Last week, Apple launched its latest MacBook Pro laptops. They are deluxe, powerful machines with innovations including the Touch Bar, where the top row of function keys is replaced by a touch-sensitive screen where different functions appear, changing as you change programs. The new models also have a fingerprint sensor built into the power button, to buy stuff online faster than you can say "impulse purchase". In this exclusive interview, Philip Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, told The Independent all about them. Schiller is a familiar face at Apple keynotes, mixing a dry sense of humour with bullish, on-message statements.

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.

DB: Imagine what the next 5 years will bring: The term "mobile computing" will eventually become a dated term, replaced by "ubiquitous computing" as the internet will be everywhere. These changes include the transportation we take on land, in the air, and at sea; the clothes and devices we wear, sensors at work, at home, in our environment, and (if we chose) in us for medical purposes as well. DB: Also right behind and coupled with the Internet of Everything: 3D mass fabricators enabling individuals to affordably "print" and modify at the molecular level tangible substances based on digital designs. Maker Faires around the world already exist showcasing the early stages of what 3D fabricators can do in the hands of artists, engineers, and hobbyists. As Co-Chair of the IEEE Committee focused on Artificial Intelligence and Innovative Policies, I firmly believe exponential changes like the era we're in offer great opportunities for society -- as well as great challenges.

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks--it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. The AI named itself Benjamin. Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor."

This year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) celebrates 50 years of the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious technical award in the computing industry. The Turing Award, generally regarded as the'Nobel Prize of computing', is an annual prize awarded to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". In celebration of the 50 year milestone, renowned computer scientist Melanie Mitchell spoke to CBR's Ellie Burns about artificial intelligence (AI) – the biggest breakthroughs, hurdles and myths surrounding the technology. MM: There are many important examples of AI in the mainstream; some very visible, others blended in so well with other methods that the AI part is nearly invisible. Web search is an "invisible" example that has had perhaps the broadest impact.

I have just returned from the fourth annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum and I want to emphasize how very important it has been for ACM Turing laureates to participate in the program. Each year 200 math and computer science undergraduates participate in the program, approximately 100 each. Speeches by laureates are mixed with undergraduate workshops and plenary open sessions. There is ample opportunity for interaction among students and laureates and between students. This year, Brian Schmidt gave the Lindau lecture (from the annual Nobel Prize winners meeting).

No one likes being reduced to a number. For example, there is much more to my financial picture than my credit score alone. There is even scholarly work on weaknesses in the system to compute this score. Everyone may agree the number is far from perfect, yet it is used to make decisions that matter to me, as Moshe Y. Vardi discussed in his Editor's Letter "Academic Rankings Considered Harmful!" (Sept. So I care what my credit score is.

In yesterday's article we talked about the 3rd gene editing company getting ready to IPO, CRISPR Therapeutics. While gene editing is an incredibly complex technology, the whole idea behind it is actually quite simple. You can use gene editing technology (read about the three main types here) to edit a gene and then start changing the way life forms actually work. When you start to play around with modifying life forms in this way, then this is an area of research we refer to as "synthetic biology". The whole gene editing/synthetic biology space is incredibly exciting because the possibilities are really infinite.

One of the central themes in Sum-Product networks (SPNs) is the interpretation of sum nodes as marginalized latent variables (LVs). This interpretation yields an increased syntactic or semantic structure, allows the application of the EM algorithm and to efficiently perform MPE inference. In literature, the LV interpretation was justified by explicitly introducing the indicator variables corresponding to the LVs' states. However, as pointed out in this paper, this approach is in conflict with the completeness condition in SPNs and does not fully specify the probabilistic model. We propose a remedy for this problem by modifying the original approach for introducing the LVs, which we call SPN augmentation. We discuss conditional independencies in augmented SPNs, formally establish the probabilistic interpretation of the sum-weights and give an interpretation of augmented SPNs as Bayesian networks. Based on these results, we find a sound derivation of the EM algorithm for SPNs. Furthermore, the Viterbi-style algorithm for MPE proposed in literature was never proven to be correct. We show that this is indeed a correct algorithm, when applied to selective SPNs, and in particular when applied to augmented SPNs. Our theoretical results are confirmed in experiments on synthetic data and 103 real-world datasets.

Deloitte's award-winning artificial intelligence platform continues to innovate financial statement audits by using advanced machine learning and natural language processing to extract key information from large volumes of audit evidence. FEI Daily spoke with Will Bible, an audit partner at Deloitte & Touche LLP, on innovating financial statement audits with artificial intelligence and how it will impact the world of finance, accounting and auditing. Will is presenting at this year's Current Financial Reporting Issues Conference, November 14-15, 2016 in New York City on the topic. Will Bible: To achieve automation and ubiquitous data analytics, you need data standardization. There's been a lot of progress on digitizing information, and automating processes around that digitized information.