Paris, France, 2 May, 2017 – We are on the threshold of an extraordinary development that makes the automation heart beat faster. Recent announcements by both Facebook and tech pioneer Elon Musk to build brain interfaces are great examples. But together with the expanding possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), emotions run higher and higher. A new report from SogetiLabs'The Frankenstein Factor: the Anatomy of Fear of AI' recommends taking these emotions seriously and pleads for a therapeutic approach. A focus on IT efficiency and effectiveness should be accompanied by a focus on human existence.

Nvidia posted a higher than expected revenue in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2018. The graphics company not only managed to beat analysts' expectation but also reported substantial revenue growth across its major business segments. For the first quarter, Nvidia recorded quarterly earnings of $1.94 billion, a huge 48 percent jump compared to the same period last year and also slightly higher than Wall Street's revenue expectations of $1.91 billion. Contributing to this huge revenue jump are the massive gains made in its gaming GPU business and the improved financial performance of its automotive and data center businesses. Nvidia also saw huge gains in its operating income and net income figures, with increases of 126 percent and 144 percent respectively.

Last summer, Adobe researchers surveyed over 2,000 office employees and nine thought leaders on the evolving definition of work. Through this exercise, researches uncovered several interesting insights about the future of work, including the most effective "carrots" used to motivate employees. "Employers may be focusing too much on ping pong tables and free dry cleaning instead of technology that helps their employees feel valued and encouraged," says Jeff Vijungco, vice president of global talent at Adobe. To help them find fulfillment, "employers need to pay attention to productivity more than perks," he adds. Workspaces that encourage subconscious thought, smart coffee machines and conference rooms that remember what you like, virtual assistants that delight, flexible attendance policies, and performance-based rewards were at the top of the list, according to the study.

Samsung subsidiary Harman Kardon quietly announced its Amazon Echo competitor, called Invoke Monday. The speaker, powered by Microsoft's voice assistant Cortana, is expected to have features such as integration with Microsoft productivity tools, such as MS-Word and artificial intelligence (AI) more focused on human-machine interactions. "We are excited to partner with Harman Kardon to create a speaker that combines premium audio and stylish design with the intelligence of Cortana. This is our next step in bringing Cortana to even more devices to help users be more productive wherever they are," Jordi Ribas, corporate vice president, AI Products at Microsoft, said in the press release. The Invoke speaker looks similar to Amazon Echo and Google Home -- it has a cylindrical design and a top with LED lighting, which glows when the speaker is listening to the user's voice commands.

In this blog post, I'll help you get started using Apache Spark's spark.ml Classification is a family of supervised machine learning algorithms that identify which category an item belongs to (for example, whether a cancer tissue observation is malignant or not), based on labeled examples of known items (for example, observations known to be malignant or not). Classification takes a set of data with known labels and pre-determined features and learns how to label new records based on that information. Features are the "if questions" that you ask. The label is the answer to those questions.

Unknown risk is a factor that delays the uptake of new technology. The public will smoke cigarettes, cross the road and fly in aeroplanes – all potentially life-threatening activities – but when it comes to something where the level of risk is uncertain then this becomes an obstacle to adoption. Ellen Enkel, Professor of Innovation Management at Zeppelin University, and her colleagues looked at the public's distrust of recent developments in artificial intelligence. They concluded that trust in the company delivering the innovation was as important as confidence that the technology would perform. The researchers looked at smart vehicles: BMW's semi-autonomous cars; Daimler's Future Truck; ZF Friedrichshafen's driving assistance system; Deutsch Bahn's semi-autonomous train; VAG Nurenbueg's fully automated underground train and four examples from the medical technology industry, including IBM's Watson AI-empowered diagnostic system.

Global Autonomous Driving Market Outlook, 2017, recent research from Frost & Sullivan's Automotive & Transportation Growth Partnership Service program, finds that the global autonomous driving market will be worth $83 billion by 2025. The study examines the top trends in the automated driving market, including developments like growing usage of driver assistance, new solutions, robot taxis, cognitive cloud computing, and adoption of mechanical light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for perception improvement. Click here for more information on the Autonomous Driving market and to speak to us: https://goo.gl/1izEYn. "Concerns surrounding legislation, system reliability issues, and incompatible infrastructure limit the opportunities for OEMs looking at automated driving," noted Venkitaraman. "Nevertheless, the journey from human-operated to completely autonomous cars is a progression, and pioneering semi-automated vehicles will be an important milestone toward achieving level 5 automated vehicles."

Last week, my Microsoft colleagues Bharath Sankaranarayan and Carl Saroufim presented a live webinar showing how you can predict a patient's length of stay at a hospital using SQL Server R Services. The recorded webinar is available for on-demand viewing now. The webinar is based on the Machine Learning Solution Template Predicting Length of Stay in Hospitals, which we covered here on the blog back in March. The solution is based on an instance of the Data Science Virtual Machine, which makes it easy to try it yourself. Just click the "Deploy" button to create your own instance in Azure with all of the data and scripts preloaded.

Nvidia stock is soaring, up more than 14% in after-hours trading, beating Wall Street's expectations for its first quarter. The graphics processing unit (GPU) company announced its first quarter earnings today with revenue of $1.94 billion, a 48% gain year over year. While gaming drives most of the company's sales, its largest area of growth over the past year was selling GPUs that power the artificial intelligence and graphics processing in datacenters. That sector of business saw 186% growth year over year, just a dip below last quarter's 205% growth. Nvidia has built itself into a leader in this space, selling enterprise GPUs to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Tencent, and Baidu.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Nuance's Second Quarter Fiscal 2017 Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Later, there'll be an opportunity for your questions, and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. With us today from Nuance are Chairman and CEO, Paul Ricci; CFO, Dan Tempesta; EVP of Corporate Strategy and Development, Bruce Bowden; and Director of Investor Relations, Christine Marchuska. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Marchuska. Before we begin, I remind, everyone, our discussion this afternoon includes predictions, estimates, expectations, and other forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause material differences in our actual results. Please refer to our recent SEC filings for a discussion of these risks.