A hymn dedicated to the ancient city of Babylon has been discovered after 2,100 years. Sung to the god Marduk, patron deity of the great city, the poem describes Babylon's flowing rivers, jewelled gates, and'bathed priests' in stunning detail. Although the song was lost to time after Alexander the Great captured the city, fragments of clay tablets survived in the ruins of Sippar, a city 40 miles to the North. In a process that would have taken'decades' to complete by hand, researchers used AI to piece together 30 different tablet pieces and recover the lost hymn. Originally 250 lines long, scientists have been able to translate a third of the original cuneiform text.

Real-time conversational AI agents face challenges in performing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in dynamic, outdoor environments like automated drive-thru systems. These settings require NLU models to handle background noise, diverse accents, and multi-intent queries while operating under strict latency and memory constraints on edge devices. Additionally, robustness to errors from upstream Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is crucial, as ASR outputs in these environments are often noisy. We introduce Babylon, a transformer-based architecture that tackles NLU as an intent translation task, converting natural language inputs into sequences of regular language units ('transcodes') that encode both intents and slot information. This formulation allows Babylon to manage multi-intent scenarios in a single dialogue turn. Furthermore, Babylon incorporates an LSTM-based token pooling mechanism to preprocess phoneme sequences, reducing input length and optimizing for low-latency, low-memory edge deployment. This also helps mitigate inaccuracies in ASR outputs, enhancing system robustness. While this work focuses on drive-thru ordering, Babylon's design extends to similar noise-prone scenarios, for e.g. ticketing kiosks. Our experiments show that Babylon achieves significantly better accuracy-latency-memory footprint trade-offs over typically employed NMT models like Flan-T5 and BART, demonstrating its effectiveness for real-time NLU in edge deployment settings.

In late 2016, Hugh Harvey was working as a consultant doctor in the UK's National Health Service. Harvey had dabbled in machine learning while doing a research degree, and had seen the potential for artificial intelligence to revolutionize health care. But he felt strongly that the introduction of AI into medicine was not going to come from within the NHS--it was going to come from industry. So when an opportunity opened up at a buzzy new health-tech startup, Babylon Health, he applied. Founded in London in 2013 by Ali Parsa, a British-Iranian ex-banker, Babylon had a lofty goal: It wanted to do with health care what Google did with information; that is, make it freely and easily available to everyone.

Digital health provider Babylon has launched its AI-powered triage tool in Rwanda to further digitise the country's healthcare system. The tool is now being used by Babylon (known locally as Babyl) call centre nurses in Rwanda to help them work more efficiently and make improved, faster decisions for their patients. It will help nurses ask patients the right questions, collect relevant information about a patient's symptoms and provide them with insights to help choose the correct triage path. If a follow-up appointment is required, the patient information collected on the triage call is passed on to the doctor, saving both the clinician and the patient time. Shivon Byamukama, CEO of Babyl Rwanda, said: "Rwandans have embraced digital healthcare that allows them to access clinicians from wherever they are. With the introduction of the AI triage tool in our call centre, we are effectively placing doctors' brains in the hands of our nurses in the digital triage."

Oxford Nanopore (@nanopore): is a sequencing company (spun out of the University of Oxford) valued at around $4,6 billion in London IPO. Oxford Nanopore is offering a technology to analyse any length of native DNA or RNA, and it's the only sequencing tech company to enable real-time analysis, in fully scalable formats--from pocket to population scale. But Nanopore goes beyond sequencing, since ML learning algorithms can be used to extract unknown biology information hidden in the Nanopore sequencing data. On the report of a Financial Times article, the pandemic put Nanopore on the map since its patented technology (MinION the world's first portable pocket-sized sequencing device) was used in identifying and tracking the spread of Covid variants in 85 countries, by sequencing about 18% of all coronavirus genomes globally. In fact, Oxford Nanopore made a gross profit of £26.9m in the first half of 2021 and is now competing with Illumina in a $7 billion market for DNA sequencing, dominated so far by Illumina.

Babylon, a world leading digital-first, value-based care company today announced a collaboration to explore opportunities to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare for people across the world by using their combined AI, Machine Learning and Cloud technologies. The new collaboration has the aim of exploring opportunities to accelerate and enhance current AI and Machine Learning, utilizing them to shift the focus from sick care to preventative health care. "Babylon and Microsoft working together shows our combined commitment to build on our leading-edge digital health technologies and deliver better access and greater affordability for health systems and patients alike", said Ali Parsa, Chief Executive Officer, Babylon. "We share the same vision of healthcare and believe that by bringing our assets together we can further the digital health revolution, offer immediate access to all-in-one personalized care and we can enhance the consumer experience, improve patient outcomes and reduce overall costs." As part of this relationship, the two organizations will explore opportunities to innovate and deliver across product, cloud and AI research with the view toward increasing the impact of their complementary healthcare technologies and extending the Babylon healthcare platform.

Recent scientific breakthroughs allowing forecasters to better predict the weather are just the latest in a long line of meteorology developments. Google's artificial intelligence (AI) arm DeepMind has developed a system allowing forecasters to predict the chance of rain within the next couple of hours with much higher precision. But people have been attempting to work out whether it is going to chuck it down or not for thousands of years. As far back as 650BC, the Babylonians, in modern-day Iraq and Syria, tried to divine the weather based on cloud patterns and astrology. By 350BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle was describing weather patterns in texts, while even Jesus Christ himself had a crack at forecasting in the New Testament.

The Government has said that artificial intelligence (AI) in GP practices will help manage patients in the elective care backlog. It today announced that new technology and innovation will allow the NHS to treat 30% more elective care patients by 2023/24. It added that NHS'come forward with a delivery plan for tackling the backlog'. In March, NHS England suggested that GPs could be asked to review hospital waiting lists for elective care to help prioritise and manage patients from the following month. Details were limited, but NHS England later told GPs that they must'jointly manage' patients stuck in the backlog of care caused by the Covid pandemic with hospitals. Meanwhile, Pulse revealed in June that NHSX and NHS England were considering the viability of a wider roll out of an artificial intelligence triage model based on that used by Babylon.

For the doctors of the future, and their creators, the re-invention of the healthcare system must begin with those working on the frontline. WIRED and HP present ten innovators developing the artificially intelligent, entrepreneurial, and on-demand doctors who are set to transform the delivery of healthcare. Subjectivity is the last quality you want in medical diagnosis, but with complex noisy scans an objective conclusion can be hard to come by. At the University of Copenhagen's department of computer science, Mads Nielsen is working on the use of machine learning to provide automatic, accurate and quantitive analyses of common medical imagery. Applications including screening for breast cancer risk in mammograms, Alzheimer's development in brain MRI scans, and arthritis in hand and knee MRI images, are being developed through his spin-out company, Biomediq.

After a year off, the summer's largest video game conference officially starts on Saturday, June 12th, featuring four days of major news and fresh trailers, all virtual and totally free for anyone to watch. The Entertainment Software Association canceled E3 2020 as the global COVID-19 pandemic shut down industries across the globe. Despite the shutdown -- or even because of it -- the video game market saw a record-setting year, and both Sony and Microsoft launched their ninth-generation consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, at the end of 2020. This year, E3 is back on and it's fully digital, taking place on live-streaming sites including Twitch and YouTube. Unlike previous years, attendance is totally free, and the show runs from June 12th through June 15th, with a handful of related events sprinkled among those dates.