Cambridge Cancer Genomics is leveraging its AI platform in a new partnership designed to more accurately target tumours in precision clinical trials. It is working with Precision-Panc, a UK-wide network of over 20 hospitals that can offer such trials to patients with pancreatic cancer. The broad-based collaboration sets out to improve and standardise data analysis, distribution and sharing in platform these vital diagnostic programmes. Startup CCG.ai is building software for data-driven precision oncology and its technology forms the basis of the piloted standardisation infrastructure and will provide insights into Precision-Panc's large-scale, multi-centre, oncology trials. CCG.ai's platform – OncOS – automates the analysis of cancer DNA samples and matches suitable clinical trials based on the underlying molecular features of a tumour, simplifying and streamlining data sharing to accelerate translation into the clinic.

Luminance, which provides Artificial Intelligence software for law firms and in-house teams, is gunning for the Disruptive Technology accolade in the 30th Anniversary Business Weekly Awards. Based at the Maurice Wilkes Building at St John's Innovation Park, Luminance prides itself as being the only platform to bring true artificial intelligence to the legal profession. Its submission says: "By deploying a unique blend of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, the core technology'LITE' is able to read and understand language in a way that is similar to the human brain and then learns from lawyers' interactions with documents as they conduct their review. "Luminance has enhanced the lives of lawyers in 165 countries globally, including 17 of'The Global Top 100', such as Holland & Knight, Slaughter and May and Bird & Bird, as well as each of the Big Four accounting firms." The company's pattern-recognition technology reads, understands and learns from the interaction between lawyers and documents, pinpointing warning signs that would be missed during a manual review.

Cambridge's relentless technology gamechanger, Arm, is exploring the long-term potential of three emergent technologies – AI, 5G and secure IoT – at Arm TechCon 2019 in San Jose next month. Chief executive Simon Segars says all these technologies are converging to enable more meaningful data insights and fuel a shift into "a new era of total compute." At the epicentre of this convergence is the Arm ecosystem whose technologies spanning multiple sectors – including mobile, infrastructure, automotive, and more – will be showcased at Arm TechCon 2019 from October 8-10. It is Arm's 15th annual such event. Segars says Arm and automotive industry leaders will use the California platform to share insights on progress in developing safe, autonomous vehicle platforms.

With new ideas innovation continuing to drive Cambridge's businesses, Stephen Hodsdon – a partner, patent and trade mark attorney in the Cambridge office of J A Kemp – considers what engineering and IT fields may lead the way in 2019. It is a well-known statistic that Cambridge produces significantly more patent applications per head than any other area of the UK and this shows little sign of decreasing. As a patent attorney, this is of course unsurprising, but it doesn't happen by accident. The diversity of Cambridge-based innovation makes it hard to pick even a selection of sectors which will lead the way in 2018. However, gazing into my crystal ball (sadly neither real nor, as far as I can determine, a Cambridge invention), here are a few thoughts on the areas that could drive 2019's innovation output.

The round was led by Cambridge angel Simon Thorpe who has already demonstrated the Midas touch. He was an investor in Swiftkey and Vocal IQ – Cambridge-founded businesses bought by Google and Apple, respectively, for a combined $350 million. The new round was also backed by Angel CoFund, a VC fund that co-invests alongside angel investors. John Spearman, GW Asia Capital Ltd and Adrian Lloyd also participated, and all three non-exec directors from round one have re-invested. Quick access to expertise on demand is essential for growth and progress in everything from rare disease research to the development of sustainable fuels.

Cambridge has been chosen to host a new global forum designed to change the face of international healthcare. Gamechanging innovation will be centre stage at the Next Health World Innovation Forum – a new international healthcare conference which takes place in Cambridge from June 26-27, 2019. The Innovation Forum is partnering with Cambridge's pioneering Milner Therapeutics Institute to challenge the status quo and identify technologies that will revolutionise patient care across a range of disease areas. The event will incorporate the annual symposium of the Milner Institute, which is dedicated to transforming groundbreaking research into new therapies, by breaking down the barriers between academia and industry. Confirmed speakers include representatives from Servier, Pfizer, Innovative Medicines Initiative and Cancer Research UK.

The CEO of a Cambridge-based Artificial Intelligence startup is helping to fashion pan-European governance and regulation of the rocketing technology segment. Dr Loubna Bouarfa of OKRA Technologies is one of 52 thought leaders on the advisory brains trust – the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI – and spent a week at a Brussels summit. Discussions were held in the European Parliament covering topics from programming bias, data security, error accountability and responsible workflows. As the founder and CEO of OKRA, a St John's Innovation Centre company, Dr Bouarfa represents AI practitioners and the healthcare space in particular. She said: "It is an honour to represent the innovative AI startup ecosystem, balancing an operational mindset with my ethical convictions. In my work at OKRA and beyond, ethical considerations around responsibility, transparency and accountability are always top of mind."

Cambridge AI decision making platform, PROWLER.io, will be centre stage in California in May as the award-winning startup holds a provocative thought leaders' summit. Business Weekly's newly crowned Startup of the Year is bringing together a cohort of great minds to push the frontiers of AI thinking for a one-day event in Palo Alto on May 9. Founder and CEO Vishal Chatrath says it will be the first of many such think tanks talking about "AI taking decisions – leaving today's discussions about perception and classification in our wake." Chaired by David Rowan, editor-at-large of WIRED magazine, the event is designed, in Chatrath's words, "to share bold provocations on the future of AI." Guests will be drawn from academia, big tech, government, complexity theory, finance, gaming, quantum, safety tech and regulation. Speakers will give a 15 minute talk, ending with "a bold provocation around decision making and AI. "We are deliberately curating a wide-ranging agenda for the first of an annual event series for PROWLER.io," said Chatrath.

An AI startup including original pioneers from DeepMind – the generalised artificial intelligence company acquired by Google for around $500 million – has roared out of stealth with a pledge to revolutionise the digital economy. Its starting premise is that today's digital economy is disconnected, with assets such as hotel rooms and cars drastically under-utilised and systems such as transport and energy networks poorly optimised. The underlying'smart ledger' contains several world first innovations including built-in AI, a new Useful Proof of Work consensus mechanism and a unique data structure that combines blockchain and Directed Acyclic Graph architecture to achieve the performance and scalability necessary to support millions of agents transacting together. CTO Toby Simpson explains: "Autonomous Economic Agents are set to revolutionise commerce. They're digital entities that can transact independently of human intervention and can represent people, machines or themselves. "Imagine a world that connects anything to anything and everything to everything, where data, services and information get up on their own two feet and deliver themselves with incredible precision.

Aseptika in St Ives and Zenzium in Cheshire have been awarded an unspecified grant from the UK's innovation agency to leverage AI and develop a new home-based early warning system for people with severe respiratory disease. Artificial Intelligence will automatically analyse and learn from data generated by the patient at home, using easy-to-use medical monitors and wearables, which connect to Aseptika's Activ8rlives App. The companies will introduce a Smart LungHealth system in the form of the Cloud-connecting Activ8rlives4 App and will also embed the AI alerting system into Aseptika's future wearable medical monitor called the BuddyWOTCH, currently in development. Aseptika and Zenzium will collaborate to create a system to automatically warn when patients health is declining. Looking at anonymised information gathered from previous clinical trials showed that many patients do not treat exacerbations and may not even be aware that they are having them.