Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's Second Quarter Fiscal 2017 Earnings Conference Call. During today's conference all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Thank you, Shannon and thanks everyone for joining us today on our second quarter fiscal 2017 earnings announcement. As Shannon just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Pierre Nanterme, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Rowland, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the News Release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Pierre will begin with an overview of our results. David will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet for the second quarter. Pierre will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before David provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2017. We will then take your questions before Pierre provides a wrap up at the end of the call. As a reminder, when we discuss revenues during today's call, we're talking about revenues before reimbursements or net revenues. Some of the matters we'll discuss on the call, including our business outlook are forward-looking and as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's News Release and discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call.

In his 60-year reign as King of Great Britain and Ireland, King George III suffered from recurrent episodes of both physical and mental illness. Researchers have programmed a computer to'read' the famous King's letters, analaysing the characteristics of his writing. The results suggest that King George III suffered from'acute mania' - a term used to describe an excitable, hyperactive condition. In his 60 year reign as King of Great Britain and Ireland, King George III suffered from recurrent episodes of both physical and mental illness. Researchers from St George's University, London, programmed a computer to'read' hundreds of King George III's letters, to understand his mental state.

A robot looks at visitors at the Soft Bank robotics stand at the Cebit technology fair in Hannover on March 20, 2017. The Digital Business fair CEBIT in Hanover with Japan as partner country runs from March 20 until March 24. I've written a number of times about the impact automation will have on both the wider world and on the way we work, and am broadly speaking optimistic about the role new technologies will play in the labor market. Indeed, a recent paper highlighted the minimal impact technology has had on the amount of jobs created in recent economic recoveries. Of course, this doesn't stop a great many articles emerging in the past few months highlighting the huge (negative) impact automation will have.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms to iteratively learn from data and finds hidden insights in data without being explicitly programmed where to look or how to find the answer. Here at SAS, we hear questions every day about machine learning: what it is, how it compares to other technologies, and why it matters. On the more technical end of the spectrum, we also hear questions about specific machine learning algorithms and how to use them. You will get all of your answers -- and more -- if you take the time to read the articles listed here, from definitions and comparisons to how-to tips on data science techniques. This isn't a comprehensive list, of course, but I tried to pick some favorite articles I've seen published over the last year, and I'm trying to list them here in order from introductory to more advanced.

In his regular courses at Georgia Tech, the computer science professor had at most a few dozen students. But his online class had 400 students -- students based all over the world; students who viewed his class videos at different times; students with questions. Maybe 10,000 questions over the course of a semester, Goel says. It was more than he and his small staff of teaching assistants could handle. "We were going nuts trying to answer all these questions," he says.

Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it's a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to connect to the cloud to deliver answers. Now, a startup called Mythic (formerly known as Isocline) is launching a chip and software that will change all that, putting voice control, computer vision and other kinds of AI into our devices locally, no cloud required. Headquartered in Austin, with offices in Redwood City, Calif., Mythic has raised $9.3 million in venture funding, including angel capital and a Series A round, according to CEO and co-founder Mike Henry. Mythic's Series A round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson joined by Lux Capital, Data Collective, and AME Cloud Ventures.

While the rise in machine learning technology may be making people's lives smarter and easier, it has conversely given rise to fear and anxiety among people about losing jobs to artificial intelligence (AI) devices, a study has showed. "Technophobes" -- persons who fear robots, artificial intelligence and new technology that they don't understand -- are three times more likely to be fearful of losing their jobs to technology when compared to others and nearly three times more likely to fear not having enough money in the future, the study has shown. This is a real concern among a substantial portion of the population. They are not simply a subgroup of generally fearful people," said researcher Paul McClure, a sociologist in Baylor University's College of Arts & Sciences, in Texas, US. "People in certain occupations may legitimately fear losing their jobs to robots and software that can work for cheaper and for longer hours than any human," McClure added, in the paper published in the journal Social Science Computer Review. Technophobes also have 95 per cent greater odds of not being able to stop or control worrying when compared to others, and 76 per cent greater odds of feeling as if something awful might happen and are also more likely to suffer anxiety-related mental health issues.

Teachers should use teaching methods that utilize technology in the most efficient way. During action research a motivating learning environment was developed, with a digital learning game and the flipped classroom pedagogy. The target group was first year pupils in a primary school. There were seventeen pupils in the class: nine of them were girls and eight were boys. The experiment was held during five weeks and there was one lesson per week.

Artificial Intelligence could almost double the UK's economic growth rate and boost the country's labour productivity by up to 40 per cent by 2035, according to a research report from Accenture. The market report, 'Why Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Growth,' suggests AI is poised to fundamentally change the nature of work and create an entirely new level of interaction between man and machine, both in the UK, elsewhere in the EU and further afield. The net result could be a dramatically more productive economy in the UK, with the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies by the private and public sectors almost doubling the country's economic growth rate and thereby adding an extraordinary £650 billion to the UK economy by 2035. "AI is poised to transform business in ways we've not seen since the impact of computer technology in the late 20th century," explained Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology Officer at Accenture. "The combinatorial effect of AI, cloud, sophisticated analytics and other technologies is already starting to change how work is done by humans and computers, and how organisations interact with consumers in startling ways.