London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has been accused of putting politics over public safety after blocking a £50m contract between the Metropolitan Police and US tech firm Palantir. Scotland Yard had been in talks to use the company's artificial intelligence to speed up criminal investigations. Palantir's UK chief executive Louis Mosley also said the decision would give hostile states and criminals an advantage. The Met has previously warned it will have to cut officer numbers if the deal does not proceed. Palantir, founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a prominent donor to US President Donald Trump, already holds contracts with other UK public sector bodies.

Combining data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning to better identify patterns that may underlie the cause or causes of multiple sclerosis (MS) is the focus of a novel partnership. Despite numerous advances in MS research and treatments, what causes the disease is still unknown. "Given the complexity of MS and the urgent need to help patients that are living with this diagnosis, we wanted to explore new ways to infuse technology into our research," Saud A. Sadiq, MD, director and chief research scientist at the Tisch MS Research Center of New York (Tisch MSRCNY), said in a press release. Sadiq and fellow researchers at Tisch MSRCNY collaborated with Deloitte, a consulting and advisory services company. Tisch MSRCNY is a nonprofit center specialized in MS, its causes, biomarkers, and other disease research tools.

It's 2019 and I have been alone for most of my adult life. As I get older, and because I am male, my loneliness is generally going to increase. If I lose my job chances are that I will become even more socially isolated. Compared to women, I'm three times more likely to take my own life because of loneliness and less likely to talk about it with anyone. But writing is my companion, it's my "talk-to".

Amazon helped show the world how machines can learn. As far back as the late '90s, the company's online retail site would track every book, CD, and movie you purchased. As time went on, it would develop a pretty good sense of what you liked, serving up product recommendations its code predicted would catch your eye. And in the years since, the field of so-called machine learning has evolved in enormous ways, with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft training enormous networks of machines to identify faces in photos, recognize the spoken word, and instantly translate conversations from one language to another. Now, as these tech giants advance the state of the art, there's a movement afoot to bring machine learning to the business world at large.