The project draws on expertise in speech recognition and in computer vision - ways of capturing visual data - which have been a strength of Cambridge and the Toshiba lab in particular.

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Six years ago, radiologist Michael Zalis found himself spending a lot of time logging in and out of separate electronic health records at Massachusetts General Hospital to gather lab data, clinical notes, and other non-imaging information scattered in multiple databases.

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Popular Apple programs iTunes and QuickTime are being used by malware code writers to hack into computer platforms and potentially steal data, Russian-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab said Friday.

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In his lab Pister has scaled his network to some 800 motes sending error-free data every two seconds.

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Pentland is also head of the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship program, and has co-founded or served in an advisory role to several big data analytics startups such as Ginger.io and Sense Networks.

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The work undertaken at the lab would be citizen-led, Mr Rattner told the BBC, and was likely to include crowdsourcing data.

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