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.

Some artificial intelligence products have become so advanced in online discussion moderation that they will no longer be confused by colloquial language, neologisms or spelling mistakes. AI is able to take on routine human tasks, but cannot fully replace human intelligence. Online discussions are abound with hate speech and off-topic comments, causing massive headaches for media companies. Legislation requires that illegal messages are removed, and users are more content if they can avoid becoming the target of inappropriate insults. The volumes of comments posted on discussion forums and below news articles can be staggering, and their proper moderation may sometimes require infeasible amounts of manpower.

At the heart of AI systems are statistical models that have no concept of social inequality, fairness, or hardships. In Cathy O'Neil's book, Weapons of Math Destruction (WMD), she points out that big data is discriminating nearly at every juncture of our society and pummeling the poor at each opportunity. Her book points to many avenues of misuse of data, but most offensive is through the use of proxies. Data statistics that are designed for one purpose but are repurposed to be used for economic or convenience sake. There are a number of examples of this.

No longer the subject of science fiction, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is profoundly transforming our daily lives. While computers have been mimicking human intelligence already for some decades using logic and if-then kind of rules, massive increases in computational power are now facilitating the creation of'deep learning' machines i.e. algorithms that permit software to train itself to recognize patterns and perform tasks, like speech and image recognition, through exposure to vast amounts of data. These deep learning algorithms are everywhere, shaping our preferences and behaviour. Facebook uses a set of algorithms to tailor what news stories an individual user sees and in what order. Bot activity on Twitter last year suppressed a protest against Mexico's now-president by overloading the hashtag used to organize the event.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere: your smartphone, on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Netflix and even in some smart home appliances. But can the technology, which has seemingly caught the attention of most VCs across the world, be used in the realm of healthcare to drive efficiency and optimise patient outcomes? We take a look at some of the UK's most promising companies using AI to transform the healthcare space. No list of this kind would be complete without a mention of DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence company founded in 2010 and acquired by tech giant Google for a reported £400m four years later. DeepMind Health is leveraging machine learning technology – a form of AI – to boost the medical research field.

March 9, 2017 --Physicist Stephen Hawking may be a proponent of artificial intelligence, but he has also been outspoken about the potential challenges it creates. In a recent interview, he sounded a similar tone, and offered a solution that conservatives my find hard to accept. Speaking to The Times of London to commemorate being awarded the Honorary Freedom of the City of London, a title that was conferred on him on Monday, Professor Hawking expressed optimism for the future. He added, however, that he is concerned about artificial intelligence (AI), as well as other global threats. "We need to be quicker to identify such threats and act before they get out of control," Hawking said.