This call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Verisk's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Lee Shavel. Mr. Shavel, please go ahead. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our first quarter of 2018 financial results. With me on the call this morning are Scott Stephenson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Anquillare, Chief Operating Officer. Following comments by Scott, Mark and myself, highlighting some key points about our financial performance, we will open the call for your questions. The earnings release referenced on this call as well as the associated 10-Q can be found in the Investors section of our website, verisk.com. The earnings release has also been attached to an 8-K that we have furnished to the SEC. We also filed an 8-K on April 26, 2018, with a description of our business segment recasting. A replay of this call will be available for 30 days on our website and by dial-in. Finally, as set forth in more detail in today's earnings release, I will remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements about Verisk's future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from what is suggested by our comments today. Information about the factors that could affect future performance is contained in our recent SEC filings. Now, I will turn the call over to Scott Stephenson. The first quarter was another example of our team achieving a high level of organic revenue growth, which remains the most important measure of our vitality as an organization. This growth was a product of our traditional multilevel growth plan including, first, the development of new customers for existing solutions, such as was seen in our claims analytics platform; secondly, the cross-selling of our existing solutions to existing customers as seen in our imagery solutions and upstream oil and gas analytics; and thirdly, new products including insurance data hosting. Over the last 90 days, I was particularly impressed by the quality of our engagement with many large leading customers resulting in real-time business wins and opportunities into the future. We continue to enjoy visits from the most senior leaders at some of our biggest customers who are looking to get closer to our pipeline of innovations. We held the largest gathering in our history for customers of our catastrophe analytics solutions and we're impressed again with the level of engagement and input from our clients.

In this episode Andrew Vaziri speaks with Nicolas Economou, CEO of the eDiscovery company H5 and co-founder and chair of the Science, Law and Society Initiative at Harvard's Kennedy School. Economou discusses how AI is applied in the legal system, as well as some of the key points from the recent "Global Governance of AI Roundtable". The roundtable, hosted by the government of the UAE and Harvard's Kennedy school, brought together a diverse group of leaders from tech companies, governments, and academia to discuss the societal implications of AI. Nicolas Economou is the chief executive of H5 and was a pioneer in advocating the application of scientific methods to electronic discovery. He contributes actively to advancing dialogue on public policy challenges at the intersection of law, science, and technology.

DeepMind has a new paper where researchers have uncovered two "surpising findings". The paper is described in "Understanding Deep Learning through Neuron Deletion". In networks that generalize well, (1) all neurons are important and (2) are more robust to damage. Deep Learning network have behavior that reminds us of holograms. These results are further confirmation of my conjecture that Deep Learning systems are like holographic memories.

Professor Barry O'Sullivan is an award-winning academic working in the field of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. He is the founding Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at University College Cork, and a Principal Investigator at the Confirm Centre for Smart Manufacturing which is based at the University of Limerick. Professor O'Sullivan is a Fellow and current Deputy President of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EurAI), one of the world's largest AI associations with over 4500 members in over 30 countries. Professor O'Sullivan was President of the International Association for Constraint Programming from 2007-2012. In 2013 he received a UCC Leadership Award and won the Association for Constraint Programming Distinguished Service Award in 2014.

If you're the guy in charge of leading Daimler--you know, the world's largest luxury carmaker, one of Europe's most important tech companies, and the inventor of the automobile--into a threatening future, it can't hurt to have a name that sounds made for a superhero. Good thing it's a guy named Wilko Stark helming CASE (that's connectivity, autonomous, shared and services, and electric mobility), which Daimler launched in 2016 to address the most promising and troubling trends under one roof. Between electrification, autonomy, car sharing, and ride hailing, the car industry is undergoing a monumental, unprecedented shift. So we sat down with Stark to hear about his plans for bringing Daimler into this future--no cape necessary. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Writing about AI for an appreciable amount of time is, in my experience, enough to make any reasonable person concerned about the future of humanity. But I worry the focus of that concern is too often directed at the relatively distant future, which could lead to unforeseen consequences in the present. Headlines from the past few months illuminate how bad things can get. Consider the cases of the self-driving Uber that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona and that of the Apple engineer who was killed when his Tesla, driving on Autopilot, plowed into a traffic barrier on the highway. You're probably aware of the content suggestion algorithms from Facebook and YouTube, which have been implicated in the spread of fake news and extremist views.

Film director Michael Anderson is seen in this undated photo. LONDON – British director Michael Anderson, whose films included war epic "The Dam Busters" and sci-fi classic "Logan's Run," has died at age 98. Anderson's family said Sunday that he died of heart disease April 25 in Canada, at his home on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. Born into a theatrical family in London in 1920, Anderson served in the army during World War II and made his feature debut in 1949 with "Private Angelo," co-directed by Peter Ustinov. His 1955 adventure "The Dam Busters" told the story of a daring wartime bombing raid on Germany's industrial heartland. Its visual flair and stirring score helped make it one of Britain's best-loved war films, and its thrilling climax helped inspire the attack on the Death Star in the first "Star Wars" movie.

Firstly, I'd like to thank Lina and Stephen from LoopMe, the world's largest mobile video advertising platform, for inviting me to be this year's keynote to present the "Future of Artificial Intelligence" at the British Museum in London the other week. All in all it was an eclectic day, after an interview which you can see below, I discussed, and showed, just how far Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come in just the past four years, lifting the kimono as they say on the latest generation of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN's) and so called "Creative Machines" that are being used to innovate new products, including aircraft, clothes, other AI's, robots, software and shoes, as well as compose and compile best selling pop songs, and create scarily realistic high definition fake news clips, after which I moved onto the impact that the forthcoming so called "Quantum AI" revolution, and self-learning brain inspired Neuromorphic computers, that will pack the power of today's biggest supercomputers into a fingernail, will have on the future pace and direction of AI development. As for the remainder of the day, and the line up, it was as interesting as it was diverse. There were luminaries such as Saqib Shaikh from Microsoft who despite being legally blind has risen to fame for using his immense drive and determination to develop AI powered solutions that help disabled people everywhere better understand and navigate the world around them, as well as Alan Kelly, Ireland's "most awarded creative," and the Creative Director of Rothco, whose recent work with the Times newspaper saw him and his team use AI and speech synthesis to help them "unsilence" JFK, and allow him to finally speak the state of the union address he was going to deliver on the day of his fatal shooting in his own voice. There were also speakers and panellists like Roger Highfield, the director of the UK Science Museum who was discussing some of the latest breakthroughs he's seen in robotics and AI, such as Nvidia's recent "fake" celebrity stunt, and Chris Russell from the Alan Turning Institute who discussed his work in using AI to create better "healthcare outcomes," as well as other executives from a range of organisations, from eConsultancy to News UK, who regailed the audience with insightful facts about the state of AI in the global advertising industry.

Cloud platforms have begun democratizing artificial intelligence, ushering in a new wave of AI innovation. As companies continue their march toward digitization, they're increasingly adding artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques to their value-creation toolboxes. In this conversation with Bill Ready, chief operating officer at PayPal, he explains how cloud platforms are making AI available to a wider set of users, unlocking a plethora of opportunities. However, access to these technologies and the digital economy is not distributed evenly across the population. Opening up access to all could create a new trajectory for future economic growth.

For the past several years, I have been a consultant and adviser on telehealth, virtual reality in health care, and artificial intelligence. I spent the last week with my colleagues in the Silicon Valley at a Stanford-Google symposium on human and artificial intelligence in health care, as well as other health-care technology meetings. Let me assure you that movies and television that suggest doctors are going to be replaced by AI technologies are incorrect. I've had conversations with venture capitalists who think that will happen, and it is clear to me that they do not understand how health care really works. The mundane and repetitive activities that drive doctors and their staffs crazy may indeed be relegated to AI, but machines will not be making life and death decisions.