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.

Apple is once again looking to Asia to turbocharge its research and development process, this time to improve its artificial intelligence efforts. In an interview with Nikkei Asian Review, CEO Tim Cook said the future of the iPhone is AI, which will be supported by its new research and development center that will open by the end of the year in Yokohama, Japan. Cook seemed to suggest that AI in the iPhone would move beyond Siri and would actually help increase your battery life through resource management. It would also recommend music more skillfully, and perform other background tasks. As is typical with Apple, Cook stayed tight-lipped on specifics but said the Yokohama team will deal with "deep engineering" and be quite different from its planned R&D effort in China.

Ryan Lochte's robbery tales weren't the only lies he concocted in Rio. As the "Dancing with the Stars" contestant revealed to New York magazine, he was contractually obligated to say he was single during the Olympics in August -- though Lochte didn't spill which company made that stipulation. The 32-year-old swimmer boasted about using dating apps during the Games to help the myth he was unattached. The bizarre admission comes days after Lochte proposed to his Playboy model girlfriend, Kayla Rae Reid, after 10 months of dating. Lochte, who was dropped by several prestigious sponsors after admitting he lied about being held up at gunpoint during a night of drunken debauchery, has kept quiet about how he first met Reid.

Apple will celebrate the iPhone's 10th anniversary next year, but in chief executive Tim Cook's view, the technology is anything but mature. The Nikkei Asian Review caught up with Cook aboard a bullet train last week and asked him about artificial intelligence, his plans for Asia, and the experience of succeeding Steve Jobs. Cook, who was visiting Japan for the first time as CEO, said Apple will open a research and development base in Yokohama, near Tokyo, later this year. The facility -- the first of its kind outside the U.S. -- will develop AI and other technologies. Cook described it as a center for "deep engineering" and said it will be "very different" from the R&D base Apple plans to build in China. "I cannot tell you the specifics," he said.

We are entering an extremely critical time in history where society will change dramatically – how we work, live and play. Science fiction is morphing into reality. Flying cars exist, cars that drive themselves are on the road, and artificial intelligence that automates our lives is here. And you? what do you think about?

To the editor: I empathize with Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck and his officers, who are reluctant to quickly release information and videos taken of police shootings. As imperfect human beings, none of us appreciates being exposed to intense public scrutiny. On the other hand, L.A.'s finest should learn from examples set by departments in cities like Las Vegas, where officers quickly post information about shootings online. First, bad things grow in the dark, and you can't set a behavioral standard without oversight. Opening up will create more support for genuine peace officers, who will then be reassured that the public has their back.

For many people, Google is simply the gateway to a vast archive of facts and memories. For those who pay closer attention to its business dealings, the company also invests billions to find new ways to use the power of computers: it's developing robots, virtual reality gear and self-driving cars. Remember all the hubbub about Google Glass? Google has been using the same approach in sustainability – spreading its wealth in a variety of projects to cut its waste and carbon footprint, initiatives which may one day generate profits. During the SXSW Eco conference this week, I caught up with Google's sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, to find out more.