The location and condition of the fuel in the three reactors hit by core meltdowns is critical information for Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., which runs the plant. Removing the fuel debris is considered the most difficult part of decommissioning the complex. Unit 3 has the highest level of water inside at 6 meters. The fuel debris inside is presumed to have melted through its pressure vessel and settled at the bottom of its primary containment vessel. "Until today, no one has seen the situation inside reactor 3," said Tsutomu Takeuchi, senior manager at Toshiba's Fukushima Restoration and Fuel Cycle Project Engineering Department.

The artificial intelligence market is still in its relatively early stages, but a player in the market has received a large amount of funding. Element AI, an AI company based in Montreal, announced Wednesday it had received $102 million in Series A funding. Element AI operates both as an incubator for AI development and as a consulting firm-like organization for companies that want to integrate AI applications into their day-to-day operations. The company, which was co-founded by noted machine learning researcher Yoshua Bengio, received its large funding round from firms and sources including Intel Capital and NVIDIA. The company, which was originally founded in October, plans to use the round to bolster its staff, internal development and potentially to invest in projects it helps to incubate.

Japan's taxi industry, faced with a labor crunch due to an aging population, has been looking at new technologies to drive growth. The sector may also have to deal with more competition in the future if the government allows ride-sharing services such as Uber to operate across the country.

The US Department of Defense is struggling to get its arms around all of the new security issues that have come with our current technological explosion. One unexpected consideration on the table is placing stricter limitations on investment capital from China flowing into American companies that are working on artificial intelligence. Technology is the fastest growing industry in the American economy according to recent data. And with all the political talk about "JOBS, JOBS, JOBS," it's a bit surprising to see the government floating plans to limit investment in American companies. But that's exactly what the Pentagon is proposing according to Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years.

The online world isn't as simple as we've thought it to be. Behind the seemingly quiet and vast space of nothingness, huge amounts of data are uploaded and downloaded in fractions of a second. Data science does not only keeps track of these numbers, but also attempts to analyze and organize them. Algorithms are created to keep tabs on searches in search engines, analyze user data preference, and so on and so forth. The demand for qualified data scientists have become very high. A recent Bloomberg article predicted that there will be a shortage of data scientists in the US by the year 2018.

Before the giant E3 video game exhibition takes place every year, it is proceeded by a series of vast press events, where publishers hope to snag just a little of the world's attention with their latest mega releases. Filling huge venues and live-streamed to a global audience of millions, these one-hour hype-fests can make all the difference between blockbusting success and ignoble failure. Here, then, are our 17 favourite announcements, culled from all the pre-E3 shows. We've stuck to games that were either revealed for the first time on stage, or were finally confirmed after months of gossip, leaks and rumours. These are the titles we want to discover more about at the show, and over the months to come.

When Swedbank customers face a problem, they reach out to Nina, the bank's virtual assistant. Visitors to Mizuho Bank are greeted by Pepper, a humanoid robot standing four feet tall. Santander allows payments to be activated by voice, and JP Morgan Chase now uses machine learning to review commercial loan agreements in seconds, a task that used to take 3,60,000 manhours every year. Wherever you look in the world of financial services, you will find some form of artificial intelligence (AI) at work. AI technologies such as machine learning and speech recognition are quietly working behind the scenes to improve lending decisions and prevent fraud.

Connected devices and the industrial internet are growing exponentially every year with Cisco expecting 50 billion devices to be in operation by 2020. In this period of growth, location-based insights are becoming invaluable to many businesses as they adopt new connected technologies. Knowing when and where these devices connect from is critical for a number of scenarios in supply chain management, disaster management, emergency response, M2M, location marketing and more. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mario Proietti, CEO of LocationSmart, discussed how Internet connectivity enables location-based services to take advantage of everything available on the World Wide Web and how this data helps expand the possibilities for how we communicate, collaborate and commute. Speaker Bio Mario Proietti is the CEO of LocationSmart, a mobile engagement platform for workers, assets and consumers.

Want to know if you'll be dead in five years? Just let a computer look at your organs. New research has indicated that "future" predicting computers could be coming to hospitals in the near future. Researchers are hoping that the technology could be used to predict serious illnesses and medical conditions such as heart attacks. For the study, five year–old medical images of 48 patient's chests were analyzed by artificial intelligence.

Canada has developed into an artificial intelligence (AI) research powerhouse, and it isn't slowing down any time soon if new reports are any indication. Element AI, a Montreal-based AI company focused on enterprise solutions, announced that it has raised USD102 million (CAD137.5 million) in its first round of venture capital funding, the largest for any AI company in history. The funding will be used to ramp up research, accelerate enterprise AI adoption, invest in large-scale AI projects globally, and create 250 new jobs in the Canadian high tech sector by January 2018. "As we've been launching the business in the last year, we've been overwhelmed by the positive feedback and the level of interest in the market for the services we're working on," CEO and co-founder Jean-François Gagné tells IT World Canada. "We received funding from large corporations and startups across the globe and we're going to use this to scale up our business and work on new projects."