When I first became a doctor, I cared for an older man whom I'll call Ted. He was so sick with pneumonia that he was struggling to breathe. His primary-care physician had prescribed one antibiotic after another, but his symptoms had only worsened; by the time I saw him in the hospital, he had a high fever and was coughing up blood. His lungs seemed to be infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium so hardy that few drugs can kill it. I placed an oxygen tube in his nostrils, and one of my colleagues inserted an I.V. into his arm. We decided to give him vancomycin, a last line of defense against otherwise untreatable infections.

The new company aims to duplicate the success of DeepMind, another Alphabet subsidiary that used AI to predict the 3D structure of a protein directly from its amino acid sequence. While the announcement was made official on Thursday, it was consolidated in February, according to a filing with Companies House, a U.K. company registry.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is launching a project in Britain that will use artificial intelligence software to "reimagine" the process of discovering new drugs and medical treatments. Alphabet said the new company, Isomorphic Labs, will expand on research previously conducted by DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence company that Google acquired several years ago. Officials said the venture, which will help scientists analyze data, could lead to cures for some of the most debilitating diseases. "Now the time is right to push this forward at pace, and with the dedicated focus and resources that Isomorphic Labs will bring," CEO Demis Hassabis said in a statement. Hassabis added that the company aims to "reimagine the entire drug discovery process from the ground up," and partner with pharma and medical companies to advance "digital biology."

Our second annual list highlights promising, private, U.S.-based companies that are using artificial intelligence in meaningful business-oriented ways.

Our second annual list highlights promising, private, U.S.-based companies that are using artificial intelligence in meaningful business-oriented ways.

Our second annual list highlights promising, private, U.S.-based companies that are using artificial intelligence in meaningful business-oriented ways.

First impressions are notoriously subjective (and flawed), but now machines are being trained to make similar snap judgments based on human-generated data. AI-published books may not be too far away! Researchers at Kyushu University in Japan have trained a deep neural network to study book covers and determine their category. On a hunt for interesting and high-quality datasets to use for machine learning, I stumbled upon these 20 weird and wonderful sets. Neat! Check out this open source deep convolutional neural network that is trained on transformed audio signals to recognize "ahem" sounds.