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If data from personal biometric devices is ever going to be truly useful to researchers, big medical centers will have to pull it into electronic health records (EHRs), de-identify it, and make it public. Without the medical data found in EHRs, like CT scans, X-rays, and blood tests, researchers have little context for wearable sensor data and there is little useful information that can be gleaned from just the raw data

Practice Fusion, a popular EHR company, will begin opening up its API over the next year to pull in data from wearable sensors to its platform.

Basis, a startup that makes a health sensor-laden watch, is working on the first step: a device-agnostic platform that puts all of a person’s health sensor data into a single online repository.

In January, the biotech company Genentech reportedly committed $10 million for access to the DNA of 3,000 Parkinson’s patients and their families. A week later, Pfizer made a similar deal for the genomes of 5,000 people with lupus.

A trove of data could give scientists the tools they need to develop gene-specific drug therapies for certain diseases. “We are hoping to ultimately develop Parkinson’s medicines, for example, that actually modify the disease as opposed to just treating symptoms,”

“this has the possibility of not only helping us find new cures, but it also helps us create a genuine health care system as opposed to just a disease care system.”

unable to separate reality (or as "real" as the online world can be, cartoon or otherwise) and the fictional world of advertising.

Dr. Domingos' recent article in the Wall Street Journal paints a utopian scenario where consumers are able to wrest control of the personal information stolen by big business and use it to create "digital models".

we really need to ask if creating millions of digital models to remove us even further from face-to-face interaction is the right thing to do.

If you create something with the Rift, the Terms of Service say that you surrender all rights to that work and that Oculus can use it whenever it wants

Oculus can collect data from you while you’re using the device

Furthermore, the information that they collect can be used to directly market products to you

Imagine a world where the narrative, background music, colour grading and general feel of a drama is shaped in real time to suit your personality.

Visual Perceptive Media is a film which changes based on the person who is watching the video. Rather than drawing on sensor data to profile the environment, it focuses on the user themselves. It uses profiled data from a phone application to build a profile of the user and their preferences via their music collection and some personality questions.

wearable system that tracks human movements to understand what task you’re doing, how difficult it is, and when you switch to something else. His goal is to help us control our multitasking lives

Gathering patterns of data that describe humans doing different tasks has more potential than just helping us work more efficiently.

the device could turn your phone to silent or deliver only emergency notifications. It could also tell you when you need to take a break

When we launched ads two years ago, ads were available in just eight countries. In September, we opened for business in around 200 countries

Facebook’s global sales team was beginning to push Instagram’s advertising to small businesses, providing them with the ability to target marketing at particular users

that international expansion was a priority, with 75 per cent of its more than 400m users based outside the US

A product team at Google is working on a hardware device that would integrate Google's search and voice assistant technology, akin to the Amazon Echo

a portable speaker with voice assistant tech

voice search and intelligent personal assistance will occupy center stage at the company's splash show

what’s called “deep learning”—a form of artificial intelligence that’s rapidly reinventing a wide range of online services—the company is beefing up its Inbox by Gmail app so that it can analyze the contents of an email and then suggest a few (very brief) responses

The idea is that you can rapidly respond to someone while on the go—without having to manually tap a fresh message into your smartphone keyboard.

system learns to generate appropriate replies by analyzing scads of email conversations from across Google’s Gmail service