Posts in category: Deepmind

Imagining the consequences of your actions before you take them is a powerful tool of human cognition. When placing a glass on the edge of a table, for example, we will likely pause to consider how stable it is and whether it might fall. On the basis of that imagined consequence we might readjust the glass to prevent it from falling and breaking. This form of deliberative reasoning is essentially imagination, it is a distinctly human ability and is a crucial tool in our everyday lives.Read More

Around two and a half thousand years ago a Mesopotamian trader gathered some clay, wood and reeds and changed humanity forever. Over time, their abacus would allow traders to keep track of goods and reconcile their finances, allowing economics to flourish.But that moment of inspiration also shines a light on another astonishing human ability: our ability to recombine existing concepts and imagine something entirely new. The unknown inventor would have had to think of the problem they wanted to solve, the contraption they could build and the raw materials they could gather to create it. Clay could be moulded into a tablet, a stick could be used to scratch the columns and reeds can act as counters. Each component was familiar and distinct, but put together in this new way, they formed something revolutionary.This idea of compositionality is at the core of human abilities such as creativity, imagination and language-based communication. Equipped with just a small number of familiar conceptual building blocks, we are able to create a vast number of new ones on the fly.Read More

The agility and flexibility of a monkey swinging through the trees or a football player dodging opponents and scoring a goal can be breathtaking. Mastering this kind of sophisticated motor control is a hallmark of physical intelligence, and is a crucial part of AI research. True motor intelligence requires learning how to control and coordinate a flexible body to solve tasks in a range of complex environments. Existing attempts to control physically simulated humanoid bodies come from diverse fields, including computer animation and biomechanics. A trend has been to use hand-crafted objectives, sometimes with motion capture data, to produce specific behaviors. However, this may require considerable engineering effort, and can result in restricted behaviours or behaviours that may be difficult to repurpose for new tasks.In three new papers, we seek ways to produce flexible and natural behaviours that can be reused and adapted to solve tasks.Read More

DeepMind has always been a unique hybrid of startup culture and academia, and weve been lucky to collaborate with many of the best researchers from around the world. Today were thrilled to announce our next phase: the opening of DeepMinds first ever international AI research office in Edmonton, Canada, in close collaboration with the University of Alberta (UAlberta).Read More

Today, a panel of Independent Reviewers has published itsfirst annual reportinto DeepMind Health. As I wrote in the foreword to their report (written, I add, before Id read it):We chose people who had specific expertise but also reputations for integrity, who did not hold back, who could be angry and critical Thats good for us and makes us better.The panel is made up of experts in their fields who were given full access to our work to carry out their review – a very unusual process for a tech company, but one that we hope will significantly increase scrutiny of our work and ultimately help us get it right. We are grateful for their and honesty, thoughtfulness, and the time they have spent on this complex task. You can read their full report here.As a result of this process, DeepMind Health has committed to a series of changes to our work and practices to try to set higher standards in our second year. We know we need to work harder to be responsive and accountable to the needs of a far greater cross-section of medicine and society. This includes significantly improving our work with patients and the public, and continuing on the path of greater engagement with Royal Colleges, professional bodies and many other groups in the NHS community.Read More

Today, dozens of people in UK hospitals will die preventably from conditions like sepsis and acute kidney injury (AKI) when their warning signs aren’t picked up and acted on in time. To help address this, we built the Streams app with clinicians at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, using mobile technology to automatically review test results for serious issues starting with AKI. If one is found, Streams sends a secure smartphone alert to the right clinician, along with information about previous conditions so they can make an immediate diagnosis.Were proud that, within a few weeks of Streams being deployed at the Royal Free, nurses said that it was saving them up to two hours each day, and we’ve already heard examples of patients with serious conditions being seen more quickly thanks to the instant alerts. Because Streams is designed to be ready for more advanced technology in the future, including AI-powered clinical alerts, we hope that it will help bring even more benefits to patients and clinicians in time. The Information Commissioner (ICO) hasnow concluded a year-long investigation that focused on the Royal Frees clinical testing of Streams in late 2015 and 2016, which was intended to guarantee that the service could be deployed safely at the hospital.Read More

Deep neural networks have learnt to do an amazing array of tasks – from recognising and reasoning about objects in images to playing Atari and Go at super-human levels. As these tasks and network architectures become more complex, the solutions that neural networks learn become more difficult to understand.Read More

Were delighted to announce our first partnership outside of London to help doctors and nurses break new ground in the NHSs use of digital technology.Streams is our secure mobile app that helps doctors and nurses give faster urgent care to patients showing signs of deterioration by giving them the right information more quickly. Over the next five years, well be rolling it out at Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust as part of a new partnership. You can find out more on the trusts website.Our collaboration with Taunton and Somerset follows on from our work with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust. Nurses already using Streams at the Royal Free tell us that the app is saving them up to two hours a day, allowing them to redirect valuable time back into targeted patient care.Where some current systems can take hours, Streams uses breaking news style alerts to notify clinicians within seconds when a test results indicates that one of their patients shows signs of becoming ill.Read More

We believe that Artificial Intelligence will be one of the most important and widely beneficial scientific advances ever made, helping humanity tackle some of its greatest challenges, from climate change to delivering advanced healthcare. But for AI to deliver on this promise, we know that the technology must be built in a responsible manner and that we must consider all potential challenges and risks. That is why DeepMind co-founded initiatives like the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society and why we have a team dedicated to technical AI Safety. Research in this field needs to be open and collaborative to ensure that best practices are adopted as widely as possible, which is why we are also collaborating with OpenAI on research in technical AI Safety. One of the central questions in this field is how we allow humans to tell a system what we want it to do and – importantly – what we dont want it to do. This is increasingly important as the problems we tackle with machine learning grow more complex and are applied in the real world.The first results from our collaboration demonstrate one method to address this, by allowing humans with no technical experience to teach a reinforcement learning (RL) system – an AI that learns by trial and error – a complex goal. This removes the need for the human to specify a goal for the algorithm in advance.Read More

Consider the reader who pieces together the evidence in an Agatha Christie novel to predict the culprit of the crime, a child who runs ahead of her ball to prevent it rolling into a stream or even a shopper who compares the relative merits of buying kiwis or mangos at the market.We carve our world into relations between things. And we understand how the world works through our capacity to draw logical conclusions about how these different things – such as physical objects, sentences, or even abstract ideas – are related to one another. This ability is called relational reasoning and is central to human intelligence.We construct these relations from the cascade of unstructured sensory inputs we experience every day. For example, our eyes take in a barrage of photons, yet our brain organises this blooming, buzzing confusion into the particular entities that we need to relate.Read More