Konami today dropped a ton of news about the future of its iconic horror franchise. Aside from confirming that remake of Silent Hill 2, the studio revealed three new games. Townfall comes from Annapurna Interactive and No Code, a Glasgow studio known for strong narrative titles like Observation and Stories Untold. The short teaser for Townfall looks to be the most traditional Silent Hill game of the trio. Ascension, due out in 2023, is the least game-like installment, but it will feature the influence of J.J. Abrams.

In this report, we summarize the takeaways from the first NeurIPS 2021 NetHack Challenge. Participants were tasked with developing a program or agent that can win (i.e., 'ascend' in) the popular dungeon-crawler game of NetHack by interacting with the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE), a scalable, procedurally generated, and challenging Gym environment for reinforcement learning (RL). The challenge showcased community-driven progress in AI with many diverse approaches significantly beating the previously best results on NetHack. Furthermore, it served as a direct comparison between neural (e.g., deep RL) and symbolic AI, as well as hybrid systems, demonstrating that on NetHack symbolic bots currently outperform deep RL by a large margin. Lastly, no agent got close to winning the game, illustrating NetHack's suitability as a long-term benchmark for AI research.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Google will have access to patient records from HCA, which operates 181 hospitals and more than 2,000 healthcare sites in 21 states. "HCA would consolidate and store with Google data from digital health records and internet-connected medical devices under the multi-year agreement," the report said on Wednesday. Google will store anonymised data from patient health records and internet-connected medical devices. That data will be used to build programmes that could inform medical decisions made by healthcare providers, the report mentioned. Not just Google, Microsoft and Amazon are also working in the field to analyse patient data and create such AI/ML-based programmes, to foray into the $3 trillion healthcare sector.

Robert Wachter, a former member of Google's healthcare advisory board, remembers when the company first set its sights on the healthcare industry more than a decade ago. "They said: We're Google, we'll solve it," says Wachter, head of medicine at University of California, San Francisco. At the time, Google was trying to create individual accounts where users could store their electronic medical records. So when then-chief executive Eric Schmidt later abandoned the effort with an admission that Google had underestimated the challenge, it came as a shock. "They conquer industry after industry, it doesn't seem like this would be very different," Wachter says.

The news that Ascension and Google are working together on a system using machine learning, called Project Nightingale, at first seems like a step forward toward better patient care. Because it's challenging for any healthcare provider to exchange information about patients and patient care, it only makes sense that the healthcare industry would look for technology solutions that could solve some of these obstacles. The design of a new software system that could suggest changes in care and make medical records easily accessible to any doctor treating a single patient would help alleviate many of the challenges our healthcare system faces today. However, it's important that these two entities move through the process with great care and consideration. Google is no stranger to controversy regarding data privacy, machine learning and ethics.

Cerner was interviewing Silicon Valley giants to pick a storage provider for 250 million health records, one of the largest collections of U.S. patient data. Google dispatched former chief executive Eric Schmidt to personally pitch Cerner over several phone calls and offered around $250 million in discounts and incentives, people familiar with the matter say. Google had a bigger goal in pushing for the deal than dollars and cents: a way to expand its effort to collect, analyze and aggregate health data on millions of Americans. Google representatives were vague in answering questions about how Cerner's data would be used, making the health-care company's executives wary, the people say. Eventually, Cerner struck a storage deal with Amazon.com The failed Cerner deal reveals an emerging challenge to Google's move into health care: gaining the trust of health care partners and the public.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal accused Google of stealthily collecting sensitive patient data from millions of Americans without their consent. The New York Times soon followed with its own report, offering more detail on "Project Nightingale" and noting how it was likely to rile up privacy advocates. Forbes then published its own story, followed by another article from Business Insider, each drip-feeding more details about this initiative. When, you might ask, will it all end? The problem is not the reporting; it's that Google's own ambitions in health care have no clear limits, which is something that Project Nightingale illustrates.

Google has gained access to a huge trove of US patient data - without the need to notify those patients - thanks to a deal with a major health firm. The scheme, dubbed Project Nightingale, was agreed with Ascension, which hopes to develop artificial intelligence tools for doctors. Google can access health records, names and addresses without telling patients, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Google said it was "standard practice". Among the data the tech giant reportedly has access to under the deal are lab results, diagnoses, records of hospitalisation and dates of birth.

David Feinberg, Google's Vice President of Healthcare, recently described "a search bar on top of ... [ ] your [electronic health records] that needs no training," on stage at a conference in Las Vegas. Google is testing a service that would use its search and artificial intelligence technology to analyze patient records for Ascension, the largest nonprofit health system in the U.S., according to documents about the efforts reviewed by Forbes. Called "'Nightingale," the Google-Ascension project indicates that Google's push into health analysis is farther along than previously believed, even as the company has faced a growing backlash over health-related privacy concerns. Ascension said in a statement that all its work with Google complies with privacy law and is "underpinned by a robust data security and protection effort, which Google echoed in its own blog post later Monday, including that "patient data cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data. " The Wall Street Journal first published details of the Ascension partnership earlier on Monday.

Google announced a partnership with a large U.S. health care system aimed at modernizing its information system and providing new tools for doctors, in the tech giant's latest foray into the health industry. Announcement of its arrangement with the Catholic health care system Ascension followed a Wall Street Journal report on Monday that Google had access to thousands of patient health records without doctors' knowledge. Both companies stressed that their deal is compliant with federal health-privacy law. Unlike most of the data Google collects on individuals, health data is strictly regulated by the federal government. Google is providing cloud computing services to Ascension, which operates health centers in 21 states, mostly across the South and Midwest. It is also testing the use of artificial intelligence to examine health records and find patterns that Google says might help doctors and other providers.