Constant scientific innovation and new technologies improve cancer detection and treatment worldwide. Imperial College London will lead, for at least 12 months, a consortium of clinicians and academics, which will collaborate with DeepMind Health and the Google AI health research team to develop more accurate breast cancer diagnosis thanks to artificial intelligence. Based at the Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, the project will explore whether machine learning could make breast screening technologies more efficient than they are nowadays – mammograms, which are X-rays images of the breasts, miss thousands of cases every year, including an estimated 30% of interval cancers. The consortium will use machine learning technology on about 7,500 depersonalised mammography images from the OPTIMAM mammography database to train computer algorithms to better analyse screenings and identify cancerous tissue more accurately. This would lead to earlier detection and treatment.

The whole issue of automation is a thorny one because it's now part and parcel of a wider public and media debate about destroying jobs. However, Yoni Abittan stresses that the issue is not really about job destruction but the shifting of tasks and the creation of new jobs. "AI pushes us to bring our skills, knowledge and basic abilities up to date. It enables the creation of new fields of activity, new job descriptions," he argues, pointing out: "For instance, the InsurTech specialist Lemonade provides AI-based services. In just a few clicks, its customers can obtain insurance cover or submit a claim and receive compensation – all thanks to AI. Well, this is a roundabout way of illustrating how job destruction can be creative."

BNP Paribas, a leading multinational bank and financial services company headquartered in Paris, has named the eight startups it had picked to join its fintech accelerator program run by L'Atelier BNP Paribas. The bank has selected blockchain startup CommonAccord in a hope to help grow the team's solution into a "Center for Collaborative Law." CommonAccord is a project of James Hazard and Primavera de Filippi that aims at creating "a global template system of codified legal text" that integrates with smart contracts. According to the CommonAccord website, "the legal code is part of a'distributed data model' for transacting. Each participant has their own files stating their legal relationships and transaction histories with each of their partners. The files are private, under their control, shared and handled exactly as they want."