MANASSAS, VIRGINIA – Think of it as the airborne cousin to the self-driving car: a robot in the cockpit to help human pilots fly passengers and cargo -- and eventually even replace them. The government and industry are collaborating on a program that seeks to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with a robot co-pilot that never tires, gets bored, feels stressed out or gets distracted. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's arm for development of emerging technologies, and run by Aurora Flight Sciences, a private contractor. With both the military and airlines struggling with shortages of trained pilots, officials say they see an advantage to reducing the number of pilots required to fly large aircraft while at the same time increasing safety and efficiency by having a robot pick up the mundane tasks of flying. The idea is to have the robot free the human pilot, especially in emergencies and demanding situations, to think strategically.

Biren Gandhi sees Cisco as the torchbearer of drone digital disruption. The flying machines have become mainstream tools for everything from delivery services to video usage. So how can the networking giant--normally known for Internet services, solutions, software and hardware--compete in the unmanned aviation realm? As the world narrows in on artificial intelligence, machines and virtual reality, Cisco too pushes to participate in innovative technology-- and Gandhi is at the helm of this innovation, along with his Cisco "co-conspirators" Nico Darrow and Angelo Fienga. Known as "Cisco's Drone Specialist" but more formally titled Distinguished Strategist, Gandhi speaks at conferences like InterDrone, XPONENTIAL, The Commercial UAV Show, etc. about how the company is moving forward with drone security, collaboration, and infrastructure.

Considering how much significance Gartner is placing the future influence of artificial intelligence and algorithms, it comes as little surprise that the group is saying that technology will be one of the most strategic and potentially disruptive for 2017. At its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow detailed the key technology trends for 2017 as the group sees them including how data science technologies are evolving to include advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence is helping create intelligent physical and software-based systems that are programmed to learn and adapt. Other key trends include the impact of melding of the physical and digital environments and how digital technology platforms are influencing the enterprise. "Applied AI and advanced machine learning give rise to a spectrum of intelligent implementations, including physical devices (robots, autonomous vehicles, consumer electronics) as well as apps and services (virtual personal assistants [VPAs], smart advisors), said Cearley. "These implementations will be delivered as a new class of obviously intelligent apps and things as well as provide embedded intelligence for a wide range of mesh devices and existing software and service solutions." Backing up the growing machine intelligence idea, Daryl Plummer, managing vice president, chief of research and Gartner Fellow stated that by 2020, algorithms will positively alter the behavior of more than 1 billion global workers global workers. More on Network World: Gartner: Get onboard the algorithm train! "Contextualization algorithms have advanced exponentially to include a variety of behavioral interventions such as psychology, social neuroscience and cognitive science.

Analysis Research in AI is expanding quickly, and the UK and US governments have begun to notice. Official reports about the new technology and future strategies were dropped by both governments this month. Blighty's Science and Technology Committee released Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, while the White House delivered Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence and National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan. The titles of the British and American reports provide a clue as to how both governments are responding. There is no "preparing" or "strategic plan" in the UK's reports.

To recap what we have learned from the WikiLeaks emails so far: How to make creamy risotto. That CNN's Donna Brazile might have slipped the Hillary Clinton campaign a question before a town hall debate. Oh, and how long it takes Clinton's team to figure out how to reply to a single Marco Rubio tweet (eight and a half hours, approximately). The emails apparently showed that at the end of July, the Clinton campaign put their heads down when Rubio tweeted "After Clinton's failed'reset' with Putin, now she wants to do a'reset' with Castro. She is making another mistake" around 7:30 a.m.

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.

For centuries, technological innovation has created jobs and improved standards of living. Artificial intelligence might change that. For starters, AI-driven automation is not going to treat workers equally. A recent White House called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence acknowledges that AI could make low- and medium-skill jobs unnecessary, and widen the wage gap between lower- and higher-educated workers. The good news is that policymakers and technology experts are thinking about this, and instituting plans aimed at avoiding the "Robots are going to take all of our jobs!"

Summary: Here's some background on how 3rd generation Spiking Neural Nets are progressing and news about a first commercial rollout. Recently we wrote about the development of AI and neural nets beyond the second generation Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Nets (CNNs / RNNs) which have come on so strong and dominate the current conversation about deep learning. Our research shows that the next generation of neural nets is most likely to be led by Spiking Neural Nets (SNNs) that are a return to the'strong' AI tradition and closely mimic actual brain function. Unlike CNNs that fire signals to every one of their deep layer connections every time, SNNs are modeled after the fact that in the brain neurons do not constantly communicate with one another. Rather they communicate in spikes of signals or more correctly short trains of spiking signals.

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