Salesforce has a history of staying close to the cutting edge of technology, so it shouldn't be surprising that it announced an artificial intelligence initiative recently, it dubbed Einstein. We caught up with some key members of the Einstein team at Dreamforce earlier this month and asked them to explain the new technology for us. Einstein isn't a product so much as a set of intelligence functionality that underlies the entire Salesforce platform, and while the types of functionality that it's enabling now are somewhat limited, the idea is to provide a base on top of which the company can continue to add new capabilities into the future. Today, Einstein can provide information like predictive lead scoring and opportunity insights, which alert a rep how a deal is trending -- the kinds of information many CRM applications have been offering for some time -- but as the technology develops, the company sees a much bigger role for it. As John Ball, GM of Einstein at Salesforce explains, it's really aimed at making life easier for users.

In the past half decade, artificial intelligence and machine learning have made significant leaps into the mainstream and into our daily lives. According to research firm Markets and Markets, the artificial intelligence market is set to grow to 5.05 billion by 2020 thanks to the increased applicability of various AI technologies into everything from finance to healthcare to retail. Today, doctors can diagnose Sepsis with an AI algorithm, for instance, and researchers can track endangered species through AI-enhanced photo capture systems. Clearly, these new self-learning and ever-improving technologies have limitless potential in a number of innovative industries. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Technology Engagement Center (C_TEC) recently hosted a panel discussion during its TecNation 2016 event that focused on where we stand with Artificial Intelligence and how it will affect our lives and unlock our potential in the long run.

Stephen Hawking has warned artificial intelligence could be the greatest disaster in human history if it is not properly managed. The world famous physicist said AI could bring about serious peril in the creation of powerful autonomous weapons and novel ways for those in power to oppress and control the masses. Hawking suggested AI could be the last event in the history of our civilisation if humanity did not learn to cope with the risks it posed. But the cosmologist and professor also said AI could have great benefits and potentially erase poverty and disease. Actress Gemma Arterton attends'Their Finest' Mayor's Centrepiece Gala screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square Actress Nicole Kidman attends the'Lion' American Express Gala screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square A woman holds up a Prince symbol during the Prince Official Tribute concert at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota Chaka Khan perform during the'Official Prince Tribute-A Celebration of Life and Music' concert at Xcel Energy Center in St Paul, Minnesota Jessie J performs during the'Official Prince Tribute-A Celebration of Life and Music,' concert Nicole Scherzinger, former lead singer for the Pussycat Dolls, performs during a tribute to late musician Prince, at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton sits with Ellen DeGeneres of the Ellen Show in Burbank, Los Angeles, California Writer/film subject Jonas Mekas takes part in a Q&A following the'I Had Nowhere To Go' screening Writer/film subject Jonas Mekas and film critic Amy Taubin take part in a Q&A following the'I Had Nowhere To Go' screening during the 54th New York Film Festival at The Film Society of Lincoln Center Gina Miller arriving at the High Court in London, where she is leading a legal challenge over Theresa May's right to trigger article 50 without a vote in Parliament Director Paolo Sorrentino and Jude Law walk the red carpet at'The Young Pope' premiere at The Space Cinema Actress Michelle Williams attends the'Manchester By The Sea' International Premiere screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square Ellie Goulding joins'Nike Training Club' at Nike Sydney in Sydney, Australia Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. of U2 perform during the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital benefit concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, California "We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. So it's a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence," Hawking said at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at Cambridge University on Wednesday.

I had thought my job was safe from automation--a computer couldn't possibly replicate the complex creativity of human language in writing or piece together a coherent story. I may have been wrong. Authors beware, because an AI-written novel just made it past the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan. The novel this program co-authored is titled, The Day A Computer Writes A Novel. It was entered into a writing contest for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award.

Getting ready to step into the self-driving Ford Fusion in Dearborn, MI. These technological advances, which are dependent on the machine learning branch of AI, rely on the data collected by car companies--data from real miles driven, such as with Tesla's Autopilot, data from simulations of autonomous driving, and data from test situations, such as Uber's driverless fleet in Pittsburgh. Big data, said Michael Cavaretta, director of analytics infrastructure at Ford Motor Company, means data that is "too big to easily handle within your computational resources." It's about looking at datasets with "high velocity, high volume and high variety," he said. And as computers have become more powerful and storage is cheaper, grappling with this data has become more difficult.

Topic identification is a top-of-the-list need for organizations working with large volumes of online, social, and enterprise text. Along with entity resolution, relation extraction, summarization, and sentiment analysis, topic modeling is a key natural language processing (NLP) function. Premise number 2: Applied NLP -- text analytics -- remains as much art as science, requiring a combination of domain and technical expertise. How better to explore topic modeling and NLP advances than via an interview with a leading practitioner? This article features an interview with Lev Konstantinovskiy, a data scientist who is community manager for gensim, which offers open-source topic modeling for Python programmers.

This is Patricia Murphy, Vice President of Investor Relations for IBM. I'd like to welcome you to our third quarter earnings presentation. The prepared remarks will be available within a couple of hours and a replay of the webcast will be posted by this time tomorrow. I'll remind you that certain comments made in this presentation may be characterized as forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in the Company's filings with the SEC. Copies are available from the SEC, from the IBM website, or from us in Investor Relations. Our presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures in an effort to provide additional information to investors. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to their related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charts at the end of the presentation and in the form 8-K submitted to the SEC today. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Martin Schroeter. In the third quarter, we generated 19.2 billion in revenues, 3.7 billion in pre-tax income and 3.29 of operating earnings per share. As we think back to the discussion 90 days ago, it was around Brexit and its impact on Europe, global spending and sectors like banking and the attractiveness of investment in the emerging markets, all of these topics have the capacity to drive some volatility and results, but what you see in our third quarter results is stability in our revenue with continued strong growth and strategic imperatives and a top and bottom line consistent with what we expected. Our revenue was essentially flat relative to last year. Looking at the revenue dynamics, I want to point out a few things. Our clients are focussed on becoming digital businesses and have strong growth in cloud, security, mobile, and across our analytics portfolio reflects this. In total, we continue to deliver double-digit revenue growth in our strategic imperatives led by our cloud business. Cloud delivered as-a-service is part of a solid recurring revenue base across software and services, and our annuity revenue continued to grow. Of course, the acquisitions we made in the last 12 months contributed to growth about the same amount as last quarter and for the first time in quite a while currency was a modest tailwind to revenue growth.

Why is it that every time humans develop a really clever computer system in the movies, it seems intent on killing every last one of us at its first opportunity? In Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 starts off as an attentive, if somewhat creepy, custodian of the astronauts aboard the USS Discovery One, before famously turning homicidal and trying to kill them all. In The Matrix, humanity's invention of AI promptly results in human-machine warfare, leading to humans enslaved as a biological source of energy by the machines. In Daniel H. Wilson's book Robopocalypse, computer scientists finally crack the code on the AI problem, only to have their creation develop a sudden and deep dislike for its creators. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep? And you're not an especially sentient being yourself if you haven't heard the story of Skynet (see The Terminator, T2, T3, etc.) The simple answer is that -- movies like Wall-E, Short Circuit, and Chappie, notwithstanding -- Hollywood knows that nothing guarantees box office gold quite like an existential threat to all of humanity. Whether that threat is likely in real life or not is decidedly beside the point. How else can one explain the endless march of zombie flicks, not to mention those pesky, shark-infested tornadoes? The reality of AI is nothing like the movies. Siri, Alexa, Watson, Cortana -- these are our HAL 9000s, and none seems even vaguely murderous. The technology has taken leaps and bounds in the last decade, and seems poised to finally match the vision our artists have depicted in film for decades. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep, or is Hollywood running away with a tired idea? Looking back at the last decade of AI research helps to paint a clearer picture of a sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightened future. An increasing number of prominent voices are being raised about the real dangers of humanity's continuing work on so-called artificial intelligence.

A RealDoll model, not one currently equipped with AI. RealDoll, as the name suggests, make incredibly life-like sex dolls. You might have seen the documentary on the BBC about the four men who treat their RealDolls like girlfriends, or Lars and the Real Girl, the Ryan Gosling movie where the co-lead is a RealDoll named Bianca. Or you might have just seen them on the internet, for it is a vast and thorough thing. You also might have seen, on the internet, that RealDoll founder Matt McMullen is working on integrating robots and artificial intelligence into the dolls. While most AI personal assistants we chat to today--Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Echo--hire writers to ensure their responses are charming but always professional, Matt's trying to exploit the developments in speech recognition to create an AI whose main aim is to get you mentally and physically excited.

"If you want to know where to make money over the next two decades, look for companies that are finding ways to automate jobs that are currently being done by humans...that you wouldn't have thought previously could be done by a machine. Truck drivers are one thing and Google as well as Tesla have a great head-start in disrupting that market, but lawyers, doctors, teachers, customer service and sales reps – there are companies that are turning these professions into lines of code, and they're going to make a lot of money." Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a roughly 25bn a year market today and Gartner projects that it will be the fastest growing enterprise SaaS segment over the next few years, reaching over 40bn in annual spend in 2019. The importance of this market is being underscored by the all-out war between tech titans Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle who have already spent close to 40bn in the past two months on CRM-related acquisitions including LinkedIn ( 26.2bn cash), NetSuite ( 9.3bn cash), and Demandware ( 2.8bn stock). Companies today are striving to leverage what is rapidly approaching the zettabyte scale data loads that customers are uploading to the cloud every year, and most CEOs understand that getting a better customer 360 will be a key driver of their firms' success.