Last year, Swedbank in Sweden "hired" Nina, a dynamo of a company rep. Nina is adept at interacting with customers on the bank's website, answering their questions and routing them to the right human representative. She typically engages in some 45,000 conversations a month and successfully answers eight out of 10 inquiries. Not only can Nina understand and mimic human speech, she can also use data to make connections and recommendations. "Nina's brain for Swedbank is educated on all things Swedbank," says Robert Weideman, EVP and GM of the enterprise division at Nuance Communications, which created Nina.

Can you recognise when someone is unwell just by studying their face? Understanding expressions can help doctors improve their diagnoses, but it's a difficult skill to practise. So a group of engineers have made a tool for training clinicians: a robot that can express pain. Many doctors already use robotic patient simulators in their training to practise procedures and test their diagnostic abilities. "These robots can bleed, breathe and react to medication," says Laurel Riek at the University of California, San Diego.

Readers of The Right Stuff long knew that founder "Mike Enoch" had two main interests: technology and white supremacy. Posts on the neo-Nazi site have included discussion of "a new blogging platform built on node.js," while other less techie content has alluded to the "chimpout" in Ferguson, putting Jews in ovens, and Trump's "top-tier troll" of Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. In January, Enoch was outed as Mike Peinovich, a Manhattan-based software engineer. His unmasking highlighted a lingering question about the racist far-right movement that rose to prominence with Donald Trump's election: What support might the so-called alt-right have among techies? Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. "The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year old tech-savvy guy working in IT," white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election.

From being the preserve of sci-fi movies, artificial intelligence has suddenly burst through into the mainstream. Once a subject only discussed in universities or by data scientists, artificial intelligence has become the'must-have' of 2017, with companies across all sectors investigating how it can be incorporated into their business models. The advertising industry, which has long prided itself on being agile and forward thinking, is one of the first sectors to bring AI into its product offerings. The amount of data available to those working in digital advertising – particularly mobile advertising – is what gives AI so much potential in this area. Artificial intelligence thrives from large amounts of data, without data it cannot build models or test its assumptions.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the NHS budget will need to increase by £88billion over the next 50 years if it is to keep pace with the rising demand for healthcare in the UK. But with the 2017 Budget showcasing a massive leaning towards building up its Brexit reserves and allocating a mere £100 million for 100 onsite GP treatment centres in A&Es across England, the NHS is justifiably bracing itself for a painful future. With £20billion worth of cuts scheduled by 2020, combined with fierce warnings that the UK's health services are on the edge of an unprecedented crisis, the urgent call for solutions to be brought to the healthcare table has incontrovertibly intensified. With deep cuts looming, it's time to properly consider how Artificial Intelligence can answer this call and shed light on how its technologies could provide the healthcare industry with some much-needed respite and real solutions to meet the ever spiralling rise in demand for healthcare. The issue of voluminous data that draws relentlessly on healthcare professionals' resources is something that could benefit significantly from the implementation of an AI-based system.

At a Tokyo job fair for the atomic energy industry on March 4, Kenta Kakitani, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, hopes to some day become a nuclear plant design engineer. But Kakitani may be a rare breed in Japan, where nuclear businesses have seen a serious shortage of new talent since the March 11, 2011, meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. "It seems that the nuclear power industry has lost much of its popularity because it is seen as in decline and is suffering a negative image from having to decommission crippled reactors," said Kakitani, 24, who majors in nuclear engineering. According to education ministry data, 298 students entered departments related to nuclear power study in fiscal 2015, a slight decline from 317 in fiscal 2010. Kakitani said that although the number may not have declined drastically, many talented students are majoring in the fields of artificial intelligence and aerospace engineering instead of nuclear engineering. The turnout at the job fair reflects the nuclear power industry's fall from grace.

Each year in the United States, more than 40,000 people die by suicide, and from 1999 to 2014, the suicide rate increased 24 percent. You might think that after generations of theories and data, we would be close to understanding how to prevent self-harm, or at least predict it. But a new study concludes that the science of suicide prediction is dismal, and the established warning signs about as accurate as tea leaves. There is, however, some hope. New research shows that machine-learning algorithms can dramatically improve our predictive abilities on suicides.

Thank you for subscribing to the monthly THINK Marketing newsletter. Surely, both are struggles, but at least the alarm clock is anticipated. The way we manage our customer experience isn't all that different. Whether launching a test environment, integrating a third-party app into your checkout process, or monitoring a known bug in your mobile application, some online struggle is anticipated. It's the unanticipated struggle, however, that really causes the pain.

Marie Kratz, Professor at ESSEC Business School and Director of ESSEC CREAR (Center of Research in Econo-finance and Actuarial sciences on Risk), shares her thoughts about how artificial intelligence will re-shape the actuarial profession. We've all experienced those minor, sometimes major, mishaps in life – your bike gets stolen, you have a car accident, you drop your computer or, worse still, you wake up one morning to find the living room swamped in 3 feet of muddy floodwater. And we have all witnessed the drama of natural catastrophe on the news. The camera covers the victims, some considering themselves lucky, others overcome by the emotion of losing their hard-earned belongings or loved ones – all of them in wait for the complications that will come, not least the financial ones. This is where the insurance company comes in.

Ubisoft Senior Producer Mathieu Ferland demonstrates Dig Rush, created by Ubisoft and Amblyotech to be the first therapeutic video game used for the treatment of'lazy eye.' (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images) "Make sure you play your video game," is not something you commonly hear parents say to kids. But Amblyotech's Amblyopad device armed with Ubisoft's video games Dig Rush and Monster Burner may change this...at least in some households. Amblyotech just filed for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for these games to help treat "lazy eye," which is the lazier way of saying amblyopia. Amblyopia is when the one of your eye's vision is reduced because, as the National Eye Institute (NEI) describes, "the eye and the brain are not working together properly." In this condition which affects 3% of children, your brain favors using one eye over the other (assuming that you only have two eyes), perhaps because your eyes are misaligned (also called strabismus) or the vision in one eye is impaired.