Pancreatic cancer has been in the news a lot in recent years. A number of well-known figures have died from this deadly cancer, including Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, singer Aretha Franklin, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The 5-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer in the United States is 11%, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology. If caught early, pancreatic cancer is treatable. Experts say that early detection is the best way to improve the chances of survival as the prognosis worsens significantly once the tumor grows beyond 2 centimeters.

When Joe Brew worked for the Florida Department of Health as an epidemiologist for two years starting in 2013, he helped with syndromic surveillance, meaning he had the arduous job of reviewing the symptoms of patients coming into the emergency departments from all across the state. The goal of such work: to detect an abnormal spike of symptoms in an area that may indicate there's a public health concern. Public health authorities worldwide continue to use this type of surveillance. The outbreak of a novel pathogen in Wuhan, China in late 2019, for instance, was in part detected by a large uptick of patients coming to the hospital with symptoms of a respiratory infection, with unknown etiology. But Brew says this system fails to prevent the transmission of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 because by the time patients arrive at the hospital, they have likely already been infectious for a matter of days.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has opened up the second round of applications for funding under the AI in Health and Care Award programme. It said that technology companies, researchers and developers are able to bid for support in developing and testing AI and machine learning products for use in the NHS. The department indicated that it is particularly interested in applications dealing with triage, screening, imaging and intelligent operational automation. This follows the first round of awards in September, under which 42 projects won shares of £50 million from the overall budget of £140 million. First round winners set to be tested in the NHS include a phone app that could help detect early kidney disease in urine samples of diabetic patients, an algorithm that could remove the need for the second human reader to assess breast cancer screening scans, and a computer software platform that uses AI to help detect early lung cancer.

Last month OpenAI rather dramatically withheld the release of its newest language model, GPT-2, because it feared it could be used to automate the mass production of misinformation. The decision also accelerated the AI community's ongoing discussion about how to detect this kind of fake news. In a new experiment, researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and HarvardNLP considered whether the same language models that can write such convincing prose can also spot other model-generated passages. The idea behind this hypothesis is simple: language models produce sentences by predicting the next word in a sequence of text. So if they can easily predict most of the words in a given passage, it's likely it was written by one of their own.

Can your financial institution's fraud detection system learn, reason and adapt to new and emerging cyberthreats? Can it identify fraudulent behavior within your account simply by analyzing interactions and patterns? In this day and age, people can access their bank accounts anywhere, anytime. We need strong, agile and efficient fraud detection systems to keep financial institutions and their customers safe. Mobile functionality and safety are among customers' top concerns when it comes to online banking -- so IBM Security Trusteer is releasing new cognitive fraud detection and behavioral biometric functionality that accomplishes just that. This enhanced functionality adds even more strength to an already robust security platform without impacting user experience.