Google, DeepMind, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, UK, COVID-19, Immortality

(March 11, 2005) A mission to destroy
Our policies are much more radical than the public has woken up to yet," said Steve Hilton,
the Tory poll and focus group analyser and central office apparatchik for the past three elections.
But, he said, the public was not yet ready, so they had to be careful in their use of language.
Danny Kruger, the big brain of the Conservative policy unit and a Tory candidate, promised:
"We plan to introduce a period of creative destruction in the public services."
[link to www.theguardian.com (secure)]

(August 11, 2009) The woman at the heart of the Tories and Google
The Tories were so keen to hold on to Mr Hilton that he was allowed to work from the US,
after his wife began working for Google in 2005. He has only recently returned,
just in time to help deal with the controversy over proposals to hand medical records to firms such as Google and Microsoft.

With Mr Cameron declaring his intention to create a "post-bureaucratic age" in British politics,
with the internet central to his plans, it is not hard to see why some believe Google has already influenced Tory policy.
In a speech last month, Mr Cameron said he aimed to build "a new era of Google government".
[link to www.independent.co.uk (secure)]

(March 14, 2011) Is Britain’s Government Too Close to Google?
In most cases, the connection largely rests on the relationship between two senior figures in both camps.
Rachel Whetstone, Google’s global director of PR, is married to Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s chief political strategist.
[link to gigaom.com (secure)]

(January 27, 2014) Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind For More Than $500M
Google will buy London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind. The Information reports that the acquisition price was more than $500 million,
and that Facebook was also in talks to buy the startup late last year. DeepMind confirmed the acquisition to us, but couldn’t disclose deal terms.
DeepMind was founded by neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, a former child prodigy in chess, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman.
Skype and Kazaa developer Jaan Tallin is an investor. This is the latest move by Google to fill out its roster of artificial intelligence
experts and, according to Re/code, the acquisition was reportedly led by Google CEO Larry Page.
[link to techcrunch.com (secure)]

(January 11, 2015) Live for ever: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
Fixing the ‘problem’ of ageing is the mission of Silicon Valley, where billions is pouring into biotech firms working to ‘hack the code’ of life
– despite concerns about the social implications. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company.
Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and “devise interventions that enable people to lead longer
and healthier lives”. Though much mystery surrounds the new biotech company, it seems to be looking in part to develop age-defying drugs.
In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal,
and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people. In March 2014, pioneering American biologist and technologist Craig Venter
– along with the tech entrepreneur founder of the X Prize Foundation, Peter Diamandis – announced a new company called Human Longevity Inc.
It isn’t aimed at developing anti-ageing drugs or competing with Calico, says Venter. But it plans to create a giant database of 1 million human genome sequences by 2020, including from supercentenarians.
In an office not far from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, with a beard reaching almost to his navel, Aubrey de Grey is enjoying the new buzz about defeating ageing.
[link to www.theguardian.com (secure)]

(April 4, 2015) Tech titans’ latest project: Defy death
Seated at the head of a table for 12 with a view of the city's soaring skyline, Peter Thiel
was deep in conversation with his guests, eclectic scientists whose research was considered radical, even heretical.
Among the guests was Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist and biogerontologist who had garnered attention for doubling the life span
of a roundworm by disabling a single gene. Aubrey de Grey, a British computer scientist turned theoretician who prophesied that medical advances would stop aging.
And Larry Page, co-founder of an Internet search darling called Google that had big ideas to improve health through the terabytes of data it was collecting.
He and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research.
The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out,
figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.
“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,” as Thiel put it. “But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.”
[link to www.washingtonpost.com (secure)]

(June 4, 2016) Google's European Revolving Door
The Google Transparency Project has identified at least 80 revolving door moves between Google
and European governments over the past decade as the company seeks to boost its influence
in the region and head-off antitrust action and privacy regulation.
[link to www.techtransparencyproject.org (secure)]

(March 6, 2018) What if billionaires could live forever?
Several billionaires, most of them Californians, have been funding firms involved in developing life-extension technologies.
What if they succeed? What if billionaires alive today live indefinitely and get ever richer?
Diamandis and Hariri's new venture is the latest example of a well-established phenomenon in Silicon Valley:
Extremely wealthy techno-optimists have for years been funding biomedical R&D companies meant to achieve immortality for their funders.
Some of the more recognizable names who have been putting money into such efforts: Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle),
Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), and Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies.
Palantir, by the way, is a "big-data" company that uses algorithms to scan huge datasets for patterns.
It does a lot of work for US government intelligence agencies. Thiel is a radical corporate libertarian, and Silicon Valley's best-known Donald Trump supporter.
In late February, Diamandis wrote to subscribers of his email bulletin: "I asked the smartest people I know for their tech predictions for the next 20 years (2018 – 2038).
What are the breakthroughs we can expect on our countdown to the Singularity?" One of the predictions he listed was that by 2030, "humanity will have achieved Longevity Escape Velocity for the wealthiest."
[link to www.dw.com (secure)]

(December 3, 2018) DeepMind Starts To Show How AI Can Be Used To Solve Scientific Problems
DeepMind, the UK artificial intelligence lab bought by Google in 2014,
is poised to start having more of a real-world impact after it was announced
as the winner of a protein folding contest in Cancun on Sunday.
[link to www.forbes.com (secure)]

(June 19, 2019) Sanofi, Google Launch “Innovation Lab” Aimed at Drug Discovery
Sanofi will apply Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing capabilities toward developing new drugs,
through a collaboration whose value was not disclosed. The companies said they have agreed to create a virtual
Innovation Lab to “radically” transform how future medicines and health services are developed and delivered.
[link to www.genengnews.com (secure)]

(July 15 2019) Alphabet’s DeepMind cracked a problem that long vexed biologists, heating up a technological arms race in health care
In December(2018), at the CASP13 meeting in Riviera Maya, Mexico, DeepMind beat seasoned biologists at predicting the shapes of proteins,
the basic building blocks of disease. The seemingly esoteric pursuit has serious implications: A tool that can accurately model protein structures
could speed up the development of new drugs.
With limited experience in protein folding — the physical process by which a protein acquires its three-dimensional shape —
but armed with the latest neural-network algorithms, Deep-Mind did more than what 50 top labs from around the world could accomplish.
In a blog post, the company bragged that its protein models were “far more accurate than any that have come before,”
opening up “new potential within drug discovery.”
[link to www.bloomberg.com (secure)]

(October 23, 2019) Why Google’s ‘Sputnik’ moment isn’t the last word in quantum supremacy
The whole goal of quantum-computer research—at Google, IBM, and elsewhere—is to build computers
that excel at tasks that are nonstarters on classical computers, and that have world-changing implications,
such as modeling molecules in all their complexity.
[link to www.fastcompany.com (secure)]

(Nov. 15, 2019) Google’s data misdeeds are haunting its healthcare plans
Google was strung up in the public square for a deal with a very large U.S. healthcare provider
that netted it access to some 50 million patient healthcare records—without patients’ or doctors’ knowledge.
[link to www.fastcompany.com (secure)]

(February 11, 2020) Trump Proposes a Cut in Research Spending, but a Boost for AI
The budget goes all-in on AI and quantum, proposing to double funding across the departments including the National Science Foundation,
the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, Darpa, and the DoD’s Joint AI Center.
At the same time, the president proposed cutting research spending in nearly every arm of the government,
including by $424 million at the National Science Foundation, $4.7 billion at the Defense Department, and $3.2 billion at the Department of Energy.
[link to www.wired.com (secure)]

(March 16, 2020) Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset
researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI),
Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET),
Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health
released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group.
Requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,
the dataset represents the most extensive machine-readable Coronavirus literature collection
available for data and text mining to date, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.
[link to www.whitehouse.gov (secure)]

(March 18, 2020) U.S. government, tech industry discussing ways to use smartphone location data to combat coronavirus
The U.S. government is in active talks with Facebook, Google and a wide array of tech companies
and health experts about how they can use location data gleaned from Americans’ phones
to combat the novel coronavirus, including tracking whether people are keeping
one another at safe distances to stem the outbreak.
[link to www.washingtonpost.com (secure)]

(April 10, 2020) Apple, Google Bring Covid-19 Contact-Tracing to 3 Billion People
Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users
if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor
about a third of the world’s population.
[link to www.bloomberg.com (secure)]

(May 1, 2020) UK government invited Google DeepMind exec to critical coronavirus meeting
The U.K. government invited DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis to attend a meeting of the scientific advisory group
for emergencies (Sage) on March 18, around the time officials were considering a lockdown.
His attendance, reported by The Guardian, has got people asking questions.
Namely, what was the leader of an American-owned AI firm doing at a top-secret government meeting on the coronavirus?
[link to www.cnbc.com (secure)]

(May 19, 2020) The Use of AI Amid COVID-19
Google’s DeepMind has predicted, not yet confirmed,
the structure of the proteins of the virus,
which will be useful in developing a drug.
[link to www.bdo.com (secure)]

(May 20, 2020) Bill Maris, who started Google’s VC arm, brings on Google walkout organizer at his new venture firm
Section 32 is one of the newer bio investment funds on the block. It was founded by the first CEO of Google Ventures, Bill Maris,
who also helped start Calico, a Google project (now Alphabet company) dedicated to anti-aging technology.
So far, Section 32 has invested in about 40 companies, including Auris, a microsurgical robotics company that sold to Johnson & Johnson;
Alector, a therapeutics company focused on neurodegenerative diseases; and Vir, an infectious disease-focused company that is working on new vaccines,
including for Covid19. More broadly, the fund is also looking at machine learning, cybersecurity, oncology, infectious diseases, diagnostics and brain health.
Maris also remains interested in anti-aging technology, and he typically meets with three to five founders a week in the space. He doesn’t believe that Calico,
which he helped start, has done enough yet to prevent new players from getting into the space.
[link to www.cnbc.com (secure)]

(May 31, 2020) Cardiff’s quiet tech investor, Bill Maris, recruits ex-Googlers to Section 32
San Diego’s most high-profile tech investor is building up his local startup fund, recruiting several ex-Google staffers
to manage his firm’s reputation, recruitment and culture. Bill Maris, who’s best known as the former Silicon Valley investor
who created and led Google’s startup investment efforts at GV, now leads his own fund here in San Diego County.
The investment group, called Section 32, is based in Cardiff-by-the-Sea.
Since it’s inception in 2017, Section 32 has raised over $400 million across two funds.
[link to www.encinitasadvocate.com (secure)]

(June 2, 2020) How AI and Big Data Contribute to the Search for Vaccines and Drugs
Google Makes Its Play in Vaccine AI
Of course, everyone would expect that tech leader Google would have an entry in the world of AI,
and it's finally clicking on all cylinders. In January, Google DeepMind introduced its AI solution called AlphaFold,
which was designed to predict the 3D structure proteins based on genetic sequences.
And in March, the AI system put the coronavirus in its sights.
As was reported, "DeepMind released protein structure predictions
of several under-studied proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2,
the virus that causes COVID-19, to help the research community better understand the virus."
It is hoped that AI will help uncover experiments and treatments that might have otherwise been missed by scientists.
[link to www.simplilearn.com (secure)]

(June 3, 2020) UK PM Defends Under-fire Virus 'Test And Trace' Scheme
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday defended a new "test and trace" system
designed to stop a second wave of coronavirus infection, amid criticism about a lack of transparency.
The scheme, launched in England last week to coincide with the easing of lockdown restrictions,
uses an army of 25,000 tracers to contact people who may have been exposed to the virus.
Anybody thought to be at risk of infection will have to self-isolate for 14 days, even if they have no symptoms.
The government aims to be able to trace the contacts of 10,000 people a day.
"NHS (National Health Service) Test and Trace started operating a week ago,"
Johnson told a daily briefing on the government's response to the outbreak.
[link to www.barrons.com (secure)]

(June 5, 2020) UK’s COVID-19 health data contracts with Google and Palantir finally emerge
Contracts for a number of coronavirus data deals that the U.K. government
inked in haste with U.S. tech giants, including Google and Palantir,
plus a U.K.-based AI firm called Faculty, have been published today
by openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove — which had threatened legal action for withholding the information.
Concerns had been raised about what is an unprecedented transfer of health data on millions of U.K. citizens to private tech companies,
including those with a commercial interest in acquiring data to train and build AI models.
Freedom of Information requests for the contracts had been deferred up to now.
In a blog post today, openDemocracy and Foxglove write that the data store contracts show
tech companies were “originally granted intellectual property rights (including the creation of databases),
and were allowed to train their models and profit off their unprecedented access to NHS data.”
[link to techcrunch.com (secure)]