President Obama thinks artificial intelligence could solve many of the world's biggest problems -- like disease, climate change, even economic inequality. To that end, his administration is recommending more investment in the technology across all levels of government, including funding STEM education to have a prepared workforce, advanced research projects, local grants and new federal infrastructure. The White House released a 48-page report today featuring 24 recommendations for how the government can be involved in an increasingly AI-powered future, as well as ways to regulate the budding technology. For one, the White House predicts artificial intelligence and robotics will upend some jobs, noting that low- and medium-skilled workers are most vulnerable to threats of automation. The administration doesn't offer a solution, but says it's an issue that deserves careful attention and pledges to investigate appropriate policy responses.

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.

A centuries-old Yemeni city stands alongside the gleaming towers of Hong Kong as one of the world's most beautiful architectural views, writes Jonathan Glancey. And, like the faces of those we hold dear, we hold certain skylines in our minds' eyes even when far … This election has been particularly noisy. Ask not what the government can do for Silicon Valley; ask what Silicon Valley can do for the government. How a tiny Florida community could influence the way we fight Zika around the world.By Graphics by Ella KoezePhotography by Erika LarsenIllustrations … The Harry Potter books have sold more than 400 million copies worldwide and been translated in over 60 languages. The books are filled with a tricky mix of wordplay, invented words, songs, allusions, British cultural references, and more.

Fifty civil rights groups have signed a letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate police use of facial-recognition databases following a report that half of America's adults have their images stored in at least one searchable facial-recognition database used by local, state and federal authorities They argue the technology disproportionately affects minorities and has minimal oversight. Researchers even found The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona has enrolled all of Honduras' driver's licenses and mug shots into its database. States in dark blue use drivers license photos in police facial recognition databases. Red dots represent other jurisdictions using facial recognition. Of the 52 agencies that acknowledged using face recognition, only one obtained legislative approval for its use and only one agency provided evidence that it audited officers' face recognition searches for misuse. Not one agency required warrants, and many agencies did not even require an officer to suspect someone of committing a crime before using face recognition to identify her.

Photographs of nearly half of all U.S. adults--117 million people--are collected in police facial recognition databases across the country with little regulation over how the networks are searched and used, according to a new study. Along with a lack of regulation, critics question the accuracy of facial recognition algorithms. Meanwhile, state, city, and federal facial recognition databases include 48 percent of U.S. adults, said the report from the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. The search of facial recognition databases is largely unregulated, the report said. "A few agencies have instituted meaningful protections to prevent the misuse of the technology," its authors wrote.

Zürich, Switzerland / Bad Neustadt, Germany - 18 Oct 2016: Today, RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG (RKA), a private hospital group in Germany, has announced, that by the end of the year, it will begin piloting a Watson-powered cognitive assistance system to help support physicians at the group's Centre for Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases located at the University Hospital Marburg. Since it opened in 2013, the renowned Center has been contacted by more than 6,000 patients to visit Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schäfer, a leading expert in rare diseases, who is also known as the "German Dr. House," based on the character of the eponymous American medical television drama. Most of the patients he and his team meets with have year-long medical histories, which include a large amount of unstructured data, such as laboratory tests, clinical reports, drug prescriptions, radiology findings as well as pathology reports. "It's not uncommon for our patients to have thousands of medical documents, leaving us overwhelmed, not only by the large number of patients, but also by the huge amount of data to be reviewed," said Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schäfer, University Hospital Marburg. "This is especially challenging because our work is often like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack -- even the smallest piece of information could lead to an accurate diagnosis."

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.

Large tech companies are snatching up artificial intelligence startups left and right. Turns out, it's a very familiar name. Google has acquired 11 AI startups over the last five years, leading the pack of corporations hungry for artificial intelligence, according to CB Insights. There have been roughly 140 acquisitions of artificial intelligence startups since 2011, including 40 this past year alone, the venture capital research firm says. That compares with just five acquisitions in 2011.

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task. "We've reached human parity," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist.