In the West, we rely on the grid, which provides most people with ample power. In off-grid communities such as those in large parts of rural Africa, energy is a highly valued resource and consumers are much more aware of energy efficiency. The limited energy that is available is disproportionately expensive and innovative solutions, such as small-scale renewable power, that cannot yet compete in the West, are gaining ground where, compared to the cost of the fossil fuels they replace, they are seen as a bargain. Developments such as small solar home systems are bringing power for the first time to millions of off-grid consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to technological advances in LED lights, batteries and mobile payment, creating what many are referring to as the "clean energy revolution" in rural electrification. While LED lighting and phone charging were the first volume application in this rapidly evolving market, consumers of the clean energy revolution in Africa want, and increasingly demand, more. Customers now expect to be able to access the latest technology, media and communications through the growth of the largely familiar pay-as-you-go technology, even in areas where there is no little or no grid access.

Bright Computing, the leading provider of hardware-agnostic cluster and cloud management software, today announced that it will be exhibiting at Huawei Connect, Paris, October 20-21, 2016. Huawei Connect, a conference for Huawei's European ICT ecosystem, focuses on business innovation and open partnerships. This year's theme is "Shape the Cloud", and policy makers, industry leaders, academics and technology elites will gather together to share, discuss and debate the future technologies and new business models that are driving the world's digital transformation. At the event, Bright Computing will showcase its latest solution, Bright for Deep Learning, which makes it easy to build an enterprise-grade deep learning environment, quickly and efficiently, enabling organizations to focus on gaining actionable insights from rich, complex data. Bright will explain how it helps to find, configure, and deploy all of the dependent pieces needed to run deep learning libraries and frameworks, in order to gain advantage from the deep learning evolution.

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.

After decades of dystopian science fiction novels and movies where sentient machines end up turning on humanity, we can't help but worry as real world AI continues to improve at such a rapid rate. That's why Amazon, Facebook, Google's DeepMind division, IBM, and Microsoft have founded a new organization called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. Williams is encouraged that tech giants like Facebook and Google are even asking questions about ethics and bias in AI. Ideally, the group will help establish new standards for thinking about artificial intelligence, big data, and algorithms that can weed out harmful assumptions and biases.

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!"

SILICON VALLEY, CA - 14 Oct 2016: Technology leaders AMD, Dell EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM (NYSE: IBM), Mellanox Technologies, Micron, NVIDIA and Xilinx today announced a new, open specification that can increase datacenter server performance by up to 10x, enabling corporate and cloud data centers to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics, and other emerging workloads. Servers and related products based on the new standard are expected in the second half of 2017. OpenCAPI sets a new standard for the industry, providing a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification built to minimize the complexity of high-performance accelerator design. Capable of 25Gbits per second data rate, OpenCAPI outperforms the current PCIe specification which offers a maximum data transfer rate of 16Gbits per second. Companies in finance, Internet services, retail, hospitality, medical, and automobile manufacturing are increasingly turning to data-intensive workloads such as machine learning, advanced analytics and other rapidly emerging technologies for competitive advantage.

This is a simple example about optimizing your prediction model on Azure. In this case we will use a Boosted Decision Tree model. We will show you how you can use the Permutation Feature Performance module to prune your trees. We start with the Student Performance Classifier from a previous blog. We already found out that the Boosted Decision Tree algorithm gave the best results, so we will start with that one to train our model with.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. Computers and mobile devices running rich operating systems have a plethora of security solutions and encryption protocols that can protect them against the multitude of threats they face as soon as they become connected to the Internet. Such is not the case with IoT. Of the billions of IoT devices presently in use, a considerable percentage are sporting low-end processing power and storage capacity and don't have the capability to become extended with security solutions. Yet they are connected to the Internet, nonetheless, which is an extremely hostile environment.

Ebay this morning launched a new site, dedicated to shopping for furniture and other items for the home. Called eBay Collective, the site also takes advantage of technology from the company's recently announced acquisition of visual search engine Corrigon, which it bought for under 30 million. On eBay Collective, the technology has been integrated to power a "Shop the Room" feature which lets online shoppers hover over an image of a fully designed space, and then the tool will search across eBay inventory to surface items that are close matches to that portion of the image. Corrigon, which had been around since 2008, had developed a way to search and identify objects within an image, then match that with other images or links to products. In a larger photo, you can hover over a specific portion of the image and Corrigon's tech can see the object in that section, then match it with others.