Greetings and welcome to the PROS Holdings Inc Third Quarter 2016 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. It is now my please to introduce your host Stefan Schulz, Chief Financial Officer. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us. With me on today's call is Andres Reiner, President and Chief Executive Officer. Before we begin, we must caution you that some of today's remarks, including our guidance, our strategy, our competitive position, future business prospects, revenue, bookings, market opportunities, as well as statements made during the question-and-answer session, contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on present information and are subject to numerous and important factors, risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from the results implied by these or other forward-looking statements. PROS does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur, or circumstances that exist, after the date on which they are made. Additional information concerning risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in the Company's filings with the SEC. Also, please note that a replay of today's webcast will be available in the Investor Relations section of our website at pros.com. We encourage everyone to review this additional information. Finally, I would like to point out that in addition to reporting financial results in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, PROS reports certain financial results, as well as forward-looking guidance, on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation of each non-GAAP measure to the most directly comparable GAAP measure, to the extent available without unreasonable efforts is available on the press release distributed earlier today, and in the Investor Relations section of our website. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us on today's call.

A wealth of data can be powerful, as long as that data delivers actionable insights. UK-based airline easyJet implemented artificial intelligence (AI) technology to make sense of its data and streamline areas of its business, such as stocking airplanes with the right amount of food. Alberto Rey Villaverde, easyJet's head of data science, spoke to eMarketer's Maria Minsker about why the airline turned to AI and the different ways the information AI provides is being used. Alberto Rey Villaverde: We've been using artificial intelligence for a few years. For the last year, we've been exploring new areas where these technologies could give us a boost. For example, we've been trying to be less wasteful with the food in our planes.

Amazon is extending its big data cloud platform across Europe, and the online retailer has machine learning research groups in Bangalore, Seattle, Palo Alto and Berlin, The Wall Street Journal reported. CEO Jeff Bezos is obsessed with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence -- anything that can help Amazon to better forecast customer wants and needs before the trends ever become obvious to the casual observer. The Amazon Machine Learning platform also is available for customer use via Amazon Web Services. Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research project (FAIR) focuses on "giving people better ways to communicate." Some of Facebook's top AI researchers are Microsoft veterans, and those experts have a habit of sharing Facebook's knowledge.

Dr. Xiwei Liu is an associate professor in the State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems Automation Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2006, he received Ph.D. degree in human factor engineering from the System Control and Management Laboratory, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. Then he worked there as a post doctor and assistant professor. From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a system engineer in Japan supplying research and development, consultant services of management information system for Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan Display Inc. (Hitachi Displays, Ltd.), Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, etc. Since 2009, he has joined the State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems.

Flexible, thin-film solar panels from a Silicon Valley company are allowing drone makers to keep their craft in the sky for hours longer than is possible with batteries alone. The panels, from Alta Devices in Sunnyvale, are produced on thin plastic sheets that can be stuck on the top frame of drones like the Bramor ppX, developed by Slovenia's C-Astral Aerospace. On Tuesday, the two companies showed off a version of the drone with six solar panels affixed to its top. The basic drone can stay aloft for 3.5 hours, but the addition of the solar panels has extended this by two hours, they said. The two plan to offer a solar version of the drone commercially.

A new wearable aid for the blind and visually impaired people uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to better analyze fed data from cameras and sensors. The device is being developed by Swiss startup Eyra, and is named Horus, after the Egyptian god. Its an apt symbol since stories tell us that Horus lost his eye in a fight only to have it restored by another god. Horus is a wrap-around headband equipped with two cameras to watch for what's in front of the user. The images seen are narrated through earpieces that directly stimulate the tiny bones in the ear, with a technology called bone conduction.

Spot the Robot Dog gets kicked. Why was I programmed to feel pain?" The question is played for laughs, but like so many memorable scenes from this most beloved of shows, it also taps into some of the deeper, overarching themes that define our modern civilization. Pain is a fundamental fact of life for many organisms on our planet; a crucial mechanism for identifying what kinds of actions pose serious threats to our physical and mental health. As robots become more sophisticated and interactive, should they also be programmed to experience pain to prevent injuries to themselves or others, and if so, to what extent? "Pain in the Machine," a 12-minute documentary released by the University of Cambridge on Monday, tackles this multifaceted and controversial issue. The film offers insights from artificial intelligence thought leaders, practicing physicians, and other interdisciplinary experts, and contrasts them with iconic popular culture moments that point to the larger philosophical questions inherent to artificially programming pain responses--including a nod to burning robot bit in The Simpsons. Like so many AI research fields, evaluating the utility and benefits of pain in robots inevitably flips the mirror back on our understanding of how those experiences function and protect us in our own lives. "Pain has fascinated philosophers for centuries," Ben Seymour, a Cambridge-based expert on the computational and systems neuroscience of pain, comments in the documentary. "Indeed, some people consider pain to be the pinnacle of consciousness.

Microsoft hosts its Future Decoded event on an annual basis at London's ExCeL center in the fast-regenerating'docklands' area. But was this year's event just another set of polished executives striding around talking about so-called'business transformation', or were there guts and substance of any kind? The firm in fact devoted much of its opening statements and arguments to discuss intelligent machines, neural networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI). By way of introduction, Microsoft UK CEO Cindy Rose leads the software firm's British operations. The New York Law School educated Rose explained some of the company's new business models and detailed the firm's approach to now operating datacenters in the UK itself -- and this is always important for so-called'data residency' and data sovereignty.

Pairwise comparison is an important tool in multi-attribute decision making. Pairwise comparison matrices (PCM) have been applied for ranking criteria and for scoring alternatives according to a given criterion. Our paper presents a special application of incomplete PCMs: ranking of professional tennis players based on their results against each other. The selected 25 players have been on the top of the ATP rankings for a shorter or longer period in the last 40 years. Some of them have never met on the court. One of the aims of the paper is to provide ranking of the selected players, however, the analysis of incomplete pairwise comparison matrices is also in the focus. The eigenvector method and the logarithmic least squares method were used to calculate weights from incomplete PCMs. In our results the top three players of four decades were Nadal, Federer and Sampras. Some questions have been raised on the properties of incomplete PCMs and remains open for further investigation.

We introduce a semi-parametric Bayesian model for survival analysis. The model is centred on a parametric baseline hazard, and uses a Gaussian process to model variations away from it nonparametrically, as well as dependence on covariates. As opposed to many other methods in survival analysis, our framework does not impose unnecessary constraints in the hazard rate or in the survival function. Furthermore, our model handles left, right and interval censoring mechanisms common in survival analysis. We propose a MCMC algorithm to perform inference and an approximation scheme based on random Fourier features to make computations faster. We report experimental results on synthetic and real data, showing that our model performs better than competing models such as Cox proportional hazards, ANOVA-DDP and random survival forests.