimes will happen and directing more officers to those areas. It's called "predictive policing," and it's already being used by dozens of police departments all over the country, including the Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta Police Departments. Aside from the obvious "Minority Report" pre-crime allusions, there has been a tremendous amount of speculation about what the future of predictive policing might hold. Could people be locked up just because a computer model says that they are likely to commit a crime? Could all crime end altogether, because an artificial intelligence gets so good at predicting when crimes will occur?

American multinational information technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has recently launched its Heaven OnDemand service, joining many other tech giants and startups that are already working on offering machine-learning analytics as a cloud service to software developers. Delivered exclusively on Microsoft Azure Cloud, HPE's Haven OnDemand, makes its customers' life easier by simplifying the process of virtually turning data into an asset they can use whenever they want. Furthermore, the data access is made even faster so that any information needed in order to create deep and meaningful insights can be reached at any time without having to go through much trouble. "Our algorithm can handle any type of digital media, which could be email, Slack messages, Skype messages, whatever, but we started with social because it's free and publicly available," Tope Alibi, co-founder of San Francisco-based startup Social Capital said for eWEEK. "Haven OnDemand has been a great tool for us. With it, we identify the'big five' personality traits that psychologists identify with each patient: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism," he added.

During a conversation I had with Peter Norvig, we discussed about the kind of projects that we do at Machinalis and how strange does it feels to say that "we are a Machine Learning company": In many projects, the amount of effort spent on R&D on Machine Learning is usually a small fraction of the total effort, or it's not even there because we plan it for a future phase after building the application first. "Machine Learning development is like the raisins in a raisin bread: 1. You need the bread first 2. It's just a few tiny raisins but without it you would just have plain bread." Typically, two things can happen: A large company, at a higher level, decides to move away from standard tools, given that "our business and our data are different/peculiar", incorporating Machine Learning or Data Science into their processes. In these situations they call us just to get some raisins.